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SpaceX static fires Falcon 9 with satellites on board for the first time in years
SpaceX has successfully completed a Falcon 9 static fire ahead of Starlink’s first dedicated launch, breaking a practice that dates back to Falcon 9’s last catastrophic failure to date.
That failure occurred in September 2016 around nine minutes before a planned Falcon 9 static fire test, completely destroying the rocket and the Amos-6 communications satellite payload and severely damaging Launch Complex 40 (LC-40). Since that fateful failure, all 42 subsequent Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy satellite launches have been preceded by static fire tests without a payload fairing attached. This process typically adds 24-48 hours of work to launch operations, an admittedly tiny price to pay to reduce the chances of a rocket failure completely destroying valuable payloads. With Starlink v0.9, SpaceX is making different choices.
When supercool liquid oxygen ruptured a composite overwrapped pressure vessel (COPV) in Falcon 9’s upper stage, the resultant explosion and fire destroyed Falcon 9. Perhaps more importantly, the ~$200M Amos-6 satellite installed atop the rocket effectively ceased to exist, a loss that posed a serious threat to the livelihood of its owner, Spacecom. Posed with a question of whether saving a day or two of schedule was worth the potential destruction of customer payloads, both customers, SpaceX, and their insurers obviously concluded that static fires should be done without payloads aboard the rocket.
The only exceptions since Amos-6 are the launch debuts of Falcon Heavy – with a payload that was effectively disposable and SpaceX-built – and Crew Dragon DM-1, in which Falcon 9’s integration with Dragon’s launch abort system had to be tested as part of the static fire. Every other SpaceX rocket launch since September 2016 has excluded payloads during each routine pre-flight static fire.
SpaceX’s Spacecraft Emporium
Why the change of pace on this launch, then? The answer is simple: for the first time ever, SpaceX is both the sole payload/satellite stakeholder and launch provider, meaning that nearly all of the mission’s risk – and the consequences of failure – rest solely on SpaceX’s shoulders. In other words, SpaceX built and owns the Falcon 9 assigned to the mission, the 60 Starlink test satellites that make up its payload, and the launch complex supporting the mission.
Even then, if Falcon 9 were to fail during an internal SpaceX mission, customer launches could be seriously delayed by both the subsequent failure investigation failure and any potential damage to the launch complex. In short, although an internal mission does offer SpaceX some unique freedoms, it is still in the company’s best interest to treat the launch like any other, even if some customer-oriented corners are likely begging to be cut. Additionally, the loss of SpaceX’s first dedicated payload of 60 Starlink satellites could be a significant setback for the constellation, although it may be less significant than most would assume.
This is not to say that SpaceX won’t take advantage of some of the newfound freedom permitted by Starlink launches. In fact, CEO Elon Musk has stated that one of SpaceX’s 2019 Starlink missions will become the first to reuse a Falcon fairing. Additionally, SpaceX is free to do things that customers might be opposed to but that the company’s own engineers believe to be low-risk. Notably, Starlink missions will be an almost perfect opportunity for SpaceX to flight-prove reusability milestones without having to ask customers to tread outside of their comfort zones.
The sheer scale of SpaceX proposed Starlink constellation – two phases of ~4400 and ~12,000 satellites – means that the company will need all the latent launch capacity it can get over the next 5-10 years, at least until Starship/Super Heavy is able to support internal missions. Extraordinary packing density will help to minimize the number of launches needed, but the fact remains that even an absurd 120 satellites per launch (double Starlink v0.9’s 60) would still require an average of 12 launches per year to finish Starlink before 2030.
In the meantime, thoughts of a dozen or more annual Starlink launches are somewhat premature. SpaceX’s first dedicated Starlink launch (deemed Starlink v0.9) is scheduled to lift off no earlier than 10:30 pm EDT (02:30 UTC), May 15th, and is being treated as an advanced but still intermediary step between the Tintin prototypes and a finalized spacecraft design. Still, in an unprecedented step, SpaceX has built sixty Starlink satellites for the development-focused mission, in stark contrast to the six satellites (still a respectable achievement) competitor OneWeb launched in February 2019 as part of its own flight-test program.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.
Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”
You will get flying cars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2026
The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.
However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package
But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.
In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:
“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?'”
However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.
Contrary to press reports, I’m not against flying cars. Just said it was important to consider both pros and cons.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2015
Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:
“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
