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SpaceX’s fleet of rocket recovery ships is about to get even bigger
Four months after SpaceX gave up on catching Falcon fairings and stripped and returned a pair of leased ships it had modified for that purpose, the company’s permanent fairing recovery solution has just come into focus.
The April 2021 departure of GO Ms Tree (formerly Mr. Steven) and GO Ms Chief from SpaceX’s East Coast fleet made it unambiguously clear that the company was abandoning fairing catching in favor of simply scooping the several million dollar nose cone halves off of the surface of the ocean. By the time that decision was made, SpaceX had reused fairing halves more than two dozen times on more than 15 Falcon 9 launches – practically none of which had actually been caught by Ms Tree or Ms Chief.
In fact, SpaceX had already begun to reuse ‘scooped’ fairing halves on commercial Falcon 9 launches, including two Transporter rideshare missions with dozens of different customers and SiriusXM’s SXM-7 multimillion-dollar geostationary communications satellite. Perhaps even more importantly, SpaceX was routinely flying splashdown fairing halves three or even four times and flew one particular half twice in just 49 days.
Put simply, thanks to the heroic and somewhat unexpected success of a small subset of SpaceX’s fairing recovery, waterproofing, design improvements, and refurbishment upgrades got so good even fairings that splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean could be rapidly reused and flown multiple (now 5+) times apiece. Onto its third consecutive year of only marginal success and a distinct lack of reliability, that meant that SpaceX’s long-struggling effort to catch Falcon fairings had effectively been made redundant.
While it’s likely that scooped fairing halves would never be certified to fly high-value US military or NASA payloads, SpaceX appears to have matured the technology to the point that it’s good enough for Starlink and many (if not most) of its private-sector launch customers. Along those lines, with Ms Tree and Ms Chief out of the picture by early April, SpaceX had to briefly shoehorn Dragon recovery ships GO Navigator and GO Searcher into scooping roles to continue recovering fairings and eventually decided to lease or rent two far larger ships with built-in deck cranes.
For whatever reason, those leases or rentals only lasted a handful of weeks apiece and the latest ship – Hos Briarwood – departed SpaceX’s fleet in early July. In an extremely rare impromptu hiatus, SpaceX hasn’t launched once since late June, likely explaining why Briarwood – with a 100% fairing recovery success rate over two missions – departed when it did.
Now, first reported by SpaceExplored.com, the first signs of SpaceX’s long-expected permanent fairing recovery solution have appeared at an obscure Louisiana drydock. By all appearances, for the first time in its history, SpaceX has outright purchased two decade-old offshore supply ships formerly known as Ingrid and Ella G. Thankfully, SpaceX wiped clean any hint of ambiguity with the installation of a classic SpaceX “X” and by renaming the ships “Bob” and “Doug” after the pair that became the first NASA astronauts to ride a Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft to orbit in May 2020.
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Relative to any of SpaceX’s more permanent fleet, including ex-members Tree and Chief, Bob and Doug are massive ships, measuring more than 80m (260 feet) long. They’re also five or six times heavier than the likes of GO Searcher or Ms Tree. Aside from an obvious potential role as fairing ‘scoopers’ thanks to the installation of large deck cranes, Bob and Doug also appear to have had heavy-duty winches installed, implying that they could also double as drone ship towboats.
Potentially, that means that SpaceX could shrink the fleet of ships needed to support each drone ship booster landing from two to one, using Bog and Doug to both tow and service the landing platforms at sea.
SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
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Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
SpaceX released new footage of Starship in space captured by the Starlink satellites it deployed.
SpaceX released a new video Friday evening showing Starship from an angle showcased by its own Starlink satellites, watching the rocket drift away in orbit.
The 65 second clip, posted on X, stitches together footage from four cameras mounted on a single Starlink V3 satellite. It opens with a close view of Starship’s 171 foot upper stage, still catching sunlight, then pulls back as the two spacecraft separate.
The footage comes from Starship’s 13th flight test, which launched July 24 from Starbase after a scrubbed attempt and an abort caused by an engine issue the week before. When Flight 13 finally flew, it carried the first batch of functional Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever deployed, twenty of them, with six equipped with cameras meant to scan the ship’s heat shield during reentry.
View of Starship in space from a Starlink V3 satellite on Flight 13.
This composite is made of imagery from four separate cameras on a single satellite. Six of the satellites were equipped with cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to… pic.twitter.com/sNTHHz5vLr
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 31, 2026
Flight 13 checked most of its boxes. Starship deployed all 20 satellites, relit a Raptor engine in space, and splashed down softly in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Musk’s longer term plan calls for a Starlink V3 constellation of 100,000 satellites, according to a recent FCC filing, with Starship as the only vehicle capable of launching them at the volume that requires. Each Starship flight is designed to carry up to 60 V3 satellites once the vehicle reaches routine service, well beyond what Falcon 9 can carry in a single mission.
Starship is next expected to fly with an attempt at catching the ship itself with the launch tower’s mechanical arms, a maneuver SpaceX has so far reserved for the Super Heavy booster.
Tesla flexed the new features of the Model Y L with a dedicated media event at the company’s Diner on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The Model Y L is the extended-wheelbase version of the all-electric crossover, which has been voted the best-selling car in the world on three occasions. The vehicle is already rolling off production lines at Gigafactory Texas, and first deliveries are slated to take place later this year.
Tesla brings Model Y L ‘Launch Series’ to the U.S. at $61,990
Teslarati was invited to the event, but due to some scheduling conflicts, we could not make it to Los Angeles. Instead, we will have our hands on a media unit sometime in August, so we’ll be able to spend some more extended time with the Model Y L.
However, plenty of those who made it to LA shared some cool features that set the Model Y L apart from the Model Y.
Multi-Row Climate Control
Tesla fitted the Model Y L with full climate control on all three rows on the front screen. It can be adjusted by selecting which row you’d like to modify on the right-hand side of the touch screen:
The Model Y L has a little row of icons on the right side of the climate screen so the front passenger can more quickly jump to whatever row they want to control. pic.twitter.com/uJS44mgCvk
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 30, 2026
Better Rear Window Visibility
One of the strangest things about the Model Y, especially the Juniper iteration, is the rear window has extremely limited visibility when looking into the rearview mirror.
Tesla has improved upon this with the Model Y L:
This is a drastic difference. https://t.co/wTdhitD5aA pic.twitter.com/z6hFs0Jkss
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 30, 2026
PowerShare will be included
Model Y L will come with PowerShare in North America, with an 11.5kW output to your home. Tesla said it would require Powerwall 3 for operation.
Wireless Charging Pad
There has been some speculation that Tesla would upgrade the wireless charging pads in the United States, but this is not the case.
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Tesla confirmed that it does not come with the cooled pads as the Y L in China does. This is because North America has not adopted Qi charging yet.
Thermal Management Improvements
These improvements in the Model Y L were seen with thermal management:
- Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
- +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather, 7 miles of real-world range gained
- 8x more solar energy reflection off of glass roof
- 30% reduction in solar energy entering the cabin
Some of the thermal management improvements in the new Model Y L Premium:
• Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
• Up to 15 min faster cabin cooling in sunny conditions
• +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather +7 miles of real-world range gained
• +10 miles recovered after… pic.twitter.com/jZirFWFdtO— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 31, 2026
Demand
Tesla said the Model Y L is almost sold out in the U.S. It comes with
- 1 year of FSD Supervised
- 1 year of Supercharging
- 1 year of Premium Connectivity
- Free exterior paint color, interior, and wheel option at no additional cost
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
