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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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SpaceX hid behind another name in the Arizona desert, and now it’s going big
SpaceX puts a $50 billion price on its Arizona supercompute campus ahead of December’s hearing.
SpaceX has put a price tag on the supercomputer campus it wants to build in the southern Arizona desert. In a statement Thursday, the company said it is pursuing a roughly $50 billion supercompute campus in Cochise County, about 80 miles east of Tucson. Together with a separate facility planned at Starbase, Texas, the two projects add up to more than $74 billion in planned investment.
The Arizona figure had not been disclosed before. SpaceX’s involvement only became public on November 4, when company representatives hosted a packed town hall at Cochise Elementary School for an application filed under the name Tombstone Resources LLC. A SpaceX representative told residents the filing used another name because putting SpaceX on it “draws attention” from outside the county, local station KVOA reported.
The application describes a 747-acre site near the Willcox Playa with up to nine buildings of about 493,000 square feet each. SpaceX plans to bring the campus online in four phases of roughly 1.5 GW, reaching 6 GW at full build, backed by a 24 GWh battery system and about $3.6 billion in grid upgrades. At that size, it would draw about 2.5 times more power than every data center in Maricopa County combined, according to an Arizona Republic analysis.
SpaceX says the project will create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs, and that it could cut electricity bills for members of the local cooperatives by up to 20 percent. The campus would use dry cooling with no industrial groundwater use. Its application estimates ongoing water needs of 7 to 10 acre-feet a year, roughly what 20 to 30 homes consume.
Power is the bigger question. The site sits next to the Apache Generating Station, a coal and natural gas plant with about 1 GW of capacity that had been slated to retire by 2028. SpaceX told residents its investment could expand the station to more than 6 GW.
Local opposition is organized. A petition asking the county to deny the permit has gathered about 2,400 signatures, and the nearby playa is a landing spot for federally protected sandhill cranes, which SpaceX says its design accounts for. The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing on December 9 in Bisbee, with written comments due November 27. If approved, construction could start in March 2027.
The Texas project faces a vote the same day. The Starbase City Commission will consider a property tax abatement for SpaceX’s $24 billion gas plant and supercompute facility at its own December 9 hearing, as Teslarati reported. SpaceX said Thursday the Starbase site has already generated more than 3,000 construction jobs, and it committed $220 million to Brownsville’s water and wastewater systems, $40 million of which has been paid.
Both campuses would expand a footprint still centered on the Memphis area, where SpaceX’s Colossus data centers run largely on gas turbines and the company won a permit for a power plant in Southaven, Mississippi earlier this year. SpaceX ended the third quarter with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute. The Arizona campus alone, at full build, would be more than three times that size.
Elon Musk
Nvidia’s board meets on Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk already has an answer
Elon Musk says it would be an honor to hire Jensen Huang amid Nvidia turmoil.
Elon Musk says he would welcome Jensen Huang at one of his companies if Nvidia’s board decides to push out its longtime chief executive.
On Wednesday evening, the financial account ZeroHedge posted “Elon please hire Jensen” on X. Musk replied roughly two hours later: “That would be an honor.” Neither Huang nor Nvidia had responded publicly as of Wednesday night.
Musk’s reply came as Nvidia’s board met to decide Huang’s future. The Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to oust him following reports of two extramarital relationships. One involves Alice Huang, a Singapore-based businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials reportedly believe was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. The New York Times separately reported a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care. Huang acknowledged being unfaithful in a memo to employees on Sunday but gave no details.
@zerohedge That would be an honor
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 12, 2026
Under Nvidia’s bylaws, a majority of its 11 directors can remove the CEO with or without cause. Bloomberg reported that the board has been working with an outside firm on possible replacements and may name an interim chief, with CFO Colette Kress seen as the likely pick. Nvidia shares fell more than 8 percent in extended trading, according to CNBC, and the company is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on November 17.
Musk has more riding on Nvidia’s leadership than most tech executives. In August, he told investors on SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company that it would build its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware, calling Vera Rubin “the best architecture.” SpaceX is also working with Nvidia on the compute payload for Starmind, its planned orbital AI constellation. In October, SpaceX said it had a binding commitment for a roughly $40 billion lease of Vera Rubin GPUs and related equipment, with the leases expected to begin in the first half of 2027.
The scale of that dependence is already enormous. On its Q3 call, SpaceX said it was bringing roughly 200,000 to 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs online each month and expects 2.5 to 3 GW of nameplate compute by the end of the year. That buildout is now reaching new sites like the proposed $24 billion power plant and supercomputer campus at Starbase.
The relationship between the two executives also goes back nearly a decade. Huang has often told the story of personally delivering Nvidia’s first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to Musk in 2016, when no other customer wanted one. “Nobody wanted to be part of it, except for Elon,” Huang said on the Joe Rogan Experience last December.
Musk did not say what role Huang might fill, and his reply stops short of a formal offer. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and still owns about 3.6 percent of its stock, so any move to a Musk company would depend on whether, and how, he leaves the chipmaker he has run for more than three decades.
News
Starlink Mini 2 arrives with one feature for true off-grid connectivity
SpaceX officially launched the Starlink Mini 2 on November 10, delivering the first portable Starlink terminal designed around independent power.
Invitation-only preorders for select U.S. customers are priced at $999 plus tax, a figure that includes a full year of Roam Unlimited service valued at roughly $2,100. A refundable $100 deposit reserves the kit, with the balance due at shipment, expected to begin in mid-December. Broader availability is listed as coming soon.
Starlink just unveiled Mini 2, its next-gen portable dish.
Quick-swap battery, up to 4.5 hrs per charge
USB-C power
Built-in Wi-Fi
Online in about 60 secondsPreorders are open now. https://t.co/QawqgbswrQ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) November 10, 2026
The headline feature is the quick-swap 71 Wh battery. Clipped to the rear of the dish without tools, it delivers up to 4.5 hours of connectivity on a single charge.
The 490-gram pack includes its own USB-C port and LED indicators, so users can charge a spare separately and swap it in seconds while staying online. Starlink notes that the terminal can continue operating while the battery charges or run directly from a 60 W USB-C source. The retail box includes one battery, a 60 W USB-C charger, and a 3-meter cable.
Beyond power, the Mini 2 is thinner at 23.1 mm (versus 38.5 mm on the original Mini) while measuring 263 × 314 mm. With the battery and kickstand attached it weighs 1.6 kg.
Built-in Wi-Fi 6 expands coverage to up to 1,800 square feet, an IP67 rating protects against dust and water, and a standard 1/4-20 tripod thread plus physical power button round out the design. Field of view remains 110 degrees, and the unit retains support for mobile use.
For travelers, campers, and remote workers, the swappable battery removes the longstanding requirement for an external power bank or vehicle outlet that defined the first Mini. Spare packs sold separately further extend runtime, turning the compact terminal into a more self-contained solution.
While the bundled $999 invitation price sits well above the original Mini’s current $149 starting point, the included year of service and genuine untethered operation mark a clear step forward in portable satellite internet.





