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Elon Musk says SpaceX is still building a third drone ship – but is it for Falcon or Starship?
Unprovoked on October 9th, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk tweeted “A Shortfall of Gravitas” – the name of a third drone ship settled on a year and a half ago – and reaffirmed that plans were still afoot to build a third rocket recovery vessel.
This is the first update on SpaceX’s newest drone ship in more than a year and comes just a few months after drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI) – formerly stationed in California – was sent East through the Panama Canal. News that A Shortfall of Gravitas (ASOG) is still in the works raises the questions: what’s the holdup and what role(s) will the new drone ship play in SpaceX’s rocket recovery fleet?
Back in July 2018 and just shy of half a year after ASOG’s development was revealed, CEO Elon Musk indicated that the drone ship could be completed and ready for recovery operations as early as “next summer”, or Q3 2019. Now two weeks into Q4 2019, this can be interpreted in several ways, with the most likely explanation being that SpaceX’s naval contractor of choice is running behind schedule while building the new drone ship.
That’s the simplest explanation and operates under the assumption that Musk’s February 2018 comments remain true, meaning that ASOG is first and foremost (if not entirely) meant to support dual side booster landings for future Falcon Heavy launches and an increased Falcon 9 flight rate. However, recent developments give reason to believe that this may no longer be the guiding motivation behind SpaceX’s construction of a new drone ship.
Most notably, over the last several months of 2019, it has become increasingly clear that SpaceX plans (or hopes) to shut down its West Coast Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) launch facilities for anywhere from 9 to 18 months. In just the last few days, word broke that Cape Canaveral Air Force Station (CCAFS) believes that it will be able to open an East Coast polar launch corridor (essentially the same thing VAFB offers) just months from now, and SpaceX hopes to be its first user as soon as February 2020.
Possibly along those lines, SpaceX took the step of sending West Coast drone ship JRTI on a several-week journey across the Panama Canal. The drone ship has since stopped in Louisiana for what is assumed to be maintenance and it remains unclear if JRTI will head to Port of Brownsville (Texas) to support Starship test flights or to Port Canaveral to fill the role ASOG was initially meant to.
As such, it’s no longer clear if SpaceX actually has a need for ASOG, at least as it was described last year. If SpaceX is moving JRTI east for the indefinite future, OCISLY and JRTI could easily support the Falcon 9 launch rates needed for Starlink and dual Falcon Heavy side booster recoveries, although Falcon Heavy is not scheduled to fly again until late-2020.
This leaves one obvious option left to explain ASOG’s continued existence and delayed debut: SpaceX may have paused work for a variety of reasons and changed ASOG’s design to account for a new role in the recovery fleet. That new role would likely center around the extremely rapid progress SpaceX is making with Starship as it pursues a series of ambitious flight tests that could begin before the end of 2019.
Of note, an August 2019 Draft Environmental Assessment (EA) of East Coast Starship launches revealed that SpaceX’s initially plans to land all Super Heavy boosters on a drone ship stationed a few miles off the Florida coast. Starship may also require drone ship landings in the early stages, at least until SpaceX is able to complete the environmental review and licensing process needed before it can begin to land Starship/Super Heavy at Pad 39A and Landing Zones 1 and 2.
For now, we’ll have to wait and see where drone ship JRTI heads after its Louisiana interlude and hopefully find out soon whether ASOG is a drone ship copy or something else entirely.
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Elon Musk has acknowledged that early discussions with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) could bring the company into his ambitious Terafab semiconductor project, signaling a possible partnership with the world’s leading contract chipmaker.
Musk confirmed that early talks are underway, but as of right now, they are “just discussions.” There is no confirmation of a deal nor dismissal of the possibility of one, leaving open the prospect of one of the largest advanced-chip collaborations under discussion in the U.S.
@wholemars Just discussions, but something may come of it
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2026
The report that speculated on potential discussions between Terafab and TSMC comes from Tim Culpan, who outlined a few ways the collaboration could operate. One is TSMC using the project as an “anchor customer” for future facilities in Texas, potentially contributing process expertise, operational know-how, or capacity while Terafab provides capital, long-term purchase commitments, or both.
Tesla and SpaceX jointly developed the Terafab project, with Intel already participating on the tech side. Elon Musk announced the project in March, and it intends to produce more than one terawatt of AI compute capacity annually once fully built.
Company statements place the first phase at approximately $16.8 billion in cost, with later filings pointing to a total that could reach well into the tens of billions across multiple stages.
Intel joined the effort in April 2026 and is expected to supply its 14A manufacturing process for the full-scale plant.
Musk has said existing suppliers, including Samsung and TSMC, remain important for near-term needs; Tesla already has production arrangements with Samsung for AI5 and AI6 chips, but that future demand from Optimus robots, Cybercab vehicles, and planned space-based data centers will eventually exceed what the global industry can currently deliver.
Terafab is positioned as the long-term answer to that projected shortfall, and Tesla did something similar during COVID to avoid a chip shortage. This is just a much larger-scale solution.
If the partnership were to materialize, it would add TSMC’s industry-leading strategies to a project that already combines Tesla’s and SpaceX’s capital and offtake with Intel’s process technology. For now, the only public confirmation is Musk’s brief acknowledgement that conversations are occurring.
Tesla’s early strategy for charging units operating within its Robotaxi fleet reveals that the company surely has not lost any of that scrappy DNA that took it from an unlikely success story to the most valuable carmaker in the world.
An observer at a Tesla Supercharger in Austin spotted ten total Robotaxi vehicles arrive: one Cybercab and nine Model Y units. A Tesla employee was waiting at the lot and allowed each unit to park itself; every car that arrived had nobody in it.
Tesla wins FCC approval for wireless Cybercab charging system
The Tesla employee would walk around and plug each car in, adjusting the parking if needed:
So look at what I found. This is how Tesla charges unsupervised robotaxis at a public supercharger. Here is a driverless Cybercab showing up with no one in it. There are 9 other Model Ys that showed up too. A Tesla employee is walking around and plugging each of them in. She also moves the cars if they are not positioned well enough to charge. I love this process. One person charges multiple robotaxis at once
— Abhimanyu Yadav (@WorldlyReviewer) October 3, 2026
It’s a very interesting strategy, but extremely understandable at this early point in the Robotaxi program. It’s only been out for about 15 months, and Cybercab just entered the fleet in early September.
On top of that, Tesla is still working tirelessly on its wireless charging apparatus, and a new patent was just published regarding that product last week.
However, this is just another example of how Tesla still has plenty of that scrappy DNA leftover from the “production hell” days, when CEO Elon Musk slept on the floor of the factory, employees were working crazy hours, Tesla was building Sprung Structures to build cars in, and the company was tiptoeing on the brink of bankruptcy.
@Teslarati Sheer magnitude of the entire production system is hard to appreciate. Almost every element of production is >75% automated. Only wire harnesses & general assembly, which are <10% of production costs, are primarily manual.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2020
For now, Tesla is utilizing a simple system for recharging its ride-hailing vehicles, and that is a Tesla employee doing it manually until another solution presents itself. Sure, it’s not the most high-tech thing, and it certainly is not what people might have expected at this point in time, but it works, and it’s keeping the entire suite running.
Tesla is expanding its Robotaxi service hours by pushing the time back by one hour, keeping the ride-hailing service operational until 11 p.m., one hour later than previously.
CEO Elon Musk confirmed the change and offered a specific reason the expansion has been gradual: the system still needs to reliably avoid small pets that are difficult to see after dark, as they commonly blend into the color of the road, especially when they’re grey.
The latest adjustment restores only a fraction of the operating window the service once held. When paid Robotaxi rides began in Austin on June 22, 2025, vehicles ran from 6 a.m. to midnight.
In September 2025, Tesla lengthened the day to a 2 a.m. close, producing a 20-hour window that stayed in place for most of the following year. By early August of this year, the cutoff had already been pulled back; an August 26 update formalized hours of 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. across Austin and several other markets.
The October move to 11 p.m. therefore leaves the Austin day one hour shorter than the original launch schedule and three hours shorter than the 2025 peak.
Musk addressed the constraint directly after the announcement. “The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night,” he wrote. “Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.”
Robotaxi operating hours moved from 10pm to 11pm.
The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night. Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2026
The example points to a low-contrast perception problem in which a small animal can blend into the road surface under limited lighting.
Tesla’s vehicles rely on cameras and neural-network processing rather than lidar; Musk has previously argued that advanced vision software can extract useful information even in low light by analyzing photon counts, but the pet-detection case remains the stated limiter in later hours.
The modest schedule change arrives alongside faster growth in the purpose-built Cybercab fleet. Texas registration data tracked by observers showed the Austin Cybercab count rising sharply in recent weeks, reaching 169 vehicles after more than 100 were added in a short span.
Tesla has indicated that a broader shift toward 24-hour operation is tied to the upcoming FSD v15 software release expected this month on Robotaxi vehicles. Until that capability is validated for the edge cases Musk described, the company continues to add service time incrementally rather than jumping straight to overnight coverage.
The one-hour extension gives Austin riders a later option for evening trips while the underlying detection work continues.
Elon Musk teases TSMC as potential Terafab partner
Tesla reveals early Robotaxi charging strategy, showing scrappy DNA
