News
SpaceX reveals Falcon fairing recovery progress as Mr. Steven barely misses catch
SpaceX has offered an extraordinary glimpse into a stealthy program of Falcon fairing recovery research and development, which has utilized drop tests and iterative hardware and software upgrades to inch ever closer to fairing reuse over the last 6-9 months.
Short of a small handful of sparse comments made by executives in 2018, this is the first time SpaceX has officially acknowledged its continued attempts to optimize Falcon fairing recovery in the face of a number of missed post-launch catches. Given that the pictured fairing was so close to a successful landing that its parafoil actually became caught in Mr. Steven’s net, it seems that SpaceX has nearly solved the problems that have thus far prevented program success.
Recent fairing recovery test with Mr. Steven. So close! pic.twitter.com/DFSCfBnM0Y
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 8, 2019
In the last six months of 2018, SpaceX has continued to tease its slow progress towards reusable Falcon fairings, originally planned to depend on a truly bizarre solution – Mr. Steven. An impressive vessel on its own, SpaceX has gradually added and extended and upgraded a range of recovery hardware on his deck, most notably including a vast net (likely tens of thousands of square feet or 2000+ square meters) supported by four huge arms and eight supporting booms. Despite increasing the usable area of the net, SpaceX has been unable to secure an operational fairing catch since it began attempts in March 2018.
In late May 2018, SpaceX provided the best look yet at the actual process of recovering Falcon fairings, showing off the guided parafoil (a wing-like parachute) and revealing that a fairing half – launched in support of Iridium-6/GRACE-FO – had splashed down just 50 meters (~165 ft) away from Mr. Steven’s net.
Falcon 9 fairing halves deployed their parafoils and splashed down in the Pacific Ocean last week after the launch of Iridium-6/GRACE-FO. Closest half was ~50m from SpaceX’s recovery ship, Mr. Steven. https://t.co/JS7d5zTdIg pic.twitter.com/LjiTwnB4wd
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) May 31, 2018
However, in the months that followed, info about catch attempts became increasingly sparse and it eventually became clear that SpaceX was preparing to perform a range of controlled drop tests a few hundred miles off the coast of California. Ultimately, the company’s engineers and technicians hoped to use the controlled environment and a greater number of available drop/catch attempts to refine the hardware and software needed to finesse fairing halves into Mr. Steven’s net.
It may be almost absurdly large relative to any other conceivable thing that exists in the real world, but a few thousand square meters is actually more like a needle in a haystack for a piece of rocket traversing a 500-800 km arc at top speeds of more than 2 km/s.
-
- Mr. Steven seen after his most recent December 2018 drop and catch test. (Pauline Acalin)
-
- After an audible “3..2..1”, a sharp noise much like compressed gas being released was followed by a clang as the harness dropped. (Pauline Acalin)
-
- SpaceX’s fairing recovery fleet technicians were seen performing a bit of an unexpected ride aboard a Falcon 9 fairing half on September 19th. (Pauline Acalin)
In December 2018, following another sadly unsuccessful fairing recovery attempt on the West Coast, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk revealed that engineers were also apparently looking into backup plans in case closing that last 50-meter gap turned out to be more expensive or complicated than it was worth. Most notably, he implied that SpaceX was interested in finding ways to waterproof and ultimately refly Falcon fairings even after soft-landings in seawater, whereas fairings are already capable of reliably landing intact in the ocean but cannot be reused due to seawater contamination and cracking caused by impact.
Falcon fairing halves missed the net, but touched down softly in the water. Mr Steven is picking them up. Plan is to dry them out & launch again. Nothing wrong with a little swim.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 3, 2018
Given just how close Mr. Steven appears to be to a successful in-net fairing recovery, it now seems implausible that SpaceX will choose just one of the two options at hand, likely instead progressing both development programs to points of success. Once fairings can both be successfully waterproofed and caught in Mr. Steven’s net, SpaceX will almost certainly have itself a foolproof solution to easy and reliable recovery and reuse even in bad sea states and stormy weather.
With the company’s first launch of 2019 probably just a few days away, chances seem good that SpaceX will attempt at least one more post-launch fairing recovery with Mr. Steven. Fingers crossed!
For prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket recovery fleet check out our brand new LaunchPad and LandingZone newsletters!
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
