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SpaceX assembles Falcon Heavy rocket for first launch in 40 months
SpaceX has assembled the fourth Falcon Heavy for the rocket’s first launch in 40 months.
A photo shared by SpaceX on October 23rd shows that it has mated Falcon Heavy’s three first stage boosters together while preparing for prelaunch testing. Simultaneously, workers have completed the equally important task of converting 39A’s transporter/erector (T/E), which has been configured for single-core Falcon 9 rockets for over three years.
The transporter/erectors SpaceX use for all Falcon launches are a bit like a mobile backbone and launch tower combined. Their first purpose is to transport horizontal Falcon rockets to and from their integration hangars and launch pads. They’re also tasked with raising Falcon rockets vertical and lowering them back down for transport or worker access. Most importantly, they connect to a pad’s ground systems and distribute propellant, gases, power, and communications to Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy through multiple umbilicals and quick-disconnect ports.
Falcon Heavy, which can only be launched out of LC-39A, has three times as many boosters as Falcon 9 and necessitates significant modifications to the pad’s T/E when switching between the two. The process is much harder when moving from F9 to FH, and waiting almost three and a half years between Falcon Heavy launches likely hasn’t made the conversion any easier. But on October 23rd, after numerous tests and weeks of work, the Pad 39A T/E picked up the ‘reaction frame’ that attaches to the bottom of Falcon rockets and was brought horizontal.
Thanks to the nature of Falcon Heavy and Pad 39A’s infrastructure, what happens next is more or less guaranteed. During normal Falcon 9 operations, 39A’s integration hangar is large enough for two or three unrelated Falcon boosters to remain while the T/E rolls inside to pick up a full Falcon 9. More importantly, Falcon 9’s booster and upper stage can technically be integrated off to the side and craned onto the T/E when ready. But with Falcon Heavy, which has a first stage akin to three Falcon 9 boosters sitting side by side, there isn’t enough room inside the hangar to integrate the rocket with the T/E inside.
For Falcon Heavy, the T/E can thus only roll back into the hangar once the rocket’s three boosters and upper stage have been fully assembled and are suspended in mid-air. SpaceX’s October 23rd photo shows that three of the four cranes required for that lift appear to already be in position, further confirming that T/E rollback is imminent. Once the T/E rolls back to the hangar and Falcon Heavy is attached, the rocket will eventually be transported to the pad and brought vertical for wet dress rehearsal (WDR) and static fire testing.
Update: SpaceX began rolling the T/E to Pad 39A’s integration hangar around 1 am EDT, October 24th.
The US Space Force’s USSF-44 payload – a mysterious pair of satellites that are more than two years behind schedule – will almost certainly not be installed on Falcon Heavy during prelaunch testing, so the rocket will need to roll back to the hangar at least one more time after testing to have its payload fairing attached.
Combined, that prelaunch process could easily take a week or more. Multiple sources report that Falcon Heavy is scheduled to launch no earlier than (NET) 9:44 am EDT (13:44 UTC) on Halloween, October 31st. But even if the rocket rolls out today (Oct 24), the odds are stacked against Falcon Heavy sailing through its first integrated prelaunch tests in 40 months, and delays are likely.
For Falcon Heavy’s fourth launch, all three of the rocket’s boosters – B1064, B1065, and B1066 – are new, as are its upper stage and payload fairing. An FCC permit for the launch has confirmed that SpaceX will intentionally expend the rocket’s new center core while its twin side boosters will attempt a near-simultaneous landing back at Cape Canaveral. USSF-44 will be SpaceX’s first attempted launch directly to geostationary orbit (GEO), an exceptionally challenging mission that requires the rocket’s upper stage to coast in space for around 4-6 hours between two major burns.
If successful, Falcon Heavy will insert the USSF-44’s mystery satellites into a circular orbit ~35,600 kilometers (~22,150 mi) above Earth’s surface. At that altitude, orbital velocity matches Earth’s rotation and spacecraft can effectively hover – indefinitely – above their region of choice.
Falcon Heavy is the most powerful operational rocket in the world. At liftoff, it weighs around 1420 tons (~3.1M lb) and can produce more than 2300 tons (~5.1M lbf) of thrust. In a fully expendable configuration, Falcon Heavy can launch 26.7 tons (59,000 lb) to an elliptical geostationary transfer orbit and 63.8 tons (141,000 lb) to low Earth orbit. SpaceX doesn’t advertise its direct-to-GEO capabilities.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a photo of himself standing with the Optimus production team inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, arms crossed amid workers in hard hats and safety vests. The image captures a pivotal industrial shift: the same facility space once dedicated to building Tesla’s flagship Model S sedan and Model X SUV is now home to the company’s humanoid robot manufacturing line.
Walking the Optimus production line in Fremont pic.twitter.com/ABS0tuRibW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2026
Tesla’s Fremont Factory, acquired in 2010 from the former NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and GM, has been the company’s original U.S. manufacturing hub since Model S production began in 2012.
The Model X followed soon thereafter. These premium vehicles offered lower annual volumes, recently around 30,000 combined, compared to the high-volume Model 3 and Model Y lines that continue around the site. Over their combined run, the S and X accounted for roughly 610,000 units.
In late January 2026, during Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Elon Musk announced the end of Model S and Model X production in Q2 2026. The final vehicles rolled off the line in early May. Rather than retooling for another vehicle, Tesla chose to convert the dedicated S/X assembly area into a dedicated Optimus Gen 3 production line.
Model 3 and Y manufacturing remains unaffected. Tesla’s official Fremont Factory page now lists Optimus alongside the 3 and Y as core products.
The conversion was executed with remarkable speed. After production stopped, crews dismantled the existing vehicle line and installed entirely new modular equipment—including lines sourced from Germany and dozens of sub-lines for actuators, batteries, and other components—in roughly four months.
Musk described the timeline as “insanely fast,” noting it would be unprecedented for any other manufacturer. Initial Optimus output is expected to ramp slowly due to the robot’s roughly 10,000 unique parts and the brand-new production processes involved. The Fremont line targets an eventual capacity of 1 million Optimus units per year.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Optimus Development Timeline
- August 19, 2021: Optimus (then called Tesla Bot) formally announced at Tesla’s first AI Day. A concept video showed a person in a suit demonstrating the vision for a general-purpose humanoid capable of dangerous, repetitive, or boring tasks using the same AI architecture as Full Self-Driving.
- 2022: Early prototypes displayed. At the second AI Day in September, semi-functional units demonstrated walking across a stage and basic arm movements
- 2023: September videos showed improved capabilities, including sorting colored blocks, precise limb awareness, and holding a Yoda pose.
- 2024-early 2025: Factory integration videos showed Optimus navigating workspaces and handling objects like battery cells.
- January 2026: Gen 3 mass-production activities began at Fremont, with reports of over 1,000 Gen 3 units already operating inside the factory for real-world learning and AI training
- April 2026: Musk confirms Optimus production on converted Fremont line would begin in late July or August 2026. The Gen 3 reveal, originally eyed for Q1, was pushed closer to production start. A second, much larger Optimus factory at Giga Texas is under construction, with volume production targeted for Summer 2027 and long-term capacity of 10 million units annually
- July 1, 2026: Musk’s on-site visit and team photo confirm the Optimus line is operational and the transition is actively progressing
Tesla positions Optimus as potentially its largest project ever, leveraging vertical integration, AI expertise, and car-like manufacturing know-how to scale humanoid robots first for its own factories and later for broader industrial and consumer use.
The Fremont conversion serves as a critical proving ground for this ambitious new chapter in Tesla’s already-rich history.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
