SpaceX has confirmed that the two large propellant tanks now present at its Boca Chica, Texas facilities will likely to be the last major ground tanks needed to enable the first test flights of the upper stage of its next-gen BFR rocket, known as the Big Falcon Spaceship (BFS).
Expected to begin as soon as late 2019, SpaceX executives have recently reiterated plans for a campaign of hop tests for the first full-scale spaceship prototype, in which the ship will follow in the footsteps of its Falcon 9-based Grasshopper and F9R predecessors.
https://twitter.com/krgv_mike/status/1055748966619537408
In a comment provided to a number of local outlets, SpaceX Communications Specialist Sean Pitt stated this about the recent arrival of a second large propellant storage tank at the company’s prospective South Texas test and launch facilities.
“The ongoing construction of our launch pad in South Texas is proceeding well. SpaceX has now received the final major ground system tank needed to support initial test flights of the Big Falcon Spaceship.” – Sean Pitt, SpaceX
While there may have been some slight uncertainty before, this official statement confirms beyond the shadow of a doubt that SpaceX is actively and rapidly preparing its South Texas property for a future of BFR-related tests, spaceship hops, and perhaps even launches.
Same dance, different hops
Unlike Falcon 9’s Grasshopper and F9R reusability development programs, SpaceX’s BFS hop test campaign is likely going to be much more aggressive in order to gather real flight-test data on new technologies ranging from unfamiliar aerodynamic control surfaces (wings & fins vs. grid fins), all-composite propellant tanks (Falcon uses aluminum-lithium), a 9m-diameter vehicle versus Falcon’s 3.7m, a massive tiled heat-shield likely to require new forms of thermal protection, and entirely new regimes of flight (falling like a skydiver rather than Falcon 9’s javelin-style attitude) – to name just a handful.
To fully prove out or at least demonstrate those new technologies, BFS hop testing is likely to be better described as “flight testing”, whereby the spaceship launches vertically but focused primarily on regimes where horizontal velocity is far more important than vertical velocity.
“But by ‘hopper test,’ I mean it’ll go up several miles and then come down. The ship will – the ship is capable of a single stage to orbit if you fully load the tanks. So we’ll do flights of increasing complexity. We really want to test the heat shield material. So I think we’ll fly out, turn around, accelerate back real hard and come in hot to test the heat shield because we want to have a highly reusable heat shield that’s capable of absorbing the heat from interplanetary entry velocities, which is really tricky.” – CEO Elon Musk, October 2017
Focusing on the important things (for fully-reusable rockets)
SpaceX does has significant familiarity with the general style of testing expected to be used to prove out its next-gen spaceship, a major department from anything the company has yet built or flown. Updated in September 2018 by CEO Elon Musk, the craft’s most recent design iteration is reportedly quite close to being finalized. That near-final design prominently features a trio of new aft fins (two able to actuate as control surfaces), two forward canards, and an updated layout of seven Raptor engines.
Critically, SpaceX has decided to commonize BFR’s main propulsion, choosing to skip the performance benefits of a vacuum-optimized Raptor variant for the simplicity and expediency of exclusively using sea level Raptors on both the booster and spaceship. This decision is ultimately strategic and well-placed: rather than concerning early-stage development with the inclusion of a second major branch of onboard propulsion, the company’s engineers and technicians can place their focus almost entirely on a one-size-fits-all version of BFR with plenty of room for upgrades down the road.
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- BFS seen standing vertically on the pads of its tripod fins. (SpaceX)
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- (SpaceX)
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- A better view. (SpaceX)
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- BFR’s booster and spaceship separate a few minutes after launch. (SpaceX)
With a rocket as large as BFR and a sea level engine already as efficient as Raptor, the performance downgrade wrought by the initial removal of Raptor Vacuum (RVac) is scarcely more than a theoretical diversion. The specific performance numbers remain to be seen but will likely be greater than 100 metric tons (~220,000 lbs) to low Earth orbit (LEO). Past a certain point, however, the actual performance to LEO and beyond is almost irrelevant, at least from a perspective of individual launches. The paradigm SpaceX is clearly already interrogating is one where the cost of individual launches is so low relative to today’s expendable launch pricing ($5,000-20,000/kg to LEO) that it will almost be anachronistic to design or work with a single-launch-limit in mind, a limit that is just shy of a natural law in the spaceflight industries of today.
Because SpaceX has already demonstrated expertise in vertically launching, landing, and generally controlling large rockets, the main challenges faced with BFR are more operational than purely technical. To be clear, the technical challenges are still immense, but successfully solving those challenges by no means guarantees that the aircraft-like operational efficiency needed for BFR to succeed can or will be fully realized.
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- A gif of Raptor throttling over the course of a 90+ second static-fire test in McGregor, Texas. (SpaceX)
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- SpaceX’s subscale Raptor engine has completed more than 1200 seconds of testing in less than two years. (SpaceX)
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- A closeup of BFS’ nose section, featuring impressively varied tile-sizes, joining methods, and extremely precise curves on the interface between canard wings and the hull. (SpaceX)
In 2016, Musk pegged SpaceX’s cost goals for a BFR-style fully-reusable rocket at less than $1M per launch for booster and spaceship maintenance alone, or $3.3M per launch with amortization (paying for the debt/investment incurred to fund BFR’s development) and propellant estimates included. To realize those ambitious costs, SpaceX will effectively have to beat the expendable but similarly-sized Saturn V’s per-launch costs (~$700M) by a factor of 100 to 200 – more than two orders of magnitude – and SpaceX’s own Falcon 9 and Heavy launch costs (~$55M to $130M) by 20-50X.
To even approach those targets, SpaceX will need to learn how to launch Falcon and BFR near-autonomously with near-total and refurbishment-free reusability, while also developing and demonstrating orbital refueling capabilities that do not currently exist and rapidly maturing large-scale composite tankage and structures. None of those things require Raptor Vacuum.
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Tesla pulls back the curtain on Cybercab mass production
Tesla’s Cybercab drives itself off the Gigafactory Texas line in a striking new production video.
Tesla has provided a first look from inside a production Cybercab as it drove itself off the assembly line at Gigafactory Texas. The video footage, posted on X, opens on the factory floor with robotic arms and assembly equipment visible through the Cybercab windshield, and follows the car through a branded tunnel marked “Cybercab”, before autonomously navigating itself to a holding lot.
The first Cybercab rolled off the Giga Texas production line on February 17, 2026, with Musk writing on X, “Congratulations to the Tesla team on making the first production Cybercab.” April marked the official shift to volume production. The Giga Texas line is being prepared to produce hundreds of units per week, with 60 units already spotted on the Gigafactory campus earlier this month.
Purpose-built for autonomy
Cybercab in production now at Giga Texas pic.twitter.com/Y9qG3KyWBa
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 23, 2026
The Cybercab was first revealed publicly at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event in October 2024 at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, where 20 pre-production units gave attendees rides around the studio lot. Musk said he believed the average operating cost would be around $0.20 per mile, and that buyers would be able to purchase one for under $30,000. The two-seat design is deliberate. Musk noted that 90 percent of miles driven involve one or two people, making a compact two-passenger vehicle the most efficient configuration for a fleet-scale robotaxi. Eliminating rear seats also removes complexity and cost, supporting that sub-$30,000 target.
Tesla’s annual production goal is 2 million Cybercabs per year once several factories reach full design capacity. The Cybercab has no steering wheel, no pedals, and relies entirely on Tesla’s vision-based FSD system. What the video shows is the first evidence of that system working not as a demo, but as a production reality, driving itself off the line and into the world.
🚗 Our first ride in Tesla Cybercab last October: pic.twitter.com/kGqIqgJPRn https://t.co/BITCXFhbVd
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2025
Elon Musk
Elon Musk talks Tesla Roadster’s future
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Tesla pulls back the curtain on Cybercab mass production
Elon Musk talks Tesla Roadster’s future
