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Starhopper update: SpaceX’s ungainly Starship testbed survives night of fireballs, Raptor testing
SpaceX’s Starhopper appears to have come out the other end of an eventful night of fires, fireballs, and Raptor testing completely unscathed, although – as with all things rocketry – there is vastly more than meets the eye.
However, signs point towards Starhopper being almost entirely unharmed by its brief voyage inside a fireball – even if Boca Chica’s fire suppression system got a thorough workout and many a SpaceX onlooker likely suffered a partial heart attack. For the time being, it’s safe to assume that Starhopper’s planned flight activities have been indefinitely delayed as SpaceX technicians analyze the vehicle and engineers work to mitigate or completely prevent major fires from recurring.
According to NASASpaceflight.com’s well-informed sources, despite the spectacular fireworks that followed Raptor’s own impressive display, the engine’s static fire test was a full success – at least in terms of data produced by the engine. The large fireball was attributed to the ignition of a large methane vent that followed soon after Raptor’s shutdown.
For now, this means that Starhopper’s untethered flight test and hover test debut should not be expected to occur for several days, even in the event that the rocket, pad, and Raptor engine all made it through their July 16th ordeal completely undamaged. If there is zero damage, this accident will serve as an unfortunate but useful demonstration of a true stainless steel rocket’s theoretically exceptional sturdiness and heat resistance.
Despite suffering what looked like a serious fireball-related anomaly, #Starhopper appears to have been refueled and is visibly venting while the flare stack burns off excess methane. Very good sign that the issue looked worse than it is. Via @labpadrehttps://t.co/sOHShoRByb pic.twitter.com/cs6FSMcZ0T— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 17, 2019
It may seem more than a little ironic, but it’s likely less than a coincidence. If it comes to fruition as a truly functional, orbit-capable steel rocket, spaceship, and upper stage, Starship/Super Heavy will exist in their shiny, steel forms almost entirely because of the unintuitive tradeoffs that could theoretically make heat-resistant-but-dense steel more efficient than a ship built out of ultra-light carbon composites. If Starhopper’s newly demonstrated resilience is anything to go by, a very happy side-effect of that efficient, heat-resistant steel could be an almost unprecedented resilience in the face of serious fires, fireballs, and other fire-related anomalies.
For almost any other rocket, exposure – at least outside of the engine section – to large fireballs and quite literally having parts burning while motionless on the ground are deeply, deeply worrisome things and risk a major vehicle malfunction – potentially up to and including a catastrophic failure (i.e. explosion). ULA’s Delta IV rocket family is famous for self-immolating during ignition and liftoff, a minimal concern to the rockets’ thin, aluminum tankage thanks to several inches of thick, fire-retardant foam insulation.
For a rocket like Falcon 9, almost entirely (by surface area) composed of thin, aluminum propellant tanks and carbon composite structures, there is a constant struggle to balance the vehicle’s extreme performance with the low melting point of its primary structures (~720 degrees C). The 301-series stainless steel Starhopper and Starship(s) are built out of has a melting point of ~1400 degrees C, nearly double aluminum-lithium alloys.
In short, while it boggles the mind and is decidedly unintuitive to anyone who watched July 16th’s live coverage of the static fire, it’s actually not a huge surprise that Starhopper has suffered serious fire-related anomalies with essentially zero visible damage. In fact, it’s almost impossible to tell that anything at all happened, let alone discerning some subtle sign(s) of damage incurred by fires. It may sound ironic to say so, but rockets and fire just do not tend to like each other much at all.
Time will tell if Starhopper and Raptor are in as good a condition as they appear to be.
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has big plans for Las Vegas by year’s end
Elon Musk’s Boring Company says Vegas Loop stations will double by year end once again.
The Boring Company says the Vegas Loop’s station count will double by the end of the year, tying the target to a hiring push for drivers and operations managers in Las Vegas. “Vegas Loop is getting bigger – the station count will double by end of year!” the company wrote in a post on X, attaching listings for a Loop driver and a senior Loop operations manager.
The number checks out against what’s already public, with the Vegas Loop currently running 14 operational stations, while the Boring Company’s own project page lists 28 as the target for the end of 2026.
Vegas Loop is getting bigger – the station count will double by end of year!
Urgently hiring exceptional and enthusiastic Drivers and Ops Managers.
Apply here!
Driverhttps://t.co/ZUPXBYTONb
Senior Loop Ops Managerhttps://t.co/mV6V22V8jH pic.twitter.com/IZ9FqIw8WY
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) September 14, 2026
Much of that growth is tied to tunnels that are already built and waiting on an opening date. A roughly two-mile dual tunnel system under Paradise Road, connecting Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, is expected to open in stages over the coming weeks, Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority chief executive Steve Hill told the Review-Journal last week. New stations at 4744 Paradise, Virgin Hotels Las Vegas, and the former Gordon Biersch site would come online with it, several of them built to speed up rides to Harry Reid International Airport ahead of Formula 1’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Clark County entitled Vegas Loop for 123 stations after approving 19 more in August, as Teslarati reported at the time. Entitlement and construction move at different speeds on this project, so county approval alone does not guarantee a station opens on any particular schedule.
Clark County approved 18 additional stations back in 2023, part of a plan that pushed the system’s target to 69 stations across 65 miles, doubling the network on paper for the first time. The target kept climbing after that, to roughly 93 stations by the end of that year and 104 by last year, before August’s vote pushed it to 123. This week’s announcement is the first time that doubling language has been attached to stations actually running rather than stations merely approved on a county map.
Ridership gives some sense of what a denser network could carry. Boring Company executive Mike Baier said in July that the Vegas Loop already moves around 40,000 passengers on busy convention days, a total that tops most light rail systems in the country despite the system running on a fraction of its planned tunnel mileage. Company leadership has projected ridership could triple or quadruple once the airport connector tunnels fully open.
Boring Company did not say which stations beyond those already under construction would open by year end, or whether the hiring push points to a fleet expansion alongside the new stops.
Tesla is looking to expand into a new Asian market, strengthening its presence in a region that has been bullish on electric vehicles as a whole.
Tesla officially filed to establish a subsidiary of its business in Vietnam, a report from Reuters suggests. Tesla named the entity “Tesla Motors Vietnam Limited Liability Company.”
The planned entrance into the Vietnamese market is a good sign and move for Tesla, as it has become one of the fastest-growing EV markets in Southeast Asia. It is already among the leaders in the region in both volume and electrification rate. In the first half of this year, Vietnam led Southeast Asia in battery-electric passenger car sales at about 116,000 units, up about 71 percent year over year.
Currently, Vietnamese EV drivers rely on VinFast’s V-Green network, which has about 150,000 ports, but these are primarily reserved for VinFast vehicles. Public third-party charging is fragmented and unreliable for those who do not own chargers that are dedicated to a certain manufacturer’s vehicles.
Tesla has had mixed results in Asia as a whole, and as China remains the core part of its story in Asia, the company is evidently working on expanding its footprint on the continent. Tesla’s domestic retail deliveries fell about 12 percent year over year through the first eight months of 2026.
Model Y remains a standout individual product, holding its position as one of, if not the, best-selling vehicles in the world. However, Model 3 has been weaker than it has been in past years.
Gigafactory Shanghai, the company’s Chinese production facility, still performs very well. Wholesale volumes in terms of exports have more than doubled and now exceed domestic retail sales; Giga Shanghai builds vehicles for Europe, South Korea, Japan, Australia, and other markets. South Korea has been an explicit bright spot, with registrations doubling year-to-date and Tesla frequently appearing as the top imported brand.
Tesla just did something in South Korea that no foreign carmaker has ever done
Tesla’s entrance into Vietnam signals a broader effort to take over the Asian market and grab more market share from rivals.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s companies made up with Apple but OpenAI still on the hook
Elon Musk’s X Corp and SpaceXAI dropped their Apple antitrust suit, leaving OpenAI as defendant.
X Corp and SpaceXAI, Elon Musk’s social platform and AI venture, have dropped Apple from the antitrust lawsuit that they filed against the iPhone maker and OpenAI last year. In a filing in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas, attorneys for X and SpaceXAI moved to dismiss the Apple portion of the case, first reported by Reuters. The filing does not explain why the companies are dropping Apple or say whether a settlement was reached.
X and SpaceXAI say they intend to keep pursuing the case against OpenAI, which remains a defendant. That resolves the dispute with one company while leaving the core allegation intact against the other, with no public accounting of what changed in between.
The lawsuit dates to August 2025, when xAI and X sued Apple and OpenAI, arguing that Apple’s decision to make ChatGPT the only generative AI chatbot built into iOS gave OpenAI an unfair structural advantage. The complaint claimed ChatGPT controlled roughly 80 percent of the chatbot market at the time, while Grok held only a few percent. It sought billions of dollars in damages and asked the court to unwind the arrangement.
Elon Musk’s xAI and X file antitrust suit against Apple and OpenAI over AI exclusivity
The filing followed weeks of Musk publicly complaining that Grok and X weren’t appearing in Apple’s “Must Have” App Store section, though Grok ranked second in the Productivity category and X ranked first in News at the time. He accused Apple of “playing politics” and warned of immediate legal action before following through days later.
Apple and OpenAI tried to get the case thrown out, but a federal judge denied both motions in November, ruling the dispute was better suited to summary judgment than an early dismissal. That decision sent the case into discovery, which is presumably what led to Monday’s filing.
Hey @Apple App Store, why do you refuse to put either 𝕏 or Grok in your “Must Have” section when 𝕏 is the #1 news app in the world and Grok is #5 among all apps?
Are you playing politics? What gives? Inquiring minds want to know. https://t.co/3wenLZGtwG
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 11, 2025
The timing is notable given how Musk’s sentiment toward Apple has shifted, with Musk noting that he was open to letting Grok power a revamped Siri after a user suggested Apple replace its aging assistant with xAI’s model.
xAI, the AI venture Musk folded into X Corp last year, has since combined with SpaceX under the SpaceXAI brand. That structure now puts X, Grok and SpaceX’s rocket and satellite businesses under one roof as Musk pushes his AI ambitions beyond chatbots.
OpenAI remains the sole defendant going forward, and Musk’s companies have not said if there’s any changes to those original claims. Apple and OpenAI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the filing.
Elon Musk’s Boring Company has big plans for Las Vegas by year’s end
Tesla looks to expand into new Asian market, strengthening presence
