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SpaceX Starlink launch marks record Falcon fairing reuse, 85th booster landing
Update: SpaceX aced its 28th operational Starlink launch without issue, simultaneously marking a new record for Falcon fairing reuse, the 85th successful Falcon booster landing, and Falcon’s 94th consecutively successful launch.
SpaceX says that its 14th Starlink launch of 2021 will also be the first mission to fly a reusable Falcon payload fairing for the fifth time, marking a significant milestone just 18 months after fairing reuse began.
Scheduled to lift off no earlier than (NET) 2:59 pm EDT (18:59 UTC) on Wednesday, May 26th, Starlink-28 will be SpaceX’s 12th dedicated Starlink launch and 14th Starlink launch overall this year – representing more than 780 satellites safely delivered to orbit in five months. Perhaps most notably, Starlink-28 – if successful – will push SpaceX past a milestone that COO and President Gwynne Shotwell recently stated would enable virtually uninterrupted Starlink coverage of the populated world.
SpaceX says that Starlink-28 will fly with two flight-proven payload fairing halves – one having previously supported four Starlink missions and the other a Starlink mission and Transporter-1. Falcon fairings are vast nosecone-like structures built mainly out of carbon fiber and aluminum honeycomb composites and designed to maintain a sterile, controlled environment for satellites and protect them from the elements, heating, and aerodynamic stress while inside Earth’s atmosphere. SpaceX currently uses the same fairing design for all Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy satellite launches, simplifying its product line to keep costs as low as possible.
Historically, SpaceX executives have stated that each pair of Falcon fairings represents around 10% of the cost of Falcon 9 production, or $5 million. Due to the need for massive autoclave curing ovens, the volume and speed of Falcon fairing production has a firm lower limit save for expensive, space-hungry factory expansions. For SpaceX’s increasingly ambitious Starlink launch cadence goals, that means that fairing recovery and reuse is more valuable and essential than each pair’s price tag would otherwise suggest.
SpaceX reused Falcon fairings for the first time on Starlink’s first operational v1.0 satellite launch in November 2019, approximately 18 months ago. Since then, of 28 operational Starlink missions, only 11 have flown new fairings, more than doubling the effective output of SpaceX’s limited fairing production capacity. All told, SpaceX has flown 34 flight-proven fairing halves on 19 separate missions – almost every other Falcon 9 launch since November 2019.
Starlink-28 will fly one of its two fairing halves for the fifth time just 18 months after the first fairing reuse. In comparison, SpaceX’s Falcon booster reusability program took three years – 36 months – to go from first reuse to a fifth flight of the same booster. In other words, SpaceX fairing reusability is speeding right along as it crosses milestones more than twice as quickly as boosters did. Over the brief life of the program, fairing reuse has likely already saved SpaceX at least $90 million in nonrecurring costs while simultaneously freeing up a substantial portion of the company’s composites team to fill in on other composites projects and reducing or replacing the need for tens of millions of dollars of new production space and equipment.
Tune in at the link below around 2:45 pm EDT (18:45 UTC) to watch SpaceX’s Starlink-28 launch live.
Elon Musk
Tesla Semi finally has an FSD timeline and it’s waiting on the Cybercab
Elon Musk told investors Semi self-driving should start working by early 2027, per today’s earnings.
During Wednesday’s’ Tesla Q2 earnings call, an analyst asked Elon Musk when Tesla would look at autonomy for the Semi. His answer set a real timeline for the first time, noting that self-driving on the Tesla Semi is expected to start working “around the end of this year or early next year”.
Musk framed the delay as a matter of priority, not capability. Tesla’s self-driving team is currently focused on Model 3, Model Y, and Cybercab, the vehicles that make up the overwhelming majority of Tesla’s fleet. Since Semi trucks on the road remain a small fraction of that total even after the recent Nevada factory ramp, Musk said it made more sense to keep the software team’s attention on what he called “the march of nines of safety” for the higher volume vehicles first. Autonomous Semi development is “taking a bit of a backseat for the next six months or so,” he said, before adding that it “will definitely be working next year and in time for the scale-up to high production of the Tesla Semi.”
Tesla Semi’s official battery capacity leaked by California regulators
The timeline lines up with what’s already been showing up on public roads. In June, a Tesla Semi was spotted in Sunnyvale wearing a full validation rig, the same rooftop sensor array Tesla mounts on vehicles ahead of an FSD milestone.
A second unit was seen near Fremont days later with a matching camera suite and lens washers. Separately, Tesla analyst Nic Cruz Patane posted video this month of the production Semi’s exterior camera array, ten AI4 based units built directly into the truck rather than added later.
Tesla Semi AI4 cameras. The production version has 10 cameras on its exterior.
These trucks are designed to be autonomous. pic.twitter.com/GH3BamxIBQ
— Nic Cruz Patane (@niccruzpatane) April 14, 2026
Musk also gave the reason autonomy on the Semi matters in the first place, a persistent shortage of qualified truck drivers. “There is a really serious shortage of truckers,” he said on the call, framing a self-driving Semi as important both for addressing that shortage and for improving safety and comfort for the drivers running the truck today.
The timing also tracks with the Semi’s production reality. Tesla’s Q2 shareholder letter, dropped language promising the Semi would reach volume production this year. Musk pointed to 4680 battery cell output as the near-term constraint on Semi and Cybercab production. A software timeline landing in early 2027 gives Tesla’s autonomy team room to work while the hardware ramp catches up behind it.
It’s worth nothing that this isn’t necessarily a promise the Semi ships driverless next year. Musk’s own language, self-driving “working” by early 2027, describes internal validation catching up to hardware already riding on every production truck, not a public unsupervised rollout.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a massive beat on vehicle deliveries for the second quarter, delivering 489,126 vehicles and building 451,758 cars during the three-month span.
This was a major shock for those on Wall Street as they anticipated somewhere around 400,000 deliveries for the quarter, and showed Tesla still has plenty of demand for its vehicles around the world and in the U.S. despite losing the $7,500 EV Tax Credit last year.
Tesla Q2 2026 Earnings Results
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.33 reported vs. $0.53 expected
- Revenues – $28.236 billion reported vs. $26.4 billion expected
- Free Cash Flow- -$1.092B
- Profit -$ 4.751B
Tesla (beat/missed) analyst expectations, so the market response to the company’s quarter is what we will look for next.
Tesla shares closed today down just over 1 percent, trading at $374.01.
In the past, it has been anyone’s guess with what Tesla shares will do after they report earnings. Strong quarters have resulted in sharp drops, while lackluster quarters have seen the stock shoot up considerably.
Tesla will hold its Q2 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q2 2026 Earnings Call https://t.co/zZS6ii2TWK
— Tesla (@Tesla) July 22, 2026
Tesla is about to make parking in busy parking lots at businesses and other points of interest less stressful than ever by allowing drivers more control over where they park and how, CEO Elon Musk confirmed on X.
Tesla has been working to improve the parking performance of vehicles utilizing the Full Self-Driving suite, but now it is looking to add more customization, allowing drivers to choose the specific space they park in, but also potentially the orientation the car pulls into the spot:
It’s coming soon
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 21, 2026
Musk has reiterated on X twice over the past several weeks that Tesla is working to make things with the FSD suite based more on the driver’s specific preferences and behaviors that were seen in past drives.
Essentially, it sounds like if you tend to park away from a business to avoid other vehicles, Tesla FSD will soon recognize that preference of yours and start parking further away as well. Additionally, the prospect of assigned parking spaces has been something many owners have voiced concerns about.
Living in a community with assigned parking spaces makes using FSD incredibly difficult as it will rarely park in the correct spot when there are so many to choose from. This is also pertinent in work settings where there are sometimes assigned parking spaces.
The updates to Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite in terms of listening to driver preferences with parking are also extending to routing. Tesla announced yesterday that with the release of its 2026 Summer Update, it was adding Automatic Navigation and Preferred Routes:
Tesla reveals 2026 Summer Update with crazy fixes to Nav and more
Tesla has always maintained the idea that any human input is bad input, and that, ideally, Tesla Full Self-Driving will always make the right decision. Of course, this is all in theory, but the issue is that so many of Tesla’s interventions have come because it does something that is not necessarily wrong, but perhaps not what the driver would prefer.
Taking these preferences into account will help Tesla alleviate some of the potentially unnecessary interventions that drivers perform.
Elon Musk’s answer to Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey got way more specific
Tesla Semi finally has an FSD timeline and it’s waiting on the Cybercab
