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Elon Musk stands beside Raptor's nozzle as SpaceX propulsion prepares for its first hot-fire test. (Elon Musk) Elon Musk stands beside Raptor's nozzle as SpaceX propulsion prepares for its first hot-fire test. (Elon Musk)

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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk arrives in Texas for milestone Starship engine test

Elon Musk stands beside Raptor's nozzle as SpaceX propulsion prepares for its first hot-fire test. (Elon Musk)

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On Saturday evening, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk landed in Waco, Texas – perhaps along with additional SpaceX propulsion engineers – for the critical static fire debut of the first “radically redesigned” Raptor engine, built to power BFR’s Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster.

If the first operationalized Raptor’s static fire tests go well, there are several possible routes the test program could take, all of which will end up with this engine and several others being tested and ultimately installed on the Starship hopper (Starhopper) prototype under construction roughly 500 miles (800 km) south of SpaceX’s Raptor test cell.

Shortly after Musk revealed official photos of the first operationalized Raptor preparing for an inaugural static fire test at SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas facilities, the SpaceX and Tesla CEO’s private jet was seen landing at Waco, Texas around sunset. Although all SpaceX technical expertise needed for Raptor’s first ignition was probably already on site several days prior, Musk has been known to offer seats on his private planes to SpaceX and Tesla employees when a critical group is needed away from their normal base of operations. The best examples come from Tesla engineering expertise sometimes traveling between Fremont and Gigafactory 1 when needed, often to solve production holdups.

Regardless of whether he was traveling with members of the SpaceX propulsion team, Musk’s arrival at McGregor yesterday signified that Raptor Block 1’s first integrated hot-fire was imminent. Assuming no attempt was made on Saturday night or Sunday morning, SpaceX technicians and engineers are presumably still working on installing what is effectively a new rocket engine and ensuring that Raptor’s test cells – extensively overhauled and upgraded for the occasion – are working as intended. While the development Raptors SpaceX built hovered around 1000 kN (~100t) of thrust, also roughly the same as Merlin 1D, the Raptor now on stand in Texas is reportedly a 200 ton-class engine or more than double the thrust of any single engine SpaceX engineers and technicians have built or test-fired in 15 years of engine development.

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A fork in the R&D road

Prior to completing Raptor Block 1 (unofficial designation), SpaceX cumulatively test-fired dev Raptors for far more than 1200 seconds over the course of more than 24 months. It’s unclear how extensively the company’s engineers will be able to test the pathfinder hardware built on the back of that extensive test program. Nominally, one would expect hundreds or thousands of seconds of additional testing to properly characterize the design and production of a brand-new, optimized engine like Raptor while primarily ensuring that it performs within engineering specifications.

Knowing CEO Elon Musk’s self-admitted tendency to push for impractical deadlines and schedules that often appeared rushed for the sake of rushing, it’s not impossible that the first Raptors could find themselves installed on the Boca Chica-based Starhopper test article after Merlin-esque acceptance testing and nothing more. For M1D and MVac, acceptance testing usually takes the shape of a full-duration burn with throttle and gimbal activity to closely simulate a true Falcon 9 or Heavy launch. For the 200-ton Raptor now in Texas, comparable acceptance testing could take a variety of forms, ranging from short Starhopper-relevant burns (10-60 seconds for small hops) to simulating conditions during a Super Heavy launch and landing or even a 6 or 7-minute orbital insertion burn indicative of the performance needed for Starship.

A trio of roughshod Raptor mockups were installed on Starhopper around Jan. 1, presumably helping engineers and technicians prepare to install the real thing. (NASASpaceflight – bocachicagal.

Depending on the interplay between the route SpaceX engineers would likely prefer and the Starhopper test schedule executives and managers might want, this first Raptor engine (and two more soon to follow) could be installed on Starhopper anywhere from a few weeks to several months from now. Elon Musk indicated in early January that he expected hop tests would occur 4-8 weeks later, shortly followed by unplanned damage to the craft’s nose cone that pushed the debut back “a few weeks”.

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Realistically, hop tests should thus be expected to begin no earlier than (NET) 8-12 weeks from the first week of January, translating to NET March or April. This would give SpaceX propulsion engineers a decent amount of time to gain at least a few hundred (or maybe 1000+) seconds of experience operating the newest and most advanced iteration of Raptor.


Check out Teslarati’s newsletters for prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket launch and recovery processes!

Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.


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.

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Starlink Mini 2 arrives with one feature for true off-grid connectivity

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Credit: SpaceX

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.

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.

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