News
SpaceX lifts soggy Falcon 9 Block 5 booster ashore after accidental splashdown
Independent group USLaunchReport has published a video capturing the entirety of SpaceX’s ad hoc East Coast Falcon 9 recovery operations, in which forlorn booster B1050 had to be carefully extracted out of the ocean after an unintentional soft-landing in the Atlantic following its successful Dec. 5 launch debut.
72 hours after B1050’s water landing and some painstaking preparation, the booster was towed to SpaceX’s dock space in Port Canaveral, where it spent just a brief few hours floating adjacent to drone ship Of Course I Still Love You and the rest of the company’s Florida fleet. Considerably less than twelve hours after arriving, technicians had already managed to lift the rocket out of the ocean and onto dry land, where another week or so was spent preparing Falcon 9 for transport.
Given the extent of the damage to the Block 5 booster’s interstage and the basic fact that SpaceX recovery technicians and engineers had never attempted anything quite like it before, it was fairly impressive that they took barely six hours to lift the booster out of the water, particularly considering that the rocket appeared to be filled with hundreds or even thousands of gallons of water. No visible damage was caused, although there was clearly some cause for extensive discussion and preparation per an unusually large and lengthy huddle of more than 30 employees prior to the beginning of the lift.
https://twitter.com/_TomCross_/status/1071886823721447424
Once on land, B1050 had an unusual sling placed exactly where the Falcon 9 booster’s liquid oxygen (LOx) and kerosene (RP-1) propellant tanks were welded together, apparently a location that is particularly sensitive to off-nominal X-axis stress. To give context, imagine bending a cardboard tube or straw in half instead of trying to push its ends together – Falcon 9’s structure is quite similar in concept. Built primarily 5mm-thick sheets of lithium-aluminum alloy, Falcon 9’s propellant tanks are extremely thin and light while also being aggressively optimized for vertical (up and down) loading, i.e. the forces experienced while accelerating (and eventually decelerating) through the atmosphere during launch and landing.
As a result, SpaceX almost always pressurizes the first stage propellant tanks of Falcon 9 with nitrogen whenever boosters are horizontal without physical support at their bendy centers. In the case of B1050, SpaceX almost certainly concluded that using its waterlogged umbilical ports to inject nitrogen into its tanks was too much of a risk without knowing the precise condition of the piping and the tanks themselves, opting instead to go with a simple sling to prevent damage from unintended bending. Thankfully, B1050 appears to have made it through its dry land ordeal even better than the time it spent in the Atlantic, suffering no visible damage whatsoever.
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- Sad interstage is sad. (Tom Cross)
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- An almost impossibly rare view. (Tom Cross)
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- That’s no boat… (Teslarati)
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- SpaceX technicians had to go through the normal process of Falcon 9 booster recovery at a decidedly abnormal 90 degree delta. (Tom Cross)
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- Falcon 9 B1050 was spotted at CCAFS near hangars SpaceX leases for refurbishment. (Instagram/anonymous)
Somewhere between December 14 and 15, the booster was at long last lifted onto SpaceX’s primary East Coast booster transporter and carefully drove the rocket to one of its 2-3 Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) refurbishment and storage hangars, avoiding detection by all but a few passersby. This could full well be the last we see (and even hear) of poor old Falcon 9 B1050, but there is still a decent chance that SpaceX hopes the entire rocket or major components can be easily salvaged.
Given the extreme care taken during the booster’s lift onto land and the week it spent having legs and grid fins removed, it can be definitively concluded that an effort will be made to save the entire vehicle (sans interstage). If it has managed to make it through the past two weeks largely unscathed, it may well become the first Falcon 9 to conduct a dedicated launch of multiple Starlink satellites sometime in the second half of 2019, at least according to CEO Elon Musk’s vague suggestion that it could fly on an “internal SpaceX mission”.
We may use it for an internal SpaceX mission
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 5, 2018
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!
Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a photo of himself standing with the Optimus production team inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, arms crossed amid workers in hard hats and safety vests. The image captures a pivotal industrial shift: the same facility space once dedicated to building Tesla’s flagship Model S sedan and Model X SUV is now home to the company’s humanoid robot manufacturing line.
Walking the Optimus production line in Fremont pic.twitter.com/ABS0tuRibW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2026
Tesla’s Fremont Factory, acquired in 2010 from the former NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and GM, has been the company’s original U.S. manufacturing hub since Model S production began in 2012.
The Model X followed soon thereafter. These premium vehicles offered lower annual volumes, recently around 30,000 combined, compared to the high-volume Model 3 and Model Y lines that continue around the site. Over their combined run, the S and X accounted for roughly 610,000 units.
In late January 2026, during Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Elon Musk announced the end of Model S and Model X production in Q2 2026. The final vehicles rolled off the line in early May. Rather than retooling for another vehicle, Tesla chose to convert the dedicated S/X assembly area into a dedicated Optimus Gen 3 production line.
Model 3 and Y manufacturing remains unaffected. Tesla’s official Fremont Factory page now lists Optimus alongside the 3 and Y as core products.
The conversion was executed with remarkable speed. After production stopped, crews dismantled the existing vehicle line and installed entirely new modular equipment—including lines sourced from Germany and dozens of sub-lines for actuators, batteries, and other components—in roughly four months.
Musk described the timeline as “insanely fast,” noting it would be unprecedented for any other manufacturer. Initial Optimus output is expected to ramp slowly due to the robot’s roughly 10,000 unique parts and the brand-new production processes involved. The Fremont line targets an eventual capacity of 1 million Optimus units per year.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Optimus Development Timeline
- August 19, 2021: Optimus (then called Tesla Bot) formally announced at Tesla’s first AI Day. A concept video showed a person in a suit demonstrating the vision for a general-purpose humanoid capable of dangerous, repetitive, or boring tasks using the same AI architecture as Full Self-Driving.
- 2022: Early prototypes displayed. At the second AI Day in September, semi-functional units demonstrated walking across a stage and basic arm movements
- 2023: September videos showed improved capabilities, including sorting colored blocks, precise limb awareness, and holding a Yoda pose.
- 2024-early 2025: Factory integration videos showed Optimus navigating workspaces and handling objects like battery cells.
- January 2026: Gen 3 mass-production activities began at Fremont, with reports of over 1,000 Gen 3 units already operating inside the factory for real-world learning and AI training
- April 2026: Musk confirms Optimus production on converted Fremont line would begin in late July or August 2026. The Gen 3 reveal, originally eyed for Q1, was pushed closer to production start. A second, much larger Optimus factory at Giga Texas is under construction, with volume production targeted for Summer 2027 and long-term capacity of 10 million units annually
- July 1, 2026: Musk’s on-site visit and team photo confirm the Optimus line is operational and the transition is actively progressing
Tesla positions Optimus as potentially its largest project ever, leveraging vertical integration, AI expertise, and car-like manufacturing know-how to scale humanoid robots first for its own factories and later for broader industrial and consumer use.
The Fremont conversion serves as a critical proving ground for this ambitious new chapter in Tesla’s already-rich history.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
