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SpaceX isn’t giving up on catching rocket fairings, boat spotted with new net
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.
Two fairing halves, each in a separate net aboard Mr Steven this morning. #spacex pic.twitter.com/beYSFQwcYr
— Pauline Acalin (@w00ki33) January 23, 2019
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.
So far they’ve placed one fairing half in the top net with another in the bottom, and done at least one drop test of a weight with a parachute. ? pic.twitter.com/MkWb9l9lqz
— Jack Beyer (@thejackbeyer) January 22, 2019
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.

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.
Recent fairing recovery test with Mr. Steven. So close! pic.twitter.com/DFSCfBnM0Y
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) January 8, 2019
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.
While I feel crushed about #SpaceX pulling the #SuperHeavy out of the @PortofLA, I feel confident that other innovators will see the huge value they get in San Pedro. (1/2)
— Joe Buscaino (@JoeBuscaino) January 16, 2019
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.
News
SpaceX hid behind another name in the Arizona desert, and now it’s going big
SpaceX puts a $50 billion price on its Arizona supercompute campus ahead of December’s hearing.
SpaceX has put a price tag on the supercomputer campus it wants to build in the southern Arizona desert. In a statement Thursday, the company said it is pursuing a roughly $50 billion supercompute campus in Cochise County, about 80 miles east of Tucson. Together with a separate facility planned at Starbase, Texas, the two projects add up to more than $74 billion in planned investment.
The Arizona figure had not been disclosed before. SpaceX’s involvement only became public on November 4, when company representatives hosted a packed town hall at Cochise Elementary School for an application filed under the name Tombstone Resources LLC. A SpaceX representative told residents the filing used another name because putting SpaceX on it “draws attention” from outside the county, local station KVOA reported.
The application describes a 747-acre site near the Willcox Playa with up to nine buildings of about 493,000 square feet each. SpaceX plans to bring the campus online in four phases of roughly 1.5 GW, reaching 6 GW at full build, backed by a 24 GWh battery system and about $3.6 billion in grid upgrades. At that size, it would draw about 2.5 times more power than every data center in Maricopa County combined, according to an Arizona Republic analysis.
SpaceX says the project will create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs, and that it could cut electricity bills for members of the local cooperatives by up to 20 percent. The campus would use dry cooling with no industrial groundwater use. Its application estimates ongoing water needs of 7 to 10 acre-feet a year, roughly what 20 to 30 homes consume.
Power is the bigger question. The site sits next to the Apache Generating Station, a coal and natural gas plant with about 1 GW of capacity that had been slated to retire by 2028. SpaceX told residents its investment could expand the station to more than 6 GW.
Local opposition is organized. A petition asking the county to deny the permit has gathered about 2,400 signatures, and the nearby playa is a landing spot for federally protected sandhill cranes, which SpaceX says its design accounts for. The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing on December 9 in Bisbee, with written comments due November 27. If approved, construction could start in March 2027.
The Texas project faces a vote the same day. The Starbase City Commission will consider a property tax abatement for SpaceX’s $24 billion gas plant and supercompute facility at its own December 9 hearing, as Teslarati reported. SpaceX said Thursday the Starbase site has already generated more than 3,000 construction jobs, and it committed $220 million to Brownsville’s water and wastewater systems, $40 million of which has been paid.
Both campuses would expand a footprint still centered on the Memphis area, where SpaceX’s Colossus data centers run largely on gas turbines and the company won a permit for a power plant in Southaven, Mississippi earlier this year. SpaceX ended the third quarter with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute. The Arizona campus alone, at full build, would be more than three times that size.
Elon Musk
Nvidia’s board meets on Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk already has an answer
Elon Musk says it would be an honor to hire Jensen Huang amid Nvidia turmoil.
Elon Musk says he would welcome Jensen Huang at one of his companies if Nvidia’s board decides to push out its longtime chief executive.
On Wednesday evening, the financial account ZeroHedge posted “Elon please hire Jensen” on X. Musk replied roughly two hours later: “That would be an honor.” Neither Huang nor Nvidia had responded publicly as of Wednesday night.
Musk’s reply came as Nvidia’s board met to decide Huang’s future. The Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to oust him following reports of two extramarital relationships. One involves Alice Huang, a Singapore-based businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials reportedly believe was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. The New York Times separately reported a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care. Huang acknowledged being unfaithful in a memo to employees on Sunday but gave no details.
@zerohedge That would be an honor
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 12, 2026
Under Nvidia’s bylaws, a majority of its 11 directors can remove the CEO with or without cause. Bloomberg reported that the board has been working with an outside firm on possible replacements and may name an interim chief, with CFO Colette Kress seen as the likely pick. Nvidia shares fell more than 8 percent in extended trading, according to CNBC, and the company is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on November 17.
Musk has more riding on Nvidia’s leadership than most tech executives. In August, he told investors on SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company that it would build its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware, calling Vera Rubin “the best architecture.” SpaceX is also working with Nvidia on the compute payload for Starmind, its planned orbital AI constellation. In October, SpaceX said it had a binding commitment for a roughly $40 billion lease of Vera Rubin GPUs and related equipment, with the leases expected to begin in the first half of 2027.
The scale of that dependence is already enormous. On its Q3 call, SpaceX said it was bringing roughly 200,000 to 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs online each month and expects 2.5 to 3 GW of nameplate compute by the end of the year. That buildout is now reaching new sites like the proposed $24 billion power plant and supercomputer campus at Starbase.
The relationship between the two executives also goes back nearly a decade. Huang has often told the story of personally delivering Nvidia’s first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to Musk in 2016, when no other customer wanted one. “Nobody wanted to be part of it, except for Elon,” Huang said on the Joe Rogan Experience last December.
Musk did not say what role Huang might fill, and his reply stops short of a formal offer. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and still owns about 3.6 percent of its stock, so any move to a Musk company would depend on whether, and how, he leaves the chipmaker he has run for more than three decades.
News
Starlink Mini 2 arrives with one feature for true off-grid connectivity
SpaceX officially launched the Starlink Mini 2 on November 10, delivering the first portable Starlink terminal designed around independent power.
Invitation-only preorders for select U.S. customers are priced at $999 plus tax, a figure that includes a full year of Roam Unlimited service valued at roughly $2,100. A refundable $100 deposit reserves the kit, with the balance due at shipment, expected to begin in mid-December. Broader availability is listed as coming soon.
Starlink just unveiled Mini 2, its next-gen portable dish.
Quick-swap battery, up to 4.5 hrs per charge
USB-C power
Built-in Wi-Fi
Online in about 60 secondsPreorders are open now. https://t.co/QawqgbswrQ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) November 10, 2026
The headline feature is the quick-swap 71 Wh battery. Clipped to the rear of the dish without tools, it delivers up to 4.5 hours of connectivity on a single charge.
The 490-gram pack includes its own USB-C port and LED indicators, so users can charge a spare separately and swap it in seconds while staying online. Starlink notes that the terminal can continue operating while the battery charges or run directly from a 60 W USB-C source. The retail box includes one battery, a 60 W USB-C charger, and a 3-meter cable.
Beyond power, the Mini 2 is thinner at 23.1 mm (versus 38.5 mm on the original Mini) while measuring 263 × 314 mm. With the battery and kickstand attached it weighs 1.6 kg.
Built-in Wi-Fi 6 expands coverage to up to 1,800 square feet, an IP67 rating protects against dust and water, and a standard 1/4-20 tripod thread plus physical power button round out the design. Field of view remains 110 degrees, and the unit retains support for mobile use.
For travelers, campers, and remote workers, the swappable battery removes the longstanding requirement for an external power bank or vehicle outlet that defined the first Mini. Spare packs sold separately further extend runtime, turning the compact terminal into a more self-contained solution.
While the bundled $999 invitation price sits well above the original Mini’s current $149 starting point, the included year of service and genuine untethered operation mark a clear step forward in portable satellite internet.