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SpaceX to launch one of its last old-gen Falcon 9s in upcoming launch
One of SpaceX’s rapidly shrinking fleet of older Falcon 9 launch vehicles has rolled out to the company’s California launch pad ahead of an expendable launch and fairing recovery attempt scheduled for no earlier than Tuesday (NET) 12:47 pm PST/19:47 UTC May 22.
Although SpaceX may have inaugurated a new era of truly reusable rocketry with the debut of Falcon 9 Block 5 earlier this month, there are still a number of older Falcon 9 boosters (all flight-proven) awaiting their second and final flights. At the moment, a minimum of four cores remain, including the sooty Falcon 9 first stage captured earlier this evening by Teslarati photographer Pauline Acalin.
Foreshadowing its imminent watery demise with a lack of landing legs, this particular booster (B1043) previously launched the mysterious and controversial Zuma mission in January 2018, a classified payload claimed (sans convincing evidence) to have failed and reentered Earth’s atmosphere mere hours after reaching orbit. While it’s possible that the mission was a failure, at the moment unsteadily blamed on the failure of a Northrop Grumman-designed payload adapter and deployment mechanism, it’s far more probable that the apparently wildly-expensive satellite is still in orbit.
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- Falcon 9 B1043 lifts off for the first time with Zuma on January 7. (Tom Cross/Teslarati)
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- After landing at LZ-1, B1043 was refurbished in approximately four months. (SpaceX)
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- On May 21, the rocket was rolled out to SLC-4E on the opposite coast of its first launch, ready for one final flight. (Pauline Acalin)
Checking the pulse of Earth’s gravity
Regardless, the same SpaceX rocket booster responsible for lifting Zuma and the Falcon 9 upper stage out of the atmosphere is now ready to launch a new payload at SLC-4E, a launch pad stationed in Vandenberg Air Force Base. B1043’s second orbit-destined payload is a compliment of seven satellites: five are of the Iridium NEXT variety and the remaining satellites make up a scientific mission and technology demonstrator known as GRACE-FO (FO for Follow-On).
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- The two GRACE-FO satellites are stacked atop five Iridium NEXT communications satellites. (NASA)
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- SpaceX is already fairly experienced with launching multi-satellite missions and building custom payload adapters. (NASA)
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- A combination of scientific satellites and five Iridium NEXT communications satellites preparing for launch in May 2018. (NASA)
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- During a normal Iridium NEXT launch, two groups of five satellites are stacked on top of each other. Here, the top stack was replaced by NASA/DLR’s GRACE-FO spacecraft. (NASA)
Following in the footsteps of the original GRACE’s (Gravity Recovery and Climate Experiment) 15 year orbital tenure, GRACE-FO is effectively the same mission with significantly upgraded hardware – the biggest experimental component is actually an advanced laser interferometer designed to measure the distance between the two satellites (roughly equivalent to the distance between LA and San Diego) with the precision of a single micrometer (10-100x smaller than the width of a human hair). At that level of precision, the pair of satellites can detect minute changes in Earth’s gravity, to the extent that they can actually observe droughts, floods, and ice melt through the change in gravity caused by the movement of large (i.e. heavy) quantities of water. If the experimental laser ranging technology works as intended, it will be at least ten times more accurate than the microwave-ranging technology also installed on the follow-on satellites.
SpaceX’s rocket fleet makes way for Block 5
On the SpaceX side of things, Falcon 9 B1043 will be expended after dutifully completing the launch of Iridium-6/GRACE-FO, although the presence of grid fins on the rocket indicates that SpaceX will likely continue a regime of soft-landing recovery tests to optimize and flesh out the limits of Falcon 9’s capabilities. At first glance, the tradeoff of expending entire rocket boosters able to be (relatively inefficiently) refurbished for considerably more than two flights seems extreme and inadvisable. However, SpaceX is presumably ravenous for data on the survivable envelope of Falcon 9 performance – particularly reuse – in advance of the complete transition to the rocket’s Block 5 iteration, a significant upgrade likely to come hand in hand with a more pronounced aversion to expendable missions given each booster’s design lifespan of 10 to 100 missions. At that level of reusability, expending Falcon 9 Block 5s would truly become comparable with the absurdity of trashing an airliner after one or a handful of flights, an (in)famous talking point used by Elon Musk over his years of public SpaceX discussions.
The rocket displays its gritty, beautiful suit of soot ahead of its final launch. (Pauline Acalin)
Thus, if SpaceX can gather data that might enable future Falcon 9 Block 5 recoveries by expending much less valuable Block 3 and 4 boosters, the payoff would be irresistible once examined with a long-term outlook. In the sense that Block 5 may be capable of magnitudes more flights with considerably cheaper refurbishment, the literal elemental value of the hardware – in the likely event that Block 5 production is more capital-intensive than Block 3/4 – is more or less irrelevant for an aversion to expending Block 5 boosters.
Rather, what is lost alongside an expendable Block 5 mission is instead the comparatively vast amount of revenue locked within dozens of additional highly-profitable launches each expended booster could have supported. From that perspective, expending Block 3s and 4s to gather data might be accurately compared to destroying single-pilot Cessnas to improve the utility of a 747 airliner.
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After B1043 is expended, only three obvious flightworthy cores will remain outside of the gradually growing Falcon 9 Block 5 fleet (just two boosters, currently). In order of anticipated launch, these three missions are SES-12 (NET May 31), CRS-15 (NET June 28), and the Crew Dragon in-flight abort test (NET Q4 2018). Barring the unexpected refurbishment of an older flight-proven core for a third mission, these final three missions will bring to a close the inherently temporary era of partially-reusable SpaceX rockets – in the words of Elon Musk, Block 5 would thus signify that SpaceX has moved from “the dog that caught the bus” to, perhaps, the dog that caught the bus and then learned how to drive and maintain it. Somewhere in the middle of those final throes of old-guard Falcons will be an ever-increasing cadence of Block 5 launches and re-launches, likely including the first manifest-necessitated reuse of a Block 5 booster sometime this summer.
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- Falcon 9 B1045 shows off its own Fairing 2.0 ahead of the launch of TESS. (NASA)
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- Chuck Bennett captured Mr Steven conducting high-speed maneuvers with its new, yellow net installed, May 17. (Charles Bennett/@chuckbennett)
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- Not nearly enough net, as it turned out. (Pauline Acalin, May 2018)
Meanwhile, despite the sealed fate of the rocket’s booster, tomorrow’s launch will debut fairing-catcher Mr Steven’s new and improved net. With the introduction of an upgraded net and what can only be described as back-to-back days of relentless ocean-going practice over the last two weeks, it’s entirely possible that Iridium-6/GRACE-FO will be able to lay claim to the first successful catch of a payload fairing following an orbital rocket launch. Fingers crossed.
Follow the mission live on SpaceX’s webcast at 12:30 pm PST on Tuesday, May 22, and make sure to check back at Teslarati over the course of the week as photographer Pauline Acalin covers Mr Steven’s return to Port of San Pedro.
Follow us for live updates, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks, and a sea of beautiful photos from our East and West coast photographers.
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Tom Cross – Twitter
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Pauline Acalin – Twitter
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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
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Elon Musk
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
SpaceX released new footage of Starship in space captured by the Starlink satellites it deployed.
SpaceX released a new video Friday evening showing Starship from an angle showcased by its own Starlink satellites, watching the rocket drift away in orbit.
The 65 second clip, posted on X, stitches together footage from four cameras mounted on a single Starlink V3 satellite. It opens with a close view of Starship’s 171 foot upper stage, still catching sunlight, then pulls back as the two spacecraft separate.
The footage comes from Starship’s 13th flight test, which launched July 24 from Starbase after a scrubbed attempt and an abort caused by an engine issue the week before. When Flight 13 finally flew, it carried the first batch of functional Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever deployed, twenty of them, with six equipped with cameras meant to scan the ship’s heat shield during reentry.
View of Starship in space from a Starlink V3 satellite on Flight 13.
This composite is made of imagery from four separate cameras on a single satellite. Six of the satellites were equipped with cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to… pic.twitter.com/sNTHHz5vLr
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 31, 2026
Flight 13 checked most of its boxes. Starship deployed all 20 satellites, relit a Raptor engine in space, and splashed down softly in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Musk’s longer term plan calls for a Starlink V3 constellation of 100,000 satellites, according to a recent FCC filing, with Starship as the only vehicle capable of launching them at the volume that requires. Each Starship flight is designed to carry up to 60 V3 satellites once the vehicle reaches routine service, well beyond what Falcon 9 can carry in a single mission.
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Starship is next expected to fly with an attempt at catching the ship itself with the launch tower’s mechanical arms, a maneuver SpaceX has so far reserved for the Super Heavy booster.
Tesla flexed the new features of the Model Y L with a dedicated media event at the company’s Diner on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The Model Y L is the extended-wheelbase version of the all-electric crossover, which has been voted the best-selling car in the world on three occasions. The vehicle is already rolling off production lines at Gigafactory Texas, and first deliveries are slated to take place later this year.
Tesla brings Model Y L ‘Launch Series’ to the U.S. at $61,990
Teslarati was invited to the event, but due to some scheduling conflicts, we could not make it to Los Angeles. Instead, we will have our hands on a media unit sometime in August, so we’ll be able to spend some more extended time with the Model Y L.
However, plenty of those who made it to LA shared some cool features that set the Model Y L apart from the Model Y.
Multi-Row Climate Control
Tesla fitted the Model Y L with full climate control on all three rows on the front screen. It can be adjusted by selecting which row you’d like to modify on the right-hand side of the touch screen:
The Model Y L has a little row of icons on the right side of the climate screen so the front passenger can more quickly jump to whatever row they want to control. pic.twitter.com/uJS44mgCvk
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 30, 2026
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Better Rear Window Visibility
One of the strangest things about the Model Y, especially the Juniper iteration, is the rear window has extremely limited visibility when looking into the rearview mirror.
Tesla has improved upon this with the Model Y L:
This is a drastic difference. https://t.co/wTdhitD5aA pic.twitter.com/z6hFs0Jkss
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 30, 2026
PowerShare will be included
Model Y L will come with PowerShare in North America, with an 11.5kW output to your home. Tesla said it would require Powerwall 3 for operation.
Wireless Charging Pad
There has been some speculation that Tesla would upgrade the wireless charging pads in the United States, but this is not the case.
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Tesla owner fixes common feature complaint with crafty DIY retrofit
Tesla confirmed that it does not come with the cooled pads as the Y L in China does. This is because North America has not adopted Qi charging yet.
Thermal Management Improvements
These improvements in the Model Y L were seen with thermal management:
- Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
- +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather, 7 miles of real-world range gained
- 8x more solar energy reflection off of glass roof
- 30% reduction in solar energy entering the cabin
Some of the thermal management improvements in the new Model Y L Premium:
• Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
• Up to 15 min faster cabin cooling in sunny conditions
• +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather +7 miles of real-world range gained
• +10 miles recovered after… pic.twitter.com/jZirFWFdtO— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 31, 2026
Demand
Tesla said the Model Y L is almost sold out in the U.S. It comes with
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- 1 year of FSD Supervised
- 1 year of Supercharging
- 1 year of Premium Connectivity
- Free exterior paint color, interior, and wheel option at no additional cost
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
