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SpaceX’s first Falcon 9 landing of 2019 foreshadows rapid rocket fleet growth
Despite an unplanned landing anomaly that foiled SpaceX’s last Falcon 9 recovery attempt, the company’s engineers and technicians have pulled off another successful launch and landing of Falcon 9 – the 33rd for the rocket family – and the first of the new year.
After helping place Iridium’s 8th and final set of NEXT satellites into a parking orbit, Falcon 9 B1049 landed aboard drone ship Just Read The Instructions approximately 7 minutes after liftoff, marking the Block 5 booster’s second successful mission in just under four months. As of now, all but one of SpaceX’s flight-ready Falcon 9 boosters have now performed two or three orbital-class launches and are quickly becoming a truly reusable fleet of rockets.
Webcast of Falcon 9 launch to complete the @IridiumComm NEXT constellation is now live → https://t.co/gtC39uBC7z pic.twitter.com/lU3TwSeCbz
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 11, 2019
Throughout the second half of 2018, SpaceX gradually built, tested, launched, and relaunched a growing fleet of Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters, the first of which debuted in May. Including new boosters that have arrived at their launch pads but have yet to launch, SpaceX’s skilled production and testing team managed to ship, test, and deliver an impressive 1 to 1.5 Falcon 9 boosters, 1-2 upper stages, and 3-4 payload fairing halves on average each month. Thanks to Falcon 9 Block 5’s increasingly exceptional reusability, SpaceX does not have to outproduce other companies and national space programs to dramatically out-launch them, exemplifed by the fact that SpaceX alone was able to launch more orbital missions than the combined output of every company and country aside from China.
As more Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy Block 5 booster are introduced into SpaceX’s growing fleet, the company’s many distinct advantages of direct and indirect competitors should come more and more into play and be increasingly difficult to avoid or ignore. As of today, a fairly incredible number of additional new Falcon boosters are already in their testing and delivery phases, a number that ignores the four (or five) flight-proven boosters and two unflown Falcons known to already be at or ready to ship to launch sites.
- SpaceX’s second Falcon 9 Block 5 booster was spied by an aerial photographer in Texas, April 17. (Aero Photo)
- Falcon 9 Block 5 will be absolutely critical to the success (and even the basic completion) of Starlink. (Tom Cross)
- The second Block 5 booster, B1047, debuted at LC-40 on July 21. (Tom Cross)
- SpaceX’s third Falcon 9 Block 5 booster successfully returned to Port of Los Angeles aboard drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) on July 27th. (Pauline Acalin)
- It’s unclear what exactly causes it, but Falcon 9 Block 5’s newly heat-shielded legs turn a rather bright white after being scorched during booster landings. (Pauline Acalin)
- Falcon 9 B1046.3. (Pauline Acalin)
- SpaceX technicians remove Falcon 9 B1046’s titanium grid fins after its historic third launch and landing, December 2018. (Teslarati – Pauline Acalin)
- Falcon 9 B1046 became the first SpaceX booster to launch three separate times in early-December 2018. (Pauline Acalin)
Just for Falcon Heavy’s second and third launches (NET March and April), SpaceX will deliver another two boosters (one side and one center) to Florida within the next ~6 weeks and will likely ship, test, and deliver another two or three new Falcon 9 boosters in the first half of 2019 for commercial missions and two crewed Crew Dragon launches scheduled for the second half of the year. Although Falcon Heavy’s new side boosters will likely remain side boosters for both of the rocket’s next missions, that should mean that they will be free enter the single-stick Falcon 9 fleet sometime in H2 2019, as will the three new boosters assigned to Crew Dragon this year. Falcon Heavy’s center core will remain dedicated to Falcon Heavy launches as a result of the extensive modifications necessary to support triple the thrust of a normal Falcon 9.
Regardless, this ultimately means that SpaceX’s reusable Falcon fleet could feature as many as 12-15 boosters capable of something like 5-10 additional launches each by the second half of fourth quarter of 2019. At that point, SpaceX might have enough experience with Block 5 and enough flight-proven boosters to plausibly begin a revolutionary shift in how commercial launches are done. With far more boosters available than SpaceX has payloads to launch, multiple flight-ready Block 5 rockets will inevitably stack up at or around the company’s three launch pads and surrounding integration and refurbishment facilities.
Liftoff of Iridium-8 from Vandenberg AFB. Gorgeous morning to end a beautiful launch campaign. 🚀 pic.twitter.com/RZPRRV9i5t
— Pauline Acalin (@w00ki33) January 11, 2019
Instead of the current process of launch where boosters are dedicated to certain missions in fairly iron-clad terms, SpaceX could conceivably treat its launch services as actual services, meaning that – aside from requests for unflown hardware or customer-specific standards (i.e. USAF/NASA/NRO) – the specifics of booster assignments would be no more of a worry to customers than the cargo plane goods are delivered with matters to 99% of logistics customers. A plane is typically a plane regardless of whether it has flown for 10 hours or 10,000 hours. That sort of interchangeability and hands-off approach to customers is likely at least 12 months off, if not longer (old habits die hard), but a fleet of a dozen or more flight-ready rockets is truly a brave new world for commercial spaceflight and even spaceflight in general.
For prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket recovery fleet check out our brand new LaunchPad and LandingZone newsletters!
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SpaceX hid behind another name in the Arizona desert, and now it’s going big
SpaceX puts a $50 billion price on its Arizona supercompute campus ahead of December’s hearing.
SpaceX has put a price tag on the supercomputer campus it wants to build in the southern Arizona desert. In a statement Thursday, the company said it is pursuing a roughly $50 billion supercompute campus in Cochise County, about 80 miles east of Tucson. Together with a separate facility planned at Starbase, Texas, the two projects add up to more than $74 billion in planned investment.
The Arizona figure had not been disclosed before. SpaceX’s involvement only became public on November 4, when company representatives hosted a packed town hall at Cochise Elementary School for an application filed under the name Tombstone Resources LLC. A SpaceX representative told residents the filing used another name because putting SpaceX on it “draws attention” from outside the county, local station KVOA reported.
The application describes a 747-acre site near the Willcox Playa with up to nine buildings of about 493,000 square feet each. SpaceX plans to bring the campus online in four phases of roughly 1.5 GW, reaching 6 GW at full build, backed by a 24 GWh battery system and about $3.6 billion in grid upgrades. At that size, it would draw about 2.5 times more power than every data center in Maricopa County combined, according to an Arizona Republic analysis.
SpaceX says the project will create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs, and that it could cut electricity bills for members of the local cooperatives by up to 20 percent. The campus would use dry cooling with no industrial groundwater use. Its application estimates ongoing water needs of 7 to 10 acre-feet a year, roughly what 20 to 30 homes consume.
Power is the bigger question. The site sits next to the Apache Generating Station, a coal and natural gas plant with about 1 GW of capacity that had been slated to retire by 2028. SpaceX told residents its investment could expand the station to more than 6 GW.
Local opposition is organized. A petition asking the county to deny the permit has gathered about 2,400 signatures, and the nearby playa is a landing spot for federally protected sandhill cranes, which SpaceX says its design accounts for. The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing on December 9 in Bisbee, with written comments due November 27. If approved, construction could start in March 2027.
The Texas project faces a vote the same day. The Starbase City Commission will consider a property tax abatement for SpaceX’s $24 billion gas plant and supercompute facility at its own December 9 hearing, as Teslarati reported. SpaceX said Thursday the Starbase site has already generated more than 3,000 construction jobs, and it committed $220 million to Brownsville’s water and wastewater systems, $40 million of which has been paid.
Both campuses would expand a footprint still centered on the Memphis area, where SpaceX’s Colossus data centers run largely on gas turbines and the company won a permit for a power plant in Southaven, Mississippi earlier this year. SpaceX ended the third quarter with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute. The Arizona campus alone, at full build, would be more than three times that size.
Elon Musk
Nvidia’s board meets on Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk already has an answer
Elon Musk says it would be an honor to hire Jensen Huang amid Nvidia turmoil.
Elon Musk says he would welcome Jensen Huang at one of his companies if Nvidia’s board decides to push out its longtime chief executive.
On Wednesday evening, the financial account ZeroHedge posted “Elon please hire Jensen” on X. Musk replied roughly two hours later: “That would be an honor.” Neither Huang nor Nvidia had responded publicly as of Wednesday night.
Musk’s reply came as Nvidia’s board met to decide Huang’s future. The Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to oust him following reports of two extramarital relationships. One involves Alice Huang, a Singapore-based businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials reportedly believe was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. The New York Times separately reported a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care. Huang acknowledged being unfaithful in a memo to employees on Sunday but gave no details.
@zerohedge That would be an honor
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 12, 2026
Under Nvidia’s bylaws, a majority of its 11 directors can remove the CEO with or without cause. Bloomberg reported that the board has been working with an outside firm on possible replacements and may name an interim chief, with CFO Colette Kress seen as the likely pick. Nvidia shares fell more than 8 percent in extended trading, according to CNBC, and the company is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on November 17.
Musk has more riding on Nvidia’s leadership than most tech executives. In August, he told investors on SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company that it would build its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware, calling Vera Rubin “the best architecture.” SpaceX is also working with Nvidia on the compute payload for Starmind, its planned orbital AI constellation. In October, SpaceX said it had a binding commitment for a roughly $40 billion lease of Vera Rubin GPUs and related equipment, with the leases expected to begin in the first half of 2027.
The scale of that dependence is already enormous. On its Q3 call, SpaceX said it was bringing roughly 200,000 to 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs online each month and expects 2.5 to 3 GW of nameplate compute by the end of the year. That buildout is now reaching new sites like the proposed $24 billion power plant and supercomputer campus at Starbase.
The relationship between the two executives also goes back nearly a decade. Huang has often told the story of personally delivering Nvidia’s first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to Musk in 2016, when no other customer wanted one. “Nobody wanted to be part of it, except for Elon,” Huang said on the Joe Rogan Experience last December.
Musk did not say what role Huang might fill, and his reply stops short of a formal offer. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and still owns about 3.6 percent of its stock, so any move to a Musk company would depend on whether, and how, he leaves the chipmaker he has run for more than three decades.
News
Starlink Mini 2 arrives with one feature for true off-grid connectivity
SpaceX officially launched the Starlink Mini 2 on November 10, delivering the first portable Starlink terminal designed around independent power.
Invitation-only preorders for select U.S. customers are priced at $999 plus tax, a figure that includes a full year of Roam Unlimited service valued at roughly $2,100. A refundable $100 deposit reserves the kit, with the balance due at shipment, expected to begin in mid-December. Broader availability is listed as coming soon.
Starlink just unveiled Mini 2, its next-gen portable dish.
Quick-swap battery, up to 4.5 hrs per charge
USB-C power
Built-in Wi-Fi
Online in about 60 secondsPreorders are open now. https://t.co/QawqgbswrQ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) November 10, 2026
The headline feature is the quick-swap 71 Wh battery. Clipped to the rear of the dish without tools, it delivers up to 4.5 hours of connectivity on a single charge.
The 490-gram pack includes its own USB-C port and LED indicators, so users can charge a spare separately and swap it in seconds while staying online. Starlink notes that the terminal can continue operating while the battery charges or run directly from a 60 W USB-C source. The retail box includes one battery, a 60 W USB-C charger, and a 3-meter cable.
Beyond power, the Mini 2 is thinner at 23.1 mm (versus 38.5 mm on the original Mini) while measuring 263 × 314 mm. With the battery and kickstand attached it weighs 1.6 kg.
Built-in Wi-Fi 6 expands coverage to up to 1,800 square feet, an IP67 rating protects against dust and water, and a standard 1/4-20 tripod thread plus physical power button round out the design. Field of view remains 110 degrees, and the unit retains support for mobile use.
For travelers, campers, and remote workers, the swappable battery removes the longstanding requirement for an external power bank or vehicle outlet that defined the first Mini. Spare packs sold separately further extend runtime, turning the compact terminal into a more self-contained solution.
While the bundled $999 invitation price sits well above the original Mini’s current $149 starting point, the included year of service and genuine untethered operation mark a clear step forward in portable satellite internet.







