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SpaceX’s next Falcon Heavy rocket on track for early 2023 launch
Two weeks after SpaceX’s first Falcon Heavy launch in three and a half years, the US Space Force says that the rocket is on track to launch again “early next year.”
Immediately before and after Falcon Heavy’s first operational launch for the US Space Force, the Space Systems Command confirmed that the massive SpaceX rocket’s next military launch – USSF-67 – was scheduled no earlier than January 2023. The military also confirmed that USSF-67 would reuse two of the three Falcon Heavy boosters that helped launch USSF-44 on November 1st.
Two weeks later, the US Space Force’s tone hasn’t changed, and the Space Systems Command remains confident that Falcon Heavy is on track to launch USSF-67 less than three months after USSF-44.
Assuming the lack of a schedule change is intentional rather than a matter of not checking with SpaceX or other US stakeholders, no change is a good sign. Since the last time the SSC reported that USSF-67 was on track to launch in January 2023, SpaceX successfully launched its fourth Falcon Heavy rocket. USSF-44 was the company’s first launch directly into a geosynchronous orbit ~36,000 kilometers (~22,300 mi) above Earth’s surface.
SpaceX successfully recovered both of Falcon Heavy’s ‘side cores’ and has likely had enough time to thoroughly inspect each booster and begin the refurbishment process. If data gathered from the launch, landing, or recovered boosters uncovered issues with Falcon Heavy’s performance during USSF-44, USSF-67 would almost certainly be delayed. The chances of a delay are magnified by the fact that USSF-67 can’t launch until two of USSF-44’s Falcon Heavy boosters are refurbished and declared ready for a second flight.
But it appears that even a gap of 40 months between Falcon Heavy launches wasn’t enough to make SpaceX falter – at least after working out some prelaunch kinks. SpaceX accomplished a similar feat – launching two Falcon Heavy rockets in less than three months with one pair of side boosters – on the rocket’s second and third launches in April and June 2019. The mission that reused Flight 2’s side boosters was for the US Air Force, so SpaceX and the military already have direct experience tackling those challenges.
In the three and a half years since, SpaceX has gained a huge amount of experience recovering and refurbishing Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters and slashed its record turnaround (the time between two launches of the same booster) from 74 days to 21 days. SpaceX should thus have no issue turning Falcon Heavy side boosters B1064 and B1065 around for a second launch in January 2023, around 60 to 91 after their debut.
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While preparing one Falcon Heavy rocket to launch USSF-67 in January, SpaceX – at least according to customer ViaSat – may also be preparing another Falcon Heavy rocket to launch the first ViaSat-3 satellite the same month. Unlike the US Space Force, which recently shipped [PDF] one of USSF-67’s payloads to Florida, ViaSat has yet to ship its first next-generation satellite to the launch site and says that milestone is scheduled for December 2022. That makes a February or March launch much more likely, but ViaSat recently told shareholders that ViaSat-3 remains on track to launch “in the earliest part of” Q1 2023.
Combined, USSF-67 and ViaSat-3 are scheduled to reuse Falcon Heavy side boosters B1064, B1065, B1052, and B1053. Each will use a brand new center core: B1068 for ViaSat-3 and B1079 for USSF-67, according to Next Spaceflight. Like USSF-44, which was the first time SpaceX intentionally expended a Falcon Heavy booster, both new center cores are expected to be expended.
For several reasons, assembling and preparing Falcon Heavy for launch is significantly more time-consuming than Falcon 9, so there will likely be at least a two, three, or even four-week gap between Falcon Heavy’s next two launches. But as long as USSF-67 and ViaSat-3 are ready to fly during narrow windows in early and late January, it appears that SpaceX could launch two Falcon Heavy rockets in one calendar month.
SpaceX has as many as five Falcon Heavy launches scheduled in 2023 – a stark change after more than three years without a single flight.
SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
Elon Musk
Tesla’s mysterious Robovan makes a sneak peek with Optimus in Terafab video
Elon Musk shared a new Terafab video showing Optimus, Robovans, and a stunningly futuristic campus.
Elon Musk posted a new video of Terafab on X Thursday morning, and the most eye-catching details in it were not the building itself, but two products still awaiting production: Optimus and the Robovan.
The concept render, credited to SpaceX, shows Optimus robots working the grounds of the roughly 2.5-mile-long facility planned for the Gibbons Creek site in Grimes County, while a Robovan glides along an elevated roadway cutting through the building itself, sharing the frame with a Tesla Semi and a Cybercab.
Robovan is the boxy, driverless people and cargo mover Musk unveiled alongside Cybercab at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event in October 2024. He pitched it as a way to move up to 20 passengers at once, or handle freight instead, at a target cost he claimed could fall under a dollar a mile, with no steering wheel or pedals, the same layout as Cybercab. Nearly two years later, Robovan still has no confirmed production timeline and has not shown up in any factory footage, which makes Thursday’s render one of the only recent looks at the vehicle in any form.
Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.
And it will be stunningly beautiful. pic.twitter.com/4NweOqTL7y
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2026
Optimus has moved further along. Tesla began converting Fremont’s old Model S and Model X assembly line into a Gen 3 Optimus production line earlier this year, and Musk visited the site on July 1 to mark the changeover. A second, larger Optimus plant is under construction at Giga Texas, targeting volume production in summer 2027 and eventual capacity of 10 million units a year. Tesla AI lead Ashok Elluswamy said this month the robot has “big shoes to fill” in replacing the S and X line, while Musk has repeatedly called Optimus the company’s biggest product of any kind, with a long-term price he has pegged between $20,000 and $30,000.
Check out the “Robovan” from @Tesla
📸: @Teslarati pic.twitter.com/D4es2i9NUe
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 11, 2024
“Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far,” Musk wrote alongside the clip. “And it will be stunningly beautiful.”
One quote post summed up the reaction: “Futuristic scene with RoboVan + Cybercab + Tesla Semi + Optimus.”
Beyond the vehicles, the architecture wrapped around them stands out too. The building’s facade is canted at sharp angles, with illuminated horizontal bands running through what appears to be a multi level interior visible from outside. Below the elevated roadway, pedestrians walk along a plaza next to a reflecting pool, and the skyline behind the campus is dotted with angular spires that read more like sculpture than infrastructure, a departure from the strictly utilitarian look of Gigafactory Texas or Starbase.
The timing tracks with what Terafab representative Riley Trennell told Grimes County residents on Wednesday, when he said renderings of the facility would be released “within days.” Musk’s post followed less than 24 hours later, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office sent out its own release Thursday confirming the project. As Teslarati reported this morning, Terafab’s tax abatement agreements with Grimes County are now signed and active, and SpaceX has sent the county its first $10 million payment under that deal. The dollar figure tied to this phase of construction, per Reuters, is $16.8 billion, one of the first hard capital expenditure numbers attached to Terafab since Musk unveiled the joint Tesla-SpaceX-xAI venture in March.Reaction on X ranged from enthusiastic to skeptical. “God Bless Texas! Everything is bigger and better in Texas!” one reply read. Another was more measured: “Terafab in a decade…..”
Whether the finished building matches the render is a separate question from whether Musk wanted people talking about the render itself. Less than a day after posting, the video had already crossed 5.5 million views.
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
