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SpaceX’s twice-flown Falcon 9 fleet grows by one with flawless launch, landing

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SpaceX has completed its 18th successful launch of 2018 while also expanding its fleet of twice-flown Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters from two to three rockets, foreshadowing a near future where most of the company’s rockets have long and storied flight histories, much like today’s airliners.

Up next for SpaceX is a mission directly related to that goal: the launch of SSO-A from Vandenberg Air Force Base is expected to make use of a twice-flown Falcon 9 booster, to become the first time the company has commercially launched the same rocket three times. The ultimate goal of Falcon 9 Block 5 is to enable at least 10 reflights with minimal refurbishment, and the 3rd reflight is the next major step in that direction.

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While we still do not have an official idea of the payload’s weight, Falcon 9 placed the roughly 3000-kg communications satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), where Es’hail-2 will gradually climb Earth’s gravity well to a circular orbit under the power of its own small propulsion system. Once complete, it will serve the Middle East a variety of satellite communications services, including both enterprise, consumer, and government customers.

Prior to launching Es’hail-2, Falcon 9 booster B1047 placed the massive (7000+ kg) Telstar 19V commsat into a low but serviceable GTO before landing aboard drone ship Of Course I Still Love You (OCISLY). The rocket then returned to Port Canaveral and was transported to one of SpaceX’s nearby facilities for repair, refurbishment, and inspection around the end of July. According to President and COO Gwynne Shotwell, Block 5 rockets – as of September 2018 – require just four weeks or refurbishment on average. Although July-November is not exactly four weeks, it’s possible that the process was completed months ago and the rocket has simply been waiting in the wings for the availability of its next payload.

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As it turns out, SpaceX decided to conduct the rocket’s second launch from a different launch pad, known as Pad 39A. 39A is in the process of being modified to support Crew Dragon launches, including a variety of changes to its ground support equipment, the transporter/erector (T/E), and the Fixed Service Structure (FSS), most notably signified by the installation of gleaming black and white crew access arm (CAA). While the reasoning behind the move from LC-40 to LC-39A is opaque, the likeliest explanation is that SpaceX wanted an opportunity to shake down a majority of those modifications to reduce schedule uncertainty and risk for Crew Dragon’s uncrewed launch debut, NET early January 2019.

Ultimately, as stated by a SpaceX announcer during the webcast, B1047’s successful second launch and landing aboard OCISLY paves the way for a potential third launch and landing for the rocket, perhaps just a few months away. The first triple-launch of a single Falcon 9 booster is currently penciled in for November 19th from VAFB, pending a static fire attempt either today or tomorrow.

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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SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch

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SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.

The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.

Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.

SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.

The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.

As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.

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SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo

SpaceX released new footage of Starship in space captured by the Starlink satellites it deployed.

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SpaceX released a new video Friday evening showing Starship from an angle showcased by its own Starlink satellites, watching the rocket drift away in orbit.

The 65 second clip, posted on X, stitches together footage from four cameras mounted on a single Starlink V3 satellite. It opens with a close view of Starship’s 171 foot upper stage, still catching sunlight, then pulls back as the two spacecraft separate.

The footage comes from Starship’s 13th flight test, which launched July 24 from Starbase after a scrubbed attempt and an abort caused by an engine issue the week before. When Flight 13 finally flew, it carried the first batch of functional Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever deployed, twenty of them, with six equipped with cameras meant to scan the ship’s heat shield during reentry.

Flight 13 checked most of its boxes. Starship deployed all 20 satellites, relit a Raptor engine in space, and splashed down softly in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Musk’s longer term plan calls for a Starlink V3 constellation of 100,000 satellites, according to a recent FCC filing, with Starship as the only vehicle capable of launching them at the volume that requires. Each Starship flight is designed to carry up to 60 V3 satellites once the vehicle reaches routine service, well beyond what Falcon 9 can carry in a single mission.

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Starship is next expected to fly with an attempt at catching the ship itself with the launch tower’s mechanical arms, a maneuver SpaceX has so far reserved for the Super Heavy booster.

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SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites

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SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.

The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.

SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters

Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.

SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.

With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.

Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.

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Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.

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