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SpaceX aces fourth Starship flight test

Starship launches on its 4th flight test (Credit SpaceX)

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SpaceX successfully launched and landed its Super Heavy booster and Starship on its fourth integrated flight test, with each making a soft splashdown in the water.

Starship took to the skies at 7:50 am CT from a foggy Starbase, Texas, in an effort to surpass previous flight milestones.

As the countdown hit zero, 32 of 33 Raptor engines on the Super Heavy booster lit, with the outlier being an engine on the outer ring. Despite the engine out, the booster still ascended with ease away from the launch mount and broke through the thick fog into clear blue skies with views streamed back to the ground from just above one of the grid fins.

As Starship climbed, everything continued to operate nominally all the way through the hot staging which saw Super Heavy Booster 11 shut down all but its 3 center Raptor engines as Starship 29 lit its 6 Raptor engines to pull away from the massive booster. As soon as Starship was clear, Booster 11 completed a flip and boostback burn to begin its trip for a planned soft touchdown in the Gulf of Mexico by relighting 10 Raptor engines.

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Once the boostback burn was complete, the hot staging ring was ejected to reduce the overall mass of the booster to help it survive reentry and landing. Future Super Heavy boosters will feature a lighter hot staging ring that will not be ejected. As the booster made its way back, it re-orientated to vertical and began re-entry back through the atmosphere, and unlike the Falcon 9, it does not perform an entry burn.

At around 7 minutes and 15 seconds into flight, the Super Heavy booster lit 12 out of a planned 13 engines for its landing burn, followed shortly by quite a bit of debris flying by the onboard camera, but it did not affect anything critical as seconds later Booster 11 made a successful splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico before a slow planned tip over into the water.

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As Booster 11 completed the first successful soft landing, Starship 29 fired its six Raptor engines, three sea level and three vacuum, with engine shutoff coming in at eight and a half minutes into flight. The starship then entered a long coast phase as it passed between the Florida Keys and Cuba and transited over the Atlantic Ocean, followed by Africa.

During IFT-3, live views were provided for a majority of this portion but due to an unknown issue, cameras didn’t come back until just before 37 minutes into the flight. Elon Musk posted on X that they had a data signal the entire time including live views from internal cameras.

45 minutes into the flight, the true test of Starship began as plasma started to build up, but this time, Starship was in the correct orientation, and the heatshield was facing the correct way to give the ship its best chance at survival.

As Starship descended, plasma build-up increased with callouts from mission control noting rising temperatures on the nose but all within acceptable limits. At just over 54 minutes into the flight, Starship made it further than the third flight test and into unknown territory.

Plasma builds up as Starship re-enters the atmosphere (Credit SpaceX)

57 minutes into the flight, peak heating had passed but tiles were starting to fall away from the forward flap followed by melting of the lower portion, despite this damage, Starship held strong and in the correct orientation as it descended.

Starship continued its descent and, with significant damage, still made it through to its own landing burn and performed its flip to a vertical orientation and a soft touchdown in the Indian Ocean west of Australia.

Damage to the forward flap as seen during the landing burn (Credit SpaceX)

Even with the damage inflicted on Starship, it completed all test objectives while providing SpaceX with incredibly valuable data that will be used to make the ship stronger on future test flights. The Starlink antenna also survived the entire flight which ensured this data made it back to mission control.

With this successful mission complete, SpaceX could launch the 5th flight by mid to late July and possibly even attempt a catch of the Super Heavy booster according to Elon Musk.

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Catch a replay of this epic mission below!

How do you think this flight went overall, and will the fifth flight take place by August?

Questions or comments? Shoot me an email at rangle@teslarati.com, or Tweet me @RDAnglePhoto.

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Launch journalist, specializing in launch photography. Based on the Space Coast, a short drive from Cape Canaveral and the SpaceX launch pads.

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Tesla Full Self-Driving expands to another European country

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Credit: Tesla

Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is heading to Czechia after the Czech Ministry of Transport recognised the Dutch RDW’s provisional type approval, making the country the seventh EU member state to clear the system for public roads. Tesla Europe announced on 21 September 2026 that “FSD Supervised is now approved in Czechia” and that rollout “will begin soon.”

The decision marks a notable reversal. Earlier in 2026, Prague had declined to automatically recognise the Netherlands’ April approval, citing concerns over speed-limit compliance, traffic-sign recognition and driver-attention monitoring, and arguing that a coordinated EU approach was preferable. Officials said months of expert review, talks with Tesla and other member states, and real-world data from countries already using the system resolved those issues.

“Safety remains the top priority,” the ministry stated.

FSD Supervised remains a Level 2 driver-assistance system: the driver must stay engaged and is legally responsible. Eligible vehicles need AI4, the company’s most up-to-date hardware version. Tesla is expected to push the feature over the air in the coming days, following the pattern seen after earlier national approvals.

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Europe’s rollout began when Dutch regulator RDW issued a provisional EU type approval on 10 April 2026 after extensive testing. Mutual recognition then produced a rapid cascade: Lithuania (20 May), Estonia (29 May), Denmark (9 June), Belgium (10 June) and Slovenia (7 September). Czechia now completes that list of seven.

The approvals cover only a modest share of the EU population, but they add political weight ahead of a 6 October vote by the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles. A qualified majority, at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the EU population, could open the remaining markets, including large ones such as Germany, France, Italy and Spain that have so far preferred to wait for a bloc-wide decision.

For Czech Tesla owners, the immediate prize is access to the same supervised highway and city driving already available in the other six countries. For Tesla, each new market generates additional European driving data and strengthens the case that FSD Supervised can operate safely under the continent’s varied road rules. The Czech approval is therefore both a local milestone and another incremental step toward a wider European launch.

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Tesla Roadster event requires restricted airspace, and the FAA obliges

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Credit: @BLKMDL3/Twitter

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has established a Temporary Flight Restriction over SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas, rocket development and test facility, a move widely viewed as preparation for Tesla’s October 1 Roadster reveal. The restriction took effect September 18 and runs through October 2.

NOTAM FDC 6/3825 covers a 1.5-nautical-mile radius around the site near Waco and extends from the surface to 10,000 feet above ground level. The FAA cited hazards under 14 CFR 91.137(a)(3) and barred aircraft and drones from the zone. Tesla’s invitation to reservation holders already placed the event in Waco, about 20 minutes from McGregor, making the timing and location more than coincidental.

What stands out is the altitude. Typical recent TFRs at McGregor for engine static fires and component tests have used far lower ceilings, often around 2,000 feet. Raising the limit to 10,000 feet is unusually high even compared with some Starbase restrictions and signals operations that go beyond a standard ground-level engine test.

That extra airspace has fueled speculation about the long-promised SpaceX Package for the Roadster. Elon Musk has described cold-gas thrusters that could deliver sub-one-second 0-60 times and, more dramatically, brief lift-off. Reports earlier this year indicated Tesla planned a remote-controlled demonstration at McGregor in which the car would leave the ground with no one inside; spectators kept hundreds of yards away because of the noise.

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The 10,000-foot envelope would give operators a large safety buffer even if the vehicle only hovers a short distance.

Tesla has not confirmed a flight demo. The company has only used the phrase “Go for launch” and posted a teaser image of the car on what looks like a launch pad. The TFR itself mentions only hazards. Still, closing airspace this high and this close to the reveal date strongly suggests the event will include more than a static display.

Whether the Roadster actually hovers on October 1 remains to be seen. What is certain is that the FAA has cleared a large vertical slice of Texas sky for whatever Tesla and SpaceX intend to show. Reservation holders heading to Waco will be among the first to find out if the car can do more than drive.

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Elon Musk drops a surprise update on Boring Company’s next big dig

Musk says Boring Company could shrink the Austin to San Antonio drive to just minutes.

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Elon Musk says The Boring Company is working on what he called “a simple, precursor Hyperloop” tunnel connecting Austin and San Antonio, targeting speeds above 200 mph and cutting a drive that can take up to two and a half hours down to a consistent under 30 minutes. Musk posted the idea on X Sunday, in a reply to a repost of an AI generated video imagining a science fiction future with human colonies on other worlds, which he shared with the line “This is the future we shall bring into being.”


The Boring Company’s own account picked up the idea in the same thread, adding a detail about how the trip would actually work: “Because Loop/Hyperloop is express (i.e. no intermediate stops), one could travel from an Austin parking lot to a favorite San Antonio restaurant in about 30 minutes. As long as they both have Loop stations.” That framing ties the proposed intercity link to the same station model the company already runs in Las Vegas, where riders enter the tunnel network through small, garage style stops rather than one central terminal.

This is not the company’s first run at the Austin to San Antonio corridor. Boring Company floated tunnels between the two cities as far back as 2021, and later competed for a separate San Antonio Loop project tied to the airport before that specific bid stalled. Pitches for tunnels in Chicago, Los Angeles, and a New York to Washington corridor have followed a similar pattern of big announcement without a shovel in the ground.

What is different this time is the balance sheet, especially since The Boring Company closed a 3 billion dollar funding round led by investors in the United Arab Emirates earlier this month at a valuation near 23 billion dollars, giving the tunneling company more capital to chase speculative projects than it had during its earlier Texas pitches. The company is also mid-build on two other intercity systems it has actually broken ground on, inc;luding a Nashville tunnel linking downtown to the airport, where a second boring machine finished commissioning in June, and its Las Vegas network, where the station count keeps climbing on paper faster than tunnels get dug.

That gap between announcement and execution is the reason to treat Sunday’s post as an opening bid rather than a project. A tunnel spanning roughly 80 miles between two metro areas, running at speeds Boring Company has not demonstrated over any real distance, would dwarf anything the company has built. For now, the Austin to San Antonio Hyperloop exists as a caption under an AI generated space video.

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