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SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says Starship (BFS) hop tests could start in early 2019
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has taken to Twitter to share an unexpected wealth of detail about the “radical” and largely unpublicized design changes the company’s Starship and Super Heavy (BFS & BFB) have undergone in 2018.
Beside information ranging from discussions of metallurgy to overall design philosophy and comparisons, the eccentric CEO also offered the most concrete target yet for the beginning of prototype spaceship (BFS/Starship) hop tests in South Texas – “March/April [2019]”.
I will do a full technical presentation of Starship after the test vehicle we’re building in Texas flies, so hopefully March/April
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 22, 2018
On one hand, this expeditious new testing schedule – acknowledged by Musk himself to be “much sooner than expected” – is a thrilling prospect, given that it implies that a nearly full-scale prototype of Starship (or something vaguely approximating the spacecraft) could take its first baby steps into the air as early as the first quarter of 2019. On the other hand, however, this is an almost bafflingly large schedule change considering that SpaceX President and COO Gwynne Shotwell asserted that a prototype of BFS (now Starship) could begin “hopping” by late 2019, speaking in September 2018.
Shotwell: think we’ll be “hopping” the second stage of BFR (the BFS) late next year. #DARPA60
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) September 6, 2018
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Schedules (especially aerospace program schedules) do certainly tend to be chaotic and jumpy, but it’s almost inconceivable that any given project – regardless of the scope or scale – could wind up reaching completion nine months earlier than previously forecasted without suffering one or several dramatic compromises, typically involving lower-fidelity testing and prototypes or watered-down deliverables. It’s unclear if BFR has suffered the same fate, but – to put it lightly – the South Texas sight greeting the eyes of close followers of SpaceX’s BFR program is downright unbelievable.
BFWhat?!
Given the very recent and conspicuous additions of triangular appendages that look precisely like rudimentary fins and an obvious nose cone assembly, the only possible conclusion to draw from photos of SpaceX’s Boca Chica facilities taken in the last week or two is that the company (and/or contractors) are busy building something related to Starship. At least in these early stages, the… thing being built could be best described as what might come to mind if you asked an imaginative kid to build a full-scale sculpture of Tintin’s spaceship on a budget of maybe $500,000.
You got something to show us in Texas? pic.twitter.com/vBF0WwwIfF
— Robotbeat🗽 ➐ (@Robotbeat) December 22, 2018
More likely than not, this could be a case of things being more than they seem. To most, it may almost look like an elaborate prank, but that assumes that we know the full story and have a decent working understanding of aerospace prototyping. For the vast majority of us, that is simply not the case – what looks like a spade is probably not a spade.
At the end of the day, the most basic of observations – that this purported ‘Starship prototype’ will begin hop tests with extraordinarily powerful Raptor engines installed as few as three months from now – suggest that this spooky metal contraption will be used to conduct the most basic of Starship tests. As such, it will probably never travel much faster than Falcon 9’s Grasshopper and F9R predecessors, which tended to gently accelerate from the ground to as high as a kilometer or two before slowly heading back down for a powered landing.
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- What now seem to be extremely rough fin outlines were welded to the main steel cylinder like giant metal straws. (bocachicagal – NASASpaceflight)
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- ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ (bocachicagal – NASASpaceflight)
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- SpaceX recovery technicians work on Falcon 9 with similar cherry-picker lifts, offering a sense of scale of the new Starship water tower. (Pauline Acalin)
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- A conspicuous nosecone appears to have arisen inside SpaceX’s new Boca Chica tent, adjacent to what looks like a water tower with tube legs. (bocachicagal – NASASpaceflight)
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- (bocachicagal – NASASpaceflight)
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Given that SpaceX has already refined this complex and challenging task to a reliable science with Falcon 9 and Merlin 1D, it’s unclear why a very similar test campaign would be of serious value to the company without simultaneously testing full-fidelity control surfaces (fins), exotic new stainless steel propellant tank technologies, and more. Perhaps SpaceX just really wants to ensure that Starship will be capable of landing and taking off from an unprepared and angled surface of the type it could (will?) experience on Mars. Maybe the company simply wants to have a bare-minimum flying platform capable of testing and refining multi-engine configurations of Raptor.
All that can be said for sure at the moment is that the public simply does not have the full story to explain the moderately shocking activity going on in Boca Chica. Musk did state that he would provide another technical update on the status of Starship and the BFR program as a whole in the first half of 2019, but only after the first Starship hopper flights have begun. It would seem that those on the sidelines will simply have to wallow in confusion and wild speculation for another ~3-4 months at minimum, hopefully only going moderately insane as a result.
In the meantime, copious thanks are owed to NASASpaceflight members bocachicagal and Nomadd for their relentless and thorough coverage of SpaceX’s activities in the obscure far south of the Texan coast, as well as their courteous permission for media outlets like Teslarati to republish their photos. Cheers!
For prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket recovery fleet check out our brand new LaunchPad and LandingZone newsletters!
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Venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya has cautioned investors shorting SpaceX shares, drawing a direct parallel to the intense short-selling pressure Tesla faced in its early public years.
Responding to reports of elevated short interest in the newly public rocket, satellite, and AI company, Palihapitiya noted that similar dynamics played out with Tesla, where aggressive short sellers ultimately “went broke.”
SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) went public on June 12, 2026, in the largest IPO on record, pricing at $135 per share. Shares quickly surged to an all-time high of $225.64 just days later, briefly implying a valuation exceeding $2 trillion. The stock has since retreated sharply amid valuation concerns, lockup expiration fears, and broader market dynamics.
By early August, it traded near $108–$125, representing a roughly 50 percent decline from the peak and bringing the market capitalization closer to the $1.5–1.7 trillion range. On August 4, shares closed up more than 9 percent at $125.33 ahead of earnings before facing pressure in after-hours and premarket trading.
Short interest has climbed dramatically. According to S3 Partners data widely cited in market reports, short positions reached approximately 219.3 million shares by late July, about 34 percent of the limited public float of roughly 640 million shares, and represented a notional value of around $24.6 billion.
Utilization of shares available to borrow hit 95 percent, with borrow fees rising. This level of shorting exceeded the dollar value of short bets against Tesla at the time and built rapidly ahead of two catalysts: the company’s first post-IPO earnings and an August 6 lockup expiration that could free up to 911.5 million additional shares.
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CEO Elon Musk has issued warnings of his own. In mid-July, as short interest approached one-third of the float, he posted that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” reiterating his view that the company could ultimately be worth more than Earth if it achieves its goals.
On August 4, just before earnings, Musk responded to the latest short-interest data by saying, “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
SpaceX delivered its first quarterly results as a public company after the close on August 4. Second-quarter revenue rose 92 percent year-over-year to $7.8 billion, beating consensus estimates near $6.8–6.9 billion.
The net loss narrowed to $541 million, or 9 cents per share, better than the roughly 23–24 cent loss expected. Starlink/connectivity contributed about $4.3 billion (up 66 percent), while the AI business generated $2.6 billion (up roughly 250 percent). Capital expenditures were heavy at $18.4 billion, largely tied to AI infrastructure. Management projected a $100 billion annualized revenue run rate by year-end 2026 and outlined a path toward $1 trillion in annual revenue by 2030.
The combination of Chamath’s historical reminder, Musk’s repeated alerts, and the company’s ambitious growth targets underscores the high-stakes debate surrounding SPCX. Short sellers are positioned for near-term supply pressure from the lockup, while long-term bulls point to Starlink scale, Starship progress, and AI compute expansion as reasons the bears may ultimately face the same fate as many early Tesla skeptics.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX and Nvidia team up on Musk’s orbital AI bet
SpaceX revealed a new Nvidia satellite partnership, then Musk pledged an exclusive Nvidia hardware commitment.
SpaceX and Nvidia are now working together on the hardware that will power Musk’s orbital data center ambitions. SpaceX announced on X on Tuesday that it is partnering with Nvidia to design the compute payload for Starmind AI1, the first satellite in a planned constellation built to run AI workloads directly in orbit. Each Starmind satellite will carry Nvidia’s Rubin GPUs and Vera CPUs, according to the post, which included renderings of the payload design.
The announcement landed hours before SpaceX’s first earnings call as a public company, where Musk went further, saying the company has committed to building its AI infrastructure exclusively on Nvidia hardware. “We think the Vera Rubin architecture is the best architecture. We think it’s the best AI computer, and we greatly value our close cooperation and partnership on many levels with Nvidia,” Musk told investors on the call,. “So we’re exclusive to Nvidia.”
Musk said SpaceX plans to deploy Nvidia’s Vera Rubin NVL72 rackscale system, codenamed Kyber, both on the ground and in space. He set a target of 2 gigawatts of compute capacity online by the end of this year, scaling to roughly 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027.
SpaceX’s newest Starmind will make earth data centers obsolete
Starmind has been in development since Musk confirmed the name in June, following an xAI trademark filing that tipped off the project before SpaceX made it official. The idea is massive in scope and instead of moving data down to ground based servers, satellites equipped with onboard processors and large solar arrays would compute AI workloads in orbit and beam results back to Earth. SpaceX has already filed with the FCC for a constellation of up to one million satellites to support the effort, citing constant solar power and the absence of zoning restrictions as advantages over terrestrial data centers.
The Nvidia exclusivity marks a shift in tone from just two weeks ago, when Musk was busy knocking down a report that SpaceX had ordered $52 billion worth of Nvidia GPUs through Foxconn, calling it fake news at the time. The dollar figure in that rumor may have been wrong, but the underlying direction seems correct. SpaceX’s AI division already leases Colossus compute capacity to Anthropic and Google, and Tuesday’s earnings report showed AI revenue climbing sharply as those deals ramp up.
Nvidia shares rose roughly 3% in Tuesday trading on the news, while SpaceX stock climbed nearly 9% during the day before giving back gains after hours as investors digested the earnings report’s capital spending figures.
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SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX) reported a beat in revenues and EBITDA in its first earnings call report while also minimizing losses as its business continues to gain momentum.
After its IPO in July, SpaceX saw some tough losses on Wall Street due to a major selloff after a delay in its 13th Starship test flight. The ship launched later that week and completed what was arguably the most successful IFT operation in the Starship program’s history.
Nevertheless, the company is continuing on and reported some encouraging financials while also promoting what appears to be a robust outlook moving forward in its Space, AI, and Connectivity divisions.
SpaceX to report first-ever earnings today: here’s what to expect
Earnings Results
- Revenues: $7.8 billion reported vs. $6.7 billion expected
- Adjusted EBITDA: $3.5 billion vs. $2 billion expected
- Net loss of $541 million, an improvement of $467 million from net loss of $1.0 billion
Additionally, CFO Bret Johnsen had these comments:
“2026 has been a momentous year so far, and the second quarter demonstrated the true power of SpaceX. Revenue growth accelerated across all our business segments and we delivered strong operating leverage, with significant margin expansion led by our new AI compute agreements. Our unparalleled leadership in launch, Starlink subscriber growth, new enterprise and government partnerships, and best-in-class AI infrastructure underscore our ability to drive meaningful scale and deliver attractive returns. As a newly public company, we are delighted to welcome our broad base of shareholders and bondholders. We ended the second quarter with $100 billion of cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities, and $47.5 billion in backlog. This financial strength gives us substantial capacity to invest in Starship, Starlink Broadband and Mobile satellites, and our AI platform, while maintaining a disciplined long-term capital allocation framework.”
Space Business Highlights
SpaceX shared some of its biggest Space Business Highlights for Q2:
- Space revenues grew 55% sequentially and 29% year-over-year to $962 million, driven by a higher number of large customer launches and a favorable customer shift compared to the prior year
- Total costs and expenses for the Space segment were up by $389 million year-over-year, as we continued to accelerate R&D investments in our Starship program, which we believe will reduce the cost to orbit by 99% or more relative to the historical average, and unlock significant revenue potential across all business segments
- Leading launch provider for the world with 78 launches and 1,041 metric tons of mass to orbit deployed over the six months ended June 30, 2026, primarily allocated to Connectivity for the deployment of our Starlink constellation
- Starship V3 development continued to advance towards full and rapid reusability:
- Completed Starship V3’s first suborbital mission in May, Flight 12, which achieved a successful lift off from our new Starbase pad, a precision landing of Starship’s upper stage, and deployment of modified V2 Starlink satellites
- Subsequent to the second quarter, completed Starship Flight 13 in July, which achieved all flight objectives including deploying 20 production V3 satellites, demonstrating in-space relight of a Raptor engine, and executing the softest ever splashdown of Starship, providing critical views of an intact heatshield
SpaceX will report its earnings today at 4:30 P.M. EDT.
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SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
SpaceX and Nvidia team up on Musk’s orbital AI bet
