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SpaceX rocket booster aces tenth launch and landing in major reusability milestone

Pictured on the left with B1058 on the right, Falcon 9 booster B1051 will reportedly become the first to fly ten times later this weekend. (Richard Angle)

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4 years ago

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Update: SpaceX Falcon 9 booster B1051 aced its Starlink-27 launch without issue, becoming the first Falcon booster ever to complete ten consecutive launches and landings.

The mission’s success also means that SpaceX’s internet constellation has more than 1500 functional satellites in orbit, leaving Starlink just two more 60-satellite batches and a few months of orbit-raising away from the ability to deliver internet virtually anywhere on Earth.

Next Spaceflight reports that SpaceX’s next Starlink launch – scheduled as few as five days after the last mission – will see Falcon 9 mark a hugely significant milestone for truly reusable rocketry.

According to Next Spaceflight’s sources, SpaceX has chosen Falcon 9 booster B1051 to launch Starlink-27 – the constellation’s 26th operational mission – as early as 2:42 am EDT (06:42 UTC) on Sunday, May 9th. Scheduled eight weeks (56 days) after the same booster’s last orbital-class launch and landing and just five days after SpaceX’s 25th operational Starlink launch, Starlink-27 will be Falcon 9 B1051’s 10th launch.

While seemingly minor in the scope of SpaceX’s unending roster of spaceflight ‘firsts,’ B1051’s Sunday flight will make Falcon 9 the first reusable liquid rocket booster of any kind to complete ten orbital launches. With that tenth launch and (hopeful) landing, SpaceX will cross a largely symbolic – but still significant – milestone that many traditional aerospace companies and direct competitors have used for at least a decade to rationalize resting on their laurels and continuing to design and build expensive, expendable rockets with no serious path to reusability.

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For the entirety of SpaceX’s operational life, its only two real competitors have – and continue to be – US conglomerate United Launch Alliance (ULA) and European conglomerate Arianespace. Almost like clockwork, both extremely conservative groups – comprised of numerous traditional, entrenched aerospace and military contractors – have gone through a similar cycle of belittlement and dismissal, denial, goalpost-moving, disbelief, and resignation as SpaceX announced plans for reusability, began real-world attempts, and gradually worked out the kinks.

As it became clear that SpaceX would succeed in its efforts to vertically launch and land Falcon 9 boosters and ULA and Arianespace had to move their goalposts from “it’ll never work,” both generally settled on largely arbitrary claims that even if SpaceX could land rockets, reuse would never be economical. ULA went even further than Arianespace with an explicit claim – derived from armchair analysis built on opaque, unspecified assumptions – that SpaceX’s approach to Falcon reuse would “require ten [booster] uses to be profitable.” [PDF]

Instead, ULA – proudly standing on its high horse – proffered an alternative called “SMART (Sensible Modular. Autonomous Return Technology) Reuse” for its next-generation Vulcan rocket. Instead of landing and reusing entire boosters like SpaceX, ULA would develop an extremely complex engine section that would detach from Vulcan in mid-air, deploy an experimental inflatable heat shield, and be grabbed out of the sky with a helicopter. Even back when the concept was first announced in 2015, ULA’s schedule for SMART reuse would have seen the technology debut no sooner than the mid 2020s.

More than half a decade later, ULA no longer talks about “SMART Reuse” and it certainly doesn’t talk about the program’s schedule. As late as mid-2020, though, CEO Tory Bruno still parrots ULA’s arbitrary estimate that reusability only makes sense after ten flights per booster – and with the added bonus of new goalposts that demand that that “breakeven flight rate…be achieved as a fleet average.”

Arianespace executives have echoed similar sentiments over the years and more recently implied that it would only ever make sense to invest in SpaceX-style reusability if the conglomerate could guarantee at least 30 launch contracts annually.

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SpaceX Falcon 9 “fleet leader” returns to port after record reuse

In the meantime, Arianespace and ULA all but handed the vast majority of their commercial market share to SpaceX’s far more affordable Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. As a result, the company has effectively taken over the commercial spaceflight industry while its relentless, iterative development approach have produced refined Falcon 9 and Heavy rockets with an unprecedented degree of reusability. Looking at all Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters that have flown more than once, the fleet average is already more than five launches less than three years after the Block 5 upgrade debuted.

SpaceX has also demonstrated – multiple times – that it can launch the same Falcon 9 booster twice in less than a month, quite literally halving the Space Shuttle’s 54-day record while likely requiring somewhere between 10 and 100 times less hands-on work. Just last month, NASA gave SpaceX’s reusability work the ultimate blessing when a Falcon 9 booster launched astronauts for the second time. Of the more than 1500 Starlink satellites SpaceX has launched over the last two years, not a single one of those internet satellites flew on a new Falcon 9 booster.

SpaceX Falcon boosters likely to surpass Elon Musk’s prime rocket reuse directive

Finally, Falcon 9 booster B1051 is now on track to become the first liquid rocket booster in history to cross the ten-flight mark set by ULA and targeted by SpaceX CEO Elon Musk. For Musk, “ten flights” has long been a line drawn in the sand – explicitly meant to be an arbitrary target. In reality, after flying multiple Falcon 9 boosters six, seven, eight, and even nine times apiece, SpaceX already believes that the rocket’s existing design is capable of significantly surpassing that target.

Perhaps most importantly, despite the fact that Arianespace and ULA have scarcely begun to even attempt to counter Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, SpaceX is already working on Starship – a far more capable, fully-reusable rocket designed from the ground up with lessons learned from Falcon.

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Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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Tesla appears to have teased a long-awaited Model Y trim for a Friday launch

The company posted it with its Europe & Middle East account, and it appears to be a Model Y Performance, which has been spotted testing at the famed Nurburgring in Germany.

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8 hours ago

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August 27, 2025

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla appears to have teased a long-awaited Model Y trim for a launch on Friday.

The company posted it with its Europe & Middle East account, and it appears to be a Model Y Performance, which has been spotted testing at the famed Nurburgring in Germany.

The Model Y Performance became a big-time hit after it packed the family-style interior with lightning-fast acceleration, speed, and handling.

As Tesla transitioned the Model Y into the updated “Juniper” design, the company took its time to create an even better vehicle with the new Performance configuration.

It has surely taken its time, but the vehicle appears to have undergone some exterior changes to enhance aerodynamics, handling, and overall performance.

We recently went into what was different about the test units spotted at Nurburgring in an article, but we’ll also list them here:

  • New 21″ wheels
  • All black headliner, a big change that was included in the Model Y L, the first time a Model Y has had that option
  • Updated brakes
  • Bucket seats that appear to be similar to the new Model Y L in China
  • New Carbon Fiber Spoiler
  • Performance Badging
  • Changes to both the front and rear bumper
  • Suspension with Adaptive Dampers

Tesla Model Y Performance zips around Nurburgring with new features

It does not seem like there’s much else it could be, but it is important to note that Tesla has been developing a handful of affordable models. There is a possibility that Tesla could launch one of these on Friday, but it seems unlikely.

The affordable models will likely be coming to the United States or China before they would in Europe.

They would be developed at Gigafactory Texas or Gigafactory Shanghai. The company stated in its Q2 Earnings Shareholder Deck that it had continued to expand its vehicle offerings and successfully manufactured the first builds of a more affordable model in June.

Volume production is planned for the second half of 2025.

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Elon Musk

SpaceX Starship Flight 10 was so successful, it’s breaking the anti-Musk narrative

That’s all the proof one could need about the undeniable success of Starship Flight 10.

Published

12 hours ago

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August 27, 2025

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Credit: Elon Musk/X

Starship Flight 10 was a huge success for SpaceX. When both the Super Heavy booster and the Starship Upper Stage successfully landed on their designated splashdown zones, the space community was celebrating.

The largest and most powerful rocket in the world had successfully completed its tenth test flight. And this time around, there were no rapid unscheduled disassemblies during the mission.

As per SpaceX in a statement following Flight 10, “every major objective was met, providing critical data to inform designs of the next generation Starship and Super Heavy.” The private space enterprise also stated that Flight 10 provided valuable data by stressing the limits of Starship’s capabilities.

With all of Flight 10’s mission objectives met, one would think that it would be pretty easy to cover the story of Starship’s successful tenth test flight. But that’s where one would be wrong, because Elon Musk companies, whether it be Tesla or SpaceX or xAI, tend to attract negative slant from mainstream media outlets.

This was in full force with Starship Flight 10’s coverage. Take the BBC’s Facebook post about the fight test, which read “Elon Musk’s giant rocket, earmarked for use in a 2027 mission to the Moon, has had multiple catastrophic failures in previous launches.” CNN was more direct with its slant, writing “SpaceX’s troubled Starship prototype pulls off successful flight after months of explosive mishaps” on its headline. 

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While some media outlets evidently adopted a negative slant towards Starship’s Flight 10 results, several other media sources actually published surprisingly positive articles about the successful test flight. The most notable of which is arguably the New York Times, which featured a headline that read “SpaceX’s Giant Mars Rocket Completes Nearly Flawless Test Flight.” Fox News also ran with a notably positive headline that read “SpaceX succeeds at third Starship test flight attempt after multiple scrubs.”

Having covered Elon Musk-related companies for the better part of a decade now, I have learned that mainstream coverage of any of his companies tends to be sprinkled with varying degrees of negative slant. The reasons behind this may never be fully explained, but it is just the way things are. This is why, when milestones such as Starship’s Flight 10 actually happen and mainstream media coverage becomes somewhat objective, I can’t help but be amazed. 

After all, it takes one heck of a company led by one heck of a leader to force objectivity on an entity that has proven subjective over the years. And that, if any, is all the proof one could need about the undeniable success of Starship Flight 10.

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Tesla’s Elon Musk takes another shot at Waymo’s capabilities stemming from LiDAR

“LiDAR also does not work well in snow, rain or dust due to reflection scatter. That’s why Waymos stop working in any heavy precipitation.”

Published

13 hours ago

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August 27, 2025

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tesla elon musk

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has frequently expressed his opinions on LiDAR in the past, but in recent days, the EV maker’s frontman has continued to discuss the weaknesses in the technology and why his company has relied on cameras.

He also mentioned the suite’s limits on Waymo’s capabilities.

Tesla completely abandoned using radar alongside its camera suite a few years ago, something it referred to as “Tesla Vision” at the time. For its vehicles, it has only used cameras since this transition, and Musk has never once shied away from this strategy.

Earlier this week, he discussed the reliance of LiDAR and radar by other companies:

“Lidar and radar reduce safety due to sensor contention. If lidars/radars disagree with cameras, which one wins?

This sensor ambiguity causes increased, not decreased, risk. That’s why Waymos can’t drive on highways.

We turned off radars in Teslas to increase safety. Cameras ftw.”

Elon Musk argues lidar and radar make self driving cars more dangerous

He continued with this narrative again and mentioned Waymo specifically on a second occasion.

Musk’s focus this time was on Waymo vehicles and their capabilities in adverse weather, specifically snow, rain, or even dust storms, and how LiDAR struggles to navigate in these conditions.

He said:

“LiDAR also does not work well in snow, rain or dust due to reflection scatter. That’s why Waymos stop working in any heavy precipitation. As I have said many times, there is a role for LiDAR in some circumstances and I personally oversaw the development of LiDAR for the SpaceX Dragon docking with Space Station. I am well aware of its strengths and weaknesses.”

Tesla’s approach is significantly different than most companies. Waymo, Motional, Aurora, and Zoox all use LiDAR for their self-driving programs, while Tesla continues to rely on its camera-only approach.

Musk even said that Model S and Model X utilized a Tesla-developed high-resolution radar, but it could not “compare to passive optical (cameras), so we turned it off.”

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