A SpaceX launch chief says the company is now an infrastructure firm

SpaceX's vice president of launch reportedly said the company is now an infrastructure firm, not only a rocket company. Kiko Dontchev made the remarks at a Florida conference last week. He said SpaceX is building infrastructure on the ground and in low Earth orbit, soon on the Moon, and eventually on Mars.

He also described a sharp rise in the use of AI at the company this year. Dontchev said tasks that used to take hours or days now take seconds or minutes. On foreign-object checks inside parts, he said people find a piece about 94 percent of the time. He said a Grok check of the same inspection video was 99.9 percent accurate, against about 94 percent for people. He said similar checks are now used on Starlink terminals, and that technicians are using the tools in daily work.

Falcon 9 is still not fully reusable, he said. Dontchev said the company still throws away the second stage on every flight. He said Starship is meant to catch both the first stage and the second stage. He said one orbital Starship flight carried 10 times the bandwidth of a Falcon 9 Starlink payload, and that a Florida launch could carry up to 20 times that Falcon 9 bandwidth.

He said Pad 39A is effectively complete. Dontchev said SpaceX hopes to barge the first boosters and ships to Florida in December, and that a flight could follow before the end of the year. He also said two more Florida pads are in development. The remarks do not give a date for a first catch of both stages.