SpaceX Says Grok Spots Debris Its Human Inspectors Miss

Launch VP Kiko Dontchev says Grok hits 99.9% on borescope video versus about 94% for people, as Falcon 9 heads toward retirement.

SpaceX's launch chief says Grok, the AI assistant from Elon Musk's xAI, finds stray debris inside aerospace parts 99.9% of the time. His human inspectors, he says, manage about 94%.

Kiko Dontchev, SpaceX's vice president of launch, gave both numbers at the UP.Summit conference in Florida last week, Ars Technica reported Monday. In his example, an inspector runs a borescope down a tube and Grok reviews the same video. Both figures are SpaceX's own, and the job matters: a loose scrap left in a part can do catastrophic damage to an engine.

SpaceX bought xAI earlier this year, and AI now checks other hardware too, including the Starlink terminals it sells to customers, Ars reported. He called SpaceX "fundamentally an infrastructure company at this point," and said Falcon 9 has to give way to the fully reusable Starship because "we still throw that second stage away every single flight."

He didn't take up the worry, widespread among U.S. commercial space companies, that Starship isn't replacing the capacity Falcon 9 has given paying customers for a decade, Ars noted. Multiple sources told Ars that SpaceX plans to keep Starship's flights for itself in the coming years, with possible room for NASA and other government buyers.

Source: arstechnica.com, retrieved November 10, 2026.