News
SpaceX returns intact fairing half on clawboat in post-launch surprise
Despite a statement from SpaceX CEO Elon Musk that the Iridium-5 mission’s fairing recovery attempt had failed due to a twisted parafoil, Teslarati captured photos of clawboat Mr Steven arriving in the Port of San Pedro early Saturday morning with an apparently intact fairing half.
Not to be confused with the first successfully recovered fairing that returned to land in late February, this half is undoubtedly fresh from Iridium-5’s Friday morning launch. The $2.5 million, carbon composite aluminum fairing half recovered during SpaceX’s PAZ mission on February 22 is currently being stored and scrapped at SpaceX’s brand new port real estate – Berth 240, or the same location that was selected as the probable location for SpaceX’s first BFR manufacturing facility.
- The Iridium-5 half, however, is not believed to have suffered any significant structural damage during recovery ops. (Pauline Acalin)
- Falcon 9 1041 rises above a sea of fog for one last mission to orbit. Half of its fairing made a surprise appearance in port on Saturday. (Pauline Acalin)
- An unmistakable Falcon 9 fairing half seen aboard the vessel Mr Steven on Saturday morning. (Pauline Acalin)
- Teslarati photographer Pauline Acalin made her way to a foggy Port of San Pedro early Saturday morning to welcome Mr Steven home. (Pauline Acalin)
Compared to Musk’s previous comments during the first intact fairing recovery in late February, it would seem that Iridium-5’s fairing was all but doomed when it “impacted [the] water at high speed,” and the majority of fans appeared to have concluded as much. Following PAZ, Musk tweeted that the Mr Steven had “missed by a few hundred meters, but fairing landed intact in water” – as an incredibly optimized and lightweight structure, a fairing half would likely have to land very gently to avoid breaking into pieces. That Mr Steven’s crew was able to bring the Iridium-5 half aboard all but guarantees that it was floating intact on the ocean surface after touching down.
GPS guided parafoil twisted, so fairing impacted water at high speed. Air wake from fairing messing w parafoil steering. Doing helo drop tests in next few weeks to solve.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 30, 2018
This does not necessarily contradict Musk’s diagnosis of a twisted parafoil, assuming he was referring to the lines that connect the fairing to the foil – paragliders frequently suffer tangles and twists in their lines, an event that typically warps the parafoil’s structure, thus lowering the amount of lift it can produce as a wing. This is an inevitable risk of what is basically a self-inflating wing, and failures of this sort are known to kill or injure paragliders at low altitudes and can also lead to uncontrolled spinning (although that is very unlikely to occur with a 1000kg payload).

A NASA experiment in the late 90s examined the use of a parafoil to enable gentle, guided landings of an orbital escape pod – the experiment was quite successful. (NASA)
Ultimately, GPS-guided parafoils have been done fairly successfully and many times over during the past two or so decades. For the most part,the problems preventing SpaceX from recovering fairings in Mr Steven’s net have been almost entirely solved: the fact that two fairing halves have been recovered intact after their last two Western launches confirm as much. SpaceX engineers have somehow found a way to enable a highly flexible, lightweight, and aerodynamically awkward lifting body to survive a journey from heights of 110+ km and speeds of more than 2250 meters per second.
SpaceX’s fairings may look unassuming dressed in their subtle soot and simple curved lines, but – as SpaceX has intoned in the past – if landing massive Falcon 9 boosters after launch is akin to “launching a pencil over the Empire State building and having it land on a shoebox on the other side…during a wind storm,” recovering the relatively minuscule and light fairings can be fairly compared to launching a paper bowl over two stacked Empire State Buildings in a tornado and catching it with one hand behind your back on the opposite side – all without ripping, folding, or denting it.
- It may look unassuming, but that fairing half could swallow an entire school bus and by all means should not be in one piece. (Fairing from PAZ, photo by Elon Musk)
- Falcon 9 B1041.2 seen before launching Iridium-5. (Pauline Acalin)
SpaceX is 99% of the way to successful and routine fairing recovery and reuse and the final 1% is all about testing and subtle refinement. Future fairing recovery attempts may even be streamed in real time on SpaceX’s webcasts, according to Musk.
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News
Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing
Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.
Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.
Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.
Big news! SpaceX is introducing a new @Starlink for Communities program that lets you earn money by providing Starlink internet to your neighbors or people nearby, who can pay for access by the hour, day, week, or month.
Neighbors pay for the access they need, while the person… pic.twitter.com/DtOUs0Ekvt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 1, 2026
The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.
A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.
Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.
Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.
Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.
The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.
The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.
News
Tesla just made its headlights even better through a software update
Tesla just upgraded its headlights through a software update, making them even better without any physical or hardware upgrade.
Tesla’s latest software update is quietly improving nighttime driving for a small number of owners. Version 2026.38 includes a new capability called Dynamic Headlight Leveling.
The feature automatically adjusts the aim of the low beams in response to driving conditions and nearby traffic, with the goal of giving the driver more usable light on the road while reducing glare for oncoming vehicles and traffic ahead.
2026.38 just dropped.
Model 3 gets Dynamic Headlight Leveling — low beams auto-aim around traffic for max visibility, less glare. Model 3 / Y (AMD HW3) also pick up sharper Tesla visuals + an enhanced park scene on the center display.
Legacy Intel cars get Supercharger Site… pic.twitter.com/45ac4AH6Vs
— Frunk To Trunk (@FrunkToTrunk) September 30, 2026
Unlike Tesla’s matrix high-beam system, which selectively dims individual LED segments to create shadows around other cars, Dynamic Headlight Leveling physically tilts the low-beam projectors. Internal motors respond to changes in vehicle pitch.
When the car accelerates hard, climbs a steep grade, or carries extra weight in the rear, the headlights can otherwise point higher than intended. The software counters that movement in real time so the beam stays aimed at the road surface rather than into the eyes of other drivers.
Early indications reveal the update is reaching a limited set of vehicles, including certain Model 3 and Cybertruck examples in the United States and the United Arab Emirates. The rollout does not appear tied to a single hardware revision, and Tesla has not published a broader schedule. It is simply a common waiting game until your car receives it.
The change arrives against a backdrop of wider complaints about headlight glare. Some earlier Model 3 and Model Y vehicles were the subject of an NHTSA recall related to excessive low-beam glare; the software adjustment offers a potential mitigation for cars equipped with the necessary leveling hardware. It does not replace adaptive high beams where those are already available, nor does it alter the basic low-beam pattern itself.
Instead, it keeps an existing beam pointed where it is most useful.
For drivers who have received the update, the system requires no new settings or user input. The headlights simply respond as road conditions and traffic change. As the feature reaches more vehicles, it adds another example of Tesla using over-the-air software to refine existing hardware rather than waiting for a new model year. Nighttime visibility and reduced glare for others are the practical results owners are expected to notice first.
Lifestyle
Tesla teases “Halloween Mode” update with Optimus rising from a graveyard
Tesla’s Halloween teaser hides a covered vehicle and an Optimus hand rising from the ground.
Tesla has started teasing a Halloween software update for its vehicles, with a short clip on X that reads, “Halloween is coming.” The clip opens on a glowing pumpkin before pulling back to the car’s center touchscreen, where the usual parked visualization has been replaced by a graveyard scene, and the vehicle draped with a white sheet so it reads as a cartoon ghost.
Halloween is coming pic.twitter.com/lM3ASUeOqX
— Tesla (@Tesla) October 1, 2026
The second detail is a robotic hand clawing its way out of the dirt like a zombie, which looks to be the hand of Tesla’s latest Optimus V3 humanoid robot. While Tesla still has not formally shown Optimus Gen 3 walking around in service, renders pulled from Tesla’s Android app last month gave the clearest look yet, including far more refined hands that Tesla has said carry 22 degrees of freedom. The hand has been the hardest part of the program. Musk has called it the majority of the robot’s engineering difficulty, and Tesla’s patents describe a design driven by tendons with the actuators moved into the forearm.
Tesla Optimus V3 hand and arm details revealed in new patents
Optimus also has a Halloween track record. Last October the robot handed out candy in Times Square, and a costumed “zombie” Optimus shuffled around the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles on Halloween night.
On the software side, Tesla’s 2025 Holiday Update expanded Santa Mode with a Santa sleigh, snowmen, snow effects, and a festive lock chime, so it wouldn’t be too far fetched if we saw something similar but themed for a Halloween Mode.





