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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SpaceX stock did the opposite of what most of Wall Street expected this week, when the day designed to be its most dangerous turned into a rally, and the rally kept going.
Thursday marked the first major lockup expiration since SpaceX’s June IPO, making roughly 911.5 million insider held shares eligible to trade for the first time, more than doubling the company’s public float. Analysts and short sellers had spent weeks bracing for a flood of selling, especially after the stock fell 13 percent following its first earnings report as a public company on Tuesday. Instead, shares rose 6.1 percent Thursday to close at $114.92, and by Friday they were trading near $129, up more than another 12 percent on the day.
SpaceX shorts get warned by Musk ally, echoing Tesla’s early struggles
The setup made the outcome notable. Short interest had climbed to roughly 34 percent of the float heading into earnings, among the highest of any large cap stock, with about 95 percent of available shares to borrow already on loan. CEO Elon Musk warned short sellers twice in the weeks before the lockup, writing on X that “the survival probability of firms who maintain a significant short position in SpaceX over time is very low,” then following up on the morning of earnings with “I try to warn them, but they just double down.”
When the newly unlocked shares hit the market and the selloff never showed up, some of that short position appears to have started unwinding. TipRanks reported that options activity shifted toward bullish strategies like put selling and risk reversals following the rally, with roughly $600 million in options premium trading Thursday alone. Retail buyers also stepped in during the earnings dip, according to Vanda Research.
The fundamentals behind the stock have not changed much in a week. SpaceX’s revenue nearly doubled year over year to $7.8 billion, with Starlink subscribers doubling to 12 million and the company’s AI segment growing 247 percent. What spooked investors on Tuesday was the spending side. Capital expenditures jumped to more than $18 billion for the quarter, up from $2.8 billion a year earlier, with AI investment alone rising from $749 million to $15.8 billion. Wall Street remains split on whether that spending is building infrastructure SpaceX needs or outrunning what the business can currently support, a debate Teslarati has tracked since shares first came under pressure.
None of that resolves the bigger question hanging over the stock. Thursday’s release was only the first of nine staggered lockup tranches, with roughly $800 billion worth of additional shares scheduled to become eligible through October, and Musk’s own stake stays locked until next June. If this week is any indication, the market is treating that supply as something it can absorb rather than something to fear, at least for now.
News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
Elon Musk
Tesla’s mysterious Robovan makes a sneak peek with Optimus in Terafab video
Elon Musk shared a new Terafab video showing Optimus, Robovans, and a stunningly futuristic campus.
Elon Musk posted a new video of Terafab on X Thursday morning, and the most eye-catching details in it were not the building itself, but two products still awaiting production: Optimus and the Robovan.
The concept render, credited to SpaceX, shows Optimus robots working the grounds of the roughly 2.5-mile-long facility planned for the Gibbons Creek site in Grimes County, while a Robovan glides along an elevated roadway cutting through the building itself, sharing the frame with a Tesla Semi and a Cybercab.
Robovan is the boxy, driverless people and cargo mover Musk unveiled alongside Cybercab at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event in October 2024. He pitched it as a way to move up to 20 passengers at once, or handle freight instead, at a target cost he claimed could fall under a dollar a mile, with no steering wheel or pedals, the same layout as Cybercab. Nearly two years later, Robovan still has no confirmed production timeline and has not shown up in any factory footage, which makes Thursday’s render one of the only recent looks at the vehicle in any form.
Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.
And it will be stunningly beautiful. pic.twitter.com/4NweOqTL7y
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2026
Optimus has moved further along. Tesla began converting Fremont’s old Model S and Model X assembly line into a Gen 3 Optimus production line earlier this year, and Musk visited the site on July 1 to mark the changeover. A second, larger Optimus plant is under construction at Giga Texas, targeting volume production in summer 2027 and eventual capacity of 10 million units a year. Tesla AI lead Ashok Elluswamy said this month the robot has “big shoes to fill” in replacing the S and X line, while Musk has repeatedly called Optimus the company’s biggest product of any kind, with a long-term price he has pegged between $20,000 and $30,000.
Check out the “Robovan” from @Tesla
📸: @Teslarati pic.twitter.com/D4es2i9NUe
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 11, 2024
“Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far,” Musk wrote alongside the clip. “And it will be stunningly beautiful.”
One quote post summed up the reaction: “Futuristic scene with RoboVan + Cybercab + Tesla Semi + Optimus.”
Beyond the vehicles, the architecture wrapped around them stands out too. The building’s facade is canted at sharp angles, with illuminated horizontal bands running through what appears to be a multi level interior visible from outside. Below the elevated roadway, pedestrians walk along a plaza next to a reflecting pool, and the skyline behind the campus is dotted with angular spires that read more like sculpture than infrastructure, a departure from the strictly utilitarian look of Gigafactory Texas or Starbase.
The timing tracks with what Terafab representative Riley Trennell told Grimes County residents on Wednesday, when he said renderings of the facility would be released “within days.” Musk’s post followed less than 24 hours later, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office sent out its own release Thursday confirming the project. As Teslarati reported this morning, Terafab’s tax abatement agreements with Grimes County are now signed and active, and SpaceX has sent the county its first $10 million payment under that deal. The dollar figure tied to this phase of construction, per Reuters, is $16.8 billion, one of the first hard capital expenditure numbers attached to Terafab since Musk unveiled the joint Tesla-SpaceX-xAI venture in March.Reaction on X ranged from enthusiastic to skeptical. “God Bless Texas! Everything is bigger and better in Texas!” one reply read. Another was more measured: “Terafab in a decade…..”
Whether the finished building matches the render is a separate question from whether Musk wanted people talking about the render itself. Less than a day after posting, the video had already crossed 5.5 million views.
Elon Musk and SpaceX shrugs off the trading day Wall Street feared most
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
