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
Elon Musk reveals SpaceX’s target for Starship’s 10th launch
Elon Musk has revealed SpaceX’s target timeline for the next Starship launch, which will be the tenth in program history.
Elon Musk has revealed SpaceX’s target timeline for the next Starship launch, which will be the tenth in program history.
Musk says SpaceX is aiming for a timeline of roughly three weeks from now, which would come about ten weeks after the previous launch.
Coincidentally, it would bring the two launches 69 days apart, and if you know anything about Elon Musk, that would be an ideal timeline between two launches.
🚨 Just wanted you to know, Starship 10’s projected test flight date, according to Grok, is August 4.
Starship’s ninth test flight took place on May 27.
August 4 is 69 days after May 27.
Do with that what you will. 🚀 https://t.co/IISpT08rIy
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 16, 2025
SpaceX is coming off a test flight in which it lost both the Super Heavy Booster and the Upper Stage in the previous launch. The Super Heavy Booster was lost six minutes and sixteen seconds into the flight, while SpaceX lost communication with the Ship at 46 minutes and 48 seconds.
Musk is aiming for the tenth test flight to take place in early August, he revealed on X:
Launching again in ~3 weeks
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 14, 2025
This will be SpaceX’s fourth test flight of the Starship program in 2025, with each of the previous three flights bringing varying results.
IFT-7 in January brought SpaceX its second successful catch of the Super Heavy Booster in the chopstick arms of the launch tower. The ship was lost after exploding during its ascent over the Turks and Caicos Islands.
IFT-8 was on March 6, and SpaceX caught the booster once again, but the Upper Stage was once again lost.
The most recent flight, IFT-9, took place on May 27 and featured the first reused Super Heavy Booster. However, both the Booster and Upper Stage were lost.
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) hit SpaceX with a mishap investigation for Flight 9 on May 30.
News
SpaceX’s Crew-11 mission targets July 31 launch amid tight ISS schedule
The flight will lift off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
NASA and SpaceX are targeting July 31 for the launch of Crew-11, the next crewed mission to the International Space Station (ISS). The flight will lift off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, using the Crew Dragon Endeavour and a Falcon 9 booster.
Crew Dragon Endeavour returns
Crew-11 will be the sixth flight for Endeavour, making it SpaceX’s most experienced crew vehicle to date. According to SpaceX’s director of Dragon mission management, Sarah Walker, Endeavour has already carried 18 astronauts representing eight countries since its first mission with NASA’s Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley in 2020, as noted in an MSN report.
“This Dragon spacecraft has successfully flown 18 crew members representing eight countries to space already, starting with (NASA astronauts) Bob (Behnken) and Doug (Hurley) in 2020, when it returned human spaceflight capabilities to the United States for the first time since the shuttle retired in July of 2011,” Walker said.
For this mission, Endeavour will debut SpaceX’s upgraded drogue 3.1 parachutes, designed to further enhance reentry safety. The parachutes are part of SpaceX’s ongoing improvements to its human-rated spacecraft, and Crew-11 will serve as their first operational test.
The Falcon 9 booster supporting this launch is core B1094, which has launched in two previous Starlink missions, as well as the private Ax-4 mission on June 25, as noted in a Space.com report.
The four-members of Crew-11 are NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke, as well as Japan’s Kimiya Yui and Russia’s Oleg Platonov.
Tight launch timing
Crew-11 is slated to arrive at the ISS just as NASA coordinates a sequence of missions, including the departure of Crew-10 and the arrival of SpaceX’s CRS-33 mission. NASA’s Bill Spetch emphasized the need for careful planning amid limited launch resources, noting the importance of maintaining station altitude and resupply cadence.
“Providing multiple methods for us to maintain the station altitude is critically important as we continue to operate and get the most use out of our limited launch resources that we do have. We’re really looking forward to demonstrating that capability with (CRS-33) showing up after we get through the Crew-11 and Crew-10 handover,” Spetch stated.
News
SpaceX launches Ax-4 mission to the ISS with international crew
The SpaceX Falcon 9 launched Axiom’s Ax-4 mission to ISS. Ax-4 crew will conduct 60+ science experiments during a 14-day stay on the ISS.
SpaceX launched the Falcon 9 rocket kickstarting Axiom Space’s Ax-4 mission to the International Space Station (ISS). Axiom’s Ax-4 mission is led by a historic international crew and lifted off from Kennedy Space Center’s Launch Complex 39A at 2:31 a.m. ET on June 25, 2025.
The Ax-4 crew is set to dock with the ISS around 7 a.m. ET on Thursday, June 26, 2025. Axiom Space, a Houston-based commercial space company, coordinated the mission with SpaceX for transportation and NASA for ISS access, with support from the European Space Agency and the astronauts’ governments.
The Ax-4 mission marks a milestone in global space collaboration. The Ax-4 crew, commanded by U.S. astronaut Peggy Whitson, includes Shubhanshu Shukla from India as the pilot, alongside mission specialists Sławosz Uznański-Wiśniewski from Poland and Tibor Kapu from Hungary.
“The trip marks the return to human spaceflight for those countries — their first government-sponsored flights in more than 40 years,” Axiom noted.
Shukla’s participation aligns with India’s Gaganyaan program planned for 2027. He is the first Indian astronaut to visit the ISS since Rakesh Sharma in 1984.
Axiom’s Ax-4 mission marks SpaceX’s 18th human spaceflight. The mission employs a Crew Dragon capsule atop a Falcon 9 rocket, designed with a launch escape system and “two-fault tolerant” for enhanced safety. The Axiom mission faced a few delays due to weather, a Falcon 9 leak, and an ISS Zvezda module leak investigation by NASA and Roscosmos before the recent successful launch.
As the crew prepares to execute its scientific objectives, SpaceX’s Ax-4 mission paves the way for a new era of inclusive space research, inspiring future generations and solidifying collaborative ties in the cosmos. During the Ax-4 crew’s 14-day stay in the ISS, the astronauts will conduct nearly 60 experiments.
“We’ll be conducting research that spans biology, material, and physical sciences as well as technology demonstrations,” said Whitson. “We’ll also be engaging with students around the world, sharing our experience and inspiring the next generation of explorers.”
SpaceX’s Ax-4 mission highlights Axiom’s role in advancing commercial spaceflight and fostering international partnerships. The mission strengthens global space exploration efforts by enabling historic spaceflight returns for India, Poland, and Hungary.
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