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SpaceX sleuths spot third drone ship under construction in Louisiana
For the first time, SpaceX fleet-tracking sleuths have confirmed the identity and location – and captured photos – of the company’s third rocket recovery ‘drone ship.’
After several years of waiting for more details and multiple apparent delays, new information and photos allow us to finally determine what exactly that third drone ship – to be named A Shortfall Of Gravitas (ASOG) – will bring to the table when it enters SpaceX’s greater fleet.
While SpaceX could have feasibly gone in any number of directions, ranging from a clean-sheet build to something more akin to Blue Origin’s plans to convert a keeled cargo ship, it appears that the company ultimately settled on the simplest possible option – effectively replicating one of its two existing drone ships. Drone ships Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY) and Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) are both converted barges based on virtually identical Marmac 303 and 304 vessels.
SpaceX’s barge conversion approach produces recovery ships with a massive, flat 300′ by 200′ (90 by 60 meter) surface perfect for supporting Falcon booster landings. SpaceX has also used the space available to add small garages to each ship for “Octagrabber” robots that allow recovery teams to remotely secure landed boosters – far safer than the hands-on alternative. Barges are also extremely affordable and simple to own, operate, and modify relative to crewed ships, making the conversion and certification process far easier.
Nevertheless, barges are flat-bottomed ships, meaning that they are more or less fully at the mercy of seas and weather, which can often force SpaceX to delay launches. At least as far as SpaceX’s current efforts go, its drone ships are must also be towed by tugboat to and from recovery zones and are only able to use their onboard propulsion for station-keeping once there. That means that SpaceX’s “drone ships” aren’t actually autonomous, per se, and are completely reliant upon several crewed support ships to do their jobs, translating to not-insignificant expenses for each at-sea booster recovery.
Given those challenges and the fact that A Shortfall Of Gravitas was originally expected to enter service some two years ago, it would have been far from surprising if SpaceX took that time to design and build a wholly new kind of rocket recovery ship meant to tackle those established issues. Instead, though, SpaceX appears to be adding an almost identical third ship to its fleet of converted barges, suggesting that the current fleet’s limitations weren’t worth the hassle to solve.
Simultaneously, signs suggest that SpaceX is on the cusp of reactivating its West Coast launch facilities for a dozen or more polar Starlink missions – missions that will very likely require drone ship booster landings for maximum efficiency. As such, it’s entirely possible that one of SpaceX’s three drone ships will immediately head for the Panama Canal as soon as ASOG is ready to enter the fleet. In other words, SpaceX’s East Coast fleet will likely continue to have two drone ships for the indefinite future.
In the meantime, it’s possible that drone ship ASOG could be ready to join its siblings just a few months from now. Stay tuned for updates!
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
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Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla has expanded the footprint of a massive safety feature worldwide with a recent Software Update labeled as 2026.20.6. The expansion of the “Blind Spot Warning While Parked” feature represents the more widespread availability of the feature, which aims to prevent “dooring.”
Dooring is when a driver or passenger opens a car door into the path of an oncoming road user, usually a cyclist or motorcyclist. It is among the most common types of cycling accidents, the League of American Bicyclists says.
For this reason, Tesla created a feature that warns occupants not to open the door because an object is approaching. The feature will sound a chime, and it will also delay the opening of the door to prevent an incident.
The release notes state (via Not a Tesla App):
“If you attempt to open a door while an approaching object is detected in your blind spot (for example, a bicyclist approaching from behind) a chime sounds, and your door will not open upon initial button press. Wait a short time and press the button a second time to override the warning.”
Tesla initially rolled out this feature back in 2024 with the Model 3 “Highland.” However, it remained with the Model 3 exclusively for over a year; that was until Tesla added it to the Cybertruck this past Spring.
Now, it is making its way to the new Model Y, 2021 and newer Model S, and 2021 or newer Model X.
The prevention of dooring incidents could eliminate many injuries to cyclists, especially in an urban setting. Dooring accounts for 10-20 percent of bike-related crashes in major cities, and over 17,000 dooring-related incidents were treated in the U.S. over the course of a decade. These usually involve fractures, contusions, and head trauma.
Tesla confirmed this morning that it has sent the first production units, manufactured with no steering wheel or pedals, to on-road testing in Austin, sharing video of the first rides with no human controls.
The lack of steering wheels and pedals in the Cybercab aligns with Tesla’s self-certification of Robotaxi as Level 4 SAE, a platform it plans to make widespread through internal vehicles and customer-owned cars that will operate and generate revenue for individuals.
The start of these engineering tests is a major signal for Tesla, which plans to bring driverless, wheel-less, and pedal-less Cybercabs to market in the coming months. With production already well underway at Gigafactory Texas, where the Cybercab is built, there is some inclination to believe the first public rides could happen sooner rather than later.
Engineering tests of the first production Cybercab have begun in Austin pic.twitter.com/fk3KQvcE8a
— Tesla (@Tesla) June 30, 2026
Tesla’s engineering tests will put the Cybercab in real-world scenarios, testing not only the hardware, but more importantly, the software that drives the car around Austin with nobody supervising it within the car.
This is perhaps the biggest part of the internal testing process, especially prior to allowing regular, everyday people to hail the Cybercab for an autonomous ride. These early rides serve as a true benchmark for Tesla: How many rides can it achieve safely? How many miles did it travel consecutively without needing an intervention? What scenarios challenge the Full Self-Driving suite the most?
The proper precautions have already been put into place as well, as Tesla released the First Responders Guide to Cybercab over the weekend, ensuring that emergency services have 24/7 access to Robotaxi Assistance, as well as other boundaries, such as Geofencing features that can be used to redirect autonomous vehicle traffic due to accidents, road closures, construction, or maintenance.
Cybercab seems genuinely close to being added to the Robotaxi fleet in Austin, but Tesla has prioritized safety throughout this entire process. Therefore, we think it could be months before it truly starts giving rides to the public. People have been frustrated with this, but Robotaxi in Austin has a tremendous safety record so far, so the slow rollout has kept people safe and accidents to a minimum.
The most important thing is that Tesla continues to show consistent progress in the Cybercab’s ramp-up toward fleet addition. A few weeks back, we saw the EPA reward the Cybercab a Certificate of Conformity, allowing it to enter the stream of commerce. Then, we saw Tesla add decals, signaling that it was likely about to start testing it publicly. That has now happened.
The next big move will be the announcement of the first rides, so this Summer should be filled with anticipation.
SpaceX gets initial stock coverage from Tesla’s biggest bull
Tesla expands massive safety feature worldwide in latest update
