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SpaceX’s Mr Steven spotted in high-speed test at sea with upgraded net
SpaceX’s newly-outfitted recovery vessel Mr Steven was recently captured conducting aggressive maneuvers off the coast of Port of Los Angeles, just days after the vessel’s massive new arms and net were installed for the first time. The intense pace of upgrades and acceptance testing confirm beyond any reasonable doubt that SpaceX does not intend to waste its next Falcon 9 fairing recovery attempt, set to accompany the July 25th launch of Iridium-7.
The iconic fairing recovery vessel has – for the past three or four weeks – been undergoing major upgrades to its arms or claws, as well as a massive, new net spanning nearly 0.9 acres (3700 m²). With what appears to be a genuine fourfold increase in usable area for fairing recoveries, SpaceX likely has a very strong chance of actually pulling off its first successful catches and reuses of Falcon 9 payload farings, valued at roughly 5% of the rocket’s cost ($3 million per a $60 million base price) per half. Manufacturing cost and price to the customer are difficult to compare, but it at least offers a hint of the full cost of each ~800 kg segment of carbon fiber and aluminum honeycomb.
Mr Steven seen just after a day spent conducting sea-trials a few miles offshore, July 14. (Pauline Acalin)
Based on photos and video captured between July 12 and 15, Mr Steven’s crew and recovery technicians appeared to waste no time at all leaping from arm and net installation to sea-trials of the new hardware at least as extreme as anything previously observed from the SpaceX-leased vessel. Less than half an hour after leaving the harbor for the first time since his massive new arms arrived, Marinetraffic tracking data showed that Mr Steven was already performing aggressive turns and sprints at speeds up to 20 knots (~25 mph), fairly impressive given the vessel’s 200 foot (62 meter) length and gross weight of nearly 200,000 pounds (82,000 kg).
While this may seem impressive, Mr Steven is a class of ship known as a Fast Supply Vessel (FSV) designed to routinely transport a full 400 metric tons of cargo on its deck at cruising speeds of 23 knots (27 mph), which means that the only thing Mr Steven’s wildly expansive arms likely challenge is the vessel’s center of gravity (balance), hence the follow-up tests with hard turns at high speed.
Also of interest, an extraordinary video of some of that testing – unofficially captured, somehow, by drone – showed the ship aggressively maneuvering in reverse, an ability that could come in useful during recovery attempts if the expanded net’s coincidental protection of Mr Steven’s cockpit means that it can become a less fixed element, actively seeking out falling fairings to help close the gap on each parasailing half’s 50 meter error margin.
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- Mr Steven makes some serious waves, using his pod thrusters to strafe backwards at 5-10 knots. (anonymous)
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- It’s subtle, but a small plus sign appears to ‘mark the spot’ on Mr Steven’s new net, stretching roughly 60×60 meters. (anonymous)
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- Mr Steven shows off the fancy new rigging of that upgraded net. (Pauline Acalin)
Another opportunity fast approaches
Previously scheduled for July 20, Iridium’s NEXT 7 multi-satellite launch was pushed back a handful of days to July 25 to give SpaceX engineers and technicians additional time to prepare what is the company’s third Block 5 Falcon 9 to roll off its Hawthorne, CA assembly line. While suboptimal for the customer and for SpaceX’s manifest, that slight delay very likely padded slim schedule margins for Mr Steven’s major arm upgrades, meaning that the vessel will now be able to participate in the imminent launch’s recovery operations. After the first flightworthy vehicle’s debut in May 2018, SpaceX’s rocket production has ramped up in quite an extreme fashion, jumping from four first stages produced in six months to another three or four boosters completed and tested in Texas in just two months.
While the transportation of Falcon fairings and upper stages is far harder to keep track of, production of those critical components of the rocket have also reached throughput levels that are new territory for SpaceX, including an impressive statistic of an average of one full Merlin 1D rocket engine manufactured daily according to an individual with experience on the factory floor.
The Block 5 iteration of the workhorse SpaceX vehicle is in many ways a wholly new rocket, featuring an array of upgrades that include new heat shielding at the rocket’s base, interstage, and legs; retractable landing legs, upgraded Merlin 1D engines, and a clean-sweep refresh of the vehicle’s avionics, to name just a handful of the major changes included.
SpaceX technicians wrench on a trio of varied Merlin 1Ds in McGregor, Texas, where every single engine is test-fired before being attached to a Falcon 9. (SpaceX)
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Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
