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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk teases Mars breakthroughs as Starship design radically changes
During an interview with Axios, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk noted that he was “[really fired up about] a number of breakthroughs [SpaceX had recently made]” while being asked about his thoughts on the likelihood of him personally going to Mars (“70%”).
The minute-long teaser did not go much deeper but it certainly raises a number of questions (and hints at explanations) for a rapid-fire series of contradictory developments and changes to SpaceX’s BFR – since renamed to “Starship” and “Super Heavy” – per a series of tweets from Musk over the last two weeks.
In a typical Muskian fashion, when Axios interviewers asked, “What is the likelihood that you personally will go to Mars?”, the CEO responded with an exact percentage – 70% – without skipping a beat. Musk also fervently and rather eloquently refuted the popular and harebrained idea that any SpaceX-enabled Mars colony would simply become “an escape hatch for the rich”. If the rich wanted Mars or lunar bases as “escape hatches”, there are dozens of multibillionaires that could singlehandedly fund Musk’s estimated $2-10B price tag for the completion of the entire BFR development program while still retaining 50-90% of their net worth.
Musk’s retort is worth reading in full.
Mike Allen: “[Mars] could be an escape hatch for rich people.”
Elon Musk: “No! Your probability of dying on Mars is much higher than earth. Really the ad for going to Mars would be like Shackleton’s ad for going to the Antarctic. It’s gonna be hard. There’s a good chance of death, going in a little can through deep space. You might land successfully. Once you land successfully, you’ll be working nonstop to build the base. So, you know, not much time for leisure, and once you get there, even after doing all this, it’s a very harsh environment, so there’s a good chance you die there. We think you can come back but we’re not sure. Now, does that sound like an escape hatch for rich people?”
Back to BFR
While thoroughly entertaining, the most interesting aspect of this one-minute teaser was the approximate two seconds where Musk suggested that SpaceX had recently made several major breakthroughs in the context of BFR and Mars. What exactly those breakthroughs could be is entirely unclear, but the fact that Musk seemed positive about the recent developments and spoke of “breakthroughs” at all feels like an encouraging sign that the last two weeks of Musk’s chaotic announcements, updates, and abrupt cancellations are less indicative of program instability than they initially seemed to be.
Most notably, Musk appeared to announce and then completely cancel a sort of mini-spaceship that SpaceX was to base off of Falcon 9’s upper stage as a BFR spaceship technology demonstrator in less than two weeks. If realized, that mini-BFS would have reentered Earth’s atmosphere at orbital velocities to flight-test hypersonic fins and a new “ultra light” heat shield that will be (or would have been) critical for the overall success of BFS/Starship.
Contour remains approx same, but fundamental materials change to airframe, tanks & heatshield
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 25, 2018
Ironically, in the middle of writing this article, Musk tweeted specifically about “fundamental” changes to the spaceship, leaving little more than the general appearance and propulsion systems unchanged. In essence, the design of BFS/Starship is now almost unrecognizable when compared with past iterations, at least from a perspective of the ship’s most critical systems.If Starship will not be built out of composites, then it’s possible that the multiple years SpaceX engineers and technicians have spent trying to develop large carbon composite propellant tanks (2016-present) and the time, energy, and capital put into those efforts will be almost entirely for naught if BFR pivots away from composite tanks.
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- A tall platform was moved inside the tent around November 10th, likely to support the integration of the tank dome and barrel section. (Pauline Acalin)
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- The dome was spied inside the tent on November 12. (Pauline Acalin)
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- SpaceX’s BFR tent is filled with custom hardware that is predominately useful only for building large composite rocket parts. (Pauline Acalin)
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- SpaceX’s huge Port of LA-based BFR tent, September 18th. (Pauline Acalin)
By all appearances, dozens of employees have spent the last year accepting delivery of $10-50M worth of custom-built composite tooling, setting it up, and building giant composite tank domes and segments. If composite tanks are no longer planned for the booster or spaceship, all that work may have been for nothing. Needless to say, we could certainly do for Musk’s proposed Reddit AMA – if not an entirely new BFR update event – to shed some light on the machinations behind these earthshaking programmatic changes.
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SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout
SpaceX launched the classified USSF-385 mission from Vandenberg, landing its booster on a tenth flight.
SpaceX launched another classified mission for the U.S. Space Force from California early Saturday morning, and the Falcon 9 booster that carried it landed on a drone ship in the Pacific for the tenth time. The USSF-385 mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:00 a.m. PT.
Booster B1100 touched down on Of Course I Still Love You roughly eight and a half minutes after liftoff. It was the booster’s tenth flight and tenth successful landing, following the NROL-95 national security mission and eight Starlink launches. Its previous flight, a Starlink Group 15 mission on August 22, came just 35 days earlier. SpaceX ended its livestream shortly after the landing, which is standard for classified payloads, and neither the company nor the Space Force has said what the rocket carried.
Watch Falcon 9 launch the USSF-385 mission from pad 4E in California https://t.co/CAdbx85Ydy
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 26, 2026
USSF-385 is the fourth Space Force launch from the same Vandenberg pad in roughly six weeks, following USSF-366 on August 15, USSF-153 on September 10, and USSF-259 on September 17. When SpaceX flew USSF-366 in August, independent trackers noted that the rocket’s stage drop zones matched SpaceX’s Starlink Group 15 missions, pointing to Starshield, the government version of the Starlink satellite bus. The Space Force later cataloged 23 satellites after both USSF-366 and USSF-153, while USSF-259 placed 17 satellites into a different orbital plane, per KeepTrack. Launch databases describe USSF-385 the same way, though the payload remains officially unidentified.
The cadence lines up with the contracts, because in July, the Space Force awarded SpaceX $1.6 billion in task orders for 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg through the end of 2027. SpaceX also holds contracts to build pieces of that same network, which pushed its Pentagon contract total for 2026 past $8 billion.
Saturday’s flight was also the sixth and final Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg in September, according to Spaceflight Now, while only one Falcon 9 flew from the East Coast this month as SpaceX shifts its Florida infrastructure toward Starship. Launch trackers list it as SpaceX’s 112th mission of 2026 and the 108th Falcon 9 flight of the year, with SLC-4E turned around about six and a half days after its previous launch.
The West Coast pad will not stay quiet for long, considering SpaceX has another Starlink mission scheduled from SLC-4E on September 30. Meanwhile, in Texas, the company is two days away from Starship Flight 14, which is targeting Monday at 7:15 a.m. CT for the vehicle’s first attempt to reach orbit.
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Tesla hints at new Roadster design in surprise clip
Tesla ended its Semi event with a Roadster teaser revealing a new front light bar.
Tesla closed out its Semi event in Nevada on Thursday night with a nod to its own history, dropping a short Roadster teaser that suggests the production car will look noticeably different from the prototype first shown in 2017.
“We can’t have a Semi event without the Roadster,” Tesla engineering executive Lars Moravy told the crowd before the clip played. The line was a deliberate callback. Tesla first revealed the next generation Roadster in November 2017 by driving it out of the back of a Semi trailer at the truck’s original unveiling in Hawthorne, California.
The new video opens on trailer doors swinging apart in the dark. A thin white light bar glows across what appears to be the nose of the car, Tesla and SpaceX logos flash over the frame, and the Roadster name appears before the clip ends on “See you next week.” Tesla posted the nine second clip on X after the livestream wrapped.
See you next week pic.twitter.com/BT52bGVxFu
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 25, 2026
The light bar is the most concrete design detail so far. The 2017 prototype used two separate curved headlamp pods, while a connected front light strip would bring the Roadster in line with the Cybertruck, Cybercab, Semi, and refreshed Model Y. Sawyer Merritt was among the first to point out what looked like part of a SpaceX logo in the video, something Tesla has not addressed.
That logo fits the buildup around the optional SpaceX Package, which Elon Musk has long said would use cold gas thrusters to improve acceleration and possibly allow the car to briefly leave the ground. Tesla’s “Go for launch” post on September 12 set the October 1 date, and invitations sent to reservation holders place the event in Waco, Texas, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Waco sits roughly 20 minutes from SpaceX’s McGregor rocket test site, where the FAA has put a temporary flight restriction in place from September 18 through October 2, covering a 1.5 nautical mile radius from the surface up to 10,000 feet.
Tesla is also taking money ahead of the reveal. The company reopened Roadster reservations earlier this week with a $5,000 refundable card payment, followed by a $45,000 wire transfer due within 10 days. That puts buyers at $50,000 committed before Tesla has published a price.
The original pitch set a high bar: 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds before any upgrades, 620 miles of range, a top speed above 250 mph, and production in 2020. That timeline has slipped repeatedly, and Tesla has since pointed to production at Gigafactory Texas no earlier than 2027. The company has said next Thursday’s event will include pricing, specifications, and production targets, the three details original reservation holders have been waiting on for nearly nine years.
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s release in Europe is set to be delayed by at least a few months.
The European Union will not vote on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on October 6. The draft agenda for the 119th meeting of the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles lists only a 25-minute “continuation of discussions” on the Netherlands’ Article 39 request, not a decision. The next scheduled TCMV session is in December, which is now the earliest date a bloc-wide vote could occur.
Tesla Europe had pointed to October 6 as a possible EU-wide vote after the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted the first European type approval on April 10.
That approval, under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption in EU Regulation 2018/858, is the legal file other member states have been recognizing one by one. The same committee has already discussed the request twice without voting.
Elon Musk’s reply to the delay was a single word: “Sigh.”
Sigh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2026
Seven EU countries have now cleared FSD Supervised on their own roads: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, and Czechia. Those seven states represent about 53 million people, or roughly 12 percent of the EU population. An EU-wide authorization still needs a qualified majority: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population, about 292 million people.
Germany, France, Italy, and Spain remain the decisive markets. France has already rejected the current system; several other governments have flagged speed-limit compliance as the main sticking point.
The safety case Tesla is putting in front of those governments is now public. On September 1, Tesla Europe said FSD Supervised was in use by more than 70,000 customers, covering over 1 million kilometers a day, and was 4.1 times less likely to be involved in a crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on EU public roads.
An earlier mid-year cut of the same fleet data, covering 65 million kilometers in five approved countries, put the collision advantage at 5.2 times, with zero highway collisions over 41.9 million kilometers. Tesla also reported far fewer automatic emergency braking events, harsh accelerations, and hard swerves than in comparable manual Tesla driving. Those figures are company-reported, not independently audited.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is taking over Europe: fourth country gets FSD approval
The public-health backdrop is harder to dispute. European countries recorded about 19,400 road deaths in 2025, or roughly 53 a day, most of them attributed to human error. FSD Supervised is not unsupervised autonomy; the driver remains legally responsible. But the software is already legal and in daily use across seven member states.
Until TCMV votes, the rest of the EU remains a patchwork: available in Prague and Amsterdam, locked behind review in Paris and Berlin. December is now the next chance to close that gap.
SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout
Tesla hints at new Roadster design in surprise clip
