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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.
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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Pauline Acalin – Twitter
Eric Ralph – Twitter
Elon Musk
Elon Musk just upped his Tesla stake further fueling SpaceX merger conversation
Elon Musk just collected a $116 billion Tesla payday and the timing is eye-opening
Elon Musk quietly collected one of the largest single-transaction paydays in corporate history on Monday. A Form 4 filed with the SEC on June 17, 2026 disclosed that Musk exercised 303,960,630 Tesla stock options from his 2018 compensation package, with the transaction dated June 16. No shares were sold on the open market.
The numbers are straightforward but striking. Musk exercised the options at a split-adjusted strike price of $23.34, with Tesla closing at $404.66 that day, putting the spread at $381.32 per share and generating roughly $115.9 billion in paper gains in a single transaction. To cover the exercise cost, Tesla withheld 17,531,857 shares through a net share settlement, meaning Musk paid nothing out of pocket.
For perspective, in 2018, Elon Musk’s award was originally approved by Tesla shareholders on March 21, 2018, and structured entirely around performance milestones that many analysts at the time called unreachable. Every tranche eventually vested. The original grant covered 20,264,042 shares at $350.02, which after Tesla’s 5-for-1 split in 2020 and 3-for-1 split in 2022 adjusted to 303,960,630 shares at $23.34. A Delaware court rescinded the award in January 2024, ruling the board was conflicted. As Teslarati reported, Tesla shareholders voted to ratify the package anyway in June 2024 by a wide margin. The Delaware Supreme Court reversed the decision in December 2025, finding full cancellation too extreme, and Tesla’s board signed an Implementation Agreement on April 21, 2026 to formally deliver the shares.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
The timing and structure of the Form 4 filing carries more weight than a routine stock option exercise typically would. Musk exercised his 2018 Tesla award on June 16, a week into SpaceX completing its IPO and trading publicly, and giving SpaceX a public market valuation and share currency for the first time in the company’s history. A stock-for-stock merger between two companies requires the acquiring entity to have tradeable shares it can offer to the target’s shareholders, and SpaceX now has exactly that. At the same time, Musk just increased his direct Tesla voting power to approximately 20%, giving him greater influence over any shareholder vote that a merger would require. The restricted shares he received cannot be sold until 2033, which removes any near-term incentive to cash out and instead positions this stake as long-term structural collateral in a deal. Additionally, Musk’s two companies are already deeply intertwined through shared semiconductor fabrication at their joint TERAFAB facility in Austin, cross-company supply chain transactions, and Tesla’s $2 billion investment in xAI prior to the SpaceX-xAI merger.
Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has publicly placed the odds of a Tesla and SpaceX combination at 80% to 90% by early 2027. The Implementation Agreement that made Monday’s exercise possible was signed on April 21, 2026, roughly two months before the SpaceX IPO closed. That sequencing, building Musk’s Tesla ownership to its highest point ever immediately before SpaceX gains the public currency needed to acquire it, is either an extraordinary coincidence or a carefully staged foundation for the largest corporate merger in history.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is going to be getting a major parking upgrade. That’s according to CEO Elon Musk, who detailed a crafty new feature that will improve parking preferences, removing a layer of human input.
Musk said that upcoming releases of Full Self-Driving will “remember your parking preferences.” It will go to the location you prefer, based on where you’ve parked in the past, instead of taking the first spot available, which is where the suite is currently.
The CEO went on to explain that destination parking is “by far” the biggest reason for intervention during FSD operation. We’d have to believe this is true; many takeovers in my Model Y, which runs the latest version of FSD as it is in the Early Access Program, are due to parking because it chooses a spot I do not want to be in.
Many times, as soon as I enter a parking lot, I take over and park manually. I prefer to park away from the entrance of wherever I am, away from cars. Too many lessons learned over the years from people with free-swinging doors.
Upcoming releases of FSD will remember your parking preferences, so that the car goes to the right location at your home, office, school drop off, etc.
Destination parking is by far the biggest reason people now intervene with FSD. Critical safety interventions are extremely…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) June 17, 2026
We’d imagine these new updates will also solve things like parking orientation. Let’s say when you arrive at work, you always park in the third spot in the third row, and you prefer to back in. It seems as if Musk is implying that your car will now do this, learning from takeovers and aiming to eliminate the need to manually park whenever possible.
This is a major upgrade because parking is a major shortcoming of FSD currently. We’ve requested things like manual input of parking preferences, choosing to park far away, first available, or away from cars, for example.
This is a big reason Parking Preferences with Supervised FSD will be so valuable.
If possible, parking a little further away and being distant from people like this is worth it. https://t.co/1YqQLgnfTz pic.twitter.com/3Ac71KQiQ3
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) June 7, 2026
However, some have used the option of dropping a pin at the location you’d like to park at your destination. This has worked some of the time, but FSD will still choose to park in whatever it sees first.
Musk did not give a timetable for when the improvements would be released, but it is likely to come soon. Tesla has been releasing a new FSD version every few weeks, so we may not have to wait long to test it.
In a remarkable demonstration of how advanced vehicle technology can intersect with family care and rapid response, a Tesla Model Y equipped with Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised helped save a driver’s life during a severe heart attack. The incident, which occurred on November 15, 2025, highlights the life-saving potential of Tesla’s connected ecosystem.
John Brandt, 55, was driving his new 2026 Model Y Launch Edition on Interstate 20 from Atlanta toward Birmingham early that morning. He had recently received the FSD v14.1.3 update. Around 3:50 a.m., he began experiencing severe chest pain. Barely conscious and unable to safely control the vehicle, John managed to call his son, Jack Brandt.
FSD Supervised remained engaged, keeping the car steadily on course while John reached out for help.
As an authorized driver on his father’s Tesla account, Jack quickly sprang into action from his own phone. He located Tanner Medical Center in Carrollton, Georgia—a facility equipped for cardiac emergencies—via Google Maps and shared the destination directly through the Tesla app.
A Model Y driver started experiencing a medical emergency with chest pain mid-drive & called his son.
His son then remotely rerouted the car – which had FSD Supervised enabled – to the nearest hospital & let them know the vehicle was en route. ER staff were standing by on… pic.twitter.com/yi1tHISK9y
— Tesla North America (@tesla_na) June 16, 2026
The Model Y responded immediately, rerouting: it took the next exit, turned around on I-20, navigated local roads, and pulled directly up to the emergency room entrance. Jack also alerted hospital staff that a heart attack patient was en route in a Tesla.
Doctors diagnosed John with a massive STEMI heart attack, requiring immediate intervention on three blocked arteries. They later confirmed that without the swift reroute, John likely would not have survived—whether he had pulled over to wait for an ambulance or attempted to continue driving. He received life-saving treatment and is now recovering fully.
Tesla shared the story on X, including an interview video featuring John and Jack reflecting on the event. John described the terrifying onset of symptoms, while Jack detailed the ease of remote intervention thanks to the app’s features. Only authorized users with vehicle access can change navigation destinations, adding a layer of security and family coordination.
This case underscores Tesla’s emphasis on connectivity and supervised autonomy. Features like remote navigation allow loved ones to assist in real-time emergencies, while FSD handles complex driving tasks reliably. Tesla notes that FSD Supervised requires active driver supervision and is not fully autonomous; this was a specific incident, not a general emergency protocol.
The story has resonated widely, with many praising Tesla’s technology for bridging gaps in critical moments. Jack previously shared details on social media in February 2026, and Tesla’s recent post has amplified its reach. As vehicles become smarter and more connected, such integrations could redefine personal safety on the road—turning cars into proactive partners in health crises.
For Tesla owners, the incident serves as a powerful reminder to add trusted family members as authorized drivers and explore FSD capabilities. While no technology replaces professional medical care, this blend of AI-assisted driving and seamless app control proved invaluable. John’s survival stands as a testament to innovation that prioritizes human life.
Elon Musk just upped his Tesla stake further fueling SpaceX merger conversation
Tesla Full Self-Driving is getting a major parking upgrade, Elon Musk says
