

SpaceX
SpaceX recycles Falcon Heavy’s commercial launch debut to Thurs – here’s why
SpaceX has scrubbed the first attempted launch of Falcon Heavy Flight 2 due to high upper-level winds deemed too much of a risk to mission success. Thursday, April 11th’s recycled launch window is identical to Wednesday’s, stretching from 6:35pm-8:31pm ET (22:35-00:31 UTC).
According to SpaceX, both the Falcon Heavy Block 5 rocket and its Arabsat 6A satellite payload are in good health and would have been ready to launch on April 10th if the weather had been slightly more cooperative. While seemingly innocuous, something as basic as wind currents can risk the partial or total failure of rockets even as large as Falcon Heavy, The intricacy and stress-optimized nature of Falcon Heavy’s three interlinked boosters make the rocket particularly susceptible to off-nominal aerodynamic stresses, constantly performing a sort of balancing act to keep those boosters flying in a sort of formation at extreme speeds.
While rockets are also susceptible to extreme ground-level wind conditions, upper-level wind violations are far more common, particularly for SpaceX’s Falcon family. Falcon 9 and Heavy are uniquely at the mercy of these conditions due to a fineness ratio (height vs. width) unprecedented at their level of performance. In fact, Falcon boosters are so long, skinny, and mass-optimized that SpaceX actually pressurizes them with nitrogen during extended/unsupported periods in a horizontal orientation. In simpler terms, held near its extremities, Falcon first stages can actually damage themselves under their own weight by bending somewhere in the middle.
Past a certain point, this bending is highly undesirable. The walls of Falcon 9’s lithium-aluminum alloy propellant tanks – also doubling as part of the rocket’s load-bearing structure – are approximately 0.2 in (5mm) thick, around 40% thinner than an iPhone X. Weighing approximately 25,000 kg (55,000 lb) empty yet 550,000 kg (1,210,000 lb) when full of fuel, Falcon 9 is thus a bit like a rolled sheet of printer paper balancing under a textbook while accelerating at several Gs.
The problem is that Earth’s atmosphere is heavily stratified: there are many different horizontal layers of air that can end up moving in very different directions at very different speeds. Imagine for a second that you’re sprinting along a sidewalk but each sidewalk section is actually a treadmill moving slightly left or right. Running along at full speed, you abruptly hit several sections that are rapidly moving, say, right. Bad times are had. For Falcon Heavy (or 9), running into high upper-level winds is much less exaggerated but still ends up having the same effect: the rocket, like the runner, loses control authority and ends up a fair bit more sideways than intended. When rockets find themselves tilting more than a few degrees off of their vector, they start to bend and flex a lot. When rockets more than minutely bend and flex, they have a tendency to crumple and warp to the point that they will literally break into pieces a bit like a partially cooked spaghetti noodle.
Those same forces act on Falcon Heavy quite a bit differently than they do on a single Falcon 9, but the principle remains the same: sideways booster = bad news. The wind wins this round but SpaceX will be ready for another attempt today. Likely a strategic choice, Wednesday’s launch attempt was called off just shy of 20 minutes before propellant loading began, dramatically simplifying the process of turning Falcon Heavy around for another launch attempt.
Tune in later today for another exciting day of Falcon Heavy photos and prelaunch operations as photographers – including Teslarati’s Pauline Acalin and Tom Cross – return to Pad 39A to replace camera batteries and generally ogle an elegant rocket.
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk shares unbelievable Starship Flight 10 landing feat
Flight 10’s Starship upper stage demonstrated impressive accuracy when it came to its target landing zone.

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently shared an insane feat accomplished by Starship’s upper stage during its tenth test flight.
Despite the challenges it faced during its return trip to Earth, Flight 10’s Starship upper stage demonstrated impressive accuracy when it came to its target landing zone.
Against the odds
Musk’s update was shared on social media platform X. In a conversation about Starship upper stage’s return to Earth, Musk revealed that the upper stage splashed down just 3 meters (under 10 feet) from its intended target. Considering the size of the Starship upper stage and the ocean itself, achieving this accuracy was nothing short of insane.
Starship Flight 10 was a success as both the Super Heavy booster and Ship upper stage completed all their mission objectives. However, videos and images released by SpaceX showed the upper stage’s heat shield scorched golden-brown and parts of its aft skirt visibly missing. The flaps and other surfaces also bore signs of heavy stress from reentry.
SpaceX highlighted this in a post on X: “Starship made it through reentry with intentionally missing tiles, completed maneuvers to intentionally stress its flaps, had visible damage to its aft skirt and flaps, and still executed a flip and landing burn that placed it approximately 3 meters from its targeted splashdown point,” SpaceX noted.
A key milestone
The result stands in stark contrast to Starship’s earlier test flights this year, when all three prior upper-stage flights in 2025 ended in premature breakup before splashdown. Flight 10 not only marked the first successful splashdown of the year for the Starship upper stage, but it also delivered near-perfect precision despite its battered state, according to a Space.com report.
For SpaceX, this success is a critical proof point in developing a fully reusable launch system. A spacecraft capable of surviving severe reentry conditions and still landing within meters of its target underscores the robustness needed for future missions, including orbital payload deliveries and, eventually, landings on the Moon and Mars.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk reveals when SpaceX will perform first-ever Starship catch
“Starship catch is probably flight 13 to 15, depending on how well V3 flights go,” Musk said.

Elon Musk revealed when SpaceX would perform the first-ever catch attempt of Starship, its massive rocket that will one day take life to other planets.
On Tuesday, Starship aced its tenth test flight as SpaceX was able to complete each of its mission objectives, including a splashdown of the Super Heavy Booster in the Gulf, the deployment of eight Starlink simulators, and another splashdown of the ship in the Indian Ocean.
It was the first launch that featured a payload deployment:
SpaceX Starship Flight 10 was so successful, it’s breaking the anti-Musk narrative
SpaceX was transparent that it would not attempt to catch the Super Heavy Booster, something it has done on three previous occasions: Flight 5 on October 13, 2024, Flight 7 on January 16, and Flight 8 on March 6.
This time, it was not attempting to do so. However, there are bigger plans for the future, and Musk detailed them in a recent post on X, where he discussed SpaceX’s plans to catch Starship, which would be a monumental accomplishment.
Musk said the most likely opportunities for SpaceX to catch Starship itself would be Flight 13, Flight 14, and Flight 15, but it depends on “how well the V3 flights go.”
The Starship launched with Flight 10 was a V2, which is the same size as the subsequent V3 rocket but has a smaller payload-to-orbit rating and is less powerful in terms of initial thrust and booster thrust. Musk said there is only one more V2 rocket left to launch.
Starship catch is probably flight 13 to 15, depending on how well V3 flights go
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 27, 2025
V3 will be the version flown through 2026, as V4, which will be the most capable Starship build SpaceX manufactures, is likely to be the first company ship to carry humans to space.
Musk said that SpaceX planned to “hopefully” attempt a catch of Starship in 2025. However, it appears that this will likely be pushed back to 2026 due to timing.
SpaceX will take Starship catch one step further very soon, Elon Musk confirms
SpaceX would need to launch the 11th and 12th test flights by the end of the year in order to get to Musk’s expected first catch attempt of Flight 13. It’s not unheard of, but the company will need to accelerate its launch rate as it has only had three test flights this year.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship Flight 10 was so successful, it’s breaking the anti-Musk narrative
That’s all the proof one could need about the undeniable success of Starship Flight 10.

Starship Flight 10 was a huge success for SpaceX. When both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship Upper Stage successfully landed on their designated splashdown zones, the space community was celebrating.
The largest and most powerful rocket in the world had successfully completed its tenth test flight. And this time around, there were no rapid unscheduled disassemblies during the mission.
As per SpaceX in a statement following Flight 10, “every major objective was met, providing critical data to inform designs of the next generation Starship and Super Heavy.” The private space enterprise also stated that Flight 10 provided valuable data by stressing the limits of Starship’s capabilities.
With all of Flight 10’s mission objectives met, one would think that it would be pretty easy to cover the story of Starship’s successful tenth test flight. But that’s where one would be wrong, because Elon Musk companies, whether it be Tesla or SpaceX or xAI, tend to attract negative slant from mainstream media outlets.
This was in full force with Starship Flight 10’s coverage. Take the BBC’s Facebook post about the fight test, which read “Elon Musk’s giant rocket, earmarked for use in a 2027 mission to the Moon, has had multiple catastrophic failures in previous launches.” CNN was more direct with its slant, writing “SpaceX’s troubled Starship prototype pulls off successful flight after months of explosive mishaps” on its headline.
While some media outlets evidently adopted a negative slant towards Starship’s Flight 10 results, several other media sources actually published surprisingly positive articles about the successful test flight. The most notable of which is arguably the New York Times, which featured a headline that read “SpaceX’s Giant Mars Rocket Completes Nearly Flawless Test Flight.” Fox News also ran with a notably positive headline that read “SpaceX succeeds at third Starship test flight attempt after multiple scrubs.”
Having covered Elon Musk-related companies for the better part of a decade now, I have learned that mainstream coverage of any of his companies tends to be sprinkled with varying degrees of negative slant. The reasons behind this may never be fully explained, but it is just the way things are. This is why, when milestones such as Starship’s Flight 10 actually happen and mainstream media coverage becomes somewhat objective, I can’t help but be amazed.
After all, it takes one heck of a company led by one heck of a leader to force objectivity on an entity that has proven subjective over the years. And that, if any, is all the proof one could need about the undeniable success of Starship Flight 10.
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