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SpaceX reinstalls Mr Steven’s arms for Sunday Falcon 9 fairing catch

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Over the course of less than half a day, SpaceX recovery technicians completed installation of three of Mr. Steven’s four fairing recovery arms, and the final arm and net are now set to be attached to the ship by the end of tomorrow, leaving plenty of time for Mr. Steven to attempt a Falcon fairing recovery this Sunday.

The reason for the delay is unclear, but SpaceX’s next launch and Mr. Steven’s next attempt at catching a Falcon fairing slipped 24 hours to 7:21 pm, October 7 (02:21 UTC, Oct. 8). Set to place Earth-observation satellite SAOCOM-1A into a low Earth orbit, this mission will mark SpaceX’s 16th reuse of Falcon 9 boosters in 18 months, as well as the operational debut of the company’s West Coast landing zone.

Prior to attaching three arms and six of eight suspension booms, SpaceX’s recovery technicians spent the majority of October 1st and 2nd assembling Mr. Steven’s arms and situating them for installation, including the introduction of a new attachment jig of some sort. Likely used to safely rotate the arms into a position where traditional harnesses can then be used to lift them for installation, technicians spent several hours repeatedly picking up and setting down Mr Steven’s recovery components, swapping between the square jig and harnesses for each arm.

Additionally, a lone diver was spotted working near Mr. Steven’s stern off of a small utility boat equipped for underwater welding, presumably performing routine maintenance or repairs on the vessel’s hull and screws (propellers).

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Once those various tasks were completed, SpaceX installed 3 of 4 arms over a period of roughly 8 hours on Wednesday, wrapping up around sunset after working through an unusual bout of rain in the Port of L.A. Despite having disappeared from Mr. Steven and Berth 240 for more than a month and a half, the vessel’s arms and booms appear almost entirely unchanged aside from visible shipping labels and the installation of small rings at the center of each arm, most likely a simple aid for organizing the rigging needed to operate his fairing catcher net.

In early August, SpaceX spent a day or two testing Mr. Steven’s arms and net with an actual Falcon fairing half, demonstrating just how flexible the combination can be. Along with motorized rigging, Mr. Steven can quickly and safely drop an ~800 kg fairing half onto its deck while also precisely controlling the net’s tension.

 

Speaking on October 3rd, SpaceX VP of Build and Launch Reliability Hans Koenigsmann expressed confidence that SpaceX would be able to close the loop and begin recovering fairings soon, and confirmed that the company still plans to conduct controlled drop tests with fairings later this year while continuing to attempt to catch fairing halves after SpaceX’s Vandenberg launches. Overall, Koenigsmann was visibly excited about the successes SpaceX’s fairing recovery team have already secured.


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!

Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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SpaceX just locked up a NASA record no other U.S. spacecraft can touch

SpaceX’s Crew-13 Dragon reached the ISS in under eight hours, and NASA confirmed a record.

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SpaceX now owns every spot on the list of the five fastest trips a U.S. spacecraft has ever made to the International Space Station, and its newest entry beat the old mark by more than four hours.

Crew Dragon Grace docked to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module at 7:05 p.m. ET on October 1, just 7 hours and 55 minutes after lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. NASA confirmed the milestone in a space station blog update, writing that the flight “marked the fastest launch‑to‑docking of a U.S. spacecraft in the history of the International Space Station.”

The previous U.S. record also belonged to Dragon. SpaceX’s uncrewed CRS-31 cargo mission reached the station in a little over 12 hours in November 2024. The fastest crewed trip before last week was Crew-11, which took 14 hours and 43 minutes in August 2025, according to Space.com.

A post that Elon Musk reposted on Monday filled out the rest of the ranking. Behind Crew-13, CRS-31 and Crew-11 sit Axiom’s Ax-2 mission at 15 hours and 35 minutes and NASA’s Crew-4 at 15 hours and 44 minutes. All five flew on Dragon.

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Crew-13 carried NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. NASA had projected a docking around 8 p.m. ET, as Teslarati reported the day before launch, and Dragon arrived nearly an hour early. Our launch day coverage noted that the flight was lined up to be the quickest Crew Dragon transit yet.

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The speed came from timing more than hardware. SpaceX’s Julianna Scheiman said the station “was in an opportune spot in space,” which let Dragon start closing the gap almost immediately after reaching orbit. “This is close to the fastest it could be,” she added. Most Crew Dragon flights still take close to a day, using a series of Draco thruster burns to raise and phase their orbit before arrival.

Dragon’s next job at the station is a departure. NASA said Monday it is targeting 8:05 a.m. ET on Wednesday, October 7, for Crew-12 to undock, setting up a splashdown off the coast of California around 11:34 a.m. on Thursday. Clearing that port makes room for CRS-35, a cargo Dragon carrying the final set of iROSA solar arrays.

Dragon remains NASA’s only operational ride to the station while Boeing’s Starliner stays grounded, and the agency recently added Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s contract in a $946 million modification.

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Elon Musk teases TSMC as potential Terafab partner

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SpaceX Terafab rendering
SpaceX Terafab rendering

Elon Musk has acknowledged that early discussions with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) could bring the company into his ambitious Terafab semiconductor project, signaling a possible partnership with the world’s leading contract chipmaker.

Musk confirmed that early talks are underway, but as of right now, they are “just discussions.” There is no confirmation of a deal nor dismissal of the possibility of one, leaving open the prospect of one of the largest advanced-chip collaborations under discussion in the U.S.

The report that speculated on potential discussions between Terafab and TSMC comes from Tim Culpan, who outlined a few ways the collaboration could operate. One is TSMC using the project as an “anchor customer” for future facilities in Texas, potentially contributing process expertise, operational know-how, or capacity while Terafab provides capital, long-term purchase commitments, or both.

Tesla and SpaceX jointly developed the Terafab project, with Intel already participating on the tech side. Elon Musk announced the project in March, and it intends to produce more than one terawatt of AI compute capacity annually once fully built.

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Elon Musk’s Terafab project locks up massive new partner

Company statements place the first phase at approximately $16.8 billion in cost, with later filings pointing to a total that could reach well into the tens of billions across multiple stages.

Intel joined the effort in April 2026 and is expected to supply its 14A manufacturing process for the full-scale plant.

Musk has said existing suppliers, including Samsung and TSMC, remain important for near-term needs; Tesla already has production arrangements with Samsung for AI5 and AI6 chips, but that future demand from Optimus robots, Cybercab vehicles, and planned space-based data centers will eventually exceed what the global industry can currently deliver.

Terafab is positioned as the long-term answer to that projected shortfall, and Tesla did something similar during COVID to avoid a chip shortage. This is just a much larger-scale solution.

If the partnership were to materialize, it would add TSMC’s industry-leading strategies to a project that already combines Tesla’s and SpaceX’s capital and offtake with Intel’s process technology. For now, the only public confirmation is Musk’s brief acknowledgement that conversations are occurring.

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Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming

Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.

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Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.

In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”

The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”

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SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.

Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.

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The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.

It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”

The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.

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