SpaceX says Grok catches rocket debris 99.9% of the time, beating human inspectors

TL;DR: SpaceX's vice president of launch, Kiko Dontchev, says Grok now reviews borescope video of rocket hardware for stray debris, and gets it right about 99.9% of the time versus about 94% for human reviewers. He made the comments at last week's UP.Summit in Florida, where he also said Starship's Pad 39A in Florida is "effectively complete," per Ars Technica.

What he said about Grok

Foreign object debris, or FOD, is anything left inside hardware that shouldn't be there, like a metal shaving, a wire clipping or a loose fastener. Inside an engine, a small piece can do serious damage.

To check for it, an inspector feeds a borescope (a thin camera on a flexible tube) into a part and records video. Dontchev described how that review now works, as quoted by Ars Technica:

| Reviewing the same borescope video | Accuracy, per Dontchev | |---|---| | Human reviewers | about 94% | | Grok | about 99.9% |

A person still runs the borescope. Grok reviews the footage. Dontchev said SpaceX has automated visual inspections of other hardware too, including Starlink customer terminals, and that tasks that once took hours to days now take seconds to minutes.

Why it matters for launch

SpaceX acquired xAI earlier this year, and Dontchev said adoption inside the company sped up sharply in 2026. "The acceleration we have seen in our ability to do engineering is unlike anything I've ever seen at the company in my 16 years," he said.

Faster, more reliable inspection matters more as SpaceX shifts toward Starship, which is meant to fly far more often than Falcon 9. Dontchev said Falcon 9's expendable second stage is the limit: "We still throw that second stage away every single flight. Starship, we're going to catch both the first stage and the second stage."

Starship in Florida

Dontchev also gave an update on Starship's East Coast base, per Ars Technica:

• Pad 39A: "effectively complete," he said.
• First barge trip: SpaceX hopes to start moving boosters and ships by barge to the Cape in December, and "maybe even fly by the end of the year."
• More pads: two additional Starship pads are in development in Florida.
• More capacity: he said a single Florida Starship launch should carry up to 20 times the Starlink bandwidth of one Falcon 9.

What we don't know

SpaceX hasn't published how the 94% and 99.9% figures were measured, such as how many inspections were compared or how often Grok flags false alarms. As TeslaNorth points out, judging an inspection tool fairly means looking at both what it misses and what it wrongly flags.

Reported. Based on Kiko Dontchev's remarks at UP.Summit as reported by Ars Technica, with additional context from TeslaNorth. SpaceX has not published the underlying inspection data.