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SpaceX rocket booster makes it back to port after hard drone ship landing
SpaceX has completed its third rocket launch of 2020 and the most recent booster to launch safely returned to Port Canaveral on Saturday after an exceptionally hard drone ship landing.
Falcon 9 booster (first stage) B1051 lifted off for the third time on January 29th, following up two prior orbital-class missions by placing SpaceX’s fourth batch of 60 Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit (LEO). B1051 debuted on March 2nd, 2019 when it became the first Falcon 9 rocket to launch SpaceX’s next-generation Crew Dragon spacecraft, successfully sending the vehicle on its way to what would end up being a flawless rendezvous with the International Space Station (ISS). Less than four months later, B1051 completed its second mission, this time lifting off from SpaceX’s Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB), California facilities before landing in zero-visibility fog conditions just a thousand feet from the pad.
Compared to some of the higher-energy geostationary (high orbit) launches SpaceX often performs, B1051’s two prior launches allowed for relatively gentle reentries and landings. On January 29th, 2020, after sending SpaceX’s 3rd batch of upgraded Starlink v1.0 satellites (Starlink V1 L3) on their way to space, the Falcon 9 booster experienced the hardest successful landing seen after a SpaceX launch in quite some time.
With Starlink V1 L3 complete, SpaceX has officially launched an incredible 120 satellites weighing some 32 metric tons (70,500 lb) in a single month – 22 days, to be precise. If everything goes as planned, those two monthly Starlink launches should become SpaceX’s average over the rest of 2020, necessary to satisfy the company’s goal of completing 20-24 Starlink launches this year alone. If SpaceX replicates its January successes this month, the company’s Starlink constellation – already ~230 satellites strong – may even be ready to start serving internet to customers in the northern US and Canada as early as March 2020, less than two months from now.
Meanwhile, the mission marked SpaceX’s second Falcon 9 landing and recovery of the new year, as well as the sixth time an orbital-class SpaceX booster has completed three launches. SpaceX continues to push the envelope of reusable rocketry ever since it debuted Falcon 9’s Block 5 upgrade in May 2018.
Designed to enable no less than 10 launches per booster with minimal refurbishment in between, SpaceX’s Block 5 reusability milestones have gotten much closer together ever since the company began dedicated Starlink launches, reusing a payload fairing for the first time and launching two Falcon 9 boosters for the fourth time in just the last two and a half months. In fact, SpaceX already has plans to launch Falcon 9 booster B1048 for the fifth time – another major reusability first – as early as the next 4-5 weeks.
Hard landing; tough rocket
Starlink V1 L3’s launch followed a trajectory almost exactly identical to the two V1 missions that preceded it in November 2019 and January 2020 and Falcon 9 B1051 ignited its central Merlin 1D engine for the last time around eight minutes after liftoff. Twenty seconds or so later, the Falcon 9 booster rapidly shut down its landing engine, visibly falling several feet onto the deck of drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY).
The results of that unintentionally hard landing are extremely apparent in photos taken of the same booster after its first (March 2019) and third (Jan 2020) landings on drone ship OCISLY, compared above. Taken from almost identical perspectives as the drone ship passed through the mouth of Port Canaveral, the difference in the booster’s height and stance are hard to miss, with B1051’s engine bells and the black ‘belt’ of its heat-shielded engine section clearly sitting several feet lower after Starlink V1 L3.
While subtle, the most important difference is near the tips of each visible landing leg’s telescoping boom, visible in the form of a final, smaller cylinder on the left (earlier) image. On the right, that cylinder has effectively disappeared. This is actually an intentional feature of Falcon 9’s landing leg design: known as a ‘crush core’, the tip of each leg boom holds a roughly 1m (3ft) long cylinder of aluminum honeycomb, optimized to lose structural integrity (crush) only after a specific amount of force is applied. In essence, those crush cores serve as dead-simple, single-use shock absorbers that can be reused as long as a given booster’s landing is gentle enough.
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B1051’s third landing was definitely not gentle enough, but it appears that the booster’s rough fall onto the drone ship’s deck was just within the safety margins those crush cores provide. Why B1051 fell onto the deck is unclear, potentially caused by the drone being at the bottom of a swell or a last-second anomaly with the booster’s landing engine. Thankfully, regardless of the cause of the anomaly, B1051’s crush cores can be quite easily replaced, meaning that the booster can remain operational as long as its hard landing didn’t cause any less-visible damage or stress elsewhere on the rocket.
In short, SpaceX smart design decisions very likely allowed a part worth just a few thousand dollars to save a Falcon 9 booster worth tens of millions of dollars from the scrap heap. With a little luck, B1051 should have at least several more launches in its future before entering retirement.
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Tesla just officially confirmed it has built its 10 millionth car, a major milestone for the company that started producing sustainable electric powertrains less than two decades ago.
In that time, Tesla has truly revolutionized the automotive industry, disrupting the idea of what a car should be, how it should be fueled, and how it truly impacts day-to-day life.
10 million vehicles produced globally.
Congrats to all Tesla teams! pic.twitter.com/JkcraR63bs— Tesla Manufacturing (@gigafactories) July 30, 2026
Tesla achieved this feat across four production facilities: the Fremont Factory in Fremont, California, Gigafactory Shanghai in China, Gigafactory Berlin in Germany, and Gigafactory Texas in Austin, Texas.
The 10 millionth vehicle was a Diamond Black Model Y.
Over the course of the past roughly 18 years, Tesla has evolved its lineup from a sporty sedan built on a Lotus body to a lineup of various body styles, performance metrics, and other characteristics that make each one unique.
This is an incredible achievement for a company that is young compared to what it goes up against. When Tesla entered the automotive market, Ford, GM, and Stellantis widely dominated the playing field. Since then, Tesla has caused such a disruption that these three massive brands had to scramble to create EV projects of their own.
Despite their best efforts, they have not been able to match the prowess or the effectiveness of Tesla. They are all reliant on Tesla’s charging infrastructure, their software is inferior, and their self-driving projects are elementary in comparison.
Tesla felt its fair share of growing pains over the years as well. As recent at 2019, there were complaints about build quality, paint quality, and overall luxuriousness. These things have all been improved upon through the company’s maturity, and these strides in quality have led to this 10 million vehicle production achievement, something that other small-and-scrappy EV makers will hope to accomplish one day.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
Elon Musk shed two new bits of detail on Starship following its 13th test launch, which was an overwhelming success.
SpaceX launched Starship for the 13th time last Friday after two delays: one on Monday when several Raptor engines did not ignite, and another on Thursday due to unfavorable weather conditions in Starbase, Texas.
The launch was overwhelmingly successful. SpaceX was able to complete a necessary test of the heat shield tiles by increasing the acceleration of Starship from launch throughout the flight; 20 Starlink v3 satellites were released with no issue; the Super Heavy Booster landed safely in the Gulf of America, Ship successfully reignited engines while in space; and it also splashed down without incident in the Indian Ocean.
SpaceX Starship just nailed something it’s never done before
Nevertheless, more details are coming out about Starship, and Musk is doing the talking.
Starship Will Be Retrieved in the Ocean
Musk revealed on Tuesday night that Starship would be recovered by a ship in the Indian Ocean. SpaceX routinely tries to recover Starship after splashdown in an effort to find out more about the flight by examining the spacecraft afterward.
We’re sending a ship out to recover Starship https://t.co/fUqUZTITO9
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 28, 2026
This helps engineers find out more about why things might have happened, allows them to examine any potential damage or anomalies that might have occurred, and increases the chances of an even more successful flight next time thanks to the additional information recovered.
Ship Could Have Been Caught by Tower Arms, Musk claims
Musk has already indicated that SpaceX will plan to attempt a catch of Starship with the 14th test flight. While this would be a major accomplishment, it would be an expected next step, considering the fact that the Super Heavy Booster has already been caught by the chopsticks on numerous occasions.
The ship landing was precise, meaning that it would have been caught by the tower arms https://t.co/6nbNrRfX9P
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 29, 2026
A ship catch would be a great indication of where SpaceX stands in terms of reusability and launch cadence. A successful catch with relatively no incidents would be a good sign that SpaceX is nearing a more frequent launch of Starship, but also that the reusability of the massive rocket would be something many would expect in the near future.
It is a necessity to make life multiplanetary.
Tesla just built it 10 millionth car
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
