SpaceX
SpaceX goes all-in on steel Starship, scraps expensive carbon fiber BFR tooling
In a wholly unforeseen turn of events, SpaceX has taken the extraordinary step of permanently scrapping both its Port of Los Angeles-based BFR development tent and what seem to be the majority of what it contained, irreparably destroying custom-built tooling meant to support the fabrication of carbon composite BFR spaceships and boosters.
Likely worth anywhere from several to tens of millions of dollars (USD), SpaceX’s advanced BFR production tools were procured from industry-expert Ascent Aerospace sometime in 2017 before being officially delivered to the rocket company’s newly-erected Port of LA tent around April 2018. Situated at the port specifically due to logistical concerns about the high cost of transporting 9m/30ft-diameter objects from SpaceX’s main Hawthorne facilities to a barge for transport east, the company has decided to unequivocally destroy its aerospace-grade composite tooling less than 12 months after accepting delivery. Put simply, this is the best evidence yet that SpaceX – willing or not – has gone all-in on build Starship and Super Heavy out of stainless steel less than six months after CEO Elon Musk began to hint at the program’s utterly radical pivot.
From the very beginning of SpaceX and Elon Musk’s serious pursuit of an entirely reusable launch vehicle capable of transporting dozens of astronauts and passengers to and from Earth and Mars, the plan had been to build the vast majority of the rocket’s booster and spacecraft structures out of advanced carbon fiber composite materials. Above all else, this fundamental architecture was motivated largely by the significant performance gains a rocket could achieve by replacing traditional aluminum tanks and structures with carbon fiber.
For a rocket (and especially an orbital spaceship) meant to somehow make Earth-Mars transport both routine and at least minutely affordable, focusing primarily on the optimization of the mass of cargo delivered relative to the empty weight of the spaceship and booster made (and still does make) a great deal of sense. Assuming that the reusability of a system is roughly constant, the only conceivable way to further lower the cost of price per unit of cargo or passenger ticket would be to increase the usable cargo/passenger capacity for each individual launch, making an extremely light and high-performance rocket the low-hanging fruit target.
The centrality of carbon fiber composites remained with SpaceX’s Sept. 2017 iteration of BFR, downsized by 25% to a diameter of 9m (~30 ft). Around six months later, that commitment to composites was further solidified by the delivery of the first 9m-diameter carbon fiber tooling in March or April 2018. The tooling used to mold and
In the subsequent months of 2018, SpaceX’s BFR and composite R&D team spent tens of thousands of hours building out an ad-hoc advanced composites workshop inside a temporary tent in an industrial area, and ultimately managed to build a number of full-scale carbon fiber segments, including at least one large tank barrel section and the beginnings of a tank dome. In September 2018, that progress was partially revealed alongside the announcement that Japanese billionaire Yasuka Maezawa had purchased the first crewed lunar launch of BFR for several hundred million dollars, set to occur no earlier than 2023.
Two months after indicating that the first BFR “airframe/tank barrel section” would be built out of a “new carbon fiber material”, Musk provided the very first teaser for a “counterintuitive” development that would later be identified as the CEO’s decision to wholly replace BFR’s proposed used of composites with stainless steel and an advanced metallic heat shield. Still more than a little controversial and hard to follow almost half a year later, the feeling at the time was that SpaceX’s eccentric leader had decided to throw away more than 24 months of composite BFR design and development work for an almost entirely unproven alternative approach.
For better or for worse, it appears that SpaceX (or maybe just Musk) has quite literally trashed the most concrete demonstration of a prior commitment to advanced carbon fiber composites, scrapping the vast majority of its composite tooling and perhaps even the prototype BFR segments built in 2018.
It remains to be seen whether the now-permanent decision to pursue a stainless steel design in place of carbon fiber was a very expensive mistake, a stroke of genius, or something in between, However, the undeniably brisk progress made with the BFR’s steel variant in last four or so months bodes well – at a minimum – for Musk’s optimism that this radical change will ultimately result in an operational vehicle far sooner (and presumably cheaper) than the composites route.
Generally speaking, it seems safe to – on the face of it – agree with Musk’s argument that steel should ultimately lend itself far more easily to reusability thanks to its high tolerance for extreme temperatures. Unlike Falcon 9’s aluminum structures (and even the most exotic, advanced carbon fiber composites), certain varieties of stainless steel can weather heating approaching that experienced during orbital reentry with minimal erosion or damage to its mechanical properties. As Musk puts it, the Super Heavy booster’s suborbital trajectory could require almost no heat shielding – and perhaps even paint – at all.
Only time will tell whether the inevitably harsher realities of real-life engineering are so kind. In the meantime, SpaceX is perhaps just hours away from the first attempted static-fire test of a Raptor installed on something approaching flight-hardware, in this case a full-scale Starship hop test prototype.
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Elon Musk
Google just picked SpaceX for its first step into orbital AI
Google will launch its first Project Suncatcher AI satellite on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare next week.
Google is about to put its own AI chips into orbit for the first time, and it is paying SpaceX to get them there.
The company said Thursday that the first in-orbit test of Project Suncatcher, its research effort to find out whether space can host large-scale AI computing, will fly next week on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission.
The satellite, called MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator and carries four of Google’s Tensor Processing Units, the same chips Google runs in its ground data centers. Google originally planned to launch two custom satellites in 2027, but chose to move faster by integrating its chips into a satellite.
MVP’s solar panels supply about one kilowatt of power, and Google will run Gemini models on the TPUs only in bursts of roughly 15 minutes before the chips shut down so the radiators can shed heat. In a blog post, Google said its Trillium TPUs survived vibration testing that mimicked sustained launch loads of up to 10g, with individual components seeing 50 to 100g, and handled a radiation dose greater than a five year mission would deliver.
SpaceX and Google mull massive partnership on Musk’s orbital data dream: report
Next week’s flight, slated for October 1, follows a relationship that became public in May, when Teslarati reported that Google was in talks with SpaceX for a launch deal tied to orbital data centers. Google also holds a stake of roughly 6% in SpaceX.
The two companies are chasing the same idea from very different starting points. SpaceX’s own orbital compute program is built around the AI1 satellite, a roughly 70 meter structure derived from Starlink V3 hardware that is designed for 150 kW of peak compute, about 150 times the power MVP will draw. Elon Musk has brushed off concerns about crowding orbit with those satellites, and SpaceX is building its Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, to produce them, targeting an annualized rate of about 1 GW of space compute by the end of 2027.
Musk also posted on X on Thursday that “the amount of compute in space will obviously round up to 100% of all compute.”
Google has been more cautious in public. Its research estimates that launch prices need to fall below about $200 per kilogram before an orbital data center can compete with a ground facility on energy cost, a threshold the company believes could be reached around the mid 2030s. The Suncatcher team has said it expects the effort to remain a project rather than a product for years, which leaves the first real test of its hardware riding on a rocket from the company with the most aggressive timeline in the field.
News
NASA taps SpaceX for more astronaut missions as Boeing Starliner remains grounded
NASA just gave SpaceX a $946 million contract for three more astronaut missions through 2030.
NASA has awarded SpaceX a $946 million contract modification covering three more astronaut missions to the International Space Station, according to an announcement the agency published Friday. The award adds Crew-15, Crew-16, and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s existing Commercial Crew Transportation Capability contract, bringing the agreement’s total value to $5.92 billion across 17 flights.
SpaceX confirmed the award on X, writing that it was excited for Falcon 9 and Dragon to launch NASA’s Crew-15, 16, and 17 missions to the Space Station from Florida. The new missions cover ground, launch, in orbit, and return operations, along with cargo transport and a lifeboat capability while docked at the station, and the period of performance runs through 2030.
We’re excited for Falcon 9 and Dragon to launch @NASA’s Crew-15, 16, and 17 missions to the @Space_Station from Florida https://t.co/Qm16vVK9F3 pic.twitter.com/drg3s7GtuM
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 18, 2026
The award follows a notice of intent NASA issued in May, when the agency first signaled it would purchase up to six additional post certification missions from SpaceX. Teslarati covered that filing at the time, noting NASA cited technical issues and schedule delays encountered by Boeing as a driving factor. Friday’s contract modification locks in three of those six missions, with the remaining three left open for NASA to award later, potentially to Boeing if Starliner clears certification.
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner has still not flown an operational crew rotation mission for NASA. The spacecraft’s most recent crewed test flight in 2024 ended without the astronauts returning aboard Starliner, and the company has spent the time since working through thruster problems. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said this week that SpaceX is not retiring Crew Dragon today, for sure, while stopping short of committing to fly it past 2030.
Crew-12 is currently docked at the space station, and NASA has said Crew-13 is targeting a launch in the coming weeks. The newly awarded Crew-15 through Crew-17 missions extend SpaceX’s role as NASA’s primary way of getting astronauts to and from orbit well into the back half of the decade, regardless of what happens with Starliner or Starship in the meantime.
Investor's Corner
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
New drone footage shows Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory steel frame nearing completion at Giga Texas.
Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory at Gigafactory Texas is closing in on a finished steel frame, according to drone footage posted Thursday afternoon by longtime site observer Joe Tegtmeyer. In the video, Tegtmeyer said structural steel assembly is now about five column grids away from reaching the building’s north perimeter beam, putting the primary skeleton in its final stretch roughly six months after Tesla broke ground on the North Campus site in late March.
The Giga Texas Optimus Factory latest update … construction keeps moving fast!
Steel assembly is now only about 5 column grids from the north perimeter beam. Concrete is going in on the three upper floors, rebar is still being laid for more pours, and footing / grade-beam work… pic.twitter.com/qvFPvwnYzW
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 17, 2026
Tegtmeyer’s footage shows concrete already going in on three upper floors while crews continue laying rebar and pouring grade beam footings at ground level. That kind of parallel work, steel rising at one end of the site while concrete sets at the other, is a scheduling approach Tesla used at the original Giga Texas building and appears to be repeating here to save time before the plant’s targeted 2027 production start.
Teslarati has tracked the building’s progress since Tesla confirmed construction was officially underway in May, when the first steel structure went up on what was then bare, reclaimed land. The facility is part of a more than 5.2 million square foot expansion of Giga Texas’s North Campus that Tesla has said will eventually run nearly the length of the existing vehicle factory, over 4,000 feet, while sitting somewhat narrower. Musk has pegged the long term output target at 10 million Optimus units a year once the line is running at full capacity, a volume that would dwarf the one million unit pilot line Tesla is standing up separately at its Fremont, California factory.
Tesla Giga Texas to feature massive Optimus V4 production line
The Texas facility sits alongside another major buildout on the same campus. Terafab, the joint Tesla and SpaceX chip fabrication plant that will eventually supply the silicon running Optimus units in the field. Housing robot assembly and chip production on the same grounds is a deliberate supply chain decision, cutting down on the shipping and lead time that would otherwise sit between the two.
Tesla has not given an updated timeline beyond its previously stated goal of bringing high volume Optimus production online at the site in the summer of 2027. Fremont’s smaller pilot line began mass producing the current Gen 3 robot in January, with that plant expected to build tens of thousands of units this year primarily to generate the real world data Tesla needs to refine the robot’s software before Giga Texas ramps up. Six months of visible construction progress, tracked almost entirely through Tegtmeyer’s recurring drone flights, gives the clearest outside look yet at how seriously Tesla is treating that 2027 deadline.
Google just picked SpaceX for its first step into orbital AI
Tesla Cybercab gets initial tie-in to localized, in-house cathode plant
