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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.
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Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s latest Tesla tunnel truck mod “fits like a glove”
The Boring Company has modified a Tesla powered tunnel truck to carry freight containers underground.
The Boring Company has found a second job for the Tesla hardware it already runs underground. In a post on X, Elon Musk’s tunneling company showed its latest Prufrock Liner Truck modified to carry a standard 20 foot shipping container. “Using TBC tunnels to transport freight,” the company wrote. “The latest Prufrock Liner Truck (using Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units) has been modified to carry a standard 20′ shipping container. Fits like a glove!”
The photo shows a red container sitting on a long, low white chassis parked outside, with drive hardware visible at one end. The Boring Company did not say where or when freight hauling would start, which customers it has in mind, or how many trucks it is converting.
Using TBC tunnels to transport freight.
The latest Prufrock Liner Truck (using Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units) has been modified to carry a standard 20’ shipping container.
Fits like a glove! https://t.co/VV0phWK4fc
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) October 19, 2026
Until now, the liner trucks have hauled concrete. Teslarati reported in August on Liner Truck 3, which uses Model 3 battery packs and drive units to move more than 22,000 pounds of precast tunnel segments to the boring machine. It has 28 miles of range, tops out at 12 mph, and is piloted remotely from the company’s operations center in Texas. The freight version appears to be the same platform with a different bed, and The Boring Company has not said whether it will also be remotely piloted.
Freight has been on the company’s menu for years. When TBC updated its product lineup in 2021, its freight tunnel was described as sized to fit a standard shipping container, “barely.” The company later used the idea at Tesla’s own factory, where Prufrock 3 dug a tunnel to Giga Texas that now moves finished Cybertrucks away from the production line.
The Boring Company closed a $3 billion Series D in September at a $23 billion valuation, and Teslarati has covered how that money is tied to a UAE tunneling push and a faster Nashville build. In Nashville, Prufrock MB1 and MB2 are mining at the same time, and a third machine is expected to launch in late October. Each machine needs a steady supply of liner trucks, so any design that works for segments and containers alike gives the company more use out of the same Tesla parts.
The Vegas Loop remains the only Boring Company system open to the public, and it moves passengers in Tesla vehicles. A freight service would be a separate product, and the post gave no indication that one is close to launch. For now, it is a truck, a container and a short caption saying they fit together.
Elon Musk said he is planning to give “every one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America” in 2027, stating that “this will be the first of many.”
SpaceX went public earlier this year, and its stock price has been relatively stable since leveling off shortly after its IPO. Based on its current price, it’s a gift of just over $10 billion to children across the United States.
It appears to be closely related to President Donald Trump’s bank accounts for children, which were set up earlier this year as Trump Accounts.
Just hours earlier, Anthropic had announced the establishment of its Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, “a new wholly-owned entity dedicated entirely to public benefit.” Musk responded by stating he recommended “giving the shares directly to the public,” and that he would be doing it that way.
Just a little bit later, Musk said children across the U.S. would be getting a share from him:
Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.
This will be the first of many.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026
There are roughly 70 million children, meaning someone under the age of 18, in the United States, according to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Musk’s ownership of SpaceX stock shows he has around 849 million Class A shares of SpaceX stock, according to filings with the SEC.
Elon Musk revealed in a post on X that “Permits were impossible to get,” explaining the fate of The Boring Company’s most ambitious East Coast proposal.
The comment responded to a query about what became of his July 20, 2017 announcement that he had “just received verbal govt approval” for an underground Hyperloop connecting New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., capable of carrying passengers from the Big Apple to the Nation’s Capital in just 29 minutes.
The Boring Company receives verbal ‘approval’ to build NY to DC Hyperloop tunnel
The 2017 post, which envisioned city-center stations and multiple elevators in each city, sparked immediate scrutiny. Local and state officials in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. said they had no knowledge of any approval. A White House spokesperson confirmed only “promising conversations” about the transformative infrastructure.
Musk clarified shortly after that there was “still a lot of work” to do for formal approvals.
@cybrtrkguy Permits were impossible to get
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026
Limited progress followed, as Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s administration issued a conditional utility permit and supported work near Fort Meade. In 2018, Washington, D.C., granted a preliminary permit for site preparation and excavation on a vacant lot at 53 New York Ave. NE in the NoMa neighborhood, which The Boring Company said could become a station.
A draft environmental assessment for a D.C.-Baltimore segment was released in 2019. Yet, by April 2021, the company had removed the project from its website, and the Federal Highway Administration reported receiving no indication of further interest. Communication with Maryland officials had ceased.
The full corridor would have required coordination among the District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, the Federal Highway Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Park Service, and other agencies.
Environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, utility clearances, and approvals for novel infrastructure added to the overall complexity of the project and its approval.
Speculation on the permitting barriers centers around a few factors, but a multi-state, multi-level route involving unproven high-speed vacuum-tube technology inherently triggers exhaustive safety, environmental, and engineering reviews that can stretch for years, even for conventional projects.
There are also other elements, of course, like officials who may face political exposure if a privately funded, untested system encountered anything such as cost overruns, delays, or safety issues. On the outset of this project, there were limited things such as engineering plans or demonstrated technology maturity, which also added to the potential skepticism.
The East Coast vision for Boring Co., once framed as a privately funded revolution that could reshape Northeast travel, quietly ended without construction of the promised network. Musk’s recent statement frames the outcome as a regulatory impasse, unfortunate but not unexpected.
The Boring Company’s latest Tesla tunnel truck mod “fits like a glove”
Elon Musk will give ‘every kid in America’ a SpaceX share in 2027
Elon Musk reveals why Boring Co’s biggest East Coast project never happened
SpaceX reveals how its 1 Million AI satellite network will work and prevent space collisions
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