Connect with us

News

SpaceX’s Starship to grow in height as workers prepare to stack its top section

SpaceX technicians work to lift Starship Mk1 onto a mobile 'Roll-Lift" transport for easier movement around its production facilities. (Elon Musk)

Published

on

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has teased new details and posted several new photos of Starship Mk1, taken on September 25th as employees worked to lift the spacecraft’s lower half onto a mobile transporter. Up next: stacking the rocket’s two halves to reach its final 50m (160 ft) height.

The company is currently working around the clock to complete Starship Mk1’s assembly and integration ahead of Elon Musk’s planned September 28th presentation, meant to provide a detailed update on the state of the next-generation rocket’s design and development. A huge amount of work clearly remains but SpaceX is making major, visible progress almost every single day along the path to Starship’s first flight tests.

Taken yesterday afternoon, Musk’s photos show scenes before and after technicians placed Starship Mk1’s lower half – its tank and propulsion section – on a ‘Roll-Lift’, a small transporter. It’s unclear why exactly this was done, but SpaceX moved the spacecraft prototype about 100m and then removed it from the transporter.

The most recent movement happened just a few hours ago – technicians used a crane delivered on September 24th to lift the half-Starship onto what looked like half a dozen steel blocks on the ground, all captured live on LabPadre’s 24/7 livestream. In order to install Starship Mk1’s separate landing legs, believed to attach somewhere inside the vehicle’s aft circumference, SpaceX likely needed to lift the aft section off the concrete mount that had been its home for the past several months.

Elon Musk also confirmed that Starship Mk1 will have six landing legs, another strong indicator that the ongoing Thursday morning work is focused on preparing Starship Mk1 for leg installation. According to Musk, Starship Mk1 will weigh as much as 200 metric tons (440,000 lb) empty, which is probably why the rocket prototype’s aft – and heaviest – half had to be loaded onto a Roll-Lift and could not simply be moved by the crane itself.

Starship’s updated design remains a bit of a mystery just two days before Elon Musk is scheduled to present an update, likely including new renders from SpaceX itself. It remains to be seen if Starship’s six landing legs will be fixed (versus retractable) or if the legs on the windward side of the ship will jut out into the airstream. To ensure stability when landing on unprepared terrain, as Musk described, six legs are certainly better than three, but the actual span of those legs is a more relevant determinant of stability. Wide, Falcon 9-style legs would be optimal, indicating that the final ship will likely lean towards legs that can be retracted or at least angled behind Starship’s reentry ‘shadow’.

Still a prototype (and possibly meant solely for suborbital operation), Starship Mk1 (and Mk2) may feature simplified legs and mechanisms to speed things along, serving as more of a rough draft while Starhopper was akin to a Starship abstract or prospectus. At this rate, we won’t have to wait very long at all to find out.

Check out Teslarati’s Marketplace! We offer Tesla accessories, including for the Tesla Cybertruck and Tesla Model 3.

Advertisement
-

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.

Advertisement
Comments

News

Tesla Robotaxi app update now tells riders if Cybercab is the better choice

Tesla’s Robotaxi app now shows ETAs, wait times and availability for Cybercab and Model Y.

Published

on

By

Concept art of a Tesla Cybercab in Las Vegas Strip as rendered via Grok

Tesla has rolled out a new vehicle selection screen in its Robotaxi app, and it puts the numbers riders care about most in front of them before they book.

Version 26.11.0 of the app shows the estimated arrival time, the expected wait and current availability for each vehicle option on a single screen, according to a video shared by @gheeunit  on X on November 7. Riders deciding between a Cybercab and a Model Y Robotaxi can now compare those figures side by side instead of picking a car first and learning how long it will take afterward.

Tesla first gave riders that choice on September 3, the day paid Cybercab rides began in Austin. The original version of the screen listed the Cybercab, which seats two, next to the Model Y, which seats four. A later build, 26.8.2, added a seating capacity indicator so groups knew which car would fit them. What it did not show was whether choosing the Cybercab meant standing on the curb a few extra minutes.

That question matters more now than it did two months ago. Tesla had 45 Cybercabs on the Texas DMV roster when rides started. By late October the state listed 573, alongside 631 Model Ys, and community trackers logged a record 1,576 Cybercab sightings across Austin on Halloween alone. With two large fleets sharing one service area, the closest car and the quickest pickup are not always the same vehicle.

Advertisement
-

Inline availability also changes what happens when demand spikes. If no Cybercab is free nearby, the rider sees that on the selection screen rather than after trying to book one.

For now the comparison is mostly an Austin feature. Riders in Dallas, Houston, Fort Worth and the Florida markets are still matched with Model Y vehicles, though Tesla said on its third quarter earnings call that Cybercab rides would launch in Dallas this month.

The update follows a steady run of smaller changes to the rider experience. Late last month Tesla brought a quiet mode that blacks out the cabin screen to Model Y Robotaxis after first testing it in the Cybercab, and it has stretched Austin service to run from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m.

The Cybercab side of that selection screen is about to get much busier. Elon Musk said this week that Tesla will wind down Cybertruck production at Gigafactory Texas around the middle of 2027 to make room for more Cybercab output, and Tesla has said it is aiming to get Cybercabs to customers by the end of this year.

Tesla has not published official release notes for version 26.11.0.

Advertisement
-
Continue Reading

Cybertruck

Tesla is ending Cybertruck production

Published

on

Credit: diagnosticdennis/Instagram and @smile__no via Tesla Owners of Santa Clarita Valley/X

Tesla is ending Cybertruck production sometime in mid-2027, according to CEO Elon Musk.

Musk made the announcement on X last night, which came as a shock to many. He said that the Cybertruck will end production “to make room for increased Cybercab production” at Gigafactory Texas.

It is a huge blow to the fans of Tesla who have come to love the Cybertruck and identify with it as a symbol of their fandom. It has been the best-selling electric pickup, but it has had an underwhelming sales performance in terms of what was expected. This is mostly due to Tesla not meeting the prices it planned to offer the Cybertruck, as its unveiling and actual release were four years apart.

Overall, the responses were mixed. Some fans understood the move toward Cybercab production, especially as Tesla is truly pushing the autonomous future through its Robotaxi platform. However, others did not understand it.

“Damn, how many Cybercabs do you guys need?” one response read. Another said it was “Sad but understandable.”Even analyst Gary Black had responded to the news, stating he hoped Tesla planned to replace it with a traditional pickup design.

It doesn’t seem like that will be the case.

Tesla is so hell-bent on delivering autonomy and eventually providing a driverless service that owning a car seems like an arbitrary idea, according to their thesis. Instead, Cybercabs will be available to pick you up and drop you off on demand, safely, without any human help.

As a result, Tesla has thinned its lineup considerably, and one can only ask where the vehicle lineup goes from here. Eventually, it seems like Cybercab could be the only vehicle that Tesla will sell.

Continue Reading

Elon Musk

SpaceX’s next Starship flight set to make history on Friday the 13th

SpaceX is targeting Friday, November 13 for Starship Flight 15 and its first ship catch.

Published

on

By

SpaceX is targeting Friday, November 13 for Starship Flight 15, the mission the company plans to use for its first attempt at catching the ship itself with the launch tower.

SpaceX Vice President of Launch Kiko Dontchev shared the date on stage at the UP.Summit on Thursday, according to Ars Technica’s Eric Berger, who was in attendance. It is the first launch target to come directly from a SpaceX executive. Until now, the public schedule had relied on FAA air traffic planning slides, which listed Flight 15 for no earlier than November 8 and later November 12. SpaceX has not posted an official mission page yet, and no launch time has been shared.

The date lands inside the window Elon Musk sketched out last month. Speaking at Giga Texas on October 10, Musk said the flight would “probably launch a little bit before Thanksgiving,” as Teslarati reported. On SpaceX’s third quarter earnings call ten days later, he confirmed that Flight 15 would try to catch both the Super Heavy booster and the ship, and put the odds of a successful ship catch at “more likely than not.” SpaceX also aired an animation of the maneuver during that webcast, showing the ship swinging vertical over Starbase before dropping into the tower’s chopsticks.

The hardware is ready. Booster 22 fired all 33 of its Raptor engines for a full duration static fire at Pad 2 on October 25. Ship 42 followed with a single engine burn simulating a deorbit maneuver on October 26 and a 60 second firing of all six engines the next day, according to NASASpaceflight. Ship 42 had already rehearsed the catch in September, when the Pad 2 arms lifted it into position and crews connected the quick disconnect arm while the vehicle hung from the tower.

The remaining hurdle is regulatory. The FAA’s Starship page does not yet list a Flight 15 license. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said in October that, after “significant constructive engagement with the FAA,” she expects the license to cover a return to the launch site and a tower catch for both stages. Bringing the ship home means a reentry path that heads toward land, rather than ending over open ocean as every Starship flight so far has.

Advertisement
-

SpaceX has caught Super Heavy three times, on Flights 5, 7 and 8, but the ship comes back from orbital velocity and has never been caught. Flight 14 on September 28 was the first Starship to reach orbit, deploying 26 Starlink V3 satellites before splashing down despite an early engine shutdown that Musk blamed on engine computer software.

Musk has called a successful ship catch “the first time that there’s been full recovery of an orbital class rocket,” and he has already named the step after it: a Flight 16 where both the booster and the ship fly again. NASASpaceflight reports that Ship 43, the next vehicle in line, is set for static fire testing in December.

Continue Reading