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SpaceX Falcon 9 booster sails into port after historic third launch and landing
Although a sister rocket did not fare nearly as well during a separate landing attempt 48 hours later, SpaceX Falcon 9 Block 5 booster B1046 nailed its third successful launch and landing on December 3rd and arrived in Port of Los Angeles a bit less than 48 hours later.
Greeting the rocket after its milestone third reuse was a rare Los Angeles rainstorm, lending a lovely reflective sheen to all uncovered surfaces as low clouds and an obscured sun bathed everything in a stark and uniform off-white light.
That’s one scorched booster, still standing on JRTI at the moment, in the rain. B1046.3 arrived back at port earlier this morning after launching and landing for the 3rd time during the SSO-A mission. What. A. Sight. #spacex pic.twitter.com/EhHY9HK9cD
— Pauline Acalin (@w00ki33) December 5, 2018
It is difficult to conceive of a set of conditions that might serve to better emphasize the well-worn patina of soot and charring now fully covering the once-shiny white exterior of B1046’s fuel and oxidizer tanks, a sort of literal badge of honor for the three orbital-class launches the booster has now supported in the last six months. Functionally speaking, cleaning a Falcon 9 booster from top to bottom would be an unbelievably tedious, time-consuming, and largely pointless task, requiring careful spot-cleaning of something like 400 square meters (4300 square feet).
While SpaceX did repaint recovered Falcon 9 boosters a handful of times around the start of commercial reflights, it always served more of an aesthetic purpose over anything seriously utilitarian. Furthermore, aerospace-grade paint like that used by SpaceX is quite heavy potentially weighing several hundred kilograms per booster and requiring a week at minimum to fully apply a new coat. Some followers like to point out the lost benefits of Falcon 9’s reflective white paint, serving as a mild thermal insulator for Falcon 9’s tanks when filled with supercool propellant. While it certainly exists, the additional heating induced by soot coatings is completely negligible for Falcon 9, which is constantly topped off with chilled propellant prior to launch.
As such, sooty boosters will be around as long as the kerolox-power Falcon family remains in operation. Not too long from now, shiny new Falcon rockets will likely be as rare as the expendable rocket launches they partially represent – the launch vehicles of the future will be rugged workhorses more comparable to the 737s that fill the ranks of airliner fleets than to single-use works of art. Nevertheless, soot is by no means an innate feature of rockets, reusable or otherwise, instead deriving from Falcon 9’s pragmatic choice of kerosene as fuel – soot is simply an inevitable byproduct of kerosene combustion.
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- Falcon 9 B1049 lifts off for the first time at SpaceX’s LC-40 pad in September 2018. (Teslarati)
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- B1048 bares its sooty skin the morning before launch. (Pauline Acalin)
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- A gif of Raptor throttling over the course of a 90+ second static-fire test in McGregor, Texas. (SpaceX)
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- SpaceX’s subscale Raptor engine has completed more than 1200 seconds of testing in less than two years. (SpaceX)
A long and sooty future
Whenever it begins flying, the sole byproducts of the combustion of BFR/Starlink/Super Heavy’s methane-oxygen (methalox) propellant are water vapor and carbon dioxide, although true methane supplies will inevitably have slight impurities and thus cause the negligible production of some less pleasant byproducts. Raptor, the methalox rocket engine that will power BFR, has been performing hot-fire tests for more than two years, and the sheer differences between the exhaust of Merlin and Raptor are a striking example of the different chemistries at work. As a result of much cleaner combustion, BFR may produce no soot byproducts whatsoever – enjoy it while it lasts!
In the meantime, Falcon 9 will continue to fly and refly for the foreseeable future. B1046’s third successful launch and recovery is a huge step in that direction and the very fact that the most noticeable difference is a new coating of soot at least partially hints at the efficacy of Block 5’s reusability-minded upgrades. Even when twice-flown Block 5 octaweb heat shields are glimpsed, it’s all but impossible to tell the difference between an unflown or twice-flown example, while the new jet-black thermal protection on Block 5 interstages and octawebs only exhibit subtle scarring after reentry heating.
It almost goes without saying that the real killer in multi-use aerospace products – fatigue – is rarely visible to the naked eye, so the external appearance of Falcon boosters is more of a swoon-worthy placebo than anything else. Still, Falcon 9 Block 5 continues to demonstrate that its external appearance is almost equally indicative of truly robust reusability engineering.
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- B1046. (Pauline Acalin)
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- . . . (Pauline Acalin)
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- ENHANCE! (Pauline Acalin)
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!
Elon Musk
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
SpaceX’s Starship flew successfully Friday, landing both stages and deploying its first Starlink V3 satellites.
Starship’s thirteenth test flight delivered exactly what SpaceX needed with a clean liftoff, two successful stage recoveries, and the first real payload the vehicle has ever carried to space. Booster 20 and Ship 40 lifted off at 5:51 p.m. CT from Starbase, and by the time the mission wrapped roughly an hour later, both halves of the rocket had done exactly what they were supposed to do.
Booster 20 separated from Ship 40 a few minutes into the flight and stuck a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico about six minutes after liftoff. That is a meaningful turnaround from Flight 12 in May, when the booster lost several engines during its boostback burn before a hard water landing attempt.
Starship as seen from Starlink satellites pic.twitter.com/e2hvfmnewh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
Starship 40’s performance was arguably the bigger win. The vehicle deployed the first 20 operational Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever carried, then flew a suborbital arc to a landing in the Indian Ocean that SpaceX commentator Dan Huot called the company’s softest splashdown yet. “This is a dream scenario for this team that’s trying to get this heat shield data,” Huot said on the live broadcast, according to Space.com’s live coverage. “I’m a little over the moon right now. Wow. Lucky number 13.”
Unlike the mass simulators SpaceX flew on Flight 12, these were production Starlink V3 satellites, meant to extend solar arrays and antennas and attempt to link with the broader constellation before reentering minutes later. Getting real hardware through a full deploy sequence on only the second flight of the V3 generation keeps Starship on schedule for the payload work NASA is counting on for future Artemis lunar landings.
What an awesome launch, really seems like everything went super well and it was all incredibly smooth.
SpaceX is awesome. Very interested to see how the market will respond on Monday pic.twitter.com/KSHmyBfV55
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 25, 2026
The flight also arrives at a moment when SpaceX needed a win. SPCX has traded below its $135 IPO price since mid-July, as Teslarati reported when the mission slipped to Friday, and short interest has climbed to roughly a third of the tradable float. A clean flight will not fix a balance sheet, but it does answer the one question SpaceX absolutely needed answered this week: whether the fixes made after the July 16 abort would hold up under real flight conditions. They did, on both stages, on the first try after the redesign.
SpaceX has not set a target date for Flight 14, though the company has said it wants to push toward an orbital attempt on the next mission. After Friday, that goal looks a lot more within reach.
Tesla’s Supercharger Diner in Los Angeles dominated the company’s global usage rankings after just one year, proving the concept is more than just a one-off novelty location that will fade away.
The performance could incite the company to build more locations, something that CEO Elon Musk has hinted at for some time.
Tesla’s Supercharger Diner delivered 21.2 GWh of energy in its first year of operation, the company’s head of Charging, Max de Zegher, revealed on X. Of the top 10 most utilized Supercharger locations in Tesla’s global infrastructure, the Diner in Los Angeles was the most used by drivers, and it wasn’t particularly close:
Tesla Diner opened exactly 1 year ago. Inspiring that futuristic places like this exist.
It’s our highest usage Supercharger in the world: 21.2 GWh delivered in a year, 1.6k sessions/day.
Top 10 Superchargers by energy delivered: https://t.co/9YvJ8lw696 pic.twitter.com/koB3AUJHws
— Max (@MdeZegher) July 21, 2026
On its launch day one year ago, nobody was too sure what the Tesla Diner would be about. It seemed like an interesting concept, and considering it had been in the works for years, it was a highly anticipated launch that many were looking forward to.
Based on its success, we could see additional Diners with Superchargers built throughout the United States, and potentially beyond. Musk has said on several occasions that the company would be willing to bring the Diner idea to more markets.
Tesla makes major change at Supercharger Diner amid epic demand
Of the markets that Musk has mentioned, both Palo Alto and Austin have come to be perceived as ideal selections. However, there are no concrete plans as of now to build new Supercharger Diners anywhere; the location on Santa Monica Boulevard will remain the exclusive spot to pick up Tesla-inspired eats, at least for the time being.
Tesla short sellers won big following the company’s massive fall on Wall Street after it reported subpar Earnings on Wednesday.
Tesla short sellers collected about $4.12 billion in single-day profits on Thursday, according to Bloomberg. Shares fell as much as 15 percent during Thursday’s session. It closed as one of the worst days for Tesla on Wall Street in the past three years.
Investors sold off the stock after Tesla said it would aggressively direct its spending toward AI and its Optimus robot project. The company had record revenues, which were driven by one of the strongest quarters in terms of vehicle deliveries in company history.
However, it missed EPS estimates by reporting just $0.33, a far cry from the $0.53 analysts expected.
S3 Partners reported that about 3 percent of Tesla’s outstanding stock is sold short. Managing Director at S3, Ihor Dusaniwsky, provided the short seller’s potential profit, as well as another figure: shorts have likely had paper gains of $8.92 billion this year, as Tesla shares are down 30 percent in 2026.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla has burned short sellers many times in the past, but the company’s latest Earnings Call was a chance for those skeptics to taste some payback. Although the company gave some very transparent information regarding future projects, the rollout of Robotaxi, Optimus, and Semi, many investors took their profits on Thursday.
Notable short sellers like Michael Burry have been transparent about their skepticism around Tesla shares. Burry just revealed three weeks ago that he had opened up a new short on the stock, stating he shorted Tesla shares at $416.22. “Happy it jumped back to this level,” he said in a blog post.
At the time of publication, Tesla shares were down about 3 percent and the stock was trading at $309.92.
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
Tesla’s Supercharger Diner probably just secured more locations
