Over the last few weeks, SpaceX’s Florida Starship launch pad construction has made some major progress and the structure that will one day support the first East Coast Starship and Super Heavy flight tests have grown several stories tall and show no signs of slowing down.
In a bid to make what could otherwise be an extremely expensive and time-consuming ordeal much faster and cheaper, SpaceX’s Starship/Super Heavy launch pads will be quite a bit different from the company’s several existing launch pads. This includes Kennedy Space Center’s LC-39A pad, leased and operated by SpaceX for Falcon Heavy and Crew Dragon missions and formerly used for dozens of Space Shuttle launches and all Saturn V Apollo Moon missions.
In a very on-brand move, SpaceX has decided to build Starship’s East Coast orbital pad within the bounds of Pad 39A but without using the pad’s existing launch mount or concrete flame trench. Instead, SpaceX is building a separate steel mount and water-cooled thruster diverter designed to stand up to the fury of a Super Heavy booster without allowing the rocket’s plume to dig a crater in the ground after ever ignition.
While choosing to pursue a dramatically different launch pad design for Starship may at first glance seem risky, SpaceX actually has more than a decade of experience building and operating similar mount and flame diverter setups at its McGregor, Texas rocket development and test facilities. A step further, NASA itself once heavily relied on similar technologies and strategies to rapidly build, test, and fly rockets larger than anything that came before them.
Most notably, the Saturn I rocket that preceded the massive Saturn V used a launch mount and flame diverter that looks quite similar to a conceptual setup SpaceX recently showed off in an updated Starship launch render.
SpaceX’s Starship mount is substantially taller, has gone with steel instead of reinforced concrete, and will have a fixed flame deflector, but the similarities are otherwise significant. Conceptually, both mounts are topped with a flat surface with numerous support arms and a large cutout for the rocket to sit atop and its exhaust to exit through. Similar to Falcon 9, the single-core Super Heavy booster mount shown in SpaceX renders will likely have four hold-down clamps and two tail service masts (TSMs), umbilical connections that supply the rocket with propellant, electricity, connectivity, and any other required fluids.
As described and pictured above, Starship’s Pad 39A launch mount has rapidly grown from a few metal beams into a major structure in just the last few weeks. By rough estimate, the existing mount is already 20 or so meters (70+ ft) tall and has large mounts for the installation of additional structures on top of it, while the conceptual mount shown in SpaceX renders appears to be about 25-30 m (80-100 ft) tall.
In the last few days, technicians have begun installing the first framework of the flame diverter SpaceX will use to prevent Starship from damaging itself or its surroundings during static fires and launches. Given the fact that Starship’s Super Heavy booster – as currently described – will be the single most powerful launch vehicle in history, such a vast amount of energy is not easy to dissipate. To accomplish that task, SpaceX revealed in August 2019 planning documents that the 39A diverter would be water-cooled.
The largest thrust diverter SpaceX has built supports the company’s McGregor, Texas booster test stand and has supported dozens upon dozens of integrated static fire tests. Originally designed to enable integrated triple-booster Falcon Heavy testing, SpaceX ultimately decided not to use that capability but the diverter is still immense, likely measuring at least 15m (50 ft) tall and 10m (33 ft) wide. By building dozens of pipes into the surface and structure of the diverter and filling those pipes with recirculating water, it can survive several minutes of hot rocket exhaust without suffering catastrophic erosion or outright melting.
It’s safe to say that Super Heavy will require a diverter that is far larger still to survive thrust equivalent to more than three Falcon Heavy rockets, but that very diverter and launch mount are already well on their way to completion at SpaceX’s Kennedy Space Center launch pad.
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Elon Musk has acknowledged that early discussions with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) could bring the company into his ambitious Terafab semiconductor project, signaling a possible partnership with the world’s leading contract chipmaker.
Musk confirmed that early talks are underway, but as of right now, they are “just discussions.” There is no confirmation of a deal nor dismissal of the possibility of one, leaving open the prospect of one of the largest advanced-chip collaborations under discussion in the U.S.
@wholemars Just discussions, but something may come of it
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2026
The report that speculated on potential discussions between Terafab and TSMC comes from Tim Culpan, who outlined a few ways the collaboration could operate. One is TSMC using the project as an “anchor customer” for future facilities in Texas, potentially contributing process expertise, operational know-how, or capacity while Terafab provides capital, long-term purchase commitments, or both.
Tesla and SpaceX jointly developed the Terafab project, with Intel already participating on the tech side. Elon Musk announced the project in March, and it intends to produce more than one terawatt of AI compute capacity annually once fully built.
Company statements place the first phase at approximately $16.8 billion in cost, with later filings pointing to a total that could reach well into the tens of billions across multiple stages.
Intel joined the effort in April 2026 and is expected to supply its 14A manufacturing process for the full-scale plant.
Musk has said existing suppliers, including Samsung and TSMC, remain important for near-term needs; Tesla already has production arrangements with Samsung for AI5 and AI6 chips, but that future demand from Optimus robots, Cybercab vehicles, and planned space-based data centers will eventually exceed what the global industry can currently deliver.
Terafab is positioned as the long-term answer to that projected shortfall, and Tesla did something similar during COVID to avoid a chip shortage. This is just a much larger-scale solution.
If the partnership were to materialize, it would add TSMC’s industry-leading strategies to a project that already combines Tesla’s and SpaceX’s capital and offtake with Intel’s process technology. For now, the only public confirmation is Musk’s brief acknowledgement that conversations are occurring.
Tesla’s early strategy for charging units operating within its Robotaxi fleet reveals that the company surely has not lost any of that scrappy DNA that took it from an unlikely success story to the most valuable carmaker in the world.
An observer at a Tesla Supercharger in Austin spotted ten total Robotaxi vehicles arrive: one Cybercab and nine Model Y units. A Tesla employee was waiting at the lot and allowed each unit to park itself; every car that arrived had nobody in it.
Tesla wins FCC approval for wireless Cybercab charging system
The Tesla employee would walk around and plug each car in, adjusting the parking if needed:
So look at what I found. This is how Tesla charges unsupervised robotaxis at a public supercharger. Here is a driverless Cybercab showing up with no one in it. There are 9 other Model Ys that showed up too. A Tesla employee is walking around and plugging each of them in. She also moves the cars if they are not positioned well enough to charge. I love this process. One person charges multiple robotaxis at once
— Abhimanyu Yadav (@WorldlyReviewer) October 3, 2026
It’s a very interesting strategy, but extremely understandable at this early point in the Robotaxi program. It’s only been out for about 15 months, and Cybercab just entered the fleet in early September.
On top of that, Tesla is still working tirelessly on its wireless charging apparatus, and a new patent was just published regarding that product last week.
However, this is just another example of how Tesla still has plenty of that scrappy DNA leftover from the “production hell” days, when CEO Elon Musk slept on the floor of the factory, employees were working crazy hours, Tesla was building Sprung Structures to build cars in, and the company was tiptoeing on the brink of bankruptcy.
@Teslarati Sheer magnitude of the entire production system is hard to appreciate. Almost every element of production is >75% automated. Only wire harnesses & general assembly, which are <10% of production costs, are primarily manual.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2020
For now, Tesla is utilizing a simple system for recharging its ride-hailing vehicles, and that is a Tesla employee doing it manually until another solution presents itself. Sure, it’s not the most high-tech thing, and it certainly is not what people might have expected at this point in time, but it works, and it’s keeping the entire suite running.
Tesla is expanding its Robotaxi service hours by pushing the time back by one hour, keeping the ride-hailing service operational until 11 p.m., one hour later than previously.
CEO Elon Musk confirmed the change and offered a specific reason the expansion has been gradual: the system still needs to reliably avoid small pets that are difficult to see after dark, as they commonly blend into the color of the road, especially when they’re grey.
The latest adjustment restores only a fraction of the operating window the service once held. When paid Robotaxi rides began in Austin on June 22, 2025, vehicles ran from 6 a.m. to midnight.
In September 2025, Tesla lengthened the day to a 2 a.m. close, producing a 20-hour window that stayed in place for most of the following year. By early August of this year, the cutoff had already been pulled back; an August 26 update formalized hours of 6 a.m. to 10 p.m. across Austin and several other markets.
The October move to 11 p.m. therefore leaves the Austin day one hour shorter than the original launch schedule and three hours shorter than the 2025 peak.
Musk addressed the constraint directly after the announcement. “The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night,” he wrote. “Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.”
Robotaxi operating hours moved from 10pm to 11pm.
The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night. Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2026
The example points to a low-contrast perception problem in which a small animal can blend into the road surface under limited lighting.
Tesla’s vehicles rely on cameras and neural-network processing rather than lidar; Musk has previously argued that advanced vision software can extract useful information even in low light by analyzing photon counts, but the pet-detection case remains the stated limiter in later hours.
The modest schedule change arrives alongside faster growth in the purpose-built Cybercab fleet. Texas registration data tracked by observers showed the Austin Cybercab count rising sharply in recent weeks, reaching 169 vehicles after more than 100 were added in a short span.
Tesla has indicated that a broader shift toward 24-hour operation is tied to the upcoming FSD v15 software release expected this month on Robotaxi vehicles. Until that capability is validated for the edge cases Musk described, the company continues to add service time incrementally rather than jumping straight to overnight coverage.
The one-hour extension gives Austin riders a later option for evening trips while the underlying detection work continues.
Elon Musk teases TSMC as potential Terafab partner
Tesla reveals early Robotaxi charging strategy, showing scrappy DNA
