News
SpaceX tests extra-fast ocean landing, celebrates 50th launch
The happy tragedy of 1044
SpaceX has successfully completed the 50th launch of Falcon 9 a bit less than eight years after its 2010 debut, and has done so in a fashion that almost perfectly captures the veritable tsunamis the company has begun to make throughout the global aerospace industry. After a duo of delays due to hardware issues and range conflicts, this evening’s launch successfully placed Hispasat 30W-6 into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), where the massive ~6100 kilogram communications satellite will now spend several months raising its orbit to around 36,000 km (22,000 miles) above Earth’s surface.
Falcon 9 flight 50 launches tonight, carrying Hispasat for Spain. At 6 metric tons and almost the size of a city bus, it will be the largest geostationary satellite we’ve ever flown.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 5, 2018
Aside from becoming the heaviest commsat the company has yet to launch into GTO, the mission’s anticipated landing attempt stirred up quite a bit of intrigue and uncertainty in the spaceflight fan community. Stormy Atlantic seas, partially connected to the chaotic weather recently seen on the East coast, proved to be far too dangerous for SpaceX’s eastern recovery fleet and its drone ship, OCISLY, and they returned to Port Canaveral around 48 hours ago, under the watchful eyes of many anxious SpaceX followers. Tragically, this means that the brand new Falcon 9 booster (B1044) – originally expected to attempt perhaps the most difficult landing yet – had to be expended. Although the booster went through its paces as if it were preparing to land, it found no drone ship beneath it once it reached sea level, and subsequently dunked into the stormy Atlantic seas.
However, due to the last-minute nature of SpaceX and Hispasat’s decision to expend the booster rather than delay for better recovery conditions, launch technicians at Pad 40 simply did not have time to remove the rocket’s iconic landing legs and valuable titanium grid fins – the first time their titanium iteration has been chosen for a Falcon 9 to resist extreme reentry heating. Due to massive swells, recovery of even pieces of the expended booster – theoretically following a soft landing – will not be possible, as no SpaceX recovery vessels remained at the planned point of touchdown 400 miles off the Florida coast. Notably, following the successful inaugural flight of Falcon Heavy, CEO Elon Musk stated that upgraded titanium grid fins were “super expensive” and unequivocally “the most important thing to recover.” SpaceX’s decision to expend Falcon 9 B1044 without even sparing the time to remove the booster’s recovery hardware and titanium fins demonstrates just how focused the company is on its customers’ needs. In the case of geostationary communications satellites like Hispasat 30W-6, launch delays on the order of a few days can cause millions of dollars of financial harm to the parent company – each day a satellite spends on the ground orbit is also a day with no revenue generation, a less-than-thrilling proposition to shareholders.
-
- Falcon 9 1044 lifts off for its first and last time in a breathtaking display of power. (Tom Cross)
-
- Falcon 9 1044 vertical at Pad 40 around 72 hours before launch. (Tom Cross)
-
- Booster 1044 displays its number one last time. (Tom Cross)
-
- RIP B1044’s titanium grid fins. May they make a happy little reef at the bottom of the ocean. (Tom Cross)
B1044 sadly lost any hope at a second flight, but the data SpaceX gathered from its uniquely fast reentry and attempted soft-landing will hopefully pave the way for the recovery of Falcon 9 and Heavy boosters after all but the heaviest satellite launches. GovSat-1, a launch that saw its flight-proven booster famously survive a similarly hot landing in the ocean, was the first largely successful test of this new and experimental method of more efficiently recovering Falcons. By igniting three of its nine Merlin 1D engines instead of the usual single engine while landing, Falcon boosters can theoretically reduce the amount of fuel needed to safely land, fuel savings that can then be used to push its payloads higher and faster. However, the downsides of this approach are several. With three times as many engines igniting at landing, the margin of error for a successful landing becomes downright miniscule – the tiniest of problems with ignition, throttle control, or guidance could cause the rocket to smash into the drone ship at considerable speed. Additionally, triple the landing thrust would subject the booster to as much as 10Gs of acceleration (10 times the force of Earth’s gravity), forces that would almost instantaneously cause the average human (and even specially trained fighter pilots) to black out.
This rocket was meant to test very high retrothrust landing in water so it didn’t hurt the droneship, but amazingly it has survived. We will try to tow it back to shore. pic.twitter.com/hipmgdnq16
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) January 31, 2018
Regardless of 1044’s untimely demise, another successful mission for SpaceX is purely positive. Happy customers make for a happy company, and SpaceX has achieved an incredible consistency of success in the last year alone. The loss of a new, potentially-reusable Falcon 9 booster is sad, but it only serves to foreshadow the imminent introduction of Falcon 9 Block 5, an upgrade hoped to realize Elon Musk’s decade-old dream of rockets that can be reused as many as 10 times with minimal refurbishment, and 100 times with maintenance. That debut could occur as early as April, just a month away.
https://twitter.com/_TomCross_/status/970900892005359617
Follow us for live updates, behind-the-scenes sneak peeks, and a sea of beautiful photos from our East and West coast photographers.
Teslarati – Instagram – Twitter
Tom Cross – Twitter
Pauline Acalin – Twitter
Eric Ralph – Twitter
News
SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout
SpaceX launched the classified USSF-385 mission from Vandenberg, landing its booster on a tenth flight.
SpaceX launched another classified mission for the U.S. Space Force from California early Saturday morning, and the Falcon 9 booster that carried it landed on a drone ship in the Pacific for the tenth time. The USSF-385 mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:00 a.m. PT.
Booster B1100 touched down on Of Course I Still Love You roughly eight and a half minutes after liftoff. It was the booster’s tenth flight and tenth successful landing, following the NROL-95 national security mission and eight Starlink launches. Its previous flight, a Starlink Group 15 mission on August 22, came just 35 days earlier. SpaceX ended its livestream shortly after the landing, which is standard for classified payloads, and neither the company nor the Space Force has said what the rocket carried.
Watch Falcon 9 launch the USSF-385 mission from pad 4E in California https://t.co/CAdbx85Ydy
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 26, 2026
USSF-385 is the fourth Space Force launch from the same Vandenberg pad in roughly six weeks, following USSF-366 on August 15, USSF-153 on September 10, and USSF-259 on September 17. When SpaceX flew USSF-366 in August, independent trackers noted that the rocket’s stage drop zones matched SpaceX’s Starlink Group 15 missions, pointing to Starshield, the government version of the Starlink satellite bus. The Space Force later cataloged 23 satellites after both USSF-366 and USSF-153, while USSF-259 placed 17 satellites into a different orbital plane, per KeepTrack. Launch databases describe USSF-385 the same way, though the payload remains officially unidentified.
The cadence lines up with the contracts, because in July, the Space Force awarded SpaceX $1.6 billion in task orders for 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg through the end of 2027. SpaceX also holds contracts to build pieces of that same network, which pushed its Pentagon contract total for 2026 past $8 billion.
Saturday’s flight was also the sixth and final Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg in September, according to Spaceflight Now, while only one Falcon 9 flew from the East Coast this month as SpaceX shifts its Florida infrastructure toward Starship. Launch trackers list it as SpaceX’s 112th mission of 2026 and the 108th Falcon 9 flight of the year, with SLC-4E turned around about six and a half days after its previous launch.
The West Coast pad will not stay quiet for long, considering SpaceX has another Starlink mission scheduled from SLC-4E on September 30. Meanwhile, in Texas, the company is two days away from Starship Flight 14, which is targeting Monday at 7:15 a.m. CT for the vehicle’s first attempt to reach orbit.
News
Tesla hints at new Roadster design in surprise clip
Tesla ended its Semi event with a Roadster teaser revealing a new front light bar.
Tesla closed out its Semi event in Nevada on Thursday night with a nod to its own history, dropping a short Roadster teaser that suggests the production car will look noticeably different from the prototype first shown in 2017.
“We can’t have a Semi event without the Roadster,” Tesla engineering executive Lars Moravy told the crowd before the clip played. The line was a deliberate callback. Tesla first revealed the next generation Roadster in November 2017 by driving it out of the back of a Semi trailer at the truck’s original unveiling in Hawthorne, California.
The new video opens on trailer doors swinging apart in the dark. A thin white light bar glows across what appears to be the nose of the car, Tesla and SpaceX logos flash over the frame, and the Roadster name appears before the clip ends on “See you next week.” Tesla posted the nine second clip on X after the livestream wrapped.
See you next week pic.twitter.com/BT52bGVxFu
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 25, 2026
The light bar is the most concrete design detail so far. The 2017 prototype used two separate curved headlamp pods, while a connected front light strip would bring the Roadster in line with the Cybertruck, Cybercab, Semi, and refreshed Model Y. Sawyer Merritt was among the first to point out what looked like part of a SpaceX logo in the video, something Tesla has not addressed.
That logo fits the buildup around the optional SpaceX Package, which Elon Musk has long said would use cold gas thrusters to improve acceleration and possibly allow the car to briefly leave the ground. Tesla’s “Go for launch” post on September 12 set the October 1 date, and invitations sent to reservation holders place the event in Waco, Texas, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Waco sits roughly 20 minutes from SpaceX’s McGregor rocket test site, where the FAA has put a temporary flight restriction in place from September 18 through October 2, covering a 1.5 nautical mile radius from the surface up to 10,000 feet.
Tesla is also taking money ahead of the reveal. The company reopened Roadster reservations earlier this week with a $5,000 refundable card payment, followed by a $45,000 wire transfer due within 10 days. That puts buyers at $50,000 committed before Tesla has published a price.
The original pitch set a high bar: 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds before any upgrades, 620 miles of range, a top speed above 250 mph, and production in 2020. That timeline has slipped repeatedly, and Tesla has since pointed to production at Gigafactory Texas no earlier than 2027. The company has said next Thursday’s event will include pricing, specifications, and production targets, the three details original reservation holders have been waiting on for nearly nine years.
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s release in Europe is set to be delayed by at least a few months.
The European Union will not vote on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on October 6. The draft agenda for the 119th meeting of the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles lists only a 25-minute “continuation of discussions” on the Netherlands’ Article 39 request, not a decision. The next scheduled TCMV session is in December, which is now the earliest date a bloc-wide vote could occur.
Tesla Europe had pointed to October 6 as a possible EU-wide vote after the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted the first European type approval on April 10.
That approval, under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption in EU Regulation 2018/858, is the legal file other member states have been recognizing one by one. The same committee has already discussed the request twice without voting.
Elon Musk’s reply to the delay was a single word: “Sigh.”
Sigh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2026
Seven EU countries have now cleared FSD Supervised on their own roads: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, and Czechia. Those seven states represent about 53 million people, or roughly 12 percent of the EU population. An EU-wide authorization still needs a qualified majority: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population, about 292 million people.
Germany, France, Italy, and Spain remain the decisive markets. France has already rejected the current system; several other governments have flagged speed-limit compliance as the main sticking point.
The safety case Tesla is putting in front of those governments is now public. On September 1, Tesla Europe said FSD Supervised was in use by more than 70,000 customers, covering over 1 million kilometers a day, and was 4.1 times less likely to be involved in a crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on EU public roads.
An earlier mid-year cut of the same fleet data, covering 65 million kilometers in five approved countries, put the collision advantage at 5.2 times, with zero highway collisions over 41.9 million kilometers. Tesla also reported far fewer automatic emergency braking events, harsh accelerations, and hard swerves than in comparable manual Tesla driving. Those figures are company-reported, not independently audited.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is taking over Europe: fourth country gets FSD approval
The public-health backdrop is harder to dispute. European countries recorded about 19,400 road deaths in 2025, or roughly 53 a day, most of them attributed to human error. FSD Supervised is not unsupervised autonomy; the driver remains legally responsible. But the software is already legal and in daily use across seven member states.
Until TCMV votes, the rest of the EU remains a patchwork: available in Prague and Amsterdam, locked behind review in Paris and Berlin. December is now the next chance to close that gap.
SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout
Tesla hints at new Roadster design in surprise clip
