News
SpaceX bids goodbye to older Falcon 9s with Florida ‘jellyfish’ launch spectacle
SpaceX’s final Block 4 Falcon 9 has completed its second and last orbital mission with a spectacular sendoff visible for hundreds of miles along the East Coast, harkening back to “alien invasion” comparisons that followed an equally stunning SpaceX launch from California last December.
Although the Falcon 9 booster was expended in the Atlantic Ocean minutes after launch, its upper stage remains in orbit in an experimental test of its lifespan, while the mission’s flight-proven Cargo Dragon spacecraft separated from the rocket and headed to the International Space Station with a promise of a possible third orbital reuse in 2019. This mission’s Dragon capsule flew for the first time in late 2016 for the CRS-9 mission and spent the two years since then having its heat shield and other major components refurbished or replaced, likely at a cost to SpaceX less than half that of constructing a brand-new Dragon spacecraft.
Falcon 9 B1045 lounges in the Florida summer humidity, hours before its second and final launch. (Tom Cross)
According to Jessica Jensen, SpaceX’s Director of Dragon Mission Management, SpaceX’s Dragon refurbishment team has also gotten considerably more efficient over several years of experience reusing the orbital spacecraft, now up to three reflights of three separate capsules. She noted in the postlaunch conference that – if all major components are healthy upon CRS-15’s early-August return to Earth – this capsule could be refurbished for its third mission in as few as months, which would make it one of the last Dragon 1 launches before the upgraded Dragon 2 begins crewed flights and takes over all cargo missions. After CRS-15, five more of those Cargo Dragon flights remain until CRS-2’s 2020 takeover, all of which will utilize flight-proven capsules.
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- CRS-15’s dramatic pre-dawn launch. (Tom Cross)
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- The extraordinary plume was lit up by the sun before it had risen above the Eastern horizon. (Tom Cross)
Falcon 9, on the other hand, reached a truly historic milestone today for SpaceX – B1045’s second and final flight marks the last rocket SpaceX will fly that does not feature a number of upgrades designed to dramatically improve booster reusability. Known as Falcon 9 Block 5, all future SpaceX missions (at least until BFR’s debut sometime in the early 2020s) will be launched aboard the upgraded rocket. If it works as intended, Block 5 should theoretically enable a rapid and affordable level of reusability never before achieved by Falcon 9 or any other rocket, for that matter.
https://twitter.com/_TomCross_/status/1012694524987092992
While still more than a little disheartening to see a Falcon 9 booster intentionally expended after launch, the spectacle created by B1045’s final flight was fitting, to say the least. Thankfully, the Block 5 takeover of all future SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launches is likely to also result in a dramatic reduction in SpaceX’s willingness to expend flight-proven rockets after launch. Whereas Block 3 and 4 Falcon 9s were never designed to affordably and safely fly more than two or three times total, minimizing any opportunity cost from expending twice-flown rockets after launch, Block 5 has been purpose-built to allow individual boosters to fly a bare minimum of 10 times with minimal refurbishment and as many as 100 times with regular maintenance. Unless Block 5’s design fails to achieve that level of reusability, SpaceX is extremely unlikely to expend Block 5 boosters unless they have flown a number of times to extract as much value as possible from them.
Up next on SpaceX’s manifest are two back-to-back Falcon 9 Block 5 launches, Iridium-7 from California on July 20 and Telstar 19V from Florida less than 18 hours later. Both Block 5 boosters will be recovered aboard SpaceX’s fleet of drone ships, Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) to the West and Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) to the East.
Follow us for live updates, peeks behind the scenes, and photos from Teslarati’s East and West Coast photographers.
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Elon Musk
Tesla gives the Roadster an official “Go for launch” demonstration date
Tesla teased an October 1 Roadster reveal, reviving years of delayed SpaceX thruster hover promises.
Tesla teased an October 1 event date for its next generation Roadster, posting an image on X Saturday that shows the car lit up like it is sitting on a launch pad, with the date “10.01” stamped across the bottom and the caption “Go for launch.” A countdown clock on Tesla’s Roadster order page now points to the same date, which falls on a Thursday. The company has not said where the event will happen or whether it will be streamed at the moment. Stay with us @Teslarati for live updates.
Go for launch pic.twitter.com/Khu03eiZ04
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 12, 2026
Tesla has since sent formal invitations to reservation holders confirming the event will take place in Waco, Texas, about 90 minutes north of its Austin headquarters, based on a digital ticket shared on X by Sawyer Merritt. Tesla did not name the exact venue, though Waco sits close to SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas, rocket test site, previously reported as the planned location for a Roadster thruster demonstration. The invite sets the reveal for 8:30 p.m. Eastern on October 1, requires RSVPs by midnight on September 16, and limits entry to guests 21 and older. Invitations are non-transferable.
The tease follows nine years of a project defined by unimaginable specs along with slipped dates. Musk first showed the second generation Roadster in November 2017 as a surprise reveal at the end of the Tesla Semi event, promising a 0 to 60 mph time under two seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery, and production starting in 2020. At last November’s shareholder meeting, Musk set an April 1 demo date and joked the choice gave him “deniability” if it slipped again, which it did, moving first to late April, then to “a month or so,” then to August.
Tesla Roadster SpaceX Package’s 1.1-second 0-60 mph launch visualized in concept video
Whatever Tesla shows on October 1 is expected to center on the SpaceX developed thruster package Musk has described since 2018. Internally code named A71, a nod to the Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird, the system reportedly 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 Roadster could hit 60 mph in about 1.1 seconds under roughly 2.75 g of launch force, well past the 1.9 second figure quoted for the standard car. That version reportedly will not be street legal and has reportedly been discussed as a limited run sold through a track only program.
The standard Roadster is still expected to carry the original $200,000 base price and $250,000 Founders Series tier, both set when Tesla opened $50,000 and $250,000 reservations in 2017. Tesla VP of Vehicle Engineering Lars Moravy has confirmed production will happen at Gigafactory Texas, with Musk targeting 2027 or 2028, 12 to 18 months after whatever the company demonstrates next month.
Tesla is planning to roll out some pretty significant safety and accident avoidance features with Full Self-Driving version 15, which will be the next major FSD deployment from the company.
Tesla AI lead Ashok Elluswamy used a near-miss this week to preview what the company says is the next leap in Full Self-Driving.
In response to a driver whose car had swerved away from another vehicle pulling out of a parking lot, Elluswamy wrote that he was glad the owner was safe and that “even earlier prediction of hazards, even faster reaction time and overall significantly better safety and collision avoidance” would arrive with FSD v15.
Glad you are safe. Even earlier prediction of hazards, even faster reaction time and overall significantly better safety and collision avoidance coming as part of the next big upgrade (v15).
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) September 11, 2026
The comment landed as Tesla continues to treat software as the primary safety upgrade path. v15 is described internally as a larger architectural step, with a much bigger neural network and tighter coupling between prediction and control.
The company has already begun using early v15 software in some robotaxi operations while rolling out safety features such as Automatic Collision Evasion into current customer cars, allowing the driving stack to intervene even when the driver is in manual control.
Tesla is rolling out a new FSD version with a massive safety addition
Tesla’s published telemetry is the backbone of its safety argument. In recent North American Vehicle Safety Report data, vehicles with FSD (Supervised) engaged traveled roughly 5.1 million to 5.7 million miles between major collisions, defined as airbag-deployment events.
Tesla’s estimate of the U.S. average over the same period is about 699,000 miles per comparable crash. That is the comparison Tesla often frames as roughly seven times fewer major collisions.
A tighter comparison uses the same Tesla fleet. Cars driven manually with active safety features such as automatic emergency braking still recorded a major collision about every 2.1 million miles. Against that baseline, FSD’s advantage shrinks to roughly 2.4 to 2.7 times fewer severe crashes, which independent researchers argue is the more apples-to-apples figure.
European data released in 2026 pointed in the same direction: Tesla reported FSD as 3.5 times safer than manual driving in the Netherlands and 4.1 times fewer collisions than manually driven Teslas with active safety across more than 100 million kilometers in five approved countries.
Those numbers do not settle every debate. NHTSA’s Standing General Order still shows Tesla accounting for the large majority of U.S. Level 2 driver-assist crash reports, in part because the fleet logs far more assisted miles than rivals. Critics also note that Tesla’s “U.S. average” mixes crash definitions and driving mix.
Even so, Tesla’s own same-car comparisons, plus lower rates of automatic emergency braking and harsh maneuvers when FSD is engaged, are the evidence Elluswamy is pointing to when he says v15 will push prediction and collision avoidance further. The claim is not that software already eliminates risk. It is that each major version is meant to widen the gap between the system and an unaided human driver.
Cybertruck
Tesla’s most delayed Cybertruck feature is finally here
Tesla finally links Cybertruck Powershare with Powerwall 3 for extended home backup after years overdue.
Tesla’s Cybertruck can now pair with a Powerwall 3 to keep a house running longer during an outage, a feature the company first promised when the truck launched in November 2023.
The official Cybertruck account posted the update on X Thursday: “Powerwall 3 & I can now power your house together. This extends your home backup by over 3 days, equivalent to 9 additional Powerwalls,” Cybertruck lead engineer Wes Morrill confirmed the rollout separately, calling it the first time a vehicle and a home battery have worked together this way. Powerwall 2 and Powerwall+ compatibility is still coming later this year, per both the Cybertruck account and Morrill.
Powerwall 3 & I can now power your house together⁰ ⁰This extends your home backup by over 3 days, equivalent to 9 additional Powerwalls pic.twitter.com/8G2twIm6AN
— Cybertruck (@cybertruck) September 10, 2026
Powershare itself is not new. Tesla enabled the version that lets Cybertruck power tools, appliances or another EV through its bed outlets when the truck launched in 2023. Home backup through a Powershare Gateway and Universal Wall Connector arrived in 2024, and Tesla extended that support to homes with solar the following year. What has been missing until now is Powershare working alongside an existing Powerwall, instead of functioning as a separate backup source competing for the same job.
The pairing matters because a single Powerwall home battery typically covers a home for about a day, less if usage is heavy or the outage stretches into a heat wave or freeze. A second Powerwall for more backup storage costs several thousand dollars installed. A Cybertruck instead uses a battery the owner already has, one large enough here to add roughly three more days of backup without mounting another unit or booking an installer visit. For households in wildfire, hurricane or winter storm regions where outages run past a day, that keeps the refrigerator and medical equipment running instead of shutting down.
The company told owners in October 2024 that Powerwall integration was coming sometime in 2025. That date passed, and in December 2025 Tesla pushed the target to mid-2026, with Morrill explaining at the time that two grid-forming devices need to negotiate which one manages a home during an outage, and that certifying the process across multiple generations of Powerwall took longer than expected.
For owners who bought Powershare hardware expecting it to work with whatever battery setup they already had, Thursday’s update closes a gap that has shown up repeatedly in owner complaints since Cybertruck deliveries began. Tesla has also rolled out a separate Powershare grid support program in Texas, letting Cybertrucks send power back to the grid during high demand events, so the truck’s role in a home’s energy setup keeps expanding even as individual pieces of it arrive later than promised.
Tesla gives the Roadster an official “Go for launch” demonstration date
Tesla plans big safety improvements for Full Self-Driving v15
