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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.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk just confirmed the Tesla and SpaceX merger step everyone was waiting for
Tesla and SpaceX formed special committees to weigh a merger, and Elon Musk supports it.
Elon Musk confirmed Tuesday that Tesla and SpaceX have each formed special committees of independent directors to study a possible merger, the first formal step toward combining the two companies after months of speculation.
Musk made the disclosure during SpaceX’s third quarter earnings call. “Both SpaceX and Tesla have formed special committees to discuss this idea at the request of shareholders,” he said. “Because I’m a conflicted party, I can’t actually be in the discussions of the special committees.” He described the setup as “an odd kabuki dance where two groups of people are talking and I can’t be in the conversation.”
Musk did not hide where he stands. “Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes,” he said, pointing to shared work on super intelligence software, chip design, the Terafab facility in Austin, robotics, mass to orbit and connectivity. “I do think there’s a lot of merit to combining the companies as we are pretty much in the super intelligence singularity.”
He also tried to cool expectations. The committees have not agreed on terms for any transaction, and Musk said assuming a merger is a certainty “would be overstating it.” Any deal would go to shareholders, and on the Tesla side it would need approval from 50 percent of all outstanding shares, not just the shares that are voted. Musk called that “quite a high hurdle.”
That bar has tripped Tesla up before. The company’s 2025 attempt to declassify its board won support from only 39.4 percent of outstanding shares and failed. Musk’s own voting stake sits near 20 percent after he exercised his 2018 options in June, so a deal would need broad backing from institutions and a retail base that often leaves votes uncast.
Timing is another open question. Tesla filed its proxy statement Monday for its December 3 annual meeting, and the ballot has only three items: director elections for Musk, Robyn Denholm and JB Straubel, a say on pay vote and auditor ratification. Barclays analyst Dan Levy had argued that an announcement would need to land by late October or early November to make the annual meeting, as Teslarati noted in its SpaceX earnings preview. With no terms agreed, any vote would likely require its own special meeting.
Elon Musk gives his most telling Tesla-SpaceX merger conversation yet
Musk has been edging toward this for weeks. At the All-In Summit in September, he asked “who can imagine what action one might take when there’s so much close collaboration,” Teslarati reported. Last week’s Roadster unveil, built around SpaceX derived cold gas thrusters, pushed the talk further. The two companies already share the Terafab chip project, and Tesla holds a small SpaceX stake that came from its earlier investment in xAI.
SpaceX brought strong numbers to the conversation. It reported Q3 revenue of $14.58 billion, up 161 percent year over year, with its Super Intelligence segment now its largest at $7.56 billion. A higher SpaceX valuation would shape any exchange ratio Tesla holders are offered.
Tesla reports its own third quarter results after the close on Wednesday, October 21. Investors had already ranked merger timing among the top retail questions for SpaceX’s call, and the committees will almost certainly come up again on Tesla’s.
SpaceX reported its third-quarter 2026 financial results on October 20, posting the company’s first solidly profitable quarter since going public earlier in the year under the ticker $SPCX.
Revenue reached $14.58 billion, up 161 percent year-over-year from $5.6 billion, and well ahead of consensus estimates in the $12.7 to $12.9 billion range. The results highlight a rapid shift in SpaceX’s center of gravity toward artificial intelligence/super intelligence, while Starlink and traditional space operations continue to show robust progress.
Here are the key financial results for the quarter:
- Revenue of $14.58 billion (+161% YoY)
- Adjusted EBITDA of $8.8 billion (+306% YoY)
- GAAP net income of $4.4 billion (versus a $1.1 billion net loss in the prior-year quarter)
- Adjusted EPS of approximately $0.35 (versus roughly $0.13–0.16 expected)
- Income from operations of $2.8 billion
The AI/SI segment generated $7.56 billion in revenue, an 830 percent year-over-year increase, making it the company’s largest segment for the first time. Growth was primarily driven by the activation of major cloud services agreements, the integration of Cursor (acquired earlier in 2026), and rising usage of Grok models and the newly introduced Grok Bot personal agent.
🚨 SpaceX just reported earnings! Here are some highlights:
Financial:
Revenue $14.58B (+161% YoY) vs. consensus ~$12.7–12.9B
Adjusted EBITDA $8.8B (+306% YoY)
GAAP net income $4.4B (vs. prior-year loss; first solidly profitable quarter post-IPO)
Adjusted EPS ~$0.35 vs. ~$0.13–0.16 expectedSegments:
Super Intelligence (SI, formerly AI): $7.56B (+830% YoY) — now the largest segment, driven by cloud contracts, Cursor, and Grok.
Connectivity (Starlink): $5.25B (+69% YoY).
Space: $1.77B.Other highlights:
Starlink subscribers: 13.6M (+89% YoY).
Nameplate compute: 1.7 GW.
Capex: $19.6B (majority AI infrastructure).
Cash & marketable securities: ~$90B.
First revenue-generating Starship mission (26 V3 Starlink satellites, ~10× Falcon 9 downlink capacity per launch).— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 20, 2026
SI adjusted EBITDA reached $5 billion, and nameplate compute capacity stood at 1.7 GW at quarter-end, up from 1.4 GW in June and 0.6 GW a year earlier. Capital expenditures totaled $19.6 billion, with the majority allocated to AI infrastructure, including continued expansion of the Colossus facilities.
The Connectivity segment, which primarily surrounds Starlink, produced $5.25 billion in revenue, a 69 percent year-over-year and 22 percent sequentially. These are pleasant results to see and expected, considering how many airlines have adopted Starlink over the past year.
Starlink consumer subscribers reached 13.6 million, an 89 percent increase from the prior year, and a sequential gain of 1.6 million. Consumer average revenue per user improved to $69. Meanwhile, Enterprise and Government revenue also grew strongly, and Starlink is now installed on more than 3,800 aircraft, making internet more accessible and better performing than previous options.
The Space segment also performed well and contributed $1.77 billion in revenue, up 6 percent year-over-year and 84 percent sequentially. A major milestone was the successful first revenue-generating Starship mission (Flight 14), which deployed 26 V3 Starlink satellites. Those satellites added roughly 10 times the downlink capacity of a typical Falcon 9 Starlink launch.
SpaceX completed 12 customer launches during the quarter, including NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope mission, and continued to grow its backlog of crewed, national security, and commercial flights.
CFO commentary noted that the combination of launch leadership, recurring Starlink revenue, and rapid SI expansion is producing meaningful operating leverage.
The company ended the quarter with roughly $90 billion in cash and marketable securities, providing substantial resources for ongoing investment while targeting an investment-grade balance sheet. Sequential revenue nearly doubled from the $7.81 billion reported in the second quarter, illustrating the pace of the AI-driven acceleration. Things are looking strong for SpaceX.
What’s incredibly striking is the fact that SI has grown to be larger than the rest of the company in such a short amount of time. CEO Elon Musk said on the earnings call that Grok Bot is the “fastest-growing product I’ve ever seen,” so it seems that it could be a true keystone of SpaceXSI over the next few years.
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) will report its second public earnings call today since its IPO earlier this year, and there are a few things we expect to hear about, as well as Wall Street analysts, who have already outlined their expectations for the call.
Wall Street analysts have a consensus of $12.72 billion in revenue and an earnings per share (EPS) of $0.13. These are broken down into three sectors: Space, Connectivity, and AI/SI, which are perceived in this way:
- Space: $1.41 billion
- Connectivity: $4.84 billion
- AI/SI: $6.47 billion
Other outlets cluster near $12.8 or $12.9 billion in revenue and $0.14 – $0.15 EPS. This implies a roughly 65 percent sequential growth from Q2’s $7.81 billion, driven mostly by AI/SI, with the first post-IPO positive EPS expected.
Here are the three things to watch for on the call:
AI Revenue Ramp and the $100B+ ARR target
AI is truly the swing factor for SpaceX, and analysts expect it to roughly double from Q2’s $2.56 billion and become about half of total revenue. Management previously guided to a $100 billion+ annualized run rate by December, including the Cursor acquisition, which was $60 billion, to close the quarter.
Listen for updates on SpaceX’s compute capacity, especially pertaining to its contracts with Google, Anthropic, and others, revenue per watt, any new deals, and Cursor’s early contribution.
Starlink/Connectivity Metrics and Mobile Expansion
Connectivity remains a main profit engine for SpaceX. Subscriber additions will be something to pay attention to, as Q2 ended at 12 million and previews are looking at 14 million for this quarter. Additionally, ARPU trends, enterprise and government growth, and any commentary on Starlink Mobile will be something to pay attention to, especially following the recent low-band spectrum deal and FCC-related constellation approvals.
Capex Trajectory, Cash Burn/FCF, and Starship/Operational Updates
Q2 capex of roughly $18.4 billion weighed on the stock. Investors will look to scrutinize Q3 spending levels, any guidance on the pace into Q4/2027, free cash flow, backlog, and liquidity. Operational color on Starship (Flight 14 milestones and Flight 15 timing/reusability progress), Falcon cadence, and government/NASA contracts are also in focus.
Of course, there will also be some speculation on the potential Tesla-SpaceX merger, but there was nothing mentioned in the company’s proxy it sent earlier this week.
SpaceX will report earnings after market close today and will stream the call on X.
Watch live as SpaceX discusses our Q3 2026 earnings at 3:30pm CT today → https://t.co/Qrb0qeVG15
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) October 20, 2026
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