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SpaceX ship Mr. Steven renamed ahead of Falcon Heavy fairing catch attempt
In a pleasant, last-minute surprise, SpaceX fairing recovery vessel Mr. Steven has departed Port Canaveral for its first Falcon fairing catch attempt in more than half a year. The speedy ship has already traveled more than 1250 km (800 mi) in ~48 hours and should soon be in position to attempt recovery of Falcon Heavy Flight 3’s payload fairing halves.
In another surprise, Mr. Steven has been renamed to GO Ms. Tree, a strong indicator that Guice Offshore (GO) – a company SpaceX is heavily involved with – has acquired the vessel from financially troubled owner/operator Sea-Tran Marine. With this likely acquisition, nearly all of SpaceX’s non-drone ship vessels are now leased from – and partially operated by – GO. The name change is undeniably bittersweet for those that have been following Mr. Steven’s fairing recovery journey from the beginning. However, it’s also more than a little fitting given that the vessel switched coasts and suffered an accident that forced SpaceX to replace the entirety of its arm-boom-net assembly. Much of Mr. Steven – now GO Ms. Tree – has been replaced in the last few months and with any luck, the vessel is better equipped than ever before to snag its first Falcon fairing(s) out of the air. Falcon Heavy is scheduled to lift off no earlier than (NET) 11:30 pm ET (03:30 UTC), June 24th.
♫ [Mr. Steven] would [sail nine] hundred miles ♫
Not one to dip his/her toes in first, Mr. Steven/GO Ms. Tree’s first fairing recovery attempt since crossing the Panama Canal will be a record-breaker. In yet another last-second surprise, Falcon Heavy Flight 3 – assigned to the US Air Force’s Space Test Program 2 (STP-2) mission – had its center core recovery profile radically modified just days ago, moving the booster’s drone ship landing from ~40 km offshore to more than 1240 km (770 mi) off the coast of Florida.
Given that the upper stage and its fairing-shrouded payload inherently separate after the center stage, after which the two fairing halves are ejected, those fairings will end up even further downrange than the center stage. In the case of Falcon Heavy’s STP-2 mission, the fairing halves could end up splashing down (or, hopefully, landing in a net) anywhere from 1400-1600 km (870-1000 mi) downrange from SpaceX’s Pad 39A Cape Canaveral launch facilities.
Records on records
With a fairing recovery attempt more than ~1400 km downrange and an attempted Falcon Heavy center core landing nearly 1250 km off the Florida coast, Falcon Heavy’s STP-2 mission is chock-full of records. As discussed previously on Teslarati, aside from the surprise recovery records-to-be, STP-2 will be a milestone launch attempt for several additional reasons.
“To successfully complete STP-2, the upper stage will be subjected to ‘four separate upper-stage engine burns, three separate deployment orbits, a final propulsive passivation maneuver, and a total mission duration of over six hours.‘ It will likely be SpaceX’s most technically-challenging launch ever.”
— Teslarati.com, 06/19/2019
“The US Air Force has decided that STP-2 presents an excellent opportunity to begin the process of certifying flight-proven SpaceX rockets for military launches. The STP-2-related work is more of a preliminary effort for the USAF to actually figure out how to certify flight-proven commercial rockets, but it will still be the first time a dedicated US military mission has flown on a flight-proven launch vehicle. Down the road, the processes set in place thanks – in part – to STP-2 and Falcon Heavy may also apply to aspirational rockets like Blue Origin’s New Glenn and ULA’s “SMART” proposal for Vulcan reuse.”
— Teslarati.com, 06/16/2019
In almost every conceivable way, STP-2 will absolutely be the most challenging launch SpaceX has ever attempted. Success would effectively confirm beyond any reasonable doubt that SpaceX is just as capable as – if not more capable than – its sole US competitor, Lockheed Martin and Boeing’s United Launch Alliance (ULA). On top of being able to compete for and perform all mission profiles required by the US military and NASA, SpaceX will also remain the only entity (private or public) in the world that is actively launching, landing, and refusing orbital-class rocket hardware.
Tune in to SpaceX’s hosted webcast around 11:15 pm ET (03:15 UTC), June 24th to watch Falcon Heavy’s third launch ever and (hopefully) catch a glimpse of multiple record-breaking recovery attempts and Falcon S2’s most challenging mission ever.
Want to remember the awesomeness of Falcon Heavy every single day? Consider a limited-edition set of high-quality prints, signed by both Teslarati photographers to commemorate the rocket’s inaugural Starman launch.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Elon Musk says SpaceX will finally retire Falcon 9 once Starship flies reliably every week.
Elon Musk gave the clearest timeline yet for retiring Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket.
The comment came in a reply on X, where Musk wrote that “once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon.” He was responding to physicist Casey Handmer, who noted that NASA is reportedly uneasy about SpaceX phasing out Falcon after building what Handmer called the most successful launcher ever, with the fleet nearing 1,000 total launches.
Now @SciGuySpace reports NASA is in a tizzy because after running the most successful launcher ever for more than a decade and nearing 1000 launches, @SpaceX is planning to retire Falcon in favor of Starship in a few years.
Sorry, NASA, you’ve had 15 years to burn down the… https://t.co/uCNoMwK0v9
— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) August 22, 2026
Falcon 9 is still SpaceX’s busiest vehicle by far. The company is on pace for roughly 140 to 145 Falcon flights this year, following 165 in 2025, president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier in 2026. She has already said Falcon flights would “tail off” as Starship comes online, while reports indicate that SpaceX has stopped booking new Falcon 9 launches past 2028 and halted production of some expendable Falcon hardware, according to Bloomberg.
It’s worth noting that Musk’s post is a condition, and not a countdown on when Falcon will retire. Starship has not yet flown weekly, let alone daily. Its most recent flight in July ended with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, a milestone Musk pointed to earlier this month when he said the vehicle’s heat shield problem was effectively solved. SpaceX towed that ship to Christmas Island for inspection, and the next flight, Flight 14, is aimed at putting Starship into orbit for the first time. A tower catch attempt for the upper stage has been pushed back to what Musk has called “a few months” away.
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
The gap between Falcon’s role today and Starship’s promised role tomorrow matters most to NASA. Falcon and its Dragon capsule remain the only way the agency rotates astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and Starship is not certified to carry NASA crews. Musk’s post did not address how that handoff would work if Falcon winds down before a crew-rated Starship variant exists. The timing lines up with Musk’s other recent Starship comments. Two days before the Falcon post, he told a different X user that SpaceX is aiming for more than 30 Starship launches a day by 2030, or roughly 10,000 a year, a figure tied to the Trump administration’s new push for higher national launch cadence. Falcon, which took over a decade to reach its first 100 launches, was never built to approach that kind of volume.
For now, Falcon 9 keeps flying at a near-record pace while Starship works to prove it can do the job Musk has already picked out for it.
Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
