News
SpaceX ramps BFR factory construction as Mr Steven arm surgery continues
Photos taken on July 1st show that land leased by SpaceX to build the first port-located BFR factory and Falcon 9 refurbishment center is continuing to ramp initial construction work, ranging from general clean-up of the long-abandoned berth to serious foundation preparation where SpaceX’s new rocket warehouse will be built.
Previously a shipyard, the Berth 240 facility now leased by SpaceX sat abandoned for the better part of a decade, and features a number of buildings deemed historic landmarks by the city of Los Angeles. As the new tenant, SpaceX is expected to do at least a little refurbishment, with the goal of leaving the site in better shape than they found it in at the end of their 10-year lease. The company does have permission, nonetheless, to demolish one less historic building in order to make space for their planned BFR factory, the construction of which is expected to take 12-18 months for Phase 1 and another 12 or so months for Phase 2, meshing nicely with SpaceX real estate director Bruce McHugh’s estimate of “three to five years” to completion.
On the rocket recovery fleet side of things, SpaceX’s fairing-catcher Mr Steven is still stationed at Berth 240 with all major components of his previous arm assembly now fully removed and stored nearby on the dock. In June 2018, CEO Elon Musk noted on Twitter that the iconic vessel was to have its net grown by a factor of four, meaning that both its length and width would be roughly doubled.
SpaceX’s Berth 240 prospective BFR factory is chock-full of construction equipment. (Pauline Acalin)
Mr Steven is also present, albeit in a sadly armless state for the time being. (Pauline Acalin)
Sitting around 400 square meters before arm removal, the new net would be closer to 1500 square meters – roughly 1.5 acres – and could nearly halve the accuracy gap that the company’s engineers need to close in order to reliably catch Falcon payload fairings, cutting 20-30 meters out of the 50 meters most separating the fairing and net at touchdown. Once SpaceX is able to close that gap and start catching fairings before they hit seawater, it should be a fairly simple process to start routinely reusing both halves of the $3 million carbon composite-aluminum honeycomb shells.
Unless they can be rapidly cycled out of the net after landing, recovering both halves may require a second net vessel like Mr Steven, and there could wind up being as many as four Mr Steven copies if the company intends to recovery both fairing halves after every launch from both their California and Florida launch pads. Recent planning on the Florida coast indicates that SpaceX expects their launch cadence to ramp up considerably with the introduction of a fleet of highly-reusable Falcon 9 Block 5 boosters, and the considerable lead-time and sluggishness inherent to manufacturing massive aerospace-grade composite structures with equally vast autoclave ovens means that payload fairings could quite quickly become a bottleneck for SpaceX’s launch business.
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- SpaceX’s BFR tent and mandrel, caught on April 14th. (Pauline Acalin)
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- Mr Steven out and about with a recovered but unreusable fairing half in May 2018, presumably for some sort of practice. (Pauline Acalin)
While such a bottleneck is far from insurmountable, dramatically expanding Falcon 9 composite component production now would presumably be an inconvenience for SpaceX at a time where they would much rather be focusing internal investments on their next-generation launch vehicle, known as BFR. That rocket is understood to be in the late stages of design and is quickly entering into a more advanced stage of concerted full-scale prototype testing and refinement as SpaceX accumulates invaluable data from hands-on R&D.
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News
SpaceX Starship Flight 13 faces wrath of the Texas skies
SpaceX pushed Starship Flight 13 to Friday, blaming weather instead of the previous engine issues.
SpaceX called off Thursday’s launch attempt of Starship Flight 13, pushing the mission to Friday because of weather tied to Tropical Storm Bertha. The company confirmed the delay on X, noting “Now targeting Friday, July 24 for Starship’s thirteenth flight test, due to weather. A key objective for the flight test is to get clear imagery from the ground of Starship’s heatshield as it flies at a higher dynamic pressure during ascent, which won’t be possible with today’s weather conditions.”
This is the second delay for Flight 13 in two weeks. SpaceX first tried to launch the mission on July 16, but the countdown ended in an automated abort at T-0 when four of Super Heavy Booster 20’s 33 Raptor engines failed to ignite. Musk said at the time that two Raptors would need to be removed and replaced, as Teslarati reported. The company spent the following week destacking Ship 40 and Booster 20, swapping engines, and running leak checks before restacking the vehicle on Pad 2 Wednesday night, according to Spaceflight Now’s live coverage.
Unlike the engine problem, Thursday’s delay has nothing to do with the hardware. SpaceX wants clean footage of Starship’s heat shield captured from the ground as the vehicle flies through max dynamic pressure, something the storm’s cloud cover over South Texas would not allow. The company said visibility should improve for Friday’s attempt, with the same 90 minute window opening at 5:45 p.m. CT.
Flight 13 will be the second outing for the V3 versions of Starship and Super Heavy, following their debut on Flight 12 in May. The mission carries 20 production Starlink V3 satellites, the first time SpaceX has flown operational satellites rather than mass simulators on Starship. Six of those satellites are fitted with cameras to inspect the heat shield from a different angle during ascent, giving engineers a second data source beyond the ground imagery the weather is currently blocking.
Booster 20 will attempt a boostback burn and a splashdown landing burn in the Gulf of America, while Ship 40 follows a suborbital trajectory toward a landing in the Indian Ocean. The flight plan largely mirrors Flight 12, though the booster will run a more aggressive ascent burn after max Q this time, and the ship’s heat shield includes load sensing tiles meant to measure stress at the higher dynamic pressure SpaceX is targeting.
If Friday’s attempt succeeds, Flight 13 could be the last suborbital test in the program. SpaceX is already looking to push for an orbital flight on Flight 14.
Tesla stock (NASDAQ: TSLA) endured one of its sharpest single-day declines in years on July 23, tumbling approximately 14.5 percent and closing near $320 after opening the session around $374. The drop erased more than $140 billion in market value amid heavy trading volume and left the shares at multi-week lows.
The sell-off followed the company’s second-quarter 2026 results, released the previous evening. Tesla reported record revenue of $28.2 billion, up 26 percent year over year, driven by a Q2-record 480,126 vehicle deliveries. Energy storage deployments also rose strongly.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Yet profitability disappointed sharply. Operating income fell 57 percent to $398 million, compressing the operating margin to just 1.4 percent. Non-GAAP earnings per share came in at $0.33, well below the roughly $0.53 analysts had expected. Free cash flow turned negative by $1.1 billion as capital expenditures surged 142 percent to $5.8 billion, largely tied to accelerated spending on artificial intelligence, robotics, and autonomous systems.
The losses on capex were expected, as Tesla said it would be spending heavily in 2026.
Investors also reacted to lingering uncertainty surrounding key product timelines. During the Earnings Call, management reiterated ambitions for Robotaxi deployment and the Optimus humanoid robot, but offered limited new concrete milestones, renewing questions about execution pace that have long accompanied Tesla’s ambitious roadmap.
The magnitude of the decline places it among Tesla’s more severe one-day percentage losses since its 2010 initial public offering. Historically, the two largest single-day drops (split-adjusted) remain September 8, 2020, when shares fell 21.1 percent amid broader market volatility and valuation concerns, and January 13, 2012, with a 19.3 percent plunge during the company’s early growth struggles.
Other notable declines include an 18.6 percent drop on March 16, 2020, at the onset of pandemic-related market turmoil. Thursday’s move ranks roughly ninth on the all-time list but stands out as the steepest in more than a year.
Despite the short-term pain, Tesla’s long-term trajectory has repeatedly recovered from such volatility. The latest results underscore both the strength of its core automotive and energy businesses and the near-term costs of heavy investment in next-generation technologies.
Elon Musk clapped back at France’s decision to withhold the approval for Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) Supervised system, projecting a clear and blunt message to French Transport Minister Phillippe Tabarot, after he publicly rejected the technology in its current form.
Tabarot outlines several concerns with Tesla Full Self-Driving in a detailed video statement, where he said, “The safety trade-offs are not yet sufficient to authorize it as it currently stands,” he said. He emphasized that FSD is not a true self-driving system and that the driver remains fully responsible.
Key issues Tabarot also brought up included allowing speeding when surrounding traffic exceeds limits and what he believes are insufficient guarantees of driver attention during complex urban maneuvers such as lane changes, intersections, and roundabouts.
Delaying the approval of FSD in France will cost lives
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 22, 2026
While acknowledging technological progress and France’s support for autonomous innovation, Tabarot stressed that deployment must prioritize road safety. He noted ongoing technical discussions with Tesla, the Netherlands, and other European partners, with further ecosystem meetings planned for the fall.
Musk’s rebuke highlights the human cost of regulatory caution. Tesla’s latest safety reports provide compelling data supporting accelerated adoption. In the most recent 12-month period, vehicles using FSD (Supervised) recorded one major collision per approximately 5.1 million miles driven, dramatically better than the U.S. national average of one crash per 698,000 miles.
Even Tesla vehicles driven manually with active safety features outperform the average by a wide margin. These figures come from billions of real-world miles of telemetry, showing FSD vehicles involved in far fewer incidents than both manual Teslas and the broader U.S. fleet.
Critics argue Tesla’s comparisons require careful scrutiny regarding reporting thresholds and fleet demographics, yet the data consistently positions FSD as a potential lifesaver. With road fatalities remaining a leading cause of death worldwide, Musk contends that proven safer technology should not face prolonged bureaucratic hurdles.
France’s measured approach reflects the broader European regulatory caution, which many, especially Musk, have been critical of in the past. However, as autonomous systems from Tesla and competitors like Waymo demonstrate superior safety in independent studies, pressure is mounting for harmonized approvals.
Musk’s warning carries the belief that every month of delay may equate to avoidable tragedies on European roads.
SpaceX Starship Flight 13 faces wrath of the Texas skies
Tesla stock tumbles after earnings, one of its sharpest single-day declines
