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SpaceX’s orbital Starship gains a nose as East Coast prototype makes progress
On May 20th, SpaceX technicians successfully stacked a nosecone on top of the company’s Boca Chica orbital Starship prototype. Simultaneously, a separate team of technicians and engineers have been hard at work building a second similar-but-different Starship prototype near Cape Canaveral, Florida.
Officially confirmed last week by Elon Musk, the SpaceX CEO revealed that the company was not only building two orbital Starship prototypes simultaneously – not news in itself – but that those prototypes were being built as a sort of internal competition between different teams and ideas. The competition is not cutthroat – knowledge is shared between Texas and Florida – but the strategy is fairly similar. In lieu of actual commercial competitors, SpaceX is attempting to compete with itself to more rapidly and effectively develop a brand new launch vehicle – the stainless steel Starship/Super Heavy.
A Starship rises in the East
In just the last week, both SpaceX groups have made major progress. On the East Coast, the general public saw the first photo of SpaceX’s Florida Starship build precisely seven days ago. It appears that SpaceX has more or less taken over a Cocoa, Florida facility known to be the prior home of Coastal Steel, a repeat NASA contractor known for steelwork.
It’s unclear if SpaceX has fully acquired Coastal Steel or is simply partnering with the small company in the early stages of its Florida Starship buildup. Regardless, even from perspectives quite a bit more distant than those available in Texas, it’s clear that the metal workmanship is at least on par with Boca Chica, if not giving them a run for their money.
Admittedly, the playing field is not exactly level. SpaceX’s South Texas team has been working just a few thousand feet away from the unobstructed Gulf of Mexico in conditions that would make for an excellent traditional-aerospace horror show. Aside from a lone tent, all welding, assembly, integration, and testing has been done while fully exposed to the elements. SpaceX’s Florida team appears to have the luxury of an established warehouse – previously used for steelwork – to use as a covered and partially insulated work and staging area. The Florida team effectively had everything they needed (give or take) on hand from the moment work began, while Texas had to quite literally build all of its facilities from nothing.
Be it the facility luxuries or Cape Canaveral’s far larger pool of local aerospace talent, it’s clear that SpaceX’s Florida team will be a competitive force to be reckoned with despite Texas’ apparent head start. In the seven days since the first photos of the Florida Starship were published, SpaceX technicians have almost doubled the height of the largest welded section, raising it from ~5.5m to ~9m (18-30 ft).
Meanwhile, those working inside the staging warehouse continue to crank out 2x9m subsections, already making way for what appears to be the first tapered nose section of the Florida Starship. At this rate, Florida could very well catch up to SpaceX’s Texas Starship just a month or two from now. It’s worth noting that the Florida team does not appear to be involved in any Starhopper activities. SpaceX Boca Chica, on the other hand, has spent a major portion of the last several months building out Starhopper and preparing the odd prototype for untethered hop tests.
The (slightly) Old(er) Guard
Despite Starship Florida’s rapid progress, Starship Texas has not exactly been standing around. In the last week or so, SpaceX technicians and engineers have been simultaneously working on major new integration, assembly, and test campaigns with both Starhopper and the first orbital Starship prototype. A dedicated Starhopper article will come later this week as SpaceX’s South Texas team nears Raptor reinstallation and an untethered hop test campaign, scheduled to begin as early as the end of May.
On the orbital Starship side of things, Boca Chica took a major symbolic step towards aeroshell completion by capping off the upper half of the prototype with a stainless steel nose section. Altogether, the Starship assembly now stands about 25m (80 ft) tall from tip to tail, roughly 60% as tall as a Falcon 9 booster (first stage). With the installation of the craft’s nose, SpaceX has also implicitly confirmed that most – if not all – of the Starship prototype’s tankage still needs to be built, unless a great deal of hardware is hiding inside Boca Chica’s on-site tent.
What could either be the orbital Starship’s seven-Raptor engine section or the start of its liquid oxygen or methane tank is also being built a few hundred feet distant. That mystery segment was recently lifted onto a second concrete jig for easier access, while SpaceX has also been hard at work building a dedicated integration facility similar to the warehouse being used in Florida.
Altogether, SpaceX’s South Texas team appears to be 30-40% away from completing a Starship-sized steel aeroshell. A huge amount of work remains to be done on the inside of the theoretically orbit-capable vehicle, including propellant tanks, a thrust structure capable of supporting seven Raptor engines, landing legs/fins, and a jungle of plumbing and avionics installation. Still, the amount of progress already visible is undeniably impressive, made even more intriguing by the existence of a separate Starship build effort to the east.
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Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a photo of himself standing with the Optimus production team inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, arms crossed amid workers in hard hats and safety vests. The image captures a pivotal industrial shift: the same facility space once dedicated to building Tesla’s flagship Model S sedan and Model X SUV is now home to the company’s humanoid robot manufacturing line.
Walking the Optimus production line in Fremont pic.twitter.com/ABS0tuRibW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2026
Tesla’s Fremont Factory, acquired in 2010 from the former NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and GM, has been the company’s original U.S. manufacturing hub since Model S production began in 2012.
The Model X followed soon thereafter. These premium vehicles offered lower annual volumes, recently around 30,000 combined, compared to the high-volume Model 3 and Model Y lines that continue around the site. Over their combined run, the S and X accounted for roughly 610,000 units.
In late January 2026, during Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Elon Musk announced the end of Model S and Model X production in Q2 2026. The final vehicles rolled off the line in early May. Rather than retooling for another vehicle, Tesla chose to convert the dedicated S/X assembly area into a dedicated Optimus Gen 3 production line.
Model 3 and Y manufacturing remains unaffected. Tesla’s official Fremont Factory page now lists Optimus alongside the 3 and Y as core products.
The conversion was executed with remarkable speed. After production stopped, crews dismantled the existing vehicle line and installed entirely new modular equipment—including lines sourced from Germany and dozens of sub-lines for actuators, batteries, and other components—in roughly four months.
Musk described the timeline as “insanely fast,” noting it would be unprecedented for any other manufacturer. Initial Optimus output is expected to ramp slowly due to the robot’s roughly 10,000 unique parts and the brand-new production processes involved. The Fremont line targets an eventual capacity of 1 million Optimus units per year.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Optimus Development Timeline
- August 19, 2021: Optimus (then called Tesla Bot) formally announced at Tesla’s first AI Day. A concept video showed a person in a suit demonstrating the vision for a general-purpose humanoid capable of dangerous, repetitive, or boring tasks using the same AI architecture as Full Self-Driving.
- 2022: Early prototypes displayed. At the second AI Day in September, semi-functional units demonstrated walking across a stage and basic arm movements
- 2023: September videos showed improved capabilities, including sorting colored blocks, precise limb awareness, and holding a Yoda pose.
- 2024-early 2025: Factory integration videos showed Optimus navigating workspaces and handling objects like battery cells.
- January 2026: Gen 3 mass-production activities began at Fremont, with reports of over 1,000 Gen 3 units already operating inside the factory for real-world learning and AI training
- April 2026: Musk confirms Optimus production on converted Fremont line would begin in late July or August 2026. The Gen 3 reveal, originally eyed for Q1, was pushed closer to production start. A second, much larger Optimus factory at Giga Texas is under construction, with volume production targeted for Summer 2027 and long-term capacity of 10 million units annually
- July 1, 2026: Musk’s on-site visit and team photo confirm the Optimus line is operational and the transition is actively progressing
Tesla positions Optimus as potentially its largest project ever, leveraging vertical integration, AI expertise, and car-like manufacturing know-how to scale humanoid robots first for its own factories and later for broader industrial and consumer use.
The Fremont conversion serves as a critical proving ground for this ambitious new chapter in Tesla’s already-rich history.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
