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SpaceX’s orbital Starship prototype sheds tiles, comes to life during first tests
After weeks of mostly invisible – albeit slow and steady – work at Starbase’s suborbital launch and test facilities, SpaceX has finally kicked off the first orbital Starship prototype’s first test campaign.
Almost two months ago, Starship 20 (S20) departed the factory it was built in for the first time and was rolled a few miles down a South Texas highway to Starbase’s nascent orbital launch site. There, SpaceX briefly installed Ship 20 on top of Super Heavy Booster 4 (B4) – an important first and one done with the same ship and booster pair CEO Elon Musk says could eventually support the rocket’s inaugural orbital launch attempt. Mere hours after that August 6th photo opportunity and fit test, Ship 20 was rolled back to the Starbase build site for another week of work before again returning to the launch site.
This time around, Starship S20 headed for one of two suborbital launch and test stands and ultimately spent the better part of the next six weeks sitting in place as workers swarmed around the 50m (~165 ft) tall spacecraft and upper stage to prepare it for the next steps. In theory, those steps were simple enough, beginning with the completion of two basic qualification tests – the same tests that a half-dozen prototypes preceding Ship 20 completed without issue.
Effectively SpaceX’s first Starship or Super Heavy test of any kind in more than two months, it thankfully didn’t take long for things to get interesting. Before the pad had even been cleared of the last few remaining workers, Starship S20 violently shed a good dozen or so fragile heat shield tiles. CEO Elon Musk quickly confirmed speculation that Starship S20 had effectively jetted the tiles off its nose during a brief test of high-pressure cold gas maneuvering thrusters, coincidentally around the same time as SpaceX began to pressurize the rocket for its first tests.
Going into what was believed to be Starship S20’s first ambient-temperature pressure test and cryogenic proof test, the loss of some heat shield tiles was almost universally expected. In a structure as large as Starship, even just the thermal contraction of steel at supercool temperatures (and expansion as it warms back up) could change the rocket’s diameter an inch or so, potentially causing tiles to scrape or press against each other. About the size of a dinner plate and the thickness of an average paperback book, Starship’s ceramic heat shield tiles have proven to be very fragile, with dozens routinely chipping, cracking, and shattering during and after installation on Ship 20.
One unique (and no less unproven) aspect of Starship is SpaceX’s decision to mount its heat shield directly to the thin steel propellant tanks and skin that make up the rocket’s entire airframe. SpaceX’s first stab at the problem involves studs/pins welded – by robot – directly to the exterior of Starship’s tanks and skin. By embedding small metal plates inside each cast tile, they can be easily installed by aligning the tile and pressing it against each set of three barb-like pins, which then irreversibly lock in place. Over most of Starship’s hull, SpaceX then tacks on blankets of off-the-shelf ceramic wool insulation before tiles are installed on top of that steel and blanket sandwich. Compared to the Space Shuttle and Russia’s Buran, the only other orbital spacecraft to fly with non-ablative heat shields, Starship’s thermal protection system (TPS) is incredibly simple. Of course, the challenges imposed on heat shields by mechanical stresses during launch/landing, orbital reentry, and a need for rapid reusability are anything but simple.
As such, to see tiles blown off Starship S20 by cold gas maneuvering thrusters that were simply placed too close to adjacent TPS was an unexpected route to an expected outcome. During Monday’s nine-hour test window, SpaceX appeared to partially or fully pressurize Starship S20 at ambient temperatures before aborting a cryogenic proof test either before or just after it began. While an ambient-temperature proof was the easier of the two tests on the docket, it’s still encouraging to see no obvious tile loss caused by the actual mechanical stresses involved in the test.
Most importantly, compared to losing dozens of tiles to regular mechanical or thermal stresses, fixing an issue with thruster impingement is much easier and should only require a few design tweaks to one specific Starship component. The real nail-biting moments will come during Starship S20’s seemingly imminent cryogenic proof and static fire debuts, major TPS issues during either of which could necessitate vehicle-wide design changes and cause delays.
With any luck, whatever forced SpaceX to abort Starship S20’s first cryogenic proof test can be easily rectified, opening the door for additional attempts. Two more test windows are scheduled later this week from 5pm to 11pm CDT on Tuesday and Wednesday. Rewatch today’s brief testing below.
Elon Musk
SpaceX President to gift Trump Accounts her SpaceX stock
Gwynne Shotwell’s 2 million SpaceX shares are headed to children’s Trump Accounts starting this December.
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell said Friday that more than 2 million SpaceX shares belonging to her and her husband, Robert, will be distributed to children’s Trump Accounts in December, turning a pledge she made over the summer into an actual transfer. “Robert and I are thrilled that our gift of over 2 million shares of SpaceX stock will be distributed to children’s Trump accounts in December!” Shotwell wrote on X, adding that the shares are “transferring to escrow as we speak.”
The first round goes to children aged 11 to 17 who live in ZIP codes where the median family income is $57,000 or less, along with kids in ZIP codes with too few residents for the Census to report that figure. Shotwell said those families should receive a notice by Monday, Reuters reported.
A second gift is expected to be finalized in the next few weeks. That round will cover eligible children in military families serving overseas, children in foster care, and more kids in Texas counties near the Shotwells’ home where median family income is $90,000 or less. Elon Musk replied to the announcement with “Cool” and a heart emoji.
Shotwell first announced the donation on July 6, less than a month after SpaceX priced its record IPO at $135 per share on the Nasdaq. IPO filings showed Shotwell owned about 12.6 million SpaceX shares, Quartz reported at the time, which makes the gift roughly one sixth of her stake. At the roughly $146 per share used to value Musk’s own pledge earlier this month, 2 million shares are worth about $290 million.
How the stock would actually reach the accounts had been an open question since July. Treasury guidance acknowledged that stock donations could flow into Trump Accounts, but it did not explain the mechanics for a program whose contributions default into an S&P 500 index fund. Shotwell thanked the Treasury, the IRS, the Dell Foundation, Greater Horizons, Invest America and the law firms Morgan Lewis and Gibson Dunn for “working over the past few months to make this happen.”
The transfer also works as a dry run for a far larger gift. On October 19, Musk said he would give one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America next year and called it “the first of many.” With roughly 72 million children in the country, that pledge is worth about $10.5 billion. President Donald Trump thanked Musk the same day and said the shares would go through Trump Accounts, though neither SpaceX nor the Treasury has published how or when that distribution will happen.
Shotwell’s recipients also fill a gap in the program itself. Trump Accounts launched on July 4, and the $1,000 Treasury deposit only goes to babies born between 2025 and 2028. Teenagers aged 11 to 17 receive no government seed money, so for many of the families getting a notice on Monday, SpaceX stock will be the first asset in the account. The accounts convert into retirement accounts when the child turns 18.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is now the centerpiece of the company’s newly revised Referral Program, which launched on October 29.
Instead of referring people to purchase vehicles and the referrer receiving $250 in Tesla Credit, the new program now incentivizes Full Self-Driving subscriptions.
If a Tesla owner is on an FSD trial and uses a referral code to subscribe to Full Self-Driving, the person whose Referral Link was used will receive one month of FSD (Supervised). Their code can be utilized 12 times per year, with January 1 marking the reset date.
Realistically, this means that if your Referral Code is used by 12 Tesla owners on an FSD trial, you will receive a full year of FSD for free.
🚨 Here is Tesla’s new Referral Program for Full Self-Driving (Supervised):
When someone subscribes to FSD using your link, you’ll get a month free. Up to a year of FSD is available to you for free!
If you’d like to use my link: https://t.co/g00IX9OCE3 https://t.co/GFBzEO2jjS
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 30, 2026
The previous program made it pretty difficult to get referrals; buying a vehicle is obviously a much larger financial strain than subscribing to Full Self-Driving for a month.
Of course, the previous Referral Program also offered a tangible benefit: $250 in credits you could use on Service, Supercharging, or anything in the Tesla Shop. It truly could pay for someone’s travel for a year. It recently bought me a new backpack and a T-shirt.
However, this new program is much more attainable for those who do not have a massive online presence of a slew of friends in the Tesla community who will use the code and max out subscriptions for vehicle purchases.
Woke up to maxed out Referrals! Thank you guys, that’s awesome!
Share your referral link below so others can use it! https://t.co/kesbwTcoTV
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 30, 2026
The Full Self-Driving suite will now be the keystone of the Referral Program, which makes it more inclusive and more fun for everyone with an awesome benefit.
It also gives the impression that Tesla is truly focused on FSD subscriptions, something that saw a tremendous increase in volume in Q3, as 75 percent of deliveries for the quarter came with an FSD subscription attached.
Full Self-Driving data is so instrumental to the suite’s improvement that this kind of program benefits Tesla as much as it does the consumer.
Elon Musk
Tesla made napping in a Robotaxi easier with its latest update
Tesla’s quiet mode reaches Model Y Robotaxis, blacking out the screen for riders wanting rest.
Tesla’s quiet mode, the setting that blacks out the screen for riders who want to rest, has moved beyond the Cybercab. A video posted Thursday by Spencer (@scotsrule08) shows the feature running in a Model Y Robotaxi on a night ride that appears to be in Dallas.
New quiet mode now on @Robotaxi https://t.co/2cM2eM9NeN — Spencer (@scotsrule08) October 29, 2026
The rider taps a small crescent moon icon in the bottom right corner of the map screen. The map, media player, app shortcuts and Grok prompt disappear, leaving a dark display with “Arriving soon,” the destination and a line reading “Tap display to exit quiet mode.” Controls a passenger may still need, including Pull Over, cabin temperature, volume and Support, stay visible. One tap anywhere brings the full map back.
Quiet mode first showed up in the Cybercab last week, which Teslarati reported alongside a new rear camera view. Tesla has been trimming cabin noise in other ways too. On October 25, Spencer reported that Robotaxi turn signals now chime for the first four blinks and then go silent. Tesla has not published release notes for either change.
Elon Musk has been pitching this use for more than a decade. In October 2014, he said that “maybe five or six years from now I think we’ll be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination,”
By 2017 he was setting a higher bar. Speaking at TED, Musk said the hard part was not making self-driving work 99.9 percent of the time, “because, like, if a car crashes one in a thousand times, then you’re probably still not going to be comfortable falling asleep. You shouldn’t be, certainly.”
Owners asked for something similar in their own cars. In December 2019, a Tesla owner requested a Nap Mode that would keep the climate running and wake the occupant with an alarm, and Musk answered “Ok,” as Teslarati covered at the time.
The line returned when the Cybercab was unveiled at the We, Robot event in October 2024. “We’ll move from supervised Full Self-Driving to unsupervised Full Self-Driving, where you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination,” Musk said. On Tesla’s first quarter earnings call in April 2025, he called it the deciding measure: “The acid test is, can you go to sleep in your car and wake up in your destination and I’m confident that will be available in many cities in the US by the end of this year,”
Tesla has run driverless Model Y rides in Dallas and Houston since April, so a passenger dozing off on the way home is now a realistic use of the button. Tesla is also offering new riders a free first trip in both cities, according to an in-app screen shared by tracker Ethan McKanna, and said on its third quarter call that Cybercab rides would launch in Dallas next month.
SpaceX President to gift Trump Accounts her SpaceX stock
Tesla Full Self-Driving becomes main pillar of new Referral Program
