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 said he is planning to give “every one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America” in 2027, stating that “this will be the first of many.”
SpaceX went public earlier this year, and its stock price has been relatively stable since leveling off shortly after its IPO. Based on its current price, it’s a gift of just over $10 billion to children across the United States.
It appears to be closely related to President Donald Trump’s bank accounts for children, which were set up earlier this year as Trump Accounts.
Just hours earlier, Anthropic had announced the establishment of its Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, “a new wholly-owned entity dedicated entirely to public benefit.” Musk responded by stating he recommended “giving the shares directly to the public,” and that he would be doing it that way.
Just a little bit later, Musk said children across the U.S. would be getting a share from him:
Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.
This will be the first of many.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026
There are roughly 70 million children, meaning someone under the age of 18, in the United States, according to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Musk’s ownership of SpaceX stock shows he has around 849 million Class A shares of SpaceX stock, according to filings with the SEC.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX’s biggest earnings test yet lands Tuesday, and Tesla shareholders should be watching
SpaceX reports earnings Tuesday as Wall Street watches AI spending, Starlink growth and Tesla merger
SpaceX reports third quarter results after the market closes Tuesday, with a webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET streamed on X, and Tesla follows a day later. Bloomberg consensus, cited by Pepperstone, calls for revenue of $12.89 billion, adjusted EBITDA of $6.62 billion and adjusted EPS near $0.15. That would be about 65% growth from the second quarter and SpaceX’s first profitable quarter since its IPO. Analysts expect roughly $6.4 billion from AI and $4.9 billion from Starlink, which is projected to reach 14.3 million consumer subscribers. Capital spending is forecast at $19.6 billion, leaving free cash flow near negative $11.6 billion.
The numbers matter because SpaceX has spent months trying to win over a skeptical market. It priced its record IPO at $135, spiked to $225.64, then sank near $105 in early August. Friday’s close of $146.03 sits about 28% below the June high. The Q2 report beat on revenue at $7.8 billion and put Starlink at 12 million subscribers, but $18.4 billion of capex hurt the stock. Since then SpaceX reached orbit on Starship Flight 14 with 26 Starlink V3 satellites, agreed to buy 800 MHz spectrum for about $8 billion as part of its Starlink Mobile push, and signed a fourth compute hosting deal in four months worth roughly $13 billion a year from December. Management is targeting more than 2 gigawatts of compute by year end and a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate. Evercore ISI, which raised its target to $275, said the quarter may be judged more on those targets than the reported figures
All of this sits under the Tesla merger question. Barclays analyst Dan Levy expects an all stock deal in which SpaceX buys Tesla at a premium, using reference values of $2.1 trillion and $1.5 trillion, and said an announcement would need to come by late October or early November to be voted on at Tesla’s December 6 annual meeting. Barclays estimates Musk would hold about 37% of the combined company and 56% of the votes. Musk said in July that combining companies cannot be discussed on an earnings call, but an investor question asking when SpaceX will merge with Tesla is sitting on SpaceX’s Q&A platform, and Teslarati has tracked how the Roadster demo revived the talk.
If a deal happens, Tuesday’s result would effectively set the price Tesla holders would receive. Their shares would convert into SpaceX stock, along with exposure to a company with a heavy investment on AI, while Tesla itself expects 2026 capex above $25 billion. A strong quarter and calmer spending would make that exchange easier to sell. Another round of heavy capex and a falling stock would make it harder.
News
SpaceX’s Gwynne Shotwell just made a quiet gesture toward Tesla
SpaceX president Gwynne Shotwell quietly followed Tesla on X, and merger watchers noticed right away.
SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell has started following Tesla’s official account on X, a small change that landed in the middle of a very loud merger conversation. Whole Mars Catalog joked about it on Sunday.
A follow is not an announcement, and neither company has said anything about a deal. What gives the moment weight is the timing. Barclays analyst Dan Levy has told clients that an agreement could come before Tesla’s annual meeting, which must be held by December 6, with SpaceX as the buyer in an all stock deal, as we reported after the Roadster unveiling. Wedbush’s Dan Ives has stuck with a 2027 timeline.
“Shit, I better start following their X account if i’m gonna be helping run the company”
— Whole Mars Catalog (@wholemars) October 18, 2026
Shotwell is the executive most worth watching if the two companies do move closer. When Musk was asked at the All In Summit why Tesla and SpaceX remain separate, Shotwell sat next to him and said SpaceX personnel had already moved into xAI to fill leadership and engineering gaps. The businesses were integrating “faster than I thought,” she said, though “not fully integrated yet.” Her responsibilities have also grown since SpaceX absorbed xAI, and she now oversees operations that include Grok and the company’s AI compute buildout.
The financial links are already there. Tesla’s $2 billion xAI investment turned into a stake of less than one percent in SpaceX, the two share the Terafab chip project in Austin, and Musk exercised his 2018 Tesla options a week after SpaceX began trading, a sequence analysts flagged as giving SpaceX public shares to use in a deal. Musk holds about 20 percent of Tesla and controls 85.1 percent of SpaceX’s voting power, according to our earlier breakdown.
The next test is close at hand. SpaceX reports its second earnings as a public company on Tuesday after the close, and Tesla follows on Wednesday. Musk told analysts in July that “we can’t talk about combining companies and that kind of thing on an earnings call,” so a direct answer is unlikely from either stage. Tesla shareholders can still submit and vote on questions through the Say portal until 4 p.m. EDT on Monday, and the merger is a recurring theme in the queue.
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