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SpaceX’s first orbital-class Starship and Super Heavy to return to launch pad next week
CEO Elon Musk says that SpaceX could return the first orbital-class Starship prototype and its Super Heavy booster to the launch site after rolling the rockets back to the factory for finishing steps.
In response to a video of Super Heavy Booster 4 (B4) returning to the build site, Musk rather specifically stated that both Booster for and Starship 20 (S20) will return to the orbital launch pad on Monday, August 16th. SpaceX returned Ship 20 to its ‘high bay’ vertical integration facility mere hours after the Starship was stacked atop a Super Heavy booster (B4) for the first time ever on August 6th. For unknown reasons, perhaps due to high winds, Booster 4 spent another five days at the pad before SpaceX finally lifted it off the orbital launch mount and rolled it back to the high bay, where it took Ship 20’s place on August 11th.
Almost immediately after S20’s August 6th return, its six Raptor engines were removed to make way for an engine-less proof test campaign that Musk has now implied could start as early as next Monday. Mirroring S20, SpaceX also begin uninstalling Super Heavy Booster 4’s 29 Raptor engines the same day it returned to the high bay.
Around 12 hours after the process began, SpaceX appeared to have removed 14 (just shy of half) of Super Heavy B4’s Raptor engines – a pace almost as spectacular as their 12-18 hour installation a bit less than two weeks prior. Aside from making engine removal dramatically easier, Musk says that SpaceX moved Ship 20 and Booster 4 back to the build site to expedite some minor final integration work – namely “small plumbing and wiring.”
However, aside from Raptor removal, the most obvious and significant work ongoing since the pair’s return to the high bay is the process of inspecting Starship S20’s heat shield and repairing or replacing broken, chipped, and loose tiles. Not long after Ship 20 arrived back at the build site, workers in boom lifts began a seemingly arduous process of inspecting the Starship’s nose heat shield and marking – with colored tape – hundreds of tiles with cracks, chips, or other less visible issues.
After several days of inspections and hundreds of tiles marked, SpaceX finally began the process of removing off-nominal tiles early on August 12th. According to NASASpaceflight.com, that removal process is not particularly easy and can require the use of power tools to effectively cut tiles off their embedded mounting frames. Given the amount of force required, some level of care is also almost certainly needed to avoid damaging any adjacent tiles, which could quickly cause a minor misstep to exponentially spread. Nevertheless, a small team of SpaceX technicians seemingly managed to remove no less than several dozen (and maybe 100+) broken tiles in a few hours.
Up next, those removed tiles will need to be replaced. Still, it remains to be seen if SpaceX will choose to fully complete Starship S20’s “98% done” heat shield before sending the ship back to the launch site for proof and static fire testing. To a degree, putting Starship through a gauntlet of ground tests with a full heat shield installed would be an excellent test of the resilience of its thermal protection system to major thermal stresses from frosty steel skin and expansion/contraction during fueling, as well as violent vibrations during static fires.
However, Starship S20’s heat shield is already so close to completion that it might be only marginally less valuable to save time by testing the vehicle as soon as possible.
To an extent, Booster 4 is a much simpler case as Super Heavy needs to major thermal protection. However, according to Musk, some or all of Super Heavy’s 29 Raptor engines will need their own miniature thermal protection system – perhaps a flexible blanket-like enclosure not unlike what SpaceX uses to partially protect Falcon booster engines during reentry. It remains to be seen if Booster 4 will return to the launch site without engines for cryogenic proof testing or if SpaceX will install heat shielded Raptors before starting the first flightworthy Super Heavy’s first test campaign.
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SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout
SpaceX launched the classified USSF-385 mission from Vandenberg, landing its booster on a tenth flight.
SpaceX launched another classified mission for the U.S. Space Force from California early Saturday morning, and the Falcon 9 booster that carried it landed on a drone ship in the Pacific for the tenth time. The USSF-385 mission lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base at 7:00 a.m. PT.
Booster B1100 touched down on Of Course I Still Love You roughly eight and a half minutes after liftoff. It was the booster’s tenth flight and tenth successful landing, following the NROL-95 national security mission and eight Starlink launches. Its previous flight, a Starlink Group 15 mission on August 22, came just 35 days earlier. SpaceX ended its livestream shortly after the landing, which is standard for classified payloads, and neither the company nor the Space Force has said what the rocket carried.
Watch Falcon 9 launch the USSF-385 mission from pad 4E in California https://t.co/CAdbx85Ydy
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) September 26, 2026
USSF-385 is the fourth Space Force launch from the same Vandenberg pad in roughly six weeks, following USSF-366 on August 15, USSF-153 on September 10, and USSF-259 on September 17. When SpaceX flew USSF-366 in August, independent trackers noted that the rocket’s stage drop zones matched SpaceX’s Starlink Group 15 missions, pointing to Starshield, the government version of the Starlink satellite bus. The Space Force later cataloged 23 satellites after both USSF-366 and USSF-153, while USSF-259 placed 17 satellites into a different orbital plane, per KeepTrack. Launch databases describe USSF-385 the same way, though the payload remains officially unidentified.
The cadence lines up with the contracts, because in July, the Space Force awarded SpaceX $1.6 billion in task orders for 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg through the end of 2027. SpaceX also holds contracts to build pieces of that same network, which pushed its Pentagon contract total for 2026 past $8 billion.
Saturday’s flight was also the sixth and final Falcon 9 launch from Vandenberg in September, according to Spaceflight Now, while only one Falcon 9 flew from the East Coast this month as SpaceX shifts its Florida infrastructure toward Starship. Launch trackers list it as SpaceX’s 112th mission of 2026 and the 108th Falcon 9 flight of the year, with SLC-4E turned around about six and a half days after its previous launch.
The West Coast pad will not stay quiet for long, considering SpaceX has another Starlink mission scheduled from SLC-4E on September 30. Meanwhile, in Texas, the company is two days away from Starship Flight 14, which is targeting Monday at 7:15 a.m. CT for the vehicle’s first attempt to reach orbit.
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Tesla hints at new Roadster design in surprise clip
Tesla ended its Semi event with a Roadster teaser revealing a new front light bar.
Tesla closed out its Semi event in Nevada on Thursday night with a nod to its own history, dropping a short Roadster teaser that suggests the production car will look noticeably different from the prototype first shown in 2017.
“We can’t have a Semi event without the Roadster,” Tesla engineering executive Lars Moravy told the crowd before the clip played. The line was a deliberate callback. Tesla first revealed the next generation Roadster in November 2017 by driving it out of the back of a Semi trailer at the truck’s original unveiling in Hawthorne, California.
The new video opens on trailer doors swinging apart in the dark. A thin white light bar glows across what appears to be the nose of the car, Tesla and SpaceX logos flash over the frame, and the Roadster name appears before the clip ends on “See you next week.” Tesla posted the nine second clip on X after the livestream wrapped.
See you next week pic.twitter.com/BT52bGVxFu
— Tesla (@Tesla) September 25, 2026
The light bar is the most concrete design detail so far. The 2017 prototype used two separate curved headlamp pods, while a connected front light strip would bring the Roadster in line with the Cybertruck, Cybercab, Semi, and refreshed Model Y. Sawyer Merritt was among the first to point out what looked like part of a SpaceX logo in the video, something Tesla has not addressed.
That logo fits the buildup around the optional SpaceX Package, which Elon Musk has long said would use cold gas thrusters to improve acceleration and possibly allow the car to briefly leave the ground. Tesla’s “Go for launch” post on September 12 set the October 1 date, and invitations sent to reservation holders place the event in Waco, Texas, at 8:30 p.m. Eastern. Waco sits roughly 20 minutes from SpaceX’s McGregor rocket test site, where the FAA has put a temporary flight restriction in place from September 18 through October 2, covering a 1.5 nautical mile radius from the surface up to 10,000 feet.
Tesla is also taking money ahead of the reveal. The company reopened Roadster reservations earlier this week with a $5,000 refundable card payment, followed by a $45,000 wire transfer due within 10 days. That puts buyers at $50,000 committed before Tesla has published a price.
The original pitch set a high bar: 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds before any upgrades, 620 miles of range, a top speed above 250 mph, and production in 2020. That timeline has slipped repeatedly, and Tesla has since pointed to production at Gigafactory Texas no earlier than 2027. The company has said next Thursday’s event will include pricing, specifications, and production targets, the three details original reservation holders have been waiting on for nearly nine years.
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s release in Europe is set to be delayed by at least a few months.
The European Union will not vote on Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) on October 6. The draft agenda for the 119th meeting of the Technical Committee on Motor Vehicles lists only a 25-minute “continuation of discussions” on the Netherlands’ Article 39 request, not a decision. The next scheduled TCMV session is in December, which is now the earliest date a bloc-wide vote could occur.
Tesla Europe had pointed to October 6 as a possible EU-wide vote after the Dutch vehicle authority RDW granted the first European type approval on April 10.
That approval, under UN Regulation 171 plus an Article 39 exemption in EU Regulation 2018/858, is the legal file other member states have been recognizing one by one. The same committee has already discussed the request twice without voting.
Elon Musk’s reply to the delay was a single word: “Sigh.”
Sigh
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 25, 2026
Seven EU countries have now cleared FSD Supervised on their own roads: the Netherlands, Lithuania, Estonia, Denmark, Belgium, Slovenia, and Czechia. Those seven states represent about 53 million people, or roughly 12 percent of the EU population. An EU-wide authorization still needs a qualified majority: at least 15 of 27 member states representing 65 percent of the bloc’s population, about 292 million people.
Germany, France, Italy, and Spain remain the decisive markets. France has already rejected the current system; several other governments have flagged speed-limit compliance as the main sticking point.
The safety case Tesla is putting in front of those governments is now public. On September 1, Tesla Europe said FSD Supervised was in use by more than 70,000 customers, covering over 1 million kilometers a day, and was 4.1 times less likely to be involved in a crash than manual driving across 100 million kilometers on EU public roads.
An earlier mid-year cut of the same fleet data, covering 65 million kilometers in five approved countries, put the collision advantage at 5.2 times, with zero highway collisions over 41.9 million kilometers. Tesla also reported far fewer automatic emergency braking events, harsh accelerations, and hard swerves than in comparable manual Tesla driving. Those figures are company-reported, not independently audited.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is taking over Europe: fourth country gets FSD approval
The public-health backdrop is harder to dispute. European countries recorded about 19,400 road deaths in 2025, or roughly 53 a day, most of them attributed to human error. FSD Supervised is not unsupervised autonomy; the driver remains legally responsible. But the software is already legal and in daily use across seven member states.
Until TCMV votes, the rest of the EU remains a patchwork: available in Prague and Amsterdam, locked behind review in Paris and Berlin. December is now the next chance to close that gap.
SpaceX completes another secret Pentagon launch, adding to suspected Starshield buildout
Tesla hints at new Roadster design in surprise clip
