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SpaceX’s next Falcon Heavy side booster arrives in Texas for hot-fire testing

SpaceX's first Falcon Heavy prepares for launch. (SpaceX)

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A few days after a brief appearance in Arizona, SpaceX’s next Falcon Heavy side booster has been spotted vertical at the company’s McGregor, Texas first stage test stand, likely just days away from the rocket’s first static-fire ignition test.

By all appearances a newly manufactured booster, this hardware is the first public evidence of serious preparations for the second flight of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy.

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Taking as little as a week to go from SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory to its McGregor first stage test stand, this Falcon Heavy side booster appears to be a new rocket, barring the possibility that it’s an older flight-proven booster that has since been modified extensively with Block 5 hardware and had all visible soot cleaned off.

Most notably, if this booster is not effectively identical to any given Falcon 9 Block 5 first stage, widespread changes to avionics, software, and firmware would be required to ensure compatibility between an older variant of Falcon 9 and its Block 5 predecessors. Among countless other changes, Falcon 9 Block 5 features a ~10% thrust increase, an almost clean-slate avionics refresh, and major structural upgrades throughout the booster.

 

With almost a full year now expected between Falcon Heavy’s first and second flights, the chances that the second vehicle wont be entirely composed of Block 5 hardware are slim to none. Anything less than a sort of fixed Falcon Heavy design would undoubtedly make it harder for SpaceX to certify the heavy-lift rocket for both NASA and USAF launches in the eyes of each agency, much like both have struggled to bend their highly inflexible certification requirements to SpaceX’s strategy of continuous hardware and software improvement.

Ultimately, the fact that an entire side booster is already preparing for static fire tests in Texas suggests that Falcon Heavy’s second launch is going to come sooner rather than later, implying that the payload will the commercial Arabsat 6A satellite rather than the USAF’s STP-2 rideshare. As of June 2018, Arabsat officially stated that the satellite was expected to launch on Falcon Heavy between December and January, a window that has since slipped into no earlier than (NET) late January 2019.

Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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These Tesla, X, and xAI engineers were just poached by OpenAI

The news is the latest in an ongoing feud between Elon Musk and the Sam Altman-run firm OpenAI.

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Credit: OpenAI | YouTube

OpenAI, the xAI competitor for which Elon Musk previously served as a boardmember and helped to co-found, has reportedly poached high-level engineers from Tesla, along with others from xAI, X, and still others.

On Tuesday, Wired reported that OpenAI hired four high-level engineers from Tesla, xAI, and X, as seen in an internal Slack message sent by co-founder Greg Brockman. The engineers include Tesla Vice President of Software Engineering David Lau, X and xAI’s head of infrastructure engineering Uday Ruddarraju, and fellow xAI infrastructure engineer Mike Dalton. The hiring spree also included Angela Fan, an AI researcher from Meta.

“We’re excited to welcome these new members to our scaling team,” said Hannah Wong, an OpenAI spokesperson. “Our approach is to continue building and bringing together world-class infrastructure, research, and product teams to accelerate our mission and deliver the benefits of AI to hundreds of millions of people.”

Lau has been in his position as Tesla’s VP of Software Engineering since 2017, after previously working for the company’s firmware, platforms, and system integration divisions.

“It has become incredibly clear to me that accelerating progress towards safe, well-aligned artificial general intelligence is the most rewarding mission I could imagine for the next chapter of my career,” Lau said in a statement to Wired.

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At xAI, Ruddarraju and Dalton both played a large role in developing the Colossus supercomputer, which is comprised of over 200,000 GPUs. One of the major ongoing projects at OpenAI is the company’s Stargate program,

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“Infrastructure is where research meets reality, and OpenAI has already demonstrated this successfully,” Ruddarraju told Wired in another statement. “Stargate, in particular, is an infrastructure moonshot that perfectly matches the ambitious, systems-level challenges I love taking on.”

Elon Musk is currently in the process of suing OpenAI for shifting toward a for-profit model, as well as for accepting an investment of billions of dollars from Microsoft. OpenAI retaliated with a counterlawsuit, in which it alleges that Musk is interfering with the company’s business and engaging in unfair competition practices.

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SpaceX share sale expected to back $400 billion valuation

The new SpaceX valuation would represent yet another record-high as far as privately-held companies in the U.S. go.

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A new report this week suggests that Elon Musk-led rocket company SpaceX is considering an insider share sale that would value the company at $400 billion.

SpaceX is set to launch a primary fundraising round and sell a small number of new shares to investors, according to the report from Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter who asked to remain anonymous due to the information not yet being public. Additionally, the company would sell shares from employees and early investors in a follow-up round, while the primary round would determine the price for the secondary round.

The valuation would represent the largest in history from a privately-owned company in the U.S., surpassing SpaceX’s previous record of $350 billion after a share buyback in December. Rivaling company valuations include ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, as well as OpenAI.

Bloomberg went on to say that a SpaceX representative didn’t respond to a request for comment at the time of publishing. The publication also notes that the details of such a deal could still change, especially depending on interest from the insider sellers and share buyers.

READ MORE ON SPACEX: SpaceX to decommission Dragon spacecraft in response to Pres. Trump war of words with Elon Musk

SpaceX’s valuation comes from a few different key factors, especially including the continued expansion of the company’s Starlink satellite internet company. According to the report, Starlink accounts for over half of the company’s yearly revenue. Meanwhile, the company produced its 10 millionth Starlink kit last month.

The company also continues to develop its Starship reusable rocket program, despite the company experiencing an explosion of the rocket on the test stand in Texas last month.

The company has also launched payloads for a number of companies and government contracts. In recent weeks, SpaceX launched Axiom’s Ax-4 mission, sending four astronauts to the International Space Station (ISS) for a 14-day stay to work on around 60 scientific experiments. The mission was launched using the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and a new Crew Dragon capsule, while the research is expected to span a range of fields including biology, material and physical sciences, and demonstrations of specialized technology.

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Tesla Giga Texas continues to pile up with Cybercab castings

Tesla sure is gathering a lot of Cybercab components around the Giga Texas complex.

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Credit: @JoeTegtmeyer/X

Tesla may be extremely tight-lipped about the new affordable models that it was expected to start producing in the first half of the year, but the company sure is gathering a lot of Cybercab castings around the Giga Texas complex. This is, at least, as per recent images taken of the facility. 

Cybercab castings galore

As per longtime drone operator Joe Tegtmeyer, who has been chronicling the developments around the Giga Texas complex for several years now, the electric vehicle maker seems to be gathering hundreds of Cybercab castings around the factory. 

Based on observations from industry watchers, the drone operator appears to have captured images of about 180 front and 180 rear Cybercab castings in his recent photos.

Considering the number of castings that were spotted around Giga Texas, it would appear that Tesla may indeed be preparing for the vehicle’s start of trial production sometime later this year. Interestingly enough, large numbers of Cybercab castings have been spotted around the Giga Texas complex in the past few months.

Cybercab production

The Cybercab is expected to be Tesla’s first vehicle that will adopt the company’s “unboxed” process. As per Tesla’s previous update letters, volume production of the Cybercab should start in 2026. So far, prototypes of the Cybercab have been spotted testing around Giga Texas, and expectations are high that the vehicle’s initial trial production should start this year. 

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With the start of Tesla’s dedicated Robotaxi service around Austin, it might only be a matter of time before the Cybercab starts being tested on public roads as well. When this happens, it would be very difficult to deny the fact that Tesla really does have a safe, working autonomous driving system, and it has the perfect vehicle for it, too.

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