SpaceX shuttle lands at Los Angeles after overnight run from Starbase

SpaceX’s employee shuttle, N154TS, touched down at Los Angeles International Airport at 3:32 a.m. local time on Thursday, capping a three-hour flight from Los Fresnos, Texas, the general-aviation field near the company’s Boca Chica Starbase. The Boeing 737-800, one of the firm’s two 737s used to move engineers and technicians between the California headquarters and the Texas launch site, made its seventh crossing in the span of ten days, per flight logs.

The return flight comes the same week SpaceX accelerates pre-launch work on the next integrated Starship test flight, for which the Federal Aviation Administration has yet to issue a launch license, per agency correspondence cited by Reuters on Monday. With the company’s Hawthorne plant still building and testing Raptor engines and Starship upper-stage components, the back-and-forth between Los Angeles County and Cameron County has remained effectively a daily shuttle service for months; the 737 logged three round trips in just the last four days.

The 22-year-old former Air China jet, acquired in August 2023 and registered to a Falcon Aviation Holdings LLC at the Hawthorne address, has averaged more than two flights per week over the past year, burning an estimated 225,000 gallons of fuel in 2024 alone. The grey livery and roof-mounted antennas have made N154TS a fixture for plane-spotters tracking the hardware pipeline to Brownsville — a pipeline that, for now, shows no sign of slowing down.