SpaceX
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says Starlink launch will reuse Falcon Heavy’s fairing
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has revealed that the company successfully recovered both Falcon Heavy Flight 2 fairing halves intact and plans to reuse them this year on an operational Starlink launch.
This will be SpaceX’s first attempt to reuse Falcon payload fairings, a capability that could ultimately save up to 10% – around $6M – and countless production time per launch. Intriguingly, the Falcon Heavy fairing halves were recovered without the use of dedicated recovery vessel Mr. Steven – the vessel has been out of commission for months after an accident ripped off two of its four arms. Instead, the fairing halves parasailed to a soft ocean landing where SpaceX recovery experts aboard GO Searcher and GO Navigator carefully extracted both halves from the surface of the Atlantic. In order to reuse the fairing halves, SpaceX will need to somehow solve – if they haven’t already – the challenge of cleaning contaminated fairings.
How To Clean Your Fairing
The challenge of reusing payload fairings that have been some combination of immersed and thoroughly coated with salt water is by no means an easy one, evidenced primarily by the fact that no company or space agency has yet to try. As a temporary part of a rocket’s uppermost stage, every kilogram of weight present on the fairing can have an almost equally deleterious effect on that same rocket’s ability to place payloads in orbit. This is why the added complexity of additional deployable fairing mechanisms is universally accepted – by jettisoning fairings as soon as possible, rockets are able to carry significantly more payload to a given orbit.
This means that adding even more weight and complexity to fairings – optimized to be extraordinarily light for their often massive sizes – is avoided with extreme prejudice. This is the problem SpaceX faces in its quest to reliably recover and reuse fairings – how does one take fragile objects landing in the middle of the ocean after traveling no less than two kilometers per second (~1.2 mi/s) at apogees upwards of 100 km (62 mi) and prevent them from being destroyed, all while keeping them as light as possible?
SpaceX’s solution was to attach GPS-guided parafoils to each fairing half, as well as cold gas thrusters that allow the halves to orient themselves and remain stable between separation and parafoil deployment. Part two of that solution was to quite literally catch those floating halves out of the air with a giant, speedy boat outfitted with an equally giant net held up by four arms. Despite 5+ catch attempts and many, many controlled drop tests, that vessel – Mr. Steven – has never managed to successfully catch a Falcon fairing half. In early 2019, SpaceX moved the ship from California to Florida due to a launch drought facing the company’s West Coast launch facilities. Less than two weeks after arriving in Florida, an unknown accident resulted in the vessel losing both its net and two of its four arms to the sea, and Mr. Steven has since remained inactive – aside from infrequent trips out and about – in Port Canaveral.
Judging from CEO Elon Musk’s twofold declaration that SpaceX will now reuse its first Falcon fairings without any involvement from Mr. Steven, it’s safe to say that success will sadly bring about the end of the leased fairing recovery vessel’s utility to SpaceX. However, there is a chance that this is not the case.
The fact that SpaceX is choosing to reuse a partially waterlogged fairing for the first time on an internal Starlink internet satellite launch suggests that whatever the solution may be, it may not be compatible – or at least kosher – with current industry standards. All prior reusability milestones have been tested on commercial launches after some sort of private agreement with the customers involved, including the first Falcon 9 booster reuse and the first instances of the same booster being launched for the third time. This is likely not fair to SpaceX or its excellent customers, though. The simpler explanation is that testing unproven technologies and hardware solutions on internal launches fundamentally minimizes the risk conveyed to paying customers that likely can’t afford to lose their spacecraft.
There remains one additional explanation: SpaceX’s solution for reusing waterlogged fairings is, in fact, too immature or is an unacceptable risk of contamination for customers relative to industry standards of design. Instead, SpaceX may have chosen to build some sort of contamination resistance into the clean-slate design of its Starlink satellites, something that would be impractical to expect of customers who have spacecraft that are either already designed or built. Redesigning – let alone rebuilding – complex systems is an extremely costly endeavor. However, wide-reaching changes are far easier to implement when starting from a functionally blank page, exactly where SpaceX is with its first-generation Starlink satellites. As such, SpaceX may have decided to do just this after it realized that catching fairings could be far harder than expected and would thus remain a major bottleneck for Starlink launches if left unsolved.
Finally, it’s unclear if Musk is referring to the very first operational Starlink launch – scheduled as early as May 2019 – or an additional follow-on mission later this year. Refurbishing and reflying fairings for the first time in just one month would be an extremely impressive achievement but may also be an impractical schedule for pathfinder technology development. For now, this serves as a reminder that SpaceX’s first operational Starlink launch is scheduled one month from now.
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Elon Musk
Tesla Roadster owners to get “Flying Stunt Mode” and looping track access
Musk says Roadster owners can command the unveiling stunts autonomously, with a Texas looping track.
Elon Musk says owners of the new Tesla Roadster will be able to ask the car to perform the stunts Tesla showed at its unveiling, with the car doing the driving itself. Musk made the comment Saturday in a reply on X to tech blogger Robert Scoble, and he added a promise of a looping track at Tesla’s Texas headquarters.
Scoble had argued that the person in the Roadster is not really driving it. In his description, the driver operates a computer that tells another computer what to do, with steering, braking and acceleration all handled by wire. Musk answered, “True. You will be able to ask the Roadster to perform any of the tricks shown autonomously, as it will be sentient. Also, we will have a wild looping track (crazier even than Hot Wheels) at our Texas HQ where you can test out your Roadster.”
@Scobleizer True.
You will be able to ask the Roadster to perform any of the tricks shown autonomously, as it will be sentient.
Also, we will have a wild looping track (crazier even than Hot Wheels) at our Texas HQ where you can test out your Roadster.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 17, 2026
At the October 15 event outside Waco, the car drove up a curved ramp until it was upside down, flew off on cold gas thrusters, flipped and landed. It also hovered over a Cybercab, Cybertruck, Semi, Model Y and Model 3 while moving. As we noted in our breakdown of the three Roadster configurations, Musk said at the event that the car “literally is just going to puff itself up” to perform the maneuvers whenever an owner wants. Saturday’s reply adds that the car would run them on its own.
Tesla has described some of the hardware that would make that possible. The Roadster uses steer by wire with a yoke, and its cold gas thrusters rely on electric actuators for small adjustments in flight. A fan system under the car creates suction, which Tesla says is strong enough to hold it upside down, a setup we covered in our look at the Roadster’s fan system and thrusters.
Musk did not say when an autonomous stunt feature might arrive, how it would work, or what he means by sentient. He also gave no size, location or opening date for the Texas track. Production is planned for Giga Texas in 2027 or 2028, and Tesla says the car is not approved for public road use. The Rocket version, the one built to fly, is invite only.
The comment follows a week of Musk teasing the event, including his claim that the demo would be a banger, which we covered before the stream. Tesla reports third quarter earnings on October 21, and shareholders can submit and vote on questions through the Say portal until 4 p.m. EDT on October 20, according to our earnings Q&A preview. A question about autonomous Roadster stunts and the Texas track would be a quick way to get specifics from management.
Investor's Corner
Tesla’s flying Roadster just revealed something bigger than the car
Analysts say the Roadster demo puts a Tesla and SpaceX merger back on the table.
The Roadster unveiling near Waco ended Thursday night, and by Friday morning much of the investor reaction had less to do with the car than with who owns the rocket technology inside it.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives said the event “puts the Tesla/SpaceX relationship on the table in a tangible way,” pointing to the propulsion, pressure vessel and control hardware sitting on a Tesla product. Gene Munster of Deepwater Asset Management called the demo “a ridiculous display of engineering” with “no commercial value” beyond embarrassing traditional automakers, though he said it showed Musk wants the two companies together.
The more specific forecast came a day earlier from Barclays. Analyst Dan Levy told clients a deal could be announced before Tesla’s annual meeting, which must happen by December 6, and that an announcement in late October or early November could make shareholder approval harder. Barclays expects SpaceX to be the buyer in an all stock deal, with Tesla holders receiving SpaceX shares at a premium, based on market values of roughly $2.1 trillion for SpaceX and $1.5 trillion for Tesla. If nothing lands around the meeting, the bank still sees an announcement within 6 to 12 months.
The Roadster demo just added more weight to merger speculations. Tesla’s demo used cold gas thrusters and pressure tanks of the kind SpaceX uses on Falcon 9, and Musk described the car as a collaboration between Tesla and SpaceX engineers, as we mentioned in our breakdown of the three Roadster configurations.
Musk has not publicly addressed a deal since the event, as far as we have seen. His most direct answer remains the one he gave at the All In Summit, when he said that with so much collaboration, “who can imagine what action one might take” without ruling anything out. Ives has held to a 2027 timeline since his March note, and Musk pushed back on the China piece of the speculation when ARK floated a year end announcement in August.
The next test is Tesla’s third quarter earnings call on October 21. However, we recall in July that Musk told analysts, “we can’t talk about combining companies and that kind of thing on an earnings call,” so a clear answer wouldn’t be expected.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk says Tesla’s Roadster demo could be a bang, quite literally
Musk says tonight’s Roadster demo will be a banger, maybe literally. The clues add up.
Elon Musk spent Wednesday and Thursday stacking teases on top of Tesla’s Roadster event, and the wording is getting harder to read as routine hype. Tesla streams the unveil tonight at 7:55 p.m. Central on X. Musk has called it “a candidate for greatest product demo of all time,” then added that “this demo will be a BANGER, probably metaphorically, though some chance literally.”
New Roadster is
beyond movies,
beyond imagination,
beyond human,
yet still made
by humans
on Earth— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 15, 2026
The “some chance literally” part is the line to watch. The Roadster has been tied to a SpaceX option package since 2018, and as we reported when the date was announced, the system is reportedly codenamed A71 and uses cold gas thrusters fed by a composite overwrapped pressure vessel, the same tank design SpaceX uses on Falcon 9. Musk has said a thruster equipped car could reach 60 mph in about 1.1 seconds. Cold gas thrusters firing at full output are loud, and reports ahead of the event say the car will be unmanned with spectators kept several hundred yards back. A literal bang could simply mean a demonstration that sounds like one, though it is also an admission that something could go wrong on stage.
Then there is “Timing is everything,” which Musk posted a day earlier. Stocktwits noted that 7:55 p.m. is 19:55 on a 24 hour clock, which echoes 1955, the year Marty McFly travels to in Back to the Future. Musk has made that connection before. In 2019 he replied to an animation of a flying DeLorean by saying the new Roadster “will actually do something like this.” Nothing from Tesla confirms the movie reference, but the stream time was chosen by someone, and Tesla has not been shy about this kind of wink.
Also, Tesla said it moved the event because it “can only be held outdoors,” and Musk then wrote that the demo was postponed “due to high winds,” as Teslarati covered at the time. A car running a standing start in front of a crowd shrugs off wind. A car that leaves the ground does not. The venue near SpaceX’s McGregor test site and the FAA airspace closures reported around the original date point the same way, though we also noted the delay could be a plain safety precaution. Musk has also described the new Roadster as “beyond movies, beyond imagination, beyond human, yet still made by humans on Earth.”
The only official figures remain the 2017 ones: 620 miles of range, a top speed above 250 mph, a 1.9 second 0 to 60 time, and prices of $200,000 for the base car and $250,000 for the Founders Series. Production is expected at Giga Texas in 2027 or 2028. Tesla has said the event will cover pricing, specifications and production targets, and its livestream preview has the full rundown. Tesla reports third quarter earnings on October 21, so whatever lands tonight will be fresh going into that call. We will have live coverage as soon as the stream starts.
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