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SpaceX’s planned refurbishment facility briefly catches fire at Cape Canaveral
Per several sources, a small fire at a planned SpaceX refurbishment facility in Cape Canaveral was put out Sunday evening.
Located inside Port Canaveral, the building suffered a minor amount of water damage and a moderate amount of damage to the roof, where the fire began. The cause of the fire is thus far unclear. More importantly, no injuries were caused by the fire and the building was said by SpaceX employees to have been empty of any valuable hardware.
@BrevardSheriff says small fire at @NASAKennedy @SpaceX building is out. No injuries. Already doing repairs.
— K Reuschle (@KReuschle) July 16, 2017
No SpaceX workers on site at time of fire; building said to be empty, no hardware; water damage reported, roof damage; cause not yet known
— William Harwood (@cbs_spacenews) July 17, 2017
Used as a facility for Astrotech Corporation’s SpaceHab module, which was launched more than 20 times aboard the Space Shuttle, the building was leased by SpaceX approximately a year ago. In addition to the actual SpaceHab facility, the lease included a total of four acres of land expected to be utilized for SpaceX’s program of reusability.
Earlier this year, SpaceX Senior Director of Launch Operations Ricky Lim discussed the company’s excitement over the new facility at a March meeting of the Canaveral Port Authority. Once a second hangar is constructed on the parcel of land, the lease will provide SpaceX with an additional 100,000 square feet of facilities that can be used for Falcon 9 first stage refurbishment and storage. Musk has in the past slyly joked about SpaceX effectively running out of space for the recovered boosters, due to the sheer speed at which the company began to successfully and routinely recover them.
May need to increase size of rocket storage hangar
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2016
Possibly the most intriguing tidbit about the facility from Lim was the implication that its existence would allow SpaceX to undertake all necessary testing and refurbishment of recovered boosters in Florida. This means SpaceX would no longer be required to transport recovered cores from Cape Canaveral to McGregor, Texas, which has so far been the primary method used for testing and refurbishment. It seems highly implausible that SpaceX would ever be able to secure a permit for routine hot-fire testing at a facility literally within the bounds of an active port, and this implies that SpaceX’s refurbishment procedures will soon pivot away from intensive static fire testing of every recovered booster.
There is no current public timeline for the development of the refurbishment facility, but it is certainly a breath of relief to hear that the small fire that occurred earlier this night was extremely minor and is highly unlikely to impact whatever that construction schedule may be.
SpaceX is preparing to begin launches of the rapid reuse-oriented Block 5 of their Falcon 9 in late 2017, and could conduct as many as 12 more launches this year, beginning in mid-August. It is likely that these new facilities are aiming to become operational at the same time as Block 5, as SpaceX’s extremely busy 2017 and 2018 launch manifests will find the company with a considerable fleet of recovered Falcon 9s.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s latest Tesla tunnel truck mod “fits like a glove”
The Boring Company has modified a Tesla powered tunnel truck to carry freight containers underground.
The Boring Company has found a second job for the Tesla hardware it already runs underground. In a post on X, Elon Musk’s tunneling company showed its latest Prufrock Liner Truck modified to carry a standard 20 foot shipping container. “Using TBC tunnels to transport freight,” the company wrote. “The latest Prufrock Liner Truck (using Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units) has been modified to carry a standard 20′ shipping container. Fits like a glove!”
The photo shows a red container sitting on a long, low white chassis parked outside, with drive hardware visible at one end. The Boring Company did not say where or when freight hauling would start, which customers it has in mind, or how many trucks it is converting.
Using TBC tunnels to transport freight.
The latest Prufrock Liner Truck (using Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units) has been modified to carry a standard 20’ shipping container.
Fits like a glove! https://t.co/VV0phWK4fc
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) October 19, 2026
Until now, the liner trucks have hauled concrete. Teslarati reported in August on Liner Truck 3, which uses Model 3 battery packs and drive units to move more than 22,000 pounds of precast tunnel segments to the boring machine. It has 28 miles of range, tops out at 12 mph, and is piloted remotely from the company’s operations center in Texas. The freight version appears to be the same platform with a different bed, and The Boring Company has not said whether it will also be remotely piloted.
Freight has been on the company’s menu for years. When TBC updated its product lineup in 2021, its freight tunnel was described as sized to fit a standard shipping container, “barely.” The company later used the idea at Tesla’s own factory, where Prufrock 3 dug a tunnel to Giga Texas that now moves finished Cybertrucks away from the production line.
The Boring Company closed a $3 billion Series D in September at a $23 billion valuation, and Teslarati has covered how that money is tied to a UAE tunneling push and a faster Nashville build. In Nashville, Prufrock MB1 and MB2 are mining at the same time, and a third machine is expected to launch in late October. Each machine needs a steady supply of liner trucks, so any design that works for segments and containers alike gives the company more use out of the same Tesla parts.
The Vegas Loop remains the only Boring Company system open to the public, and it moves passengers in Tesla vehicles. A freight service would be a separate product, and the post gave no indication that one is close to launch. For now, it is a truck, a container and a short caption saying they fit together.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk will give ‘every kid in America’ a SpaceX share in 2027
Elon Musk said he is planning to give “every one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America” in 2027, stating that “this will be the first of many.”
SpaceX went public earlier this year, and its stock price has been relatively stable since leveling off shortly after its IPO. Based on its current price, it’s a gift of just over $10 billion to children across the United States.
It appears to be closely related to President Donald Trump’s bank accounts for children, which were set up earlier this year as Trump Accounts.
Just hours earlier, Anthropic had announced the establishment of its Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, “a new wholly-owned entity dedicated entirely to public benefit.” Musk responded by stating he recommended “giving the shares directly to the public,” and that he would be doing it that way.
Just a little bit later, Musk said children across the U.S. would be getting a share from him:
Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.
This will be the first of many.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026
There are roughly 70 million children, meaning someone under the age of 18, in the United States, according to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Musk’s ownership of SpaceX stock shows he has around 849 million Class A shares of SpaceX stock, according to filings with the SEC.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk reveals why Boring Co’s biggest East Coast project never happened
Elon Musk revealed in a post on X that “Permits were impossible to get,” explaining the fate of The Boring Company’s most ambitious East Coast proposal.
The comment responded to a query about what became of his July 20, 2017 announcement that he had “just received verbal govt approval” for an underground Hyperloop connecting New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., capable of carrying passengers from the Big Apple to the Nation’s Capital in just 29 minutes.
The Boring Company receives verbal ‘approval’ to build NY to DC Hyperloop tunnel
The 2017 post, which envisioned city-center stations and multiple elevators in each city, sparked immediate scrutiny. Local and state officials in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. said they had no knowledge of any approval. A White House spokesperson confirmed only “promising conversations” about the transformative infrastructure.
Musk clarified shortly after that there was “still a lot of work” to do for formal approvals.
@cybrtrkguy Permits were impossible to get
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026
Limited progress followed, as Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s administration issued a conditional utility permit and supported work near Fort Meade. In 2018, Washington, D.C., granted a preliminary permit for site preparation and excavation on a vacant lot at 53 New York Ave. NE in the NoMa neighborhood, which The Boring Company said could become a station.
A draft environmental assessment for a D.C.-Baltimore segment was released in 2019. Yet, by April 2021, the company had removed the project from its website, and the Federal Highway Administration reported receiving no indication of further interest. Communication with Maryland officials had ceased.
The full corridor would have required coordination among the District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, the Federal Highway Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Park Service, and other agencies.
Environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, utility clearances, and approvals for novel infrastructure added to the overall complexity of the project and its approval.
Speculation on the permitting barriers centers around a few factors, but a multi-state, multi-level route involving unproven high-speed vacuum-tube technology inherently triggers exhaustive safety, environmental, and engineering reviews that can stretch for years, even for conventional projects.
There are also other elements, of course, like officials who may face political exposure if a privately funded, untested system encountered anything such as cost overruns, delays, or safety issues. On the outset of this project, there were limited things such as engineering plans or demonstrated technology maturity, which also added to the potential skepticism.
The East Coast vision for Boring Co., once framed as a privately funded revolution that could reshape Northeast travel, quietly ended without construction of the promised network. Musk’s recent statement frames the outcome as a regulatory impasse, unfortunate but not unexpected.