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SpaceX’s Mr. Steven preparing for first Falcon 9 fairing catch attempt in months
SpaceX recovery vessel Mr. Steven has spent the last several weeks undergoing major refits – including a new net and arms – and testing the upgraded hardware in anticipation of the vessel’s first fairing catch attempt in more than four months.
Required after a mysterious anomaly saw Mr. Steven return to Port in February sans two arms and a net, the appearance of a new net and arms guarantees that SpaceX is still pursuing its current method of fairing recovery. Above all else, successfully closing the loop and catching fairings could help SpaceX dramatically ramp its launch cadence and lower costs, especially critical for the affordable launch of the company’s own Starlink satellite constellation.
The Saga of Steven
For a few months of 2019, it was entirely conceivable that SpaceX had all but given up on catching Falcon fairings, having spent the better part of 2018 without a single success during both post-launch and experimentally controlled catch attempts. Admittedly, a year may feel like a huge amount of time, but SpaceX has demonstrated just how hard the reliably successful recovery of orbital-class rocket hardware really is.
Depending on how one examines the history of Falcon 9, it took SpaceX anywhere from ~30 and ~70 months and either 7 or 9 failed recovery attempts before the first Falcon 9 booster successfully landed in December 2015. Excluding helicopter-based fairing drop tests, Mr. Steven and SpaceX’s fairing recovery team have made five attempts to catch fairings in the vessel’s net after Falcon 9 launches. All have been unsuccessful, with the closest miss reportedly landing in the Pacific Ocean just 50 meters away from Mr. Steven’s massive net.
In January 2019, Mr. Steven sailed ~8000 km (5000 mi) from Port of Los Angeles to Port Canaveral, passing through the Panama Canal. For unknown reasons, during a trip out to sea to catch a Falcon 9 fairing in February, Mr. Steven abruptly turned around early and arrived in port missing two of four arms, four of eight booms, and the entirety of its custom net. The remaining arms/booms were removed and the vessel spent roughly three months docked with just a handful of excursions.
In late May, technicians rapidly installed new arms and booms, as well as a new (and blue) net, bringing about the end of months of inactivity. Mr. Steven has yet to venture beyond the safety of Port Canaveral since its new ‘catcher’s mitt’ was installed, but SpaceX has been testing the new setup by repeatedly lowering a Falcon fairing half into the net. It’s too early to raise expectations but it seems plausible that the iconic recovery vessel will be ready to attempt its first fairing catch in ~4 months as part of Falcon Heavy’s next scheduled launch, currently NET June 22.
A challenger approaches…
Although Mr. Steven’s prospects look better than they have in months, SpaceX’s fairing recovery engineers and technicians have not been sitting on their hands. Begun as a check against the growing possibility that reliably catching fairings in a (relatively) small net is just too difficult to be worth it, SpaceX has been analyzing methods of reusing fairings without Mr. Steven. Most notably, despite the failure to catch fairings out of the air, the fairing halves themselves – relying on GPS-guided parafoils – have proven to be capable of reliably performing gentle landings on the ocean surface.
This consistently leaves the fairings intact and floating on the ocean but at the cost of partial saltwater immersion and exposure to surface-level sea spray and waves. At least in today’s era of highly complex large satellites, customers typically demand that payload fairings (like Falcon 9’s) offer a clean room-quality environment once the satellite is encapsulated inside. Sea water is full of salt, organic molecules, and water, all three of which do not get along well with extremely sensitive electronics. The whole purpose of recovering and reusing fairings is to make their reuse more efficient and less expensive than simply building a new fairing. The task of cleaning composite structures to clean room-standards after salt water exposure and immersion tends to be less than friendly to both aspirations.
According to SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, however, that challenge may be distinctly solvable and could even be easier than the Mr. Steven approach. After Falcon Heavy’s commercial Arabsat 6A launch debut in April 2019, Musk again confirmed that SpaceX would be ready to test that alternate method of fairing reuse very soon and plans to do so on an “internal” (i.e. Starlink) launch later this year. As noted below, this is helped by the fact that SpaceX’s internally-developed Starlink satellites apparently have no need for the acoustic insulation panels that normally protect sensitive spacecraft from the brutal acoustic environment produced by rockets while still in Earth’s atmosphere.
For fairing reusability, the lack of those panels is just one less thing to have to worry about cleaning or replacing. Intriguingly, it’s easy to imagine that – much like SpaceX has apparently designed Starlink satellites to be resistant to intense acoustic environments – the company could have also required that they be tough enough to tolerate a less-than-pristine fairing environment. With that approach, SpaceX could continue to build new fairings for every customer launch, entirely amortizing their production cost before transferring the ‘dirty’, flight-proven fairings to internal Starlink launches.
In essence, SpaceX’s customers would quite literally be paying the company to build the very Falcon 9 boosters and fairings it will ultimately use to launch its massive Starlink constellation, requiring hundreds of launches over the next decade. The faster and more efficiently SpaceX can build and launch Starlink, the faster it can develop Starship/Super Heavy and entirely transcend any concerns of salty fairings (let alone expendable upper stages). But in the meantime, Mr. Steven will return to his catching duties and SpaceX will continue to attempt to reuse payload fairings.
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Tesla has launched its newest iteration of the Model 3 in China with a slew of new features, including the highly requested V2L (vehicle-to-load) feature and a new interior option.
The Model 3 now has a 16″ front touchscreen with improved resolution, a black headliner, V2L capabilities, Zen Grey interior in the Premium and Performance trims, as the White option has officially been discontinued, and 19″ Dark Nova Wheels, which are standard on the Model 3 Premium only.
🚨 Tesla has launched the Model 3 in China with a variety of new features and specs:
✅ 16” front touchscreen
✅ Black Headliner
✅ V2L Capability
✅ Zen Grey interior (Premium & Performance only)
✅ 19” Dark Nova wheels (Model 3 Premium only)
✅ Zen Grey Interior option… pic.twitter.com/ltTAEIYi2Z— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 1, 2026
The touchscreen in the U.S. version of the Model 3 is just 15.4″, so the newly upgraded screen is .6″ larger. Additionally, the Black Headliner, now standard on Model Y vehicles in the U.S., is coming to China.
Additionally, Tesla’s decision to end the white interior option has also made its way to the Asian market, as Zen Grey is the lighter color consumers can now go with. It is slightly different from the previously offered White option:
These options are available in China, Australia, and New Zealand as well, as Giga Shanghai serves those markets, bringing its mass-market vehicles to those countries in the South Pacific.
The Model 3 trims are now priced at:
- Rear-Wheel-Drive – 235,500 yuan (~$35,000)
- Long Range Rear-Wheel-Drive – 259,500 yuan ($38,700)
- Long Range All-Wheel-Drive – 285,500 yuan (~$42,600)
- Performance – 339,500 yuan (~$50,600)
These features have yet to make their way to the U.S., which might upset some buyers, but it is probably a good sign that Tesla will bring these changes to U.S. trims sometime next year. Potentially, these could come even sooner, as they could be used to stimulate demand for the year-end sales push.
Nevertheless, when things start at Giga Shanghai, they usually end up in the U.S. market. Tesla has also already started to install things like the Black Headliner and larger touchscreen in certain U.S.-built vehicles, so these things will be easy to implement across other vehicles in the lineup.
Elon Musk
The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future
Hegseth named Elon Musk to help lead Project Meridian, a Pentagon study of future warfare.
Elon Musk has a new role in the Trump administration. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced on war.gov Wednesday that Musk will help lead Project Meridian, a new Pentagon study meant to identify the weapons and technologies the U.S. military will need to fight wars decades from now.
Hegseth unveiled the project during his State of the Force address at Marine Corps Base Quantico in Virginia. Musk will direct the effort alongside Anduril founder Palmer Luckey and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, working under Pentagon Chief Technology Officer Emil Michael. All three men were in attendance, and Hegseth said their first meeting would take place directly after the speech inside a secure compartmented facility, according to The Hill.
Hegseth said the group “will be focused on discovering, developing, and fielding the weapons and systems that our children and our grandchildren will need in their lifetimes, without any creative limitations or restrictions, on any future battlefield, from under the Earth to beyond the Moon.” He added that Meridian is not meant to produce new strategy or policy documents.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
A memo released after the announcement gives Michael until January 28, 2027, to deliver findings, a window of 120 days. It names artificial intelligence, autonomy, directed energy, robotics and biotechnology as the fields expected to change how wars are fought. The results will come as a public report with a classified annex. The memo says the study will run through a partner organization it does not name, and it does not mention Musk directly. His role comes from Hegseth’s speech and a Pentagon press release.’
Musk had not commented publicly on the appointment as of Wednesday evening. This will be Musk’s first official advisory role in the administration since he left DOGE last year.
The mandate overlaps heavily with Musk’s companies. SpaceX is one of the Pentagon’s largest contractors, with 2026 defense awards topping $8 billion, much of it tied to launches and a suspected Starshield buildout out of Vandenberg. The Pentagon’s release says Meridian will examine domains “from subterranean depths to the cislunar frontier,” which maps onto The Boring Company’s tunneling and Starship’s lunar plans. Tesla’s work on autonomy and Optimus falls within the fields the memo lists.
Meridian was one of six initiatives Hegseth announced Wednesday. Another is a new Autonomous Warfare Command, which the department wants operating as a four-star combatant command by October 1, 2027.
The news lands a day before SpaceX is scheduled to fly a classified National Reconnaissance Office payload on Falcon Heavy, one of three launches the company has planned for Thursday.
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SpaceX set to launch astronauts and a classified Falcon Heavy mission on the same day
SpaceX plans three launches Thursday, including Crew-13 astronauts and Falcon Heavy’s first classified NRO mission.
SpaceX is lining up one of the busiest single days in its history, and the company offered a preview on Wednesday morning with a simple post on X: “Sunrise at pad 40.” The video and photos show Falcon 9 standing at Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral, roughly a day before it is scheduled to carry four astronauts to the International Space Station.
That launch is only the first of three SpaceX missions planned for Thursday, October 1, across both coasts.
Sunrise at pad 40 pic.twitter.com/J7Qme4VvIX
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 30, 2026
Crew-13 is targeting liftoff at 11:10 a.m. ET, with a backup opportunity Friday at 10:47 a.m. ET. NASA astronaut Jessica Watkins will command the mission, with NASA’s Luke Delaney as pilot and Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov serving as mission specialists. According to NASA, Dragon is set to dock with the forward port of the station’s Harmony module around 8 p.m. ET, less than nine hours after launch. Watkins is the only member of the crew who has flown before, and Kutryk will become the first Canadian to reach orbit through NASA’s Commercial Crew Program.
The Falcon 9 booster is flying for the third time after supporting Crew-12 and a Starlink mission, and it will attempt a landing at Landing Zone 40 beside the pad. That site made its debut in February when the Crew-12 booster touched down there, as Teslarati reported at the time. Crew-13 will relieve the Crew-12 astronauts, who have been aboard the station since the middle of February.
On the West Coast, another Falcon 9 is scheduled to lift off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in a window running from 2:18 to 3:16 p.m. ET, a flight NASASpaceflight lists as a Transporter rideshare mission.
The day is set to close at 11:53 p.m. ET, when Falcon Heavy launches from Launch Complex 39A with NROL-97, the first National Reconnaissance Office payload ever to fly on the rocket. SpaceX rolled the vehicle out to the pad Tuesday night. Its two side boosters, which previously flew GOES-U, ViaSat-3 F3 and NASA’s Roman Space Telescope, will return to Landing Zones 1 and 2, while a new center core will be expended in the Atlantic. The Roman launch took place on August 30, so NROL-97 will come barely a month later as Falcon Heavy’s third flight of 2026 and 14th overall.
NASA taps SpaceX to launch the telescope that could unlock new worlds
If all three Florida boosters land as planned, it would be the first time the Space Coast has seen landings at LZ-40, LZ-1 and LZ-2 on the same day, according to the Orlando Sentinel, which has warned residents in Brevard, Orange and Volusia counties that more than one sonic boom is possible.
The schedule arrives just three days after Starship reached orbit for the first time on Flight 14 from Starbase, Texas, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites. If Thursday’s missions stay on time, SpaceX will have flown Starship, Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy from four different pads in about four days.
Crew-13 is also the start of a longer run for Dragon. NASA recently added Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s contract in a $946 million modification, keeping Dragon as the agency’s only operational ride to the station while Boeing’s Starliner remains grounded.
Tesla launches improved Model 3 in China with V2L, new interior option
The Pentagon taps Elon Musk to design the battlefield of the future
