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SpaceX’s Starhopper readies for more ambitious Raptor-powered flight tests
For the second time in two months, SpaceX technicians have begun to install a Raptor engine on Starhopper, a full-scale Starship testbed theoretically capable of low-velocity, moderate-altitude ‘hops’.
Back in late March, Raptor and Starhopper were joined for the first time, enabling a lengthy series of attempted tests that were followed by two engine ignitions and tethered hops before Raptor was removed for inspection. In the two months since that first round of integrated testing, SpaceX has significantly upgraded Starhopper and its spartan launch facilities, all focused on transforming the odd vehicle from a largely fixed test stand into a giant, mobile Grasshopper.
All the way back in 2012, SpaceX began testing Falcon 9 recovery and reusability concepts with a low-fidelity prototype known as Grasshopper – essentially a minimalist Falcon 9 first stage with ad hoc legs and a single Merlin engine. It supported a series of 8 major test flights – all successful and a source of valuable data – before the vehicle’s 2013 retirement. An upgraded Grasshopper – known instead as Falcon 9 Reusable Development Vehicle (F9R Dev1) – began testing around the same time and continued even higher altitude vertical takeoff/vertical landing (VTVL) tests until its untimely demise in August 2014.
Starhopper is quite similar, although it is also serving as a testbed for a far more varied range of technologies due to the fact that it has been developed before the inaugural launch of its namesake (Starship/Super Heavy). By the time SpaceX started Grasshopper/F9R tests, Falcon 9 had already completed several successful launches. With Starhopper, SpaceX is building and testing its first 9m-diameter ‘flight’ hardware, its first propellant tanks built out of steel, its first flight-capable rocket fueled by methane and oxygen, and its first mobile Raptor testbed, among numerous other things. The challenges are inherently much greater, but SpaceX has the luxury of taking the opposite approach it took towards Falcon 9 and building a launch vehicle entirely around its intended reusability, rather than trying to squeeze a method of reusability around an already-flying rocket.
Saurid Oddities
As noted by NASASpaceflight.com in a June 2nd article, SpaceX seems to be juggling its growing selection of newly-produced and tested Raptor engines in pursuit of Starhopper’s return to flight. According to the publication’s reliable sources,
“Up until recently, [SpaceX] was planning to utilize Raptor SN4 for [Starhopper’s first] untethered hops. However, the company has now decided to utilize this engine only for fit checks, and will instead perform the hops with SN5 – the latest Raptor to come out of SpaceX’s factory in Hawthorne, California.” – NASASpaceflight.com, June 2nd, 2019
This indicates that the Raptor engine delivered to Boca Chica on June 1st and currently in the process of being installed on Starhopper is actually more of a stand-in* for a future Raptor, SN05. The reasons behind this Raptor shuffle elude detection, but it’s possible that the simplest explanation – also posed by NASASpaceflight – is the correct one. By shipping a Raptor that may not be ready for flight tests, SpaceX could likely save anywhere from a few days up to a few weeks by doing everything short of lifting off under the powered of Raptor SN04.
*By all appearances, SN04 is a flight-grade Raptor that has completed assembly and likely been test-fired in McGregor, Texas. Why it may currently be resigned to a “stand-in” role is unknown.
It appears that the Raptor engine is not centered, could it be that they are going straight with the 3 engine test. (Idk honestly, I wonder why this is?) @elonmusk are things about to get epic?? pic.twitter.com/sne5v7SMhy— Austin Barnard? (@austinbarnard45) June 1, 2019
Very curiously, upon Raptor SN04’s South Texas arrival, it appears that SpaceX technicians have indeed rapidly installed the engine on Starhopper, but in a position that is decidedly off-center. Pictured above, the photo could have simply caught the engine while technicians were moving it to its actual installation spot, but it could also indicate that SpaceX is speeding towards Starhopper’s first triple-Raptor test flights.
Starhopper delays?
In line with the last-second switch from Raptor SN04 to Raptor SN05 as the engine-to-be for untethered hops, SpaceX has pushed the start of that test series from approximately May 31st to June 11th. More likely than not, the ~11-day delay is meant to allow time for Raptor SN05’s McGregor, Texas acceptance testing, given that – per CEO Elon Musk – the engine wasn’t even finished as of May 22nd.
On the other hand, with Raptor SN05 now scheduled to support Starhopper hop tests as early as mid-June, it begs the question of whether SpaceX is instead working towards expedited triple-Raptor testing. For unknown reasons, neither Raptor SN03 or SN04 are apparently ready to support flight operations, although both have been thoroughly hot-fired in McGregor. Perhaps each engine is a distinct prototype with a different level of experimental readiness, or perhaps SpaceX is just testing certain engines (like SN03) more extensively than others (SN05).
Regardless, SpaceX now seems to have 3-4 intact, functional Raptor engines (excluding SN01; destroyed during stress testing), 2-3 of which are actively testing or being worked on a day’s drive north of Boca Chica. SN02 – having successfully supported a brief duo of ignition tests with Starhopper – could still be intact and test-ready. SN03 is an unknown quantity, but SN04 is clearly in excellent shape and is probably close to flight-readiness if it isn’t already. This is to say that SpaceX likely already has three Raptors on hand that are capable of supporting multi-engine Starhopper testing, whether or not such a test regime would actually be valuable.
Musk has noted that both orbit-capable Starship prototypes will be far closer to finished products and will thus fly with “at least 3 engines” (3 sea level engines, as it would turn out) or even “all 6” (3 sea level, 3 vacuum-optimized). In the meantime, Starhopper stands with an off-centered Raptor, awaiting the arrival of a different Raptor to kick off a second hop test program. If nothing else, SpaceX’s Starship/Super Heavy development program is operating in a spectacularly hardware-rich fashion, lending itself to the breakneck-pace of iteration and improvement SpaceX is famous for.
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Tesla’s surprise Roadster video hints the 2017 design is gone
Tesla ended its Semi event with a Roadster teaser revealing a new front light bar.
Tesla closed out its Semi event in Nevada on Thursday night with a nod to its own history, dropping a short Roadster teaser that suggests the production car will look noticeably different from the prototype first shown in 2017.
“We can’t have a Semi event without the Roadster,” Tesla engineering executive Lars Moravy told the crowd before the clip played. The line was a deliberate callback. Tesla first revealed the next generation Roadster in November 2017 by driving it out of the back of a Semi trailer at the truck’s original unveiling in Hawthorne, California.
The new video opens on trailer doors swinging apart in the dark. A thin white light bar glows across what appears to be the nose of the car, Tesla and SpaceX logos flash over the frame, and the Roadster name appears before the clip ends on “See you next week.” Tesla posted the nine second clip on X after the livestream wrapped.
See you next week pic.twitter.com/BT52bGVxFu
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 25, 2026
The light bar is the most concrete design detail so far. The 2017 prototype used two separate curved headlamp pods, while a connected front light strip would bring the Roadster in line with the Cybertruck, Cybercab, Semi, and refreshed Model Y. Sawyer Merritt was among the first to point out what looked like part of a SpaceX logo in the video, something Tesla has not addressed.
That logo fits the buildup around the optional SpaceX Package, which Elon Musk has long said would use cold gas thrusters to improve acceleration and possibly allow the car to briefly leave the ground. Tesla’s “Go for launch” post on September 12 set the October 1 date, and invitations sent to reservation holders place the event in Waco, Texas, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Waco sits roughly 20 minutes from SpaceX’s McGregor rocket test site, where the FAA has put a temporary flight restriction in place from September 18 through October 2, covering a 1.5 nautical mile radius from the surface up to 10,000 feet.
Tesla is also taking money ahead of the reveal. The company reopened Roadster reservations earlier this week with a $5,000 refundable card payment, followed by a $45,000 wire transfer due within 10 days. That puts buyers at $50,000 committed before Tesla has published a price.
The original pitch set a high bar: 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds before any upgrades, 620 miles of range, a top speed above 250 mph, and production in 2020. That timeline has slipped repeatedly, and Tesla has since pointed to production at Gigafactory Texas no earlier than 2027. The company has said next Thursday’s event will include pricing, specifications, and production targets, the three details original reservation holders have been waiting on for nearly nine years.
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s release in Europe is set to be delayed by at least a few months.
The European Union will not vote on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on October 6. The draft agenda for the 119th meeting of the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles lists only a 25-minute “continuation of discussions” on the Netherlands’ Article 39 request, not a decision. The next scheduled TCMV session is in December, which is now the earliest date a bloc-wide vote could occur.
Tesla Europe had pointed to October 6 as a possible EU-wide vote after the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted the first European type approval on April 10.
That approval, under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption in EU Regulation 2018/858, is the legal file other member states have been recognizing one by one. The same committee has already discussed the request twice without voting.
Elon Musk’s reply to the delay was a single word: “Sigh.”
Sigh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2026
Seven EU countries have now cleared FSD Supervised on their own roads: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, and Czechia. Those seven states represent about 53 million people, or roughly 12 percent of the EU population. An EU-wide authorization still needs a qualified majority: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population, about 292 million people.
Germany, France, Italy, and Spain remain the decisive markets. France has already rejected the current system; several other governments have flagged speed-limit compliance as the main sticking point.
The safety case Tesla is putting in front of those governments is now public. On September 1, Tesla Europe said FSD Supervised was in use by more than 70,000 customers, covering over 1 million kilometers a day, and was 4.1 times less likely to be involved in a crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on EU public roads.
An earlier mid-year cut of the same fleet data, covering 65 million kilometers in five approved countries, put the collision advantage at 5.2 times, with zero highway collisions over 41.9 million kilometers. Tesla also reported far fewer automatic emergency braking events, harsh accelerations, and hard swerves than in comparable manual Tesla driving. Those figures are company-reported, not independently audited.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is taking over Europe: fourth country gets FSD approval
The public-health backdrop is harder to dispute. European countries recorded about 19,400 road deaths in 2025, or roughly 53 a day, most of them attributed to human error. FSD Supervised is not unsupervised autonomy; the driver remains legally responsible. But the software is already legal and in daily use across seven member states.
Until TCMV votes, the rest of the EU remains a patchwork: available in Prague and Amsterdam, locked behind review in Paris and Berlin. December is now the next chance to close that gap.
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SpaceX readies Starship Flight 14 for a historic journey into uncharted territory
SpaceX finished Starship’s Flight 14 rehearsal, clearing the way for its first orbital flight Monday.
SpaceX has cleared one of the last hurdles before Starship’s first trip to orbit. The company posted on X Thursday afternoon that its launch rehearsal for Flight 14 was complete, keeping the mission on track for Monday, September 28. The launch window opens at 7:15 a.m. CT at Starbase, Texas, and runs for 75 minutes.
A wet dress rehearsal is essentially launch day without the launch. Crews fill Booster 21 and Ship 41 with thousands of tons of extremely cold propellant, run the countdown nearly to ignition, then drain everything back out. It lets engineers catch leaks or equipment problems before anything leaves the pad. SpaceX still needs a launch license from the FAA before the stack, which stands 407 feet tall, can fly.
Flight 14 matters because of where it is going. All 13 previous Starship flights followed a suborbital path, which works like throwing a ball extremely high and far: the vehicle reaches space, but it is always on a course that brings it back down within about an hour. This time, Ship 41 will perform a short engine firing called an orbital insertion burn roughly 25 minutes after liftoff, giving it enough speed to keep falling around Earth instead of back into it. SpaceX plans about six laps at an altitude near 275 kilometers (171 miles) over nearly 10 hours, as Teslarati detailed when the mission was first announced.
Launch rehearsal complete ahead of Starship Flight 14 pic.twitter.com/h5LBYyBqi4
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 24, 2026
Getting into orbit also means Starship has to prove it can get back out. The ship must relight a single Raptor engine in space to slow down for reentry. SpaceX says it will only attempt the orbital insertion burn after flight controllers confirm the hardware needed for that return burn has enough backup, and its flight plan includes health checks that could shorten the mission to two or five orbits.
Flight 14 is also the first to put working satellites into service. Flight 13 carried 20 Starlink V3 satellites in July, but they came back down with the ship because that mission never reached orbit. This time, 26 V3 satellites are meant to stay up and join the constellation within a few weeks. Together they add about 26 terabits per second of network capacity, which SpaceX says is roughly 10 times what a single Falcon 9 launch of older V2 Mini satellites adds. Three of them carry cameras that will photograph Starship’s heat shield in orbit to check for tile damage before reentry.
The hardware has changed too. Ship 41 flies with extra fasteners on tiles in the most vulnerable areas, fixes for gaps where superheated plasma slipped behind tiles, and curved tiles designed to reduce heating between them. Two tiles recovered from Ship 40 will fly again, the first reuse of any part of a Starship heat shield. Booster 21 carries better engine filtering and new relight software after ice clogged three center engines on the previous booster, leaving only eight of 13 engines to restart for its landing burn.
Ship 41 is targeting a splashdown in the Pacific Ocean west of Chile, a new recovery zone after several Indian Ocean landings, while Booster 21 aims for the Gulf. Neither will be caught by the tower on this flight. Elon Musk said in August that a ship catch was likely “in a few months.”
Tesla’s surprise Roadster video hints the 2017 design is gone
Tesla Full Self-Driving release in the EU gets delayed
