News
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 has revealed plans through permit submissions for a massive Robotaxi charging hub in Austin, Texas.
Tesla plans to build the Supercharger hub in multiple phases, with the second phase potentially introducing wireless induction charging, something the company has been developing for the Robotaxi fleet.
Initially, 48 Tesla Robotaxi-geared Superchargers will be built on a lot just across from the St. Elmo, Texas, Service Center. There are about 80 additional spots that will not be impacted by phase 1 of the construction process.
Filings show that the second phase of the project will turn those 80 additional spots into wireless charging for Robotaxi, but it might be an error. The Key Notes state that item 3 is listed as “V4 Charging Cabinet to Support 80 Wireless Chargers in Phase 2. However, the drawings point to V3 Cabinets that are already tied to Superchargers:
There are roughly 128 total spots in the lot, but it is unclear if they will all be used for charging based on what appears to be some sort of typo in the blueprint.
A new Robotaxi fleet charging hub is coming soon to Austin, Texas!!
Permits have been filed for the installation of 48 (V3) stalls in a vehicle storage lot across the road from Tesla’s St Elmo service center. pic.twitter.com/xwRgSWDqht
— MarcoRP (@MarcoRPi1) August 18, 2026
This is among the first Robotaxi charging hubs Tesla has started to develop, as it currently has four others planned throughout various areas: one in Phoenix, one in San Antonio, another in Irving, which will serve the Dallas-Fort Worth area, and another in Las Vegas.
These projects are necessary as Tesla expands its Robotaxi program. Now that preparations have started for the public launch of Cybercab, Robotaxi will likely be expanding aggressively, especially over the next two to three years.
Last night, The Information reported that Tesla was planning to launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Hours later, Tesla then announced it was launching a competition for fans to potentially ride in Cybercab during its first public rides.
Tesla’s plan to expand its charging infrastructure in the regions where Robotaxi will initially operate is great preparation for the expanding service. There is still a lot to do, including launching the Cybercab on time.
Tesla got its largest order for the all-electric Class 8 Semi yet, a 500-unit order from Einride AB, a Swedish trucking company.
Einride made the announcement this morning following its second-quarter earnings call. The company said it plans to use 500 Tesla Semi units on its fleet intelligence platform, called Saga AI. The deployments will serve large companies like Amazon and will extend Einride’s electric freight network across logistics routes in California, New Jersey, Texas, Illinois, and Georgia.
🚨 Tesla has received a MASSIVE order from Swedish freight company Einride AB, which placed an order for 500 Tesla Semi trucks
Tesla’s biggest order for the Semi yet! pic.twitter.com/PrtLp5yzvh
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 18, 2026
The deployment is being carried out in several phases over the next two years as Tesla ramps production of the Semi at its dedicated production facility in Sparks, Nevada. Einride will receive its first Semi units in September.
Saga AI
Saga AI is Einride’s dedicated fleet intelligence platform. It enables scaled adoption of electric trucks for freight use and allows shippers to integrate electric capacity without the operational burden or capital risks of managing a fleet. This helps integrate cost-efficient logistics and makes budgeting and forecasting much more accurate.
Tesla Semi’s Adoption
The Tesla Semi is now gathering large-scale clients past those who have helped the company operate a Pilot Program to gain initial information and feedback from real-world drivers.
Perhaps the biggest and most notable is that of Frito-Lay and PepsiCo., who have worked with Tesla for the past several years to dial in the finer details of the truck, including its efficiency and operation-related components.
Tesla Semi gets strange-but-understandable comparison from Jay Leno
There has been tremendous progress in that time, and it even catalyzed Tesla to make some design changes, which were unveiled earlier this year.
But Einride CEO Roozbeh Charli says his company’s partnership with Tesla will continue to push those things forward:
“This deployment is yet another proof point that we can execute at the scale our customers demand. Working closely with Tesla to bring next-generation Semis into active operations quickly and at scale is a testament to the strength of that partnership, and how quickly this technology is maturing from promise to daily operations.”
Additionally, Dan Priestley, the Director of the Semi Program at Tesla, said the partnership is ideal due to Einride’s focus on sustainable transport:
“Einride is at the forefront of sustainable freight, and we are thrilled to deepen our relationship with them through this order of 500 Semis. EV heavy trucks provide lower costs per mile from fuel savings, reduced maintenance, and better uptime over diesel trucks. These savings increase further through operational efficiency when deploying EV trucks at scale, and we are excited that Einride recognizes this and look forward to supporting their deployments.”
Elon Musk
India tells Elon Musk’s X to “Follow the Law” in latest censorship update
Elon Musk says X now exposes government censorship, but India’s secrecy laws complicate that promise.
Elon Musk’s promise to make government censorship requests on X “clearly visible” is running into a wall in India, where the law forbids the very disclosure Musk is promising.
On August 15, Musk responded to an update from X’s open-source algorithm team by writing “Any censorship required by governments is now clearly visible.” The claim referred to a change X pushed two days earlier to its public xai-org/x-algorithm repository, which now includes a controversial filter written directly into the code. The filter suppresses posts from 665 accounts flagged by Brazil’s Superior Electoral Court from appearing in the For You feed of any viewer located in Brazil, unless the viewer already follows the account. The election tied to the filter is scheduled for October 4.
India’s government wasn’t as impressed, and responded on Monday that “X will have to follow the law of the land,” in response to Musk’s transparency push covered by the Times of India. The problem is structural rather than political. India issues content blocking orders under Section 69A of its IT Act, and Rule 16 of the accompanying 2009 Blocking Rules requires those orders to stay confidential. Publishing an India equivalent of the Brazil filter, naming specific accounts and citing specific government orders, would itself violate Indian law. Government use of Section 69A has grown from roughly 6,000 orders a year between 2018 and 2023 to about 24,300 in 2025, according to a Tech Times report.
The contrast puts Musk’s transparency pledge in an odd spot. It works largely as advertised in Brazil, where electoral law requires disclosure and X can point to specific account IDs and a specific court order in public code. It cannot work the same way in India, where the law requires the opposite. X users in India will keep seeing content disappear from search and their feeds without any public accounting of why, even as X tells the rest of the world that its censorship compliance is now inspectable.
This isn’t the first time X’s fights with a national government have shaped how the platform operates. Brazil’s Supreme Court ordered X to suspend the accounts of sitting lawmakers and journalists in 2024, a standoff that cost X its Brazilian revenue for months and froze Starlink’s local accounts before the investigation into Musk and X was closed in March with no evidence of wrongdoing found. X also sued California over a state law requiring moderation disclosures, arguing the mandate itself violated the First Amendment.
Whether India’s government pursues anything beyond a public statement remains to be seen. For now, the mismatch between what X can legally publish and what different governments legally allow it to publish is the real story behind Musk’s seven word claim.
Tesla reveals plans for Robotaxi charging hub in Austin
Tesla Semi gets its largest order yet
