News
SpaceX Mars rocket test site receives first huge rocket propellant storage tank
SpaceX has delivered one of the first undeniably rocketry-related pieces of hardware to its prospective Boca Chica test and launch facility in South Texas, this time in the form of a massive 100,000-gallon liquid oxygen tank now stationed adjacent to the company’s ~600 kW Tesla solar and battery array.
In a statement provided to local paper Valley Morning Star, SpaceX spokesperson Sean Pitt filled in a few of the details and confirmed that the LOX tank had been delivered to Boca Chica as part of an ongoing effort to ready the site for initial testing – and eventually launches – of an unspecified “vehicle”
“Delivery of a new liquid oxygen tank, which will be used to support propellant-loading operations during launch and vehicle tests, represents the latest major piece of launch hardware to arrive at the [South Texas] site for installation.” – SpaceX
The official SpaceX statement may not have explicitly stated that the aforementioned “vehicle” was something other than Falcon 9 or Heavy, but it can be all but guaranteed that the testing and launching described refers to the company’s next-generation Mars rocket, a completely reusable architecture known as BFR.
An immense liquid oxygen (LOX) tank just arrived at @SpaceX's prospective Boca Chica, TX facility, likely to be dedicated to BFR & BFS testing. @NASASpaceflight forum user "Nomadd" caught some of the first detailed photos, as well as the tank's arrival at SpaceX land on July 11. pic.twitter.com/hr7SeA6BGw
— Eric Ralph (@13ericralph31) July 12, 2018
A slow burn in South Texas
Over the past 6-9 months, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk and President/COO Gwynne Shotwell have repeatedly spoken on the subject of SpaceX’s South Texas ambitions, lending unambiguous credence to the idea that the Boca Chica rocket facility will be almost exclusively dedicated to testing BFR’s first flightworthy spaceship prototypes, beginning with a series of familiar suborbital “hops”.
- Artist David Romax’s jaw-dropping rendition of a BFR burning to Mars orbit. The craft’s various curves and hull complexities will likely rely on cutting-edge composite joining tech to function. (Gravitation Innovation)
- SpaceX may well already be fabricating propellant tanks and structural components for the first Mars spaceship prototype in a giant tent at Port of San Pedro. July 1st. (Pauline Acalin)
- An overview of SpaceX’s Port of LA tent, April 2018. While not confirmed, SpaceX seems to intend to begin early BFR prototype construction at the temporary facility. (Pauline Acalin)
In the early days of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 reusability program, the company completed several different phases of short flights (“hops”, hence the Grasshopper label) of a development version of a Falcon 9 booster, ranging from purely vertical jaunts just above the pad to 1000+ meter cross-range maneuvers, tests that ultimately culminated in SpaceX’s extraordinarily reliable Falcon 9 and Heavy booster recovery capabilities. Something similar – albeit somewhat more ambitious – is planned for BFR, starting with a prototype of the upper stage (spaceship). Musk described these plans in more detail in an October 2017 Reddit AMA:
Will we see BFS hops or smaller test vehicles similar to Grasshopper/F9R-Dev?
A (Elon): A lot. Will be starting with a full-scale Ship doing short hops of a few hundred kilometers altitude and lateral distance. Those are fairly easy on the vehicle, as no heat shield is needed, we can have a large amount of reserve propellant and don’t need the high area ratio, deep space Raptor engines.
Speaking a bit less than five months later after the stunningly successful debut of Falcon Heavy, Musk expanded further on the BFR test program, reiterating that spaceship hop testing would “most likely … happen at our Brownsville [South Texas] location,” perhaps as early as 2019.
“We’ll do flights of increasing complexity. We really want to test the heat shield material… like fly out, turn around, accelerate back real hard, and come in hot to test the heat shield.”
- Blue Origin’s New Glenn LOX and liquid methane (LNG) propellant tanks, looking suspiciously identical to the SpaceX tank that just arrived in Boca Chica. It’s likely that both companies are using the same contractor. (Blue Origin)
- Captured by NASASpaceflight user nomadd before it arrived in Boca Chica, the storage tank is clearly vacuum-insulated. (NASASpaceflight /u/nomadd)
- An immense liquid oxygen (LOX) tank arriving at SpaceX’s prospective Boca Chica BFR testing facility, July 11th. (NASASpaceflight.com /u/Nomadd)
Musk also noted that he expected the first full-up orbital launch with both the Booster (BFB) and Spaceship (BFS) could happen as soon as 2021 or 2022. Shotwell, on the other hand, stated in early 2018 and again more recently that she believed BFR could begin its first orbital test missions as early as 2020, an extraordinarily rare moment where the typically pragmatic executive appeared to be more confident than Musk, often lambasted for his reliably over-optimistic timelines. About a month later, Musk’s comments were much more closely aligned with Shotwell’s BFR timeline estimates, and he enthusiastically said that that spaceship hop tests would likely begin within the first half of 2019.
The unambiguous arrival of a rocket propellant storage tank – confirmed officially by SpaceX – strongly suggests that activity is about to seriously pick up speed in Boca Chica for the first time in a year and a half, paving the way for full-scale hop tests of the first Mars spaceship prototype perhaps less than a year from today. Stay tuned…
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News
SpaceX hid behind another name in the Arizona desert, and now it’s going big
SpaceX puts a $50 billion price on its Arizona supercompute campus ahead of December’s hearing.
SpaceX has put a price tag on the supercomputer campus it wants to build in the southern Arizona desert. In a statement Thursday, the company said it is pursuing a roughly $50 billion supercompute campus in Cochise County, about 80 miles east of Tucson. Together with a separate facility planned at Starbase, Texas, the two projects add up to more than $74 billion in planned investment.
The Arizona figure had not been disclosed before. SpaceX’s involvement only became public on November 4, when company representatives hosted a packed town hall at Cochise Elementary School for an application filed under the name Tombstone Resources LLC. A SpaceX representative told residents the filing used another name because putting SpaceX on it “draws attention” from outside the county, local station KVOA reported.
The application describes a 747-acre site near the Willcox Playa with up to nine buildings of about 493,000 square feet each. SpaceX plans to bring the campus online in four phases of roughly 1.5 GW, reaching 6 GW at full build, backed by a 24 GWh battery system and about $3.6 billion in grid upgrades. At that size, it would draw about 2.5 times more power than every data center in Maricopa County combined, according to an Arizona Republic analysis.
SpaceX says the project will create about 5,500 construction jobs and 1,000 permanent jobs, and that it could cut electricity bills for members of the local cooperatives by up to 20 percent. The campus would use dry cooling with no industrial groundwater use. Its application estimates ongoing water needs of 7 to 10 acre-feet a year, roughly what 20 to 30 homes consume.
Power is the bigger question. The site sits next to the Apache Generating Station, a coal and natural gas plant with about 1 GW of capacity that had been slated to retire by 2028. SpaceX told residents its investment could expand the station to more than 6 GW.
Local opposition is organized. A petition asking the county to deny the permit has gathered about 2,400 signatures, and the nearby playa is a landing spot for federally protected sandhill cranes, which SpaceX says its design accounts for. The Cochise County Planning and Zoning Commission will hold a public hearing on December 9 in Bisbee, with written comments due November 27. If approved, construction could start in March 2027.
The Texas project faces a vote the same day. The Starbase City Commission will consider a property tax abatement for SpaceX’s $24 billion gas plant and supercompute facility at its own December 9 hearing, as Teslarati reported. SpaceX said Thursday the Starbase site has already generated more than 3,000 construction jobs, and it committed $220 million to Brownsville’s water and wastewater systems, $40 million of which has been paid.
Both campuses would expand a footprint still centered on the Memphis area, where SpaceX’s Colossus data centers run largely on gas turbines and the company won a permit for a power plant in Southaven, Mississippi earlier this year. SpaceX ended the third quarter with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute. The Arizona campus alone, at full build, would be more than three times that size.
Elon Musk
Nvidia’s board meets on Jensen Huang, and Elon Musk already has an answer
Elon Musk says it would be an honor to hire Jensen Huang amid Nvidia turmoil.
Elon Musk says he would welcome Jensen Huang at one of his companies if Nvidia’s board decides to push out its longtime chief executive.
On Wednesday evening, the financial account ZeroHedge posted “Elon please hire Jensen” on X. Musk replied roughly two hours later: “That would be an honor.” Neither Huang nor Nvidia had responded publicly as of Wednesday night.
Musk’s reply came as Nvidia’s board met to decide Huang’s future. The Wall Street Journal reported that directors were preparing to oust him following reports of two extramarital relationships. One involves Alice Huang, a Singapore-based businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence officials reportedly believe was working for China’s Ministry of State Security. The New York Times separately reported a relationship with Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s vice president of health care. Huang acknowledged being unfaithful in a memo to employees on Sunday but gave no details.
@zerohedge That would be an honor
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 12, 2026
Under Nvidia’s bylaws, a majority of its 11 directors can remove the CEO with or without cause. Bloomberg reported that the board has been working with an outside firm on possible replacements and may name an interim chief, with CFO Colette Kress seen as the likely pick. Nvidia shares fell more than 8 percent in extended trading, according to CNBC, and the company is scheduled to report quarterly earnings on November 17.
Musk has more riding on Nvidia’s leadership than most tech executives. In August, he told investors on SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company that it would build its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware, calling Vera Rubin “the best architecture.” SpaceX is also working with Nvidia on the compute payload for Starmind, its planned orbital AI constellation. In October, SpaceX said it had a binding commitment for a roughly $40 billion lease of Vera Rubin GPUs and related equipment, with the leases expected to begin in the first half of 2027.
The scale of that dependence is already enormous. On its Q3 call, SpaceX said it was bringing roughly 200,000 to 220,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs online each month and expects 2.5 to 3 GW of nameplate compute by the end of the year. That buildout is now reaching new sites like the proposed $24 billion power plant and supercomputer campus at Starbase.
The relationship between the two executives also goes back nearly a decade. Huang has often told the story of personally delivering Nvidia’s first DGX-1 AI supercomputer to Musk in 2016, when no other customer wanted one. “Nobody wanted to be part of it, except for Elon,” Huang said on the Joe Rogan Experience last December.
Musk did not say what role Huang might fill, and his reply stops short of a formal offer. Huang co-founded Nvidia in 1993 and still owns about 3.6 percent of its stock, so any move to a Musk company would depend on whether, and how, he leaves the chipmaker he has run for more than three decades.
News
Starlink Mini 2 arrives with one feature for true off-grid connectivity
SpaceX officially launched the Starlink Mini 2 on November 10, delivering the first portable Starlink terminal designed around independent power.
Invitation-only preorders for select U.S. customers are priced at $999 plus tax, a figure that includes a full year of Roam Unlimited service valued at roughly $2,100. A refundable $100 deposit reserves the kit, with the balance due at shipment, expected to begin in mid-December. Broader availability is listed as coming soon.
Starlink just unveiled Mini 2, its next-gen portable dish.
Quick-swap battery, up to 4.5 hrs per charge
USB-C power
Built-in Wi-Fi
Online in about 60 secondsPreorders are open now. https://t.co/QawqgbswrQ
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) November 10, 2026
The headline feature is the quick-swap 71 Wh battery. Clipped to the rear of the dish without tools, it delivers up to 4.5 hours of connectivity on a single charge.
The 490-gram pack includes its own USB-C port and LED indicators, so users can charge a spare separately and swap it in seconds while staying online. Starlink notes that the terminal can continue operating while the battery charges or run directly from a 60 W USB-C source. The retail box includes one battery, a 60 W USB-C charger, and a 3-meter cable.
Beyond power, the Mini 2 is thinner at 23.1 mm (versus 38.5 mm on the original Mini) while measuring 263 × 314 mm. With the battery and kickstand attached it weighs 1.6 kg.
Built-in Wi-Fi 6 expands coverage to up to 1,800 square feet, an IP67 rating protects against dust and water, and a standard 1/4-20 tripod thread plus physical power button round out the design. Field of view remains 110 degrees, and the unit retains support for mobile use.
For travelers, campers, and remote workers, the swappable battery removes the longstanding requirement for an external power bank or vehicle outlet that defined the first Mini. Spare packs sold separately further extend runtime, turning the compact terminal into a more self-contained solution.
While the bundled $999 invitation price sits well above the original Mini’s current $149 starting point, the included year of service and genuine untethered operation mark a clear step forward in portable satellite internet.





