News
SpaceX’s second Super Heavy booster enters production in South Texas
In a rare burst of visible activity, SpaceX’s South Texas Starship factory has begun fabricating a second Super Heavy booster and taken a significant step forward on the first prototype.
Set to be the largest operational rocket stage ever built by more than a factor of two, Super Heavy is the booster tasked with launching a fully fueled and loaded Starship (~1400 mT or 3 million lbs) out of the bulk of Earth’s atmosphere. Powered by up to 28 Raptor engines, Super Heavy and Starship will weigh upwards of 5000 metric tons (~11 million lbs) and produce anywhere from 5600 to 7700 metric tons (12.5-17 million lbf) of thrust at liftoff.
Most importantly, though SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has noted that an optimized Starship might be able to reach orbit on a one-way trip, a giant, reasonably efficient booster like Super Heavy is necessary to send Starship into a healthy orbit with all the extra hardware and mass needed to make the orbital spaceship reusable. More than twice as heavy and two-thirds as tall as SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket, that will be no small feat.
Following the appearance of Super Heavy booster number 1’s (BN1) unique common dome, extra-large ‘transfer tube’ segments, and a donut-like eight-Raptor thrust section last month, visible booster work settled down for the next several weeks. In the interim, Musk revealed that SpaceX aims to hop the first Super Heavy booster (BN1) just “a few months” into 2021, followed by the bombshell that the CEO wants to eventually catch Super Heavy boosters to avoid the need for landing legs entirely.
Two weeks after that latest info from Musk and a month after major booster-related factory activity, the first hardware intended for Super Heavy prototype BN2 was spotted on January 19th. Featuring a never-before-seen structural addition in the form of what looks like a hexagonal or octagonal steel ring, the booster’s unique forward dome represents the first real evidence of the modifications needed to install a variety of hardware specific to Super Heavy.
The limited nature and number of current views make it hard to conclude with certainty that the BN2 forward dome’s add-on is hexagonal or octagonal – either could technically be made to work. Barring a surprise design change, Super Heavy – like Falcon 9 and Heavy boosters – will sport four equally spaced grid fins and use them to ensure aerodynamic stability and control authority from hypersonic to supersonic velocities. Based on official SpaceX graphics, Super Heavy’s grid fins will be built out of welded steel, measure some 7 meters (23 ft) tall, and likely weigh 5+ metric tons apiece, thus requiring extremely powerful actuation systems and strong structural support.
Meanwhile, beyond Super Heavy BN2’s first visible appearance, the process of assembling the first booster prototype also took a significant step forward. Sometime on January 19th, SpaceX ended a long period of inactivity, stacking the first Super Heavy ring sections since November 2020. More specifically, SpaceX teams appear to have installed either one or two four-ring sections on an existing booster segment already inside the high bay.
If at rest on top of the rest of the stack in Mary’s (BocaChicaGal) latest photo, one of two Super Heavy ‘stacks’ inside the high bay is now 12 rings (three sections) tall, representing almost a third of a complete 70-meter (~230 ft) tall booster. As of the most recent look inside the high bay, there were two separate stacks of Super Heavy rings – one with four and the other with eight. Based on the location of the new 12-ring stack, it’s more likely than not that SpaceX has simply combined the 12 rings last seen inside the high bay rather than adding one or two new ring sections to one of the two separate stacks.
Ultimately, the return of Super Heavy stacking activity after a two-month pause is an encouraging sign that SpaceX has settled on a design for the first few prototype boosters and could, in fact, be ready to start testing BN1 “a few months” from now.
Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
Tesla will resolve its massive recall of nearly three million vehicles in China with stickers and a software update.
On Friday, Chinese regulators filed recall plans against Tesla, Xiaomi, Leapmotor, Xpeng, Chery, Geely, Dongfeng, Arcfox, and FAW to resolve what is essentially a carbon-copy issue throughout each of the companies’ vehicle models: emergency door release latches are simply not visible enough.
Tesla door handle saga gets its latest chapter and a big change is coming
The companies will be required to add things that will make these latches, which will open the door in the event of an emergency, more visible. Of the 7 million vehicles impacted, Tesla accounts for 2,975,910 units. More than 1.9 million of those are Model Y vehicles, with the rest, just over 970,000, being Model 3s.
To resolve the issue, Tesla is going to add warning labels to the emergency latches free of charge, and then utilize an Over-the-Air update to add a post-crash window-lowering strategy, according to CNEVpost.
This massive effort to fix the all-electric Model Y and Model 3’s emergency latch system comes just months after several probes across various markets identified the trouble some had identifying this latch. Those who had gotten involved in car accidents that stripped the vehicle of its power were not aware that every Tesla has emergency door latches.
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said that severe crashes that disable a vehicle’s low-voltage system could not only hinder occupants from getting out, but also make it more difficult for emergency response workers to gain entry.
SAMR is starting to tighten the regulations it has on door handles on vehicles. A new mandatory national standard will take effect for all models starting January 1, 2027, and will require all doors to be equipped with mechanical release mechanisms. This will effectively end purely electronic door handles. Models already on sale with type approval have been granted a two-year transition period, which will enable things to change until January 2029.
Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
