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
SpaceX’s next Starship launch is about to attempt its biggest leap yet
SpaceX targets September 22 for Starship Flight 14, its first attempt to reach real orbit.
SpaceX has set September 22 as the target date for Starship’s 14th test flight, and this one carries a different goal than any of the 13 that came before it. Every previous Starship mission has intentionally flown a suborbital arc, reentering the atmosphere within the same hour it launched. Flight 14 is designed to send the craft into a genuine orbit around Earth for the first time.
The launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. Central time at Starbase in South Texas and runs for 75 minutes, pending regulatory approval, according to SpaceX’s mission description published Tuesday. If the flight goes as planned, Starship will circle the planet roughly six times at an altitude near 275 kilometers over about ten hours before a deorbit burn sends it toward a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, a departure from the Indian Ocean recoveries used on the last several flights.
The mission also marks the first attempt to put a working batch of Starlink V3 satellites into actual service. Flight 13 carried 20 of the new satellites in July, but because that mission never left a suborbital trajectory, the payload reentered along with the ship instead of separating into orbit.
SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
Each V3 satellite is rated for roughly one terabit per second of downlink capacity, so a successful deployment on Flight 14 would be SpaceX’s largest single jump in network bandwidth since Starlink began flying on Falcon 9.
Flight 13 still did the heavier lifting on the technical side. That July mission flew a deliberately more stressful reentry profile to test Starship’s heat shield, and the ship survived its softest splashdown yet, intact enough for drone inspections shortly after landing. Elon Musk said the flight delivered “all the heat shield data we needed and then some,” a result Teslarati covered in detail when he later said SpaceX had solved the vehicle’s biggest reusability challenge. Flight 14 is where SpaceX starts spending that confidence on an actual orbital insertion rather than another controlled fall back to Earth.
One thing Flight 14 will not attempt is a tower catch of the ship. Musk floated the idea right after Flight 13, but walked the timeline back in August, saying a catch attempt was more likely “in a few months.” The Super Heavy booster will still aim for its own recovery, targeting an offshore landing point in the Gulf of America, the same approach used on recent flights.
September 22 is SpaceX’s own target, not a locked date. Starship’s schedule has slipped before over hardware readiness and FAA sign off, and the company has said as much in its own mission notes. But the plan itself represents the clearest marker yet that Starship is moving from a suborbital test program into something meant to carry paying payloads and, eventually, people.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk gives his most telling Tesla-SpaceX merger conversation yet
Elon Musk hinted a Tesla-SpaceX merger could be coming, and Wall Street is taking notice.
Elon Musk gave his clearest signal yet that Tesla and SpaceX could eventually combine, telling the All-In Summit in Los Angeles that the two companies’ deepening collaboration makes the question worth asking. Sawyer Merritt first surfaced the highlight on X Tuesday.
Asked directly why Tesla and SpaceX remain separate given how closely they already work together, Musk told hosts at the summit: “Great question there. With all this collaboration, on so many levels, who can imagine what action one might take when there’s so much close collaboration in so many areas.” SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell, who joined Musk on stage, added that SpaceX personnel have already moved into xAI to fill leadership and engineering gaps, saying the businesses are integrating “faster than I thought,” though “not fully integrated yet,”
The comments landed on top of merger speculation that has been building on Wall Street for months. JPMorgan has called a tie-up “strategically coherent on paper,” pointing to overlapping ambitions in AI, robotics, energy, transportation and space. Jefferies went further, estimating Musk could retain roughly 55.3 percent voting control in a deal structured without a premium, a scenario that would still leave room for Tesla shareholders to come out ahead. On Kalshi, traders now put the odds of a merger before 2028 at 66 percent.
Tesla’s stake in SpaceX, still under one percent, traces back to its earlier investment in xAI, which converted to SpaceX equity after SpaceX absorbed the AI company. The two are also jointly building Terafab, a chip facility in Austin meant to serve both Tesla’s AI computing needs and SpaceX’s satellite ambitions. Wedbush analyst Dan Ives has stood by a 2027 merger timeline for months, and Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest recently floated a similar case, an idea Musk pushed back on directly at the time.
Another Tesla SpaceX merger prediction by ARK Invest has Elon Musk talking
The timing adds another layer. Tesla has scheduled an October 1 unveiling for its next generation Roadster at a venue near SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas test site, using the phrase “Go for launch” in its promotional material. Both stocks dipped roughly 2 percent Monday before recovering slightly in premarket trading Tuesday, with SpaceX shares up about 0.4 percent and Tesla essentially flat.
Musk stopped short of confirming anything is in motion. But unlike his past denials of a corporate restructuring, this response didn’t rule one out, and it came with Shotwell sitting next to him describing an integration that’s already underway.
News
Why SpaceX is finishing another space-internet system that isn’t Starlink
SpaceX launched three final O3b mPower satellites Sunday, finishing a lesser known SES satellite network.
SpaceX had an 87 minute window opening at 2:49 p.m. Eastern on Sunday to fly a Falcon 9 out of Cape Canaveral carrying the final three satellites for SES’s O3b mPower constellation, a project that has taken more than a decade to finish since Boeing and SES first signed SpaceX on for the work.
Unlike the thousands of Starlink satellites SpaceX has stacked into orbit over the years, O3b mPower flies in a different neighborhood entirely. The three new satellites, tagged F11, F12 and F13, are headed for medium Earth orbit at roughly 5,000 miles up, more than ten times higher than Starlink’s shell around 340 miles but still a small fraction of the 22,000 miles where old school geostationary satellites sit. That middle position is the whole point, because a satellite that far out needs far fewer siblings to blanket the globe than a low orbit constellation does. Essentially, SES only needed 13 satellites total to build a network offering quick, steady service that used to require thousands of spacecraft.
With most people having heard plenty about Starlink and almost nothing about O3b mPower, SES and SpaceX already blend the two networks for some customers. Both SpaceX and SES sell satellite broadband, but they’re aimed at different buyers. Starlink is built for volume, direct to consumers, RVs, homes, small businesses, plus a growing aviation and maritime business. O3b mPower skips consumers entirely and sells enterprise grade connectivity to airlines, cruise lines, offshore energy operators, telecoms needing backhaul, and governments, priced and provisioned more like a dedicated circuit.
A 2023 partnership lets cruise ships combine Starlink’s speed with O3b mPower’s steady capacity depending on what a ship needs at a given moment. Sunday’s completed 13 satellite constellation effectively finishes the medium orbit half of that pairing, years after.
Sunday’s mission was already a something on SpaceX’s manifest well before O3b mPower entered the picture. This flight marked its 29th trip to orbit, a history that includes two crewed Axiom missions, the European Space Agency’s Euclid telescope and 22 separate Starlink batches. SpaceX has landed boosters on the droneship A Shortfall of Gravitas so often that Sunday’s touchdown attempt, if it went as planned, was set to be the 661st successful Falcon booster landing to date.
For a company that pushed the Starlink constellation past 11,000 satellites back in August, almost entirely through bulk launches from California, Sunday’s flight was a reminder that SpaceX’s schedule still has room for someone else’s satellites too. SES gets a finished network built for a narrower set of customers, and Falcon 9 gets one more line on an already long resume.
SpaceX’s next Starship launch is about to attempt its biggest leap yet
Elon Musk gives his most telling Tesla-SpaceX merger conversation yet
