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SpaceX Mars landing expert talks Starship recovery challenges in new interview
Formerly responsible for developing Falcon 9 (and Heavy) into the routinely-landing reusable rocket it is today, senior SpaceX engineer Lars Blackmore says he now has one primary focus: figuring out how to land Starship on Earth, the Moon, and Mars.
A graduate of University of Cambridge and MIT, the latter of which interviewed him on October 23rd for an “Alumni Stories” blog, Lars Blackmore has become famous for his groundbreaking work in guidance, navigation, and control (GNC). After graduating with honors from Cambridge and earning a PhD from MIT, Dr. Blackmore joined NASA in 2007 and immersed himself in “precision Mars landing”, part of a more general focus on figuring out how to autonomously control vehicles in uncertain conditions.
In his last year at NASA, Blackmore co-invented an algorithm known as G-FOLD (Guidance for Fuel Optimal Large Divert) that should theoretically enable precision landings on Mars, improving the state of the art by two full orders of magnitude (+/- 10 km to +/- 100 m). In 2011, he departed NASA and joined SpaceX, where he lead the development of the GNC technology needed to successfully and reliably recovery Falcon 9 boosters. Although the same could be said for any number of critical, groundbreaking systems that had to be developed, the onboard software that autonomously guides Falcon 9 landings on the fly is one of many things that booster recovery and reuse would be wholly impossible without.
After numerous failed attempts, all part SpaceX’s preferred learning process, Falcon 9 successfully landed for the first time on December 21st, 2015. As they say, the rest is history: in the roughly four years since that milestone landing, SpaceX has successfully completed 57 orbital launches, recovered boosters 43 more times, and reused flight-proven boosters on 23 launches. Since that first success, more than half of all SpaceX launches have been followed by a successful booster landing (or two).
Back to Mars
In 2018, Dr. Blackmore officially took on a new full-time role as SpaceX’s Principal Mars Landing Engineer. As the namesake suggests, this meant handing (now semi-routine) Falcon 9 and Heavy GNC development to a strong team and beginning to tackle an array of new problems that will need to be solved for SpaceX to reach the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
Following radical design modifications made to Starship in 2018 and again in 2019, SpaceX is pursuing a radically different method of recovery with Starship (the upper stage), while Super Heavy will more directly follow in the footsteps of Falcon 9/Heavy. Starship, however, is being designed to perform a guided descent more akin to a skydiver falling straight down, using flaps at its nose and tail (explicitly “not wings”) to accurately guide its fall.
As little as a few hundred meters above the ground, Starship will then perform a radical maneuver, igniting its Raptor engines to flip around, burn in the opposite direction to counteract that sideways boost, and finally coming in for a precise landing on Earth/Mars/the Moon.
Beyond the new GNC software and knowledge needed to make that maneuver real, Blackmore is also responsible for Starship atmospheric entry, no less critical to enabling precise, repeatable landings from orbital velocity to touchdown. In his recent interview with University of Cambridge staff, Lars revealed that his role as Principal Mars Landing Engineer involved a far wider scope than his previous GNC-centered work, with the goal instead being to design a launch vehicle (Starship) from the ground up to be easily recovered and reused. Falcon 9 Block 5 may be radically different than the ‘V1.0’ rocket that debuted in 2010, but it’s still ultimately a product of retroactive engineering.
With Starship and Super Heavy, SpaceX instead wants to take the vast wealth of knowledge and experience gained from F9/FH and build the vehicle from the ground up to be optimized for full reuse. Ultimately, Dr. Blackmore stated that “landing Starship will be much harder than landing Falcon 9, but if [SpaceX] can do it, it will be revolutionary.”
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s X goes down as users report major outage Friday morning
Error messages and stalled loading screens quickly spread across the service, while outage trackers recorded a sharp spike in user reports.
Elon Musk’s X experienced an outage Friday morning, leaving large numbers of users unable to access the social media platform.
Error messages and stalled loading screens quickly spread across the service, while outage trackers recorded a sharp spike in user reports.
Downdetector reports
Users attempting to open X were met with messages such as “Something went wrong. Try reloading,” often followed by an endless spinning icon that prevented access, according to a report from Variety. Downdetector data showed that reports of problems surged rapidly throughout the morning.
As of 10:52 a.m. ET, more than 100,000 users had reported issues with X. The data indicated that 56% of complaints were tied to the mobile app, while 33% were related to the website and roughly 10% cited server connection problems. The disruption appeared to begin around 10:10 a.m. ET, briefly eased around 10:35 a.m., and then returned minutes later.
Previous disruptions
Friday’s outage was not an isolated incident. X has experienced multiple high-profile service interruptions over the past two years. In November, tens of thousands of users reported widespread errors, including “Internal server error / Error code 500” messages. Cloudflare-related error messages were also reported.
In March 2025, the platform endured several brief outages spanning roughly 45 minutes, with more than 21,000 reports in the U.S. and 10,800 in the U.K., according to Downdetector. Earlier disruptions included an outage in August 2024 and impairments to key platform features in July 2023.
News
Tesla wins top loyalty and conquest honors in S&P Global Mobility 2025 awards
The electric vehicle maker secured this year’s “Overall Loyalty to Make,” “Highest Conquest Percentage,” and “Ethnic Loyalty to Make” awards.
Tesla emerged as one of the standout winners in the 2025 S&P Global Mobility Automotive Loyalty Awards, capturing top honors for customer retention and market conquest.
The electric vehicle maker secured this year’s “Overall Loyalty to Make,” “Highest Conquest Percentage,” and “Ethnic Loyalty to Make” awards.
Tesla claims loyalty crown
According to S&P Global Mobility, Tesla secured its 2025 “Overall Loyalty to Make” award following a late-year shift in consumer buying patterns. This marked the fourth consecutive year Tesla has received the honor. S&P Global Mobility’s annual analysis reviewed 13.6 million new retail vehicle registrations in the U.S. from October 2024 through September 2025, as noted in a press release.
In addition to overall loyalty, Tesla also earned the “Highest Conquest Percentage” award for the sixth consecutive year, highlighting the company’s continued ability to attract customers away from competing brands. This achievement is particularly notable given Tesla’s relatively small vehicle lineup, which is largely dominated by just two models: the Model 3 and Model Y.
Ethnic market strength and conquest
Tesla also captured top honors for “Ethnic Market Loyalty to Make,” a category that highlighted especially strong retention among Asian and Hispanic households. According to the analysis, Tesla achieved loyalty rates of 63.6% among Asian households and 61.9% among Hispanic households. These figures exceeded national averages.
S&P Global Mobility executives noted that loyalty margins across categories were exceptionally narrow in 2025, underscoring the significance of Tesla’s wins in an increasingly competitive market. Joe LaFeir, President of Mobility Business Solutions at S&P Global Mobility, shared his perspective on this year’s results.
“For 30 years, this analysis has provided a fact-based measure of brand health, and this year’s results are particularly telling. The data shows the market is not rewarding just one type of strategy. Instead, we see sustained, high-level performance from manufacturers with broad portfolios. In the current market, retaining customers remains a critical performance indicator for the industry,” LaFeir said.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft is heading to jury trial
The ruling keeps alive claims that OpenAI misled the Tesla CEO about its charitable purpose while accepting billions of dollars in funding.
OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft will face a jury trial this spring after a federal judge rejected their efforts to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit, which accuses the artificial intelligence startup of abandoning its original nonprofit mission. The ruling keeps alive claims that OpenAI misled the Tesla CEO about its charitable purpose while accepting billions of dollars in funding.
As noted in a report from Bloomberg News, a federal judge in Oakland, California, ruled that OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft failed to show that Musk’s claims should be dismissed. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers stated that while the evidence remains unclear, Musk has maintained that OpenAI “had a specific charitable purpose and that he attached two fundamental terms to it: that OpenAI be open source and that it would remain a nonprofit — purposes consistent with OpenAI’s charter and mission.”
Judge Gonzalez Rogers also rejected an argument by OpenAI suggesting that Musk’s use of an intermediary to donate $38 million in seed money to the company stripped him of legal standing. “Holding otherwise would significantly reduce the enforcement of a large swath of charitable trusts, contrary to the modern trend,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers wrote.
The judge also declined to dismiss Musk’s fraud allegations, citing internal OpenAI communications from 2017 involving co-founder Greg Brockman. In an email cited by the judge, fellow OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis informed Musk that Brockman would “like to continue with the non-profit structure.”
Just two months later, however, Brockman wrote in a private note that he “cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit. don’t want to say that we’re committed. if three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie.”
Marc Toberoff, a member of Musk’s legal team, said Judge Gonzalez Rogers’s ruling confirms that “there is substantial evidence that OpenAI’s leadership made knowingly false assurances to Mr. Musk about its charitable mission that they never honored in favor of their personal self-enrichment.”
OpenAI, for its part, maintained that Musk’s legal efforts are baseless. In a statement, the AI startup said it is looking forward to the upcoming trial. “Mr. Musk’s lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment, and we look forward to demonstrating this at trial. We remain focused on empowering the OpenAI Foundation, which is already one of the best-resourced nonprofits ever,” OpenAI stated.
Elon Musk’s X goes down as users report major outage Friday morning
Tesla wins top loyalty and conquest honors in S&P Global Mobility 2025 awards
