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SpaceX isn’t giving up on catching rocket fairings, boat spotted with new net

Mr. Steven was captured performing tests with a duo of fairings and nets at its Port of LA berth, January 22nd. (Pauline Acalin)

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SpaceX fairing recovery vessel Mr. Steven was spotted in Port of San Pedro on January 22nd performing tests with two fairings in its net, hinting at the challenging logistics of safely recovering both Falcon 9 fairing halves with one ship.

Although SpaceX engineers and technicians have yet to catch a parasailing Falcon 9 fairing (let alone two) after an actual operational launch, a series of controlled fairing drop tests – using a barge and a helicopter – have brought Mr. Steven agonizingly close to success, evidenced by an official video published by SpaceX earlier this month.

Teslarati photographer Pauline Acalin managed to make it to Berth 240 in time to capture one section of SpaceX’s fairing recovery testing, in which Mr. Steven was loaded with two fairings, one on the large main net (the passive half) and one (the active half) atop a much smaller net slack on the vessel’s deck. By asymmetrically actuating each net’s separate electric motors, recovery technicians appear to be able to control fairing half orientation and shift their position in the net. It’s unclear how exactly Mr. Steven’s main (top) and secondary (bottom) nets are meant to interface insofar as it does not appear physically possible for a fairing half in the top net to make its way to the bottom net without the intervention of dockside cranes.

Perhaps more importantly, local photographer Jack Beyer was able to observe additional activities just prior to Pauline’s arrival, capturing what looked like a weighted parachute drop test onto either Mr. Steven’s net or the concrete docks beside the vessel.

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The goal of that parachute/weight drop test is entirely opaque. Regardless, Tuesday’s tests do seem to indicate that SpaceX is thinking about recovering both post-launch Falcon fairing halves with a single Mr. Steven, a capability upgrade that would make the incomplete challenge of catching fairings even more difficult. Assuming both fairing halves deploy their parafoils at roughly the same time, it might be possible for the autonomous parafoils to modify trajectories in such a way that a gap of seconds or even minutes could be created between both planned splashdowns, offering Mr. Steven a minute or two to free its net of the first captured half before gently catching the second.

Despite the fact that SpaceX has not yet had operational success in the ~12 months recovery engineers and technicians have been working with Mr. Steven, tests like those performed on Tuesday have continued to reliably occur. If anything, the fact that experiments with dual-fairing recovery operations are still on the table is an encouraging indication that fairing recovery and reuse – particularly with Mr. Steven in the loop – are still a priority at SpaceX, while also suggesting that the company’s engineers and technicians are extremely confident that repeatable success is just a matter of refinement.

Mr. Steven is seen here just after a fairing half was placed on his main net. (Pauline Acalin, 01/22/19)

This should not come as a much of a surprise given that Falcon 9 began propulsive soft landing attempts in September 2013, 27 months before the company’s first successful Falcon 9 booster recovery. Nevertheless, SpaceX attempted its first actual landing aboard a drone ship in January 2015, separating the first attempt from the first successful landing by just less than 12 months. Fairing recovery is clearly an entirely different beast but the gist of this analogy remains true regardless – SpaceX’s brilliant engineers and technicians are unlikely to give up until a given problem is solved or their efforts are redirected elsewhere as company priorities shift.

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Berth 240’s uncertain future

In the meantime, SpaceX may soon have to move Mr. Steven’s Port of San Pedro operations elsewhere according to a report from the LA Times that the company plans to “terminate [its] Terminal Island lease agreement.” SpaceX was unable to offer further insight beyond a statement provided about the future of BFR’s manufacturing, initially planned to occur at a dedicated factory that would have been built at Berth 240, which has also acted as Mr. Steven’s home for the last eight months.

Given the lack of official insight into the proceedings, it’s ambiguous if the terminated lease will be modified to allow for Mr. Steven to continue operating out of Berth 240. Prior to moving to Berth 240, SpaceX stationed Mr. Steven at Berth 52, home of drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) and support vessel NRC Quest. Space is already tight at that site, however, making it a suboptimal replacement for Berth 240.

SpaceX signed its Berth 240 lease near the end of March 2018 and would have reached the first anniversary of its prospective BFR factory around two months from now. For now, only SpaceX seems to know where Mr. Steven’s operations and the first BFR (Starship/Super Heavy) production will ultimately be located.


Check out Teslarati’s newsletters for prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket launch and recovery processes!

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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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Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley

Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.

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Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.

Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.

Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:

“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”

Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.

The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.

Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.

Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.

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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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Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing

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(Credit: Starlink | X)

Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.

Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.

Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.

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The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.

A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.

Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.

Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.

Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.

The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.

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Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration

Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.

The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.

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