News
SpaceX may have missed a rocket booster landing but it snagged both nosecone halves
Although SpaceX sadly lost a record-breaking rocket booster and suffered a significant in-flight anomaly during its sixth Starlink launch, the company later revealed that it successfully recovered both of Falcon 9’s nosecone halves.
Starlink V1 L5 is now the second time ever that SpaceX – or anyone, for that matter – has successfully reused an orbital-class launch vehicle payload fairing, while the mission also marked the first time that SpaceX managed to recover a reused Falcon fairing. The burn from booster issues certainly isn’t fully salved, as twin fairing catchers Ms. Tree and Ms. Chief both missed their fairing catch attempts, but both twice-flown fairing halves were still successfully scooped out of the Atlantic Ocean before they were torn apart.
This is perhaps the most important milestone for SpaceX’s fairing recovery and reuse program since the first successful catch (June 2019) and first successful reuse (November 2019). With a twice-flown fairing now safely in hand for the first time, SpaceX will hopefully be able to dramatically expand its understanding of how flight-proven fairings – especially those that were fished out of the sea – stand up to launch conditions. If these flight-proven halves appear to be in great condition, it could be a boon for the near-term future of fairing recovery and reuse.
Catching fairings = hard
SpaceX has now been attempting to catch Falcon payload fairings for more than two years, beginning back in February 2018 after many months of additional development prior. The first successful catch came on the sixth post-launch attempt, followed immediately by a second successful catch two months later (August 2019). That back-to-back recovery appears to have been a bit of a fluke, however, with only one additional partial success (one of two ships caught a half) out of the five subsequent attempts.
By all appearances, accurately and reliably catching parasailing Falcon fairings is a spectacularly unforgiving challenge. That shouldn’t come as a huge surprise: each Falcon fairing will typically reach top speeds of 2.5+ km/s (1.5+ mi/s), technically reach space (100+ km or 63+ mi), and travel 500-1000+ km (300-600 mi) downrange before even remotely entering the vicinity of the ships designed to catch them out of the air.
Likely weighing just ~1000 kg (2200 lb) apiece, the lightweight, sail-like nature of SpaceX’s carbon fiber-aluminum honeycomb payload fairings is both a blessing and a curse. While it means they can effectively reenter Earth’s atmosphere at hypersonic velocities with next to no heat shield, it also means that free-falling and parasailing fairing halves are at the full mercy of said atmosphere after reentry, bowing to winds and air currents like dandelions in a breeze.
Fairing halves ultimately spend something like 30-40 minutes parasailing through the atmosphere after parafoil deployment, creating vast uncertainties when it comes to local weather and the general behavior of the atmosphere. Even excluding weather, the average fairing catch attempt is roughly akin to throwing an average marble into a kitchen sink from more than a kilometer (0.8 mi) away.
Soft ocean landings: quite a bit easier
What SpaceX has effectively discovered is that while catching fairing halves may be almost comically difficult, recovering the same halves intact is easily doable if the goal instead is to gently pick them up off the ocean surface. Of the eleven catch attempts SpaceX has made, all but two were followed by recovery vessels extracting one or both fairing halves -intact – from the ocean.
Most notably, though, SpaceX has yet to reuse any of the three Falcon fairing halves that were caught with Ms. Tree. Instead, both the first and second reuses used fairing halves that had been fished onto recovery ships after gentle Atlantic Ocean landings.
SpaceX has ultimately chosen to tackle the much harder reusability challenge – reusing fairings that have been partially immersed in saltwater – first, and done so quite successfully. Critically, the first reused fairing was unable to be recovered – even by sea – due to bad weather in the area, meaning that Wednesday’s recovery was a first for rare flight-proven fairing hardware. Given all the challenges Falcon fairings face with water sealing, corrosion, and contamination after water landings, it would be little surprise to learn that the second reused fairing is not exactly in pristine condition.
However, if it looks as good or better than SpaceX’s less-informed expectations, there’s a chance that it could open the floodgates for the full-scale pursuit of routine waterlogged fairing reuse. Even better, if the Starlink v0.9 and V1 L5 fairing halves have been recovered in great condition, there might be a chance to reuse Falcon fairings multiple times, following in the footsteps of the rocket boosters they launch on top of.
Check out Teslarati’s Marketplace! We offer Tesla accessories, including for the Tesla Cybertruck and Tesla Model 3.
News
NHTSA just escalated its Tesla Cybercab investigation in a big way
NHTSA escalated its Cybercab audit into a sworn Special Order with a September 30 deadline.
Federal regulators have moved from asking Tesla questions about its Cybercab to demanding sworn answers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a Special Order that requires a Tesla officer to sign an affidavit attesting to the completeness of the company’s responses, with a deadline of September 30.
The order builds on Audit Query AQ26002, which NHTSA opened on September 3, the same day Tesla began commercial Cybercab service in Austin. Teslarati covered that initial inquiry when it surfaced, noting the agency wanted to understand how Tesla certified a vehicle with no permanently attached steering wheel, pedals, or mirrors as compliant with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. A Special Order is a different tool and converts a fact finding review into a legally enforceable demand, the same mechanism NHTSA used against Tesla in 2023 during its Autopilot investigation.
Several of the 21 requests target a specific gap in Cybercab’s design. One asks whether Tesla used temporarily attached human controls at any point to help certify the vehicle, and if so, which standards depended on that equipment being present. Another quotes an existing rule directly: “The service brakes shall be activated by means of a foot control.” Cybercab has no foot pedal. NHTSA wants a detailed explanation of how the vehicle satisfies that requirement, and how it complies without the kind of exemption granted to Zoox in July under Part 555, the regulatory pathway built for steering wheel free vehicles.
The order does not claim Cybercab is unsafe or that Tesla broke a rule. It requires Tesla to explain, under oath, the reasoning behind decisions the company already made when it self-certified the vehicle. That distinction matters, but so does the exposure. Motor1’s reporting, summarized here, put potential civil penalty exposure as high as $139 million if NHTSA later finds the certification was flawed, on top of whatever criminal risk comes with a false sworn statement.
Tesla has not said publicly how it plans to respond. Cybercab is still carrying passengers in Austin through the Robotaxi app while the September 30 deadline approaches, and the company has continued expanding the vehicle’s footprint even as the regulatory question remains open. The Special Order does not pause any of that and just sets a date by which Tesla has to put its certification logic on the record, with a company officer’s name attached to it.
In a new interview on Wednesday, Tesla uber bull Ron Baron said that anyone looking to buy the company’s stock should do so as soon as they can.
Baron, founder and CEO of Baron Capital and one of Tesla’s most persistent institutional bulls, used a CNBC Squawk Box appearance on Wednesday to deliver a familiar message with fresh urgency: In his opinion, Tesla stock is a buy:
“The time to buy the stock is now. FSD is catching on, and it’s going to be bigger and bigger. 55% of new buyers are buying it (Teslas) with FSD. It’s going to be everywhere. It’s safer.”
The Baron Capital frontman’s case is built around Full Self-Driving. Tesla reported 1.48 million active FSD subscriptions in the second quarter, up 56 percent year over year, and company officials have said roughly 55 percent of new North American deliveries left with a subscription enabled.
Baron framed that attach rate as proof the product is moving from enthusiast extra to default expectation, and as a reason software, not just vehicle volume, should drive the next phase of value.
His conviction on Tesla shares is not theoretical, as Baron Capital made its first Tesla investment in 2014, after years of meetings that began around the 2010 IPO roadshow. The firm later built a large SpaceX position starting in 2017.
Ron Baron today in new interview on Tesla:
“The time to buy the stock is now. FSD is catching on, and it’s going to be bigger and bigger. 55% of new buyers are buying it (Teslas) with FSD. It’s going to be everywhere. It’s safer.” pic.twitter.com/Rv5PB0bVZ2
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) September 16, 2026
Baron said those Musk-led bets have generated about $30 billion of the $71 billion in profits Baron Capital has produced for clients. He put the firm’s current exposure at roughly $25 billion in SpaceX and $5 billion in Tesla. Personally, he described SpaceX as his largest holding, at about $5 billion, with about $1.5 billion in Tesla and additional Tesla exposure through the firm’s funds.
That concentration is also a statement of loyalty. Asked about talk of a SpaceX-Tesla combination, Baron said he had already walked Elon Musk through arguments for and against a deal, then declined to repeat them on air. His public position was simpler: “Whatever you decide is better is what I’m going to support,” he said to Musk.
Baron also said that he picked up the farewell edition of the Model S after Tesla decided to sunset the vehicle earlier this year, calling it his favorite car he’s ever driven.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next Starship launch is about to attempt its biggest leap yet
SpaceX targets September 22 for Starship Flight 14, its first attempt to reach real orbit.
SpaceX has set September 22 as the target date for Starship’s 14th test flight, and this one carries a different goal than any of the 13 that came before it. Every previous Starship mission has intentionally flown a suborbital arc, reentering the atmosphere within the same hour it launched. Flight 14 is designed to send the craft into a genuine orbit around Earth for the first time.
The launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. Central time at Starbase in South Texas and runs for 75 minutes, pending regulatory approval, according to SpaceX’s mission description published Tuesday. If the flight goes as planned, Starship will circle the planet roughly six times at an altitude near 275 kilometers over about ten hours before a deorbit burn sends it toward a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, a departure from the Indian Ocean recoveries used on the last several flights.
The mission also marks the first attempt to put a working batch of Starlink V3 satellites into actual service. Flight 13 carried 20 of the new satellites in July, but because that mission never left a suborbital trajectory, the payload reentered along with the ship instead of separating into orbit.
SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
Each V3 satellite is rated for roughly one terabit per second of downlink capacity, so a successful deployment on Flight 14 would be SpaceX’s largest single jump in network bandwidth since Starlink began flying on Falcon 9.
Flight 13 still did the heavier lifting on the technical side. That July mission flew a deliberately more stressful reentry profile to test Starship’s heat shield, and the ship survived its softest splashdown yet, intact enough for drone inspections shortly after landing. Elon Musk said the flight delivered “all the heat shield data we needed and then some,” a result Teslarati covered in detail when he later said SpaceX had solved the vehicle’s biggest reusability challenge. Flight 14 is where SpaceX starts spending that confidence on an actual orbital insertion rather than another controlled fall back to Earth.
One thing Flight 14 will not attempt is a tower catch of the ship. Musk floated the idea right after Flight 13, but walked the timeline back in August, saying a catch attempt was more likely “in a few months.” The Super Heavy booster will still aim for its own recovery, targeting an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America, the same approach used on recent flights.
September 22 is SpaceX’s own target, not a locked date. Starship’s schedule has slipped before over hardware readiness and FAA sign off, and the company has said as much in its own mission notes. But the plan itself represents the clearest marker yet that Starship is moving from a suborbital test program into something meant to carry paying payloads and, eventually, people.
NHTSA just escalated its Tesla Cybercab investigation in a big way
Tesla uber bull Ron Baron says ‘the time to buy the stock is now’
