News
SpaceX envisions massive rocket enclosure for military applications
SpaceX has published the first renders of a massive tower (MST) designed to fully enclose a Falcon Heavy rocket, giving the US military access to certain prized satellite payloads even when the vehicle is vertical at the launch pad.
Stretching some 70 m (230 ft) tall and 12.2 m (40 ft) wide, building a movable tower capable of fully enclosing SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rockets is no mean feat. Known as a mobile service tower (MST), SpaceX has managed to avoid the need for the expensive, complex, and extremely unwieldy infrastructure for the first decade of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy launch operations. Instead, SpaceX has designed its launch vehicles around the concept of horizontal integration, meaning that its Falcon rockets can be entirely integrated and prepared for flight before going vertical for launch. This approach has ensured easy, cheap access to the entire rocket and payload up until the last few days of static fire and launch operations, lowering the cost of launch.
Beyond Russian spaceflight operations, SpaceX, and a handful of other companies around the world, nearly all other major launch providers and space agencies – including the United Launch Alliance (ULA), Arianespace, ISRO (India), and CNSA (China) – rely almost exclusively on vertical integration. With its new Pad 39A mobile tower, SpaceX will soon join that small club, giving it the ability to compete on completely even footing with ULA and others for lucrative military launch contracts.
While one only has so much flexibility when designing a mobile skyscraper that needs to survive Florida’s hurricane seasons, SpaceX’s solution is still visually unique. According to the company, the mobile service tower (MST) it plans to build at its Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Launch Complex 39A (Pad 39A) facilities will measure 87m (284 ft) from its wheels to the top of its roof, while the tower’s ‘crawler’ base will be some 36m x 33m (118 ft x 108 ft) wide, a quarter of the area of a US football field.
During launch preparations, SpaceX would integrate its Falcon Heavy and Falcon 9 rockets like usual, joining boosters, side boosters, upper stages, and recovery while still horizontal inside its Pad 39A hangar. The integrated rocket would be installed (still horizontal) on 39A’s transporter/erector (T/E) – the white steel structure seen backing the rocket above – and rolled out to the launch mount, where the T/E is effectively bolted into the ground before lifting the rocket vertical.
Once vertical, SpaceX’s new tower would slowly crawl about 40m (130 ft) to fully encompass a given Falcon Heavy or Falcon 9 rocket. Once safely inside the MST, 11 different levels would give SpaceX and customer technicians access to the vast majority of the rocket. Most importantly, the tower would allow SpaceX technicians to crane certain US military payloads – encapsulated inside a Falcon payload fairing – onto the top of the rocket.
At the end of the day, that’s really the only reason SpaceX needs such a tower – certain customers (the US military and, to a lesser extent, NASA) have certain payloads that they either can’t or won’t tweak to allow for horizontal integration. No schedule for the MST construction has been mentioned yet but knowing SpaceX, it’s safe to say it could be completed sooner than later once environmental impact studies are complete and construction permits have been secured.
Check out Teslarati’s Marketplace! We offer Tesla accessories, including for the Tesla Cybertruck and Tesla Model 3.
Tesla has snagged a deal with IMC Logistics to supply the company with 50 Semi units for its logistics operations.
IMC handles drayage and landside logistics and has over 2,700 asset trucks in its fleet. In its over forty years of service, it has established more than 50 locations across the United States and spans operations from coast to coast.
Jim Gillis of IMC said that the addition of the Tesla Semi will help IMC move toward a “zero-emission service for long-haul lanes.”
The move is one that has become more common over the past few years, as more and more companies doing large-scale logistics have moved to sustainable powertrains, using either Tesla or others.
🚨 IMC Logistics announced that it will add 50 Tesla Semis to its fleet https://t.co/ymh1Ca2IuX
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 5, 2026
Tesla’s Semi program just entered its first truly public phase, as the company handed over its first production units to companies in September, although a pilot program with companies like PepsiCo. and Frito-Lay has been ongoing for years.
IMC announced its intention to purchase 50 Semi units from Tesla in September, and according to VP of Marketing and Public Relations on September 29 to Trucking Drive, the company will take delivery either this week or took delivery late last week.
With surging prices of diesel and high logistics costs, Tesla and the Semi could truly revolutionize how companies manage their fleets. With the advent of Full Self-Driving, the Semi will potentially cut down on driver fatigue and increase productivity, while decreasing the cost of operation per mile by being cheaper to refuel.
Tesla had a dedicated Semi handover event at the Semi factory in Sparks, Nevada, a few weeks back, as it officially introduced its truck to many company fleets that have been waiting to add these sustainable powertrains.
Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
Tesla snags Semi supply deal with major logistics firm
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
