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SpaceX rocket catch simulation raises more questions about concept
CEO Elon Musk has published the first official visualization of what SpaceX’s plans to catch Super Heavy boosters might look like in real life. However, the simulation he shared raises just as many questions as it answers.
Since at least late 2020, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has been floating the idea of catching Starships and Super Heavy boosters out of the sky as an alternative to having the several-dozen-ton steel rockets use basic legs to land on the ground. This would be a major departure from SpaceX’s highly successful Falcon family, which land on a relatively complex set of deployable legs that can be retracted after most landings. The flexible, lightweight structures have mostly been reliable and easily reusable but Falcon boosters occasionally have rough landings, which can use up disposable shock absorbers or even damage the legs and make boosters hard to safely recover and slower to reuse.
As a smaller rocket, Falcon boosters have to be extremely lightweight to ensure healthy payload margins and likely weigh about 25-30 tons empty and 450 tons fully fueled – an excellent mass ratio for a reusable rocket. While it’s still good to continue that practice of rigorous mass optimization with Starship, the vehicle is an entirely different story. Once plans to stretch the Starship upper stage’s tanks and add three more Raptors are realized, it’s quite possible that Starship will be capable of launching more than 200 tons (~440,000 lb) of payload to low Earth orbit (LEO) with ship and booster recovery.
One might think that SpaceX, with the most capable rocket ever built potentially on its hands, would want to take advantage of that unprecedented performance to make the rocket itself – also likely to be one of the most complex launch vehicles ever – simpler and more reliable early on in the development process. Generally speaking, that would involve sacrificing some of its payload capability and adding systems that are heavier but simpler and more robust. Once Starship is regularly flying to orbit and gathering extensive flight experience and data, SpaceX might then be able refine the rocket, gradually reducing its mass and improving payload to orbit by optimizing or fully replacing suboptimal systems and designs.
Instead, SpaceX appears to be trying to substantially optimize Starship before it’s attempted a single orbital launch. The biggest example is Elon Musk’s plan to catch Super Heavy boosters – and maybe Starships, too – for the sole purpose of, in his own words, “[saving] landing leg mass [and enabling] immediate reflight of [a giant, unwieldy rocket].” Musk, SpaceX executives, or both appear to be attempting to refine a rocket that has never flown. Further, based on a simulation of a Super Heavy “catch” Musk shared on January 20th, all that oddly timed effort may end up producing a solution that’s actually worse than what it’s trying to replace.
Based on the simulated telemetry shown in the visualization, Super Heavy’s descent to the landing zone appears to be considerably gentler than the ‘suicide burn’ SpaceX routinely uses on Falcon. By decelerating as quickly as possible and making landing burns as short as possible, Falcon saves a considerable amount of propellant during recovery – extra propellant that, if otherwise required, would effectively increase Falcon’s dry mass and decrease its payload to orbit. In the Super Heavy “catch” Musk shared, the booster actually appears to be landing – just on an incredibly small patch of steel on the tower’s ‘Mechazilla’ arms instead of a concrete pad on the ground.
Aside from a tiny bit of lateral motion, the arms appear motionless during the ‘catch,’ making it more of a landing. Further, Super Heavy is shown decelerating rather slowly throughout the simulation and appears to hover for almost 10 seconds near the end. That slow, cautious descent and even slower touchdown may be necessary because of how incredibly accurate Super Heavy has to be to land on a pair of hardpoints with inches of lateral margin for error and maybe a few square feet of usable surface area. The challenge is a bit like if SpaceX, for some reason, made Falcon boosters land on two elevated ledges about as wide as car tires. Aside from demanding accurate rotational control, even the slightest lateral deviation would cause the booster to topple off the pillars and – in the case of Super Heavy – fall about a hundred feet onto concrete, where it would obviously explode.
What that slow descent and final hover mean is that the Super Heavy landing shown would likely cost significantly more delta V (propellant) than a Falcon-style suicide burn. Propellant has mass, so Super Heavy would likely need to burn at least 5-10 tons more to carefully land on arms that aren’t actively matching the booster’s position and velocity. Ironically, SpaceX could probably quite easily add rudimentary, fixed legs – removing most of the bad aspects of Falcon legs – to Super Heavy with a mass budget of 10 tons. But even if SpaceX were to make those legs as simple, dumb, and reliable as physically possible and they wound up weighing 20 tons total, the inherent physics of rocketry mean that adding 20 tons to Super Heavy’s likely 200-ton dry mass would only reduce the rocket’s payload to orbit by about 3-5 tons or 1-3%.
Further, per Musk’s argument that landing on the arms would enhance the speed of reuse, it’s difficult to see how landing Super Heavy or Starship in the exact same corridor – but on the ground instead of on the arms – would change anything. If Super Heavy is accurate enough to land on a few square meters of steel, it must inherently be accurate enough to land within the far larger breadth of those arms. The only process landing on the arms would clearly remove is reattaching the arms to a landed booster or ship, which it’s impossible to imagine would save more than a handful of minutes or maybe an hour of work. SpaceX’s Falcon booster turnaround record is currently 27 days, so it’s even harder to imagine why SpaceX would be worrying about cutting minutes or a few hours off of the turnaround and reuse of a rocket that has never even performed a full static fire test – let alone attempted an orbital-class launch, reentry, or landing.
Put simply, while Starbase’s launch tower arms will undoubtedly be useful for quickly lifting and stacking Super Heavy and Starship, it’s looking more and more likely that using those arms as a landing platform will, at best, be an inferior alternative to basic Falcon-style landings. More importantly, even if everything works perfectly, the arms actually cooperate with boosters to catch them, and it’s possible for Super Heavy to avoid hovering and use a more efficient suicide burn, the apparent best-case outcome of all that effort is marginally faster reuse and perhaps a 5% increase in payload to orbit. Only time will tell if such a radical change proves to be worth such marginal benefits.
Tesla has started to perform earthworks engineering on the roughly 3,000-acre site in Fort Bend County, Texas, advancing the massive $10 billion Project Crystal Sun plan to build a vertically integrated solar manufacturing complex.
Flyover drone footage from S.E. Robinson, Jr. released this morning shows the location under development. Tesla has crews on site performing large clearings, but you can also see equipment staging areas, the use of an existing homestead, and active leveling across a substantial portion of the property.
Tesla has started construction on Project Crystal Sun, its $10B vertically integrated solar factory near Houston, Texas.
The plant will make everything from silicon ingots and wafers to finished cells and panels, with operations targeted for Q1 2029.
@SERobinsonJr with a great flyover of the facility:
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) November 9, 2026
Public filings first submitted in July under Texas’s Jobs, Energy, Technology and Innovation Act describe a plant that would manufacture the full solar chain: everything from silicon ingots, wafers, coated cells, and finished modules.
Tesla projects 9,712 permanent jobs by 2033, ramping from roughly 1,900 positions in the first year of operations, plus a peak of about 1,147 construction jobs. Construction is targeted for 2026–2028, with commercial production beginning in the first quarter of 2029. An accompanying economic analysis estimates the project could add roughly $107 billion to Texas GDP over several decades.
Local incentives have cleared major hurdles. Lamar Consolidated Independent School District unanimously approved school-tax limitations in September, and Fort Bend County commissioners approved a package of abatements and related agreements in late October that could extend equipment tax breaks for as long as 35 years.
Tesla had previously indicated it was evaluating a competing out-of-state location.
The effort fits broader statements by Musk that Tesla and SpaceX are each working toward 100 gigawatts of annual U.S. solar manufacturing capacity. If built as described, Project Crystal Sun would stand as one of the largest domestic attempts to create a fully integrated solar supply chain on American soil.
While Tesla has not issued a formal groundbreaking announcement, the visible site preparation and high-profile social media activity represent a concrete step forward for a project that has moved from confidential filings to active earthworks in a matter of months.
Elon Musk continues to shed more reasons that justify the cancelation of the Tesla Cybertruck, but some of the reasons for the sunset, as well as the process the company is choosing, do not make a lot of sense.
Musk announced last week on X that Tesla would wind down Cybertruck production in mid-2027, a decision that aims to prioritize Cybercab and its importance to the company’s future and passenger transportation as a whole.
But some of what Tesla and Musk are saying does not seem to make much sense. From the process the company is taking with orders to some of the reasoning for the cancelation, the whole situation seems strange.
With that being said: I totally see the merit in prioritizing Cybercab, but I also believe there is room for Cybertruck, a vehicle that has traditionally had low volumes, especially now at its current price point. If it were not for the cancelation, Cybertruck would sell very few units with the recent price adjustments.
Musk Talks Order Rate vs. Production Rate
The first thing that does not make a lot of sense here is the fact that this morning, Musk said that “The Cybertruck order rate far exceeds our production rate. We will try to make as any as possible before shutting down the line in about 8 months, but will have to return deposits for a lot of people.”
The Cybertruck order rate far exceeds our production rate. We will try to make as many as possible before shutting down the line in about 8 months, but will have to return deposits for a lot of people.
This is not a case of Cybertruck being unprofitable, as has been misreported by legacy media, but rather that the opportunity cost of the complexity of Cybertruck is vastly outweighed by the value of incremental Cybercab production.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 9, 2026
Then why is Tesla STILL accepting orders for the Cybertruck if it already cannot fulfill its order log by mid-2027?
There are so many people ordering Cybertruck that will not receive it. If Tesla already is having trouble seeing how it will build its current orders, why would it allow additional ones?
There are going to be a lot of people who are very upset next June or July, all because they placed an order for a truck that Tesla knew it would not have the time to build. At this point, it seems like a better idea from a customer service standpoint to simply stop accepting orders on a certain date, build those trucks, fulfill those orders, and then close production.
Continuing to accept orders at this point seems wildly strange. If anything, it feels like the $59k Cybertruck orderers will be the ones who get the short end of the stick here, but that’s speculation and just a hunch on my end.
If not Cybertruck, then what?
With only the Model 3 and Model Y available for consumers, meaning the general public, to buy, there is now no utility vehicle in the Tesla lineup, and that is definitely a disappointment.
Ford already washed its hands of the Lightning, which means the Rivian R1T will likely be the best-selling EV pickup on the market, dueling with the GMC Hummer Pickup, Chevy Silverado EV, and the GMC Sierra EV. There are several pickups that are set to hit the market soon, like the Slate EV Truck, and Ford’s new EV pickup, the Fathom.
Tesla could provide some some transparency on what it is planning to do with a future pickup or utility design. Musk said in the past that something much cooler than a minivan will be built. Cries for a full-size SUV have been heard by Tesla, but the company seems to adamant on prioritizing ridesharing vehicles instead of vehicles people want for work, climate, or hobbies.
Some clarity here, past the point of “Tesla is still going to build cars” would be nice. Even a simple, “Yes” response from all the people asking if Tesla will build something larger would be more than enough. We don’t need all the details now, but something would be nice.
Closing Thoughts
More than anything, it is important to note that I do believe Tesla is making a tough decision and one that, from a business standpoint, does make sense. However, I also believe that there is room for the Cybertruck in Tesla’s lineup.
One thing I think it’s worth mentioning is Tesla is not that much different from many companies. They do things that are better for the business that will surely upset consumers. The difference is very few companies have a following like Tesla, so when these things happen, they feel very personal.
Add in the fact that Cybertruck has truly become a symbol of Tesla, and people are even more upset about it.
It will all get figured out, but it’s still very confusing when we step back and take a look at the bigger picture.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s Anthropic deal has a catch, and Elon Musk just addressed it
Elon Musk says SpaceX’s Anthropic compute deal cuts both ways after Chamath floats higher prices.
Elon Musk pushed back on Sunday against the idea that SpaceX’s compute contract with Anthropic is a one way bet, after venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya argued the company could use a termination clause to charge the AI lab far more.
“It works both ways, of course. If compute becomes plentiful and cheap, SpaceX revenue will drop. No crying in the casino for either party,” Musk wrote on X Sunday evening, replying to a clip of Palihapitiya’s comments shared by AI commentator Rohan Paul.
On the All-In podcast released Sunday, Palihapitiya said either side can walk away from the agreement on 90 days’ notice. If data center supply tightens, he argued, SpaceX could exercise that option and bring the contract back at two to three times the current price, and Anthropic would have little choice but to accept. He called it “the kingmaking move,” according to BigGo Finance.
The clause itself is not new. SpaceX disclosed in its IPO filings in May that Anthropic would pay $1.25 billion per month for dedicated capacity at its Colossus clusters through May 2029, nearly $45 billion in total, with both companies able to terminate on 90 days’ notice, as Teslarati reported at the time. SpaceX’s later compute deals with Google and Reflection AI carry similar exit terms.
What has changed is the political backdrop. Palihapitiya’s thesis rests on incoming Democratic governors pulling tax incentives for data centers and slowing new construction. In Texas, Gov.-elect Gina Hinojosa campaigned on a moratorium on new data center approvals, and Deutsche Bank analysts warned last week that SpaceX’s Texas compute capacity could face delays. SpaceX and Tesla shares both fell after the midterm results.
A slowdown would favor companies that already own capacity. SpaceX acquired xAI in February and has been renting data centers to outside AI labs before the space is needed for Grok. At the Baron Investment Conference on Friday, Musk said SpaceX was “getting 50 billion a year for 35 billion dollar investments” and that it can bring a data center online in eight or nine months, compared to two and a half years for competitors. He also said SpaceX is tracking toward an annualized revenue rate above $100 billion in December, with a “best guess” of $500 billion by December 2027.
Musk’s reply points to the other side of the clause. Anthropic has signed large compute agreements with Amazon, Google and Microsoft, and if that capacity comes online faster than new construction slows, the AI lab would have its own leverage to renegotiate or leave. Musk has called Anthropic “obviously currently the leader in AI,” and it remains one of SpaceX’s largest compute customers.
SpaceX shares rose more than 2 percent in overnight trading late Sunday after closing Friday at $134.27, according to Stocktwits.
Tesla begins groundworks on $10B ‘Project Crystal Sun’ in Texas
Elon Musk keeps justifying Tesla Cybertruck’s cancelation, but it’s confusing
