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SpaceX’s newest drone heads to sea for first Falcon 9 booster landing
Update: Fresh from the drydock where it was built, SpaceX drone ship A Shortfall of Gravitas has departed Port Canaveral and is headed around 300 km (~190 mi) into the Atlantic Ocean for its first attempted Falcon 9 booster landing and recovery.
Designed to eventually be SpaceX’s first truly autonomous drone ship, it appears that ASOG’s first booster recovery mission(s) will nevertheless be performed like any other – with a tugboat to tow it to and from the landing zone and constant supervision from a team aboard a second support ship. Stay tuned to watch A Shortfall of Gravitas support its first Falcon booster landing as early as 3:37am EDT (07:37 UTC) on Saturday, August 28th.
SpaceX’s newest drone ship will reportedly support its first Falcon 9 booster recovery attempt ever as part of the company’s first launch in almost two months.
As previously discussed on Teslarati, SpaceX last launched on June 30th and is currently scheduled to return to flight (in a sense, at least) no earlier than August 28th, setting up an almost 60-day gap between launches – SpaceX’s longest in almost two years. Now, on top of a few significant milestones for the upgraded Cargo Dragon spacecraft meant to launch later this week, the mission will also mark an important step for the newest addition to SpaceX’s fleet of rocket recovery ships.
Known as A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG), that vessel is SpaceX’s third and newest “autonomous spaceport drone ship” and could potentially usher in a new era of rocket recovery for SpaceX according to CEO Elon Musk. Namely, Musk says that ASOG is designed to be the first truly autonomous drone ship. While existing ships Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) and Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) are technically autonomous in the sense that they are uncrewed during booster landings at sea, they must be towed to and from their recovery zones and are never far from a crewed support ship with a team of technicians.
Unlike OCISLY and JRTI, Musk says that drone ship ASOG will be truly autonomous in the sense that it’s been designed to propel itself to and from the recovery area without the need for a tugboat. According to Space Offshore, drone ship ASOG unsurprisingly won’t be operated (semi) autonomously on its very first recovery mission. It’s entirely possible that the regulatory side of things (in no way optimized for the operation of autonomous civilian ships) will have to catch up to SpaceX before ASOG is allowed to attempt a Falcon booster recovery with no human intervention.
Combined with the ship’s new ‘Octagrabber’ robot, the third of its kind, it’s not inconceivable that A Shortfall of Gravitas will one day be capable of sailing several hundred kilometers downrange, holding its position during landing, robotically safing and securing a landed booster, and sailing back to port with zero human intervention. Of course, given that things can always go wrong with systems as complex as Falcon boosters and drone ships, SpaceX will almost certainly have technicians tailing ASOG in a support ship for one or several dozen successful missions before ever attempting a fully autonomous recovery without a single human safeguard nearby.
Ultimately, though, that means that SpaceX’s upcoming CRS-23 Cargo Dragon mission could be the first in a long line of careful steps towards a truly autonomous rocket recovery system that might one day save the company millions of dollars per launch.
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Elon Musk is, in many respects, one of the biggest and most influential figures in modern-day artificial intelligence.
Given that Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI are all looked at in their respective fields as leaders to an extent, each of them has a heavy influence on the future of AI, even though two of them are not thought of, at face value, as AI companies.
Musk has grand expectations for what is to come with AI, not only as a form of assistance to make human lives easier, but to make humans multiplanetary and solve some of the biggest issues that face us today. But even he is astounded by AI’s pace of progress.
He believes that in two years, AI will be so mind-blowing it might be unrecognizable.
Given that AI from 2 years ago feels so old that it should be in a museum, then obviously AI 2 years from now will be mind-blowing https://t.co/TcsKZ8o8OE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2026
This progress can be seen in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most popular way people have shown AI’s progress, especially on social media, is through an incredibly arbitrary way of watching Will Smith eat spaghetti:
The progression in AI of Will Smith eating spaghetti (2023 – 2026) pic.twitter.com/VDv82mB5gs
— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) February 10, 2026
This is a great way to show people how AI is improving, especially from a perspective that examines how it can manufacture images and video from prompts. AI is an incredibly complex concept, however, and it goes much deeper than Will Smith eating Italian food.
Musk’s most widely adopted method of AI is likely Tesla Full Self-Driving, which impacts millions of people as they utilize it to increase safety with their travel. Musk has routinely pushed incredibly aggressive timelines for self-driving, especially unsupervised.
Perhaps this perspective is why he feels that things will be solved in a timeframe that is much more aggressive than most of us would think. Regardless, the progress of AI is moving fast, and it seems that Musk’s expectations for it could be high.
But if it can actually achieve full-length motion pictures and even more realistic production value, it will be hard to distinguish between reality and AI very soon.
Tesla just officially confirmed it has built its 10 millionth car, a major milestone for the company that started producing sustainable electric powertrains less than two decades ago.
In that time, Tesla has truly revolutionized the automotive industry, disrupting the idea of what a car should be, how it should be fueled, and how it truly impacts day-to-day life.
10 million vehicles produced globally.
Congrats to all Tesla teams! pic.twitter.com/JkcraR63bs— Tesla Manufacturing (@gigafactories) July 30, 2026
Tesla achieved this feat across four production facilities: the Fremont Factory in Fremont, California, Gigafactory Shanghai in China, Gigafactory Berlin in Germany, and Gigafactory Texas in Austin, Texas.
The 10 millionth vehicle was a Diamond Black Model Y.
Over the course of the past roughly 18 years, Tesla has evolved its lineup from a sporty sedan built on a Lotus body to a lineup of various body styles, performance metrics, and other characteristics that make each one unique.
This is an incredible achievement for a company that is young compared to what it goes up against. When Tesla entered the automotive market, Ford, GM, and Stellantis widely dominated the playing field. Since then, Tesla has caused such a disruption that these three massive brands had to scramble to create EV projects of their own.
Despite their best efforts, they have not been able to match the prowess or the effectiveness of Tesla. They are all reliant on Tesla’s charging infrastructure, their software is inferior, and their self-driving projects are elementary in comparison.
Tesla felt its fair share of growing pains over the years as well. As recent at 2019, there were complaints about build quality, paint quality, and overall luxuriousness. These things have all been improved upon through the company’s maturity, and these strides in quality have led to this 10 million vehicle production achievement, something that other small-and-scrappy EV makers will hope to accomplish one day.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
Elon Musk has a crazy prediction about AI in two years
Tesla just built it 10 millionth car
