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SpaceX wants to attempt Starship booster catch during first orbital launch
An updated document submitted by SpaceX to the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has revealed details about the company’s plan for the first Starship booster ‘catch’ attempt.
The document follows a different batch submitted by SpaceX in June 2021, when the company detailed its plans for Starship’s orbital launch debut as background while requesting permission from the FCC to use Starlink dishes for in-flight telemetry. A month earlier, a different request focused on more standard telemetry antennas had already revealed that even if the mission went perfectly, Starship would not fully reach orbit on its first attempted spaceflight. It also confirmed that SpaceX had no intention of recovering the upper stage or Super Heavy booster assigned to Starship’s launch debut – a sort of implicit acknowledgment that success was (then) not expected on the first try.
Twelve months later, SpaceX has submitted an updated overview of Starship’s orbital launch debut in a new request for permission to use multiple Starlink dishes on both stages. While most of the document is the same, a few particular details have changed about Super Heavy’s role in the mission.
This time around, SpaceX says that the Super Heavy booster will “will separate[,] perform a partial return[,] and land in the Gulf of Mexico or return to Starbase and be caught by the launch tower.” Prior to this document, SpaceX’s best-case plans for the first Super Heavy booster to launch never strayed from a controlled splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico – potentially demonstrating that it would be safe to attempt booster recovery on the next launch but all but guaranteeing that the first booster would be lost at sea.
A year later, SpaceX appears to be a bit more confident and wants to leave itself the option to attempt to recover the first Super Heavy booster that launches. However, the company has dramatically complicated the process of testing early Super Heavy and Starship recovery (and thus reuse) by fully removing traditional and predictable landing legs and designing its latest prototypes such that the only way they can be recovered in one piece is with a giant mechanized ‘launch tower’ nicknamed Mechazilla.
The launch tower and its three mobile arms will play a crucial role in all aspects of orbital Starship launches. The first arm swings out to brace Super Heavy for Starship installation and connect the upper stage to power, propellant supplies, and other launch pad utilities. A more exotic pair of arms nicknamed ‘chopsticks’ has a more complex job. On top of using the chopsticks to lift, stack, and demate Starships and Super Heavy boosters and almost any weather and wind conditions, SpaceX wants to use the arms as an incredibly complex and precarious rocket recovery system.
For a booster or Starship “catch,” the rocket will approach the tower, enter the gap between the splayed arms, hover in place while the arms close around it, and eventually come to rest on hardpoints that appear to offer about as much surface area as a coffee table. Based on a simulation of the process shown by Elon Musk, calling it a “catch” is a misnomer, as the arms will mainly move in one dimension (open/close) and can’t actually ‘grab’ the rocket in any real sense. As built and shown, they are closer to a tiny fixed landing platform capable of minor last-second positional adjustments.
Eventually, the chopsticks could shave a small amount of time off of post-recovery processing, removing the need for a crane (or the same arms) to attach to a landed booster or ship. They could also shave off the dry mass required for landing legs, though all interplanetary ships will still need legs. However, they will also inherently make proving their own efficacy a nightmare. By all appearances, the current recovery mechanisms on the arms and the landing hardpoints on ships and boosters mean that a ‘catch’ could fail if either stage is more than a foot or two from a perfect bullseye or rotated a few degrees in the wrong direction. With the method SpaceX has devised, even the tiniest error could easily end with a massive, pressurized, partially-fueled rocket destroying the chopsticks and plummeting a few hundred feet to the ground, guaranteeing an explosion that could damage surrounding infrastructure or start fires that might.
In the event of larger anomalies during a landing attempt, Starship or Super Heavy could accidentally impact the launch tower, damaging or even outright destroying the skyscraper-sized structure. Ultimately, the immense risk posed by any catch attempt means that unless SpaceX has miraculously gotten the design of everything involved nearly perfect on its first try, the company will have to be extraordinarily cautious and expend a large number of ships and boosters to avoid rendering its only Starship launch tower unusable.
At least to some extent, SpaceX likely knows this and Super Heavy would likely need to be in excellent health and perform perfectly during the ascent and boostback portions of its launch debut to be cleared for a catch attempt. Ultimately, Starship’s first orbital launch could end up being even more of a spectacle than it’s already guaranteed to be.
Tesla is being sued by the family of the woman who was killed in a Texas crash involving a Model 3. The driver, who is also being sued, claimed the vehicle was operating on Autopilot mode, but Tesla executives have come out challenging that claim, stating that the driver of the vehicle overrode the system.
The lawsuit was filed by 76-year-old Martha Avila’s daughter and her husband, who allege a “design defect” involving a Tesla and a failure to warn. The suit alleges negligence against Tesla and the driver, Michael Butler.
Butler “stated he was operating with an automated driving assistance system engaged at the time of the crash,” the Harris County Sheriff’s Office said in a statement. He showed no signs of intoxication and was cooperative, the Sheriff’s Office said, according to NBC News.
Just after reports of the crash and numerous headlines that immediately blamed Tesla’s Autopilot suite, both Tesla CEO Elon Musk and Head of AI Ashok Elluswamy challenged that. Musk said the crash made “no sense” given that Tesla Autopilot and Full Self-Driving do not travel at the speeds the door cameras captured the car traveling at, which Tesla says was 73 MPH.
Tesla finally clarifies fatal Texas crash, confirms driver manually overrode acceleration
Elluswamy also revealed that Tesla data showed Butler overrode the system by pressing the accelerator to 100%, and that the pedal was compressed fully even after the car had crashed. Tesla has not released this data to the public, likely because it is communicating with agencies like the NHTSA on an investigation.
The suit uses a Washington Post analysis of government data that “identified at least 17 fatal incidents linked to Tesla Autopilot.”
This is far from the first time an accident has been blamed on Autopilot. A fatal crash in Texas was blamed on Autopilot several years ago, but when Tesla released data to the NTSB, which was investigating the crash, Autopilot was not available where the crash occurred, and Autosteer was never enabled, meaning the car was manually controlled at the time of the accident.
“Application of the accelerator pedal was found to be as high as 98.8 percent,” the NTSB said in their findings. The highest recorded speed in the five seconds leading up to the impact was 67 miles per hour. The area where the crash occurred is residential, and Texas State laws… pic.twitter.com/XGD97NHVZ2
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) March 18, 2026
More information on the accident will be released as Tesla works with agencies to find the cause of the crash. From personal experience, it is hard to imagine Tesla Autopilot or FSD operating in this manner. It drives sometimes too cautiously in residential areas in parking lots, at least in my experience. Speeding happens, but at this rate in this type of area, it is hard to believe.
We look forward to more details being released with time.
The Insurance Institute for Highway Safety (IIHS) has awarded the 2025-2026 Tesla Cybertruck crew cab pickup its highest honor: Top Safety Pick+. This marks the Cybertruck as the only full-size pickup to achieve this distinction in recent evaluations.
The award applies specifically to vehicles built after April 2025, following structural upgrades including front underbody reinforcements and footwell modifications.
These changes enabled strong performance in updated crash tests. The Cybertruck earned “Good” ratings in the small overlap front (driver and passenger sides), updated moderate overlap front, and updated side tests—core requirements for the Top Safety Pick+ designation.
It also secured acceptable or good headlights across trims and a “Good” rating for its standard front crash prevention system in pedestrian scenarios, along with acceptable or good performance in vehicle-to-vehicle testing.
The Cybertruck avoided every single pedestrian collision, including:
- Daytime child crossing
- Nightitime adult crossing
- Night parallel adult
In IIHS pedestrian front crash prevention tests, @Cybertruck avoided every single collision – daytime, nighttime & different angles
It was also the only pickup to earn Top Safety Pick+ (highest award) in 2026https://t.co/BNPqT9TbsW pic.twitter.com/M6nwDisBFK
— Tesla (@Tesla) June 24, 2026
In the large pickup category, competitors such as the Toyota Tundra received only a standard Top Safety Pick, while the Ford F-150 and Ram 1500 did not qualify for either award. This positions the Cybertruck as a standout in occupant protection and crash avoidance among its peers.
Credit: IIHS
Ironically, the same vehicle celebrated for superior U.S. safety performance remains banned from public roads in the United Kingdom and much of Europe. Regulators there cite the Cybertruck’s sharp external edges and highly rigid stainless-steel construction as failing pedestrian-protection standards. European and UK rules require rounded surfaces on protruding parts to minimize injury risk in collisions with vulnerable road users.
Critics also point to the truck’s substantial weight and unyielding body structure, which some argue could transfer more force to other vehicles or pedestrians rather than absorbing it.
Tesla’s engineering philosophy underpins the Cybertruck’s strong IIHS results. The vehicle features a distinctive stainless-steel exoskeleton made from ultra-hard 30X cold-rolled stainless steel. This provides exceptional structural rigidity and a robust safety cage that resists deformation in side impacts and rollovers.
Engineers designed integrated load paths to channel crash forces away from the occupant compartment while allowing controlled energy absorption in key zones. Post-April 2025 refinements to the front underbody further optimized performance in overlap crashes.
Complementing the passive structure is Tesla’s advanced active safety suite, including the standard Collision Avoidance Assist system with automatic emergency braking. This contributed directly to the vehicle’s strong front crash prevention scores. The skateboard platform and low center of gravity also enhance stability and handling, reducing the likelihood of certain crashes.
The IIHS recognition highlights how Tesla’s combination of high-strength materials, structural innovation, and software-driven safety systems can deliver top-tier protection in rigorous testing. While global regulatory differences on design and pedestrian interaction continue to limit the Cybertruck’s availability outside North America, its U.S. safety credentials set a new benchmark for full-size pickups.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
Elon Musk confirmed Starmind as SpaceX’s AI satellite constellation name, targeting one million orbital compute nodes.
Elon Musk confirmed that Starmind will be the official name of SpaceX’s planned AI satellite constellation, following a trademark filing by xAI that surfaced earlier this week. Starmind is what’s being described to the FCC as a constellation of up to one million AI satellites
It’s worth noting that SpaceX’s Starlink communication satellite and Starmind are built on the same orbital infrastructure concept but serve entirely different purposes. Starlink is a connectivity network, with satellites receiving and relaying data between points on Earth, and functioning as a high-speed internet backbone in space. The satellites themselves do not process or think, and move information from one place to another, the same function a fiber cable performs underground.
SpaceX just forced Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile to team up for the first time in history
Starmind, on the other hand, is something completely different, and tather than moving data, its satellites would compute data through artificial intelligence and directly in orbit using onboard processors powered by large solar arrays. Where a Starlink satellite is essentially a very fast pipe, a Starmind satellite is a server. The practical implication is that Starmind would allow AI models to run inference, process queries, and generate outputs from space, then beam results down to users anywhere on Earth within milliseconds, and without the data ever needing to travel to a terrestrial data center.
Starship will be able to carry 30 to 50 AI1 satellites per launch, delivering the equivalent of dozens of server racks per flight, with no land acquisition, no power grid approval, and no cooling infrastructure required on the ground.
SpaceX is pursuing this new technology as terrestrial data centers are running into hard limits such as lack of physical space, community opposition, and power and water consumption at a scale that is increasingly difficult to permit. Space has unlimited solar power, natural vacuum cooling, and no zoning boards. Musk said in a June 8 video presentation that he expects space to become the lowest-cost location to deploy AI compute within two to three years. Two AI1 prototypes are scheduled to launch in early 2027, with volume production targeted for the end of that year at a new facility called Gigasat.
The real world applications Starmind enables extend well beyond powering Grok. A constellation of orbiting AI processors could run inference workloads for any paying customer, anywhere on Earth, with latency measured in milliseconds rather than the seconds associated with ground-based cloud routing across continents. Starmind, if it scales as described, would make SpaceX the landlord of AI compute the same way Starlink made it the landlord of satellite internet.
Tesla and driver sued by family of woman killed in Texas crash: what we know
Tesla Cybertruck is officially the safest pickup, IIHS says
