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)
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.
- SpaceX’s BFR tent and mandrel, caught on April 14th. (Pauline Acalin)
- 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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Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s latest Tesla tunnel truck mod “fits like a glove”
The Boring Company has modified a Tesla powered tunnel truck to carry freight containers underground.
The Boring Company has found a second job for the Tesla hardware it already runs underground. In a post on X, Elon Musk’s tunneling company showed its latest Prufrock Liner Truck modified to carry a standard 20 foot shipping container. “Using TBC tunnels to transport freight,” the company wrote. “The latest Prufrock Liner Truck (using Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units) has been modified to carry a standard 20′ shipping container. Fits like a glove!”
The photo shows a red container sitting on a long, low white chassis parked outside, with drive hardware visible at one end. The Boring Company did not say where or when freight hauling would start, which customers it has in mind, or how many trucks it is converting.
Using TBC tunnels to transport freight.
The latest Prufrock Liner Truck (using Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units) has been modified to carry a standard 20’ shipping container.
Fits like a glove! https://t.co/VV0phWK4fc
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) October 19, 2026
Until now, the liner trucks have hauled concrete. Teslarati reported in August on Liner Truck 3, which uses Model 3 battery packs and drive units to move more than 22,000 pounds of precast tunnel segments to the boring machine. It has 28 miles of range, tops out at 12 mph, and is piloted remotely from the company’s operations center in Texas. The freight version appears to be the same platform with a different bed, and The Boring Company has not said whether it will also be remotely piloted.
Freight has been on the company’s menu for years. When TBC updated its product lineup in 2021, its freight tunnel was described as sized to fit a standard shipping container, “barely.” The company later used the idea at Tesla’s own factory, where Prufrock 3 dug a tunnel to Giga Texas that now moves finished Cybertrucks away from the production line.
The Boring Company closed a $3 billion Series D in September at a $23 billion valuation, and Teslarati has covered how that money is tied to a UAE tunneling push and a faster Nashville build. In Nashville, Prufrock MB1 and MB2 are mining at the same time, and a third machine is expected to launch in late October. Each machine needs a steady supply of liner trucks, so any design that works for segments and containers alike gives the company more use out of the same Tesla parts.
The Vegas Loop remains the only Boring Company system open to the public, and it moves passengers in Tesla vehicles. A freight service would be a separate product, and the post gave no indication that one is close to launch. For now, it is a truck, a container and a short caption saying they fit together.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk will give ‘every kid in America’ a SpaceX share in 2027
Elon Musk said he is planning to give “every one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America” in 2027, stating that “this will be the first of many.”
SpaceX went public earlier this year, and its stock price has been relatively stable since leveling off shortly after its IPO. Based on its current price, it’s a gift of just over $10 billion to children across the United States.
It appears to be closely related to President Donald Trump’s bank accounts for children, which were set up earlier this year as Trump Accounts.
Just hours earlier, Anthropic had announced the establishment of its Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, “a new wholly-owned entity dedicated entirely to public benefit.” Musk responded by stating he recommended “giving the shares directly to the public,” and that he would be doing it that way.
Just a little bit later, Musk said children across the U.S. would be getting a share from him:
Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.
This will be the first of many.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026
There are roughly 70 million children, meaning someone under the age of 18, in the United States, according to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Musk’s ownership of SpaceX stock shows he has around 849 million Class A shares of SpaceX stock, according to filings with the SEC.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk reveals why Boring Co’s biggest East Coast project never happened
Elon Musk revealed in a post on X that “Permits were impossible to get,” explaining the fate of The Boring Company’s most ambitious East Coast proposal.
The comment responded to a query about what became of his July 20, 2017 announcement that he had “just received verbal govt approval” for an underground Hyperloop connecting New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., capable of carrying passengers from the Big Apple to the Nation’s Capital in just 29 minutes.
The Boring Company receives verbal ‘approval’ to build NY to DC Hyperloop tunnel
The 2017 post, which envisioned city-center stations and multiple elevators in each city, sparked immediate scrutiny. Local and state officials in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. said they had no knowledge of any approval. A White House spokesperson confirmed only “promising conversations” about the transformative infrastructure.
Musk clarified shortly after that there was “still a lot of work” to do for formal approvals.
@cybrtrkguy Permits were impossible to get
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026
Limited progress followed, as Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s administration issued a conditional utility permit and supported work near Fort Meade. In 2018, Washington, D.C., granted a preliminary permit for site preparation and excavation on a vacant lot at 53 New York Ave. NE in the NoMa neighborhood, which The Boring Company said could become a station.
A draft environmental assessment for a D.C.-Baltimore segment was released in 2019. Yet, by April 2021, the company had removed the project from its website, and the Federal Highway Administration reported receiving no indication of further interest. Communication with Maryland officials had ceased.
The full corridor would have required coordination among the District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, the Federal Highway Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Park Service, and other agencies.
Environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, utility clearances, and approvals for novel infrastructure added to the overall complexity of the project and its approval.
Speculation on the permitting barriers centers around a few factors, but a multi-state, multi-level route involving unproven high-speed vacuum-tube technology inherently triggers exhaustive safety, environmental, and engineering reviews that can stretch for years, even for conventional projects.
There are also other elements, of course, like officials who may face political exposure if a privately funded, untested system encountered anything such as cost overruns, delays, or safety issues. On the outset of this project, there were limited things such as engineering plans or demonstrated technology maturity, which also added to the potential skepticism.
The East Coast vision for Boring Co., once framed as a privately funded revolution that could reshape Northeast travel, quietly ended without construction of the promised network. Musk’s recent statement frames the outcome as a regulatory impasse, unfortunate but not unexpected.


