News
SpaceX ‘sleeves’ Starship-derived propellant tank for the first time – here’s why
In a small but important step towards activating a pad capable of launching the largest and most powerful rocket ever built, SpaceX has ‘sleeved’ one of its Starship-derived propellant storage tanks for the first time.
Starship is a fully-reusable, two-stage liquid rocket designed to ultimately cut the cost of orbital launch by at least one magnitude, opening the door for humanity’s sustainable expansion to Earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, and even beyond. To accomplish that lofty feat, it has to be a massive rocket. Measuring approximately 120m (~395 ft) tall and 9m (~30 ft) wide, Starship and Super Heavy will weigh on the order of 300 metric tons (~675,000 lb) when empty.
Once filled to the brim with cryogenic liquid methane (CH4) and liquid oxygen (LOx) propellant and gas, though, a two-stage Starship will easily weigh more than 5000 tons (11 million lb) shortly before and after liftoff. Further, SpaceX wants to be able to launch at least two Starships from Boca Chica in rapid succession. To meet the staggering needs of back-to-back Starship launches, SpaceX has thus had to design and build what will be the world’s largest launch pad tank farm.
Work on that tank farm is already well underway, though progress has been slower than expected. The site’s foundation and a few associated blockhouses were mostly completed by January 2021. By early April, the company had completed the first of at least seven steel propellant storage tanks at its Starship factory and rolled it to the launch pad for installation.
Notably, SpaceX chose to manufacture those storage tanks itself and ended up building structures virtually identical to the tanks that already make up most of flightworthy Starship and Super Heavy airframes. Depending on whether they’re meant to store liquid oxygen or methane, the seven tanks SpaceX is building are either 26 or 30 meters (85 or 100 feet) tall – though the concrete mounts they’re affixed to at the launch site are sized such that all storage tanks will have the same final height.
Of course, being made with the same tools and out of the same steel as Starship and Super Heavy, that means that SpaceX’s custom storage tanks are little more than 4mm (~1/6″) thick steel shells – about as bad as it gets for keeping cryogenic rocket fuel… cryogenic. If SpaceX were to simply use those unmodified tanks, it would be almost impossible to store Starship fuel for more than a few hours – and maybe just a few minutes – without it warming up past the point of usability.
As such, SpaceX’s final Starship tank farm design involves seven Starship-derived storage tanks and seven contractor-built tank sleeves. Measuring around 12m (~40 ft) wide and 40m (~130 ft) tall, those “cryo shells” will enclose all seven SpaceX-built tanks, allowing the company to fill the 1.5m (~5 ft) gap between them with an insulating solid, gas, or some combination of both. With those shells and insulation, SpaceX’s custom-built Starship tank form should be more than capable of storing cryogenic liquid oxygen and methane for days or even weeks.
As of August 5th, SpaceX has installed three of Starship’s custom ground supply equipment (GSE) tanks (with a fourth moved onsite on Thursday), moved two ‘cryo shells’ to temporary storage spots at the pad, and installed one cryo shell that actually turned out to be a million-gallon water tank. On Thursday, SpaceX ‘sleeved’ one of those storage tanks for the first time ever, marking an important milestone towards the activation of a tank farm capable of supporting Starship’s orbital launch debut. Another four sleeves are more or less complete, with the eighth and final sleeve likely just a week or two away from completion.
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A fifth GSE tank is also more or less complete, leaving two more to go. However, with some basic math, it’s possible to determine that SpaceX’s orbital launch pad likely only needs five cryogenic tanks (three oxygen, two methane) – and possibly as few as four – to support Starship’s first orbital test flight(s). With SpaceX finally beginning to install tank sleeves, it’s possible that that four or five-tank milestone – and the first tests of SpaceX’s custom, unproven storage solution – are now much closer at hand.
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News
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station, joining an exclusive two resort transit club.
Sahara Las Vegas opened a new Vegas Loop station Thursday, giving The Boring Company’s underground transit system its northernmost stop yet on the Strip. The station sits at Sahara’s Paradise Road entrance, on the southeast corner of Las Vegas Boulevard and Sahara Avenue, and connects riders to the Las Vegas Convention Center, other Strip resorts on the network and, eventually, Harry Reid International Airport.
The addition makes Sahara the second resort, after Fontainebleau opened its own station in January, to get a stop built at street level rather than tucked into the property itself. Sahara now joins Westgate as the only two Strip resorts offering both a Vegas Loop station and a stop on the Las Vegas Monorail, giving guests two separate ways to get around without leaving the property.
The Boring Company just doubled its tunneling power in Nashville
The bigger news buried in Thursday’s announcement is what comes next. Boring Company has already secured its first permit to tunnel north of Sahara Avenue, extending the network beyond where it currently ends, even though permits to push the Loop toward downtown Las Vegas still haven’t been granted. Crews are also working on a two mile dual tunnel line running from Westgate to a planned station at 4744 Paradise Road, just north of Tropicana Avenue, that Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority CEO Steve Hill has said the company hopes to open in time for November’s Las Vegas Grand Prix.
Ridership has grown alongside the buildout. The Loop moved roughly 82,000 passengers during CONEXPO in early March, a total the company highlighted on its own X account at the time, and the system has now carried more than 4 million passengers through 11 open stations since it began running in 2021. The airport connector tunnels, meant to give the Loop a direct link to Harry Reid, have slipped past their original first quarter target and remain under construction, with Boring Company director Mike Baier saying that a full opening is still a few months out.
For Sahara, the calculation is straightforward. Convention traffic drives a large share of Loop ridership, and a station at the property’s front door gives conventiongoers one more reason to book rooms on the Strip’s north end instead of closer to the convention center itself.
Elon Musk
Tesla’s mysterious Robovan makes a sneak peek with Optimus in Terafab video
Elon Musk shared a new Terafab video showing Optimus, Robovans, and a stunningly futuristic campus.
Elon Musk posted a new video of Terafab on X Thursday morning, and the most eye-catching details in it were not the building itself, but two products still awaiting production: Optimus and the Robovan.
The concept render, credited to SpaceX, shows Optimus robots working the grounds of the roughly 2.5-mile-long facility planned for the Gibbons Creek site in Grimes County, while a Robovan glides along an elevated roadway cutting through the building itself, sharing the frame with a Tesla Semi and a Cybercab.
Robovan is the boxy, driverless people and cargo mover Musk unveiled alongside Cybercab at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event in October 2024. He pitched it as a way to move up to 20 passengers at once, or handle freight instead, at a target cost he claimed could fall under a dollar a mile, with no steering wheel or pedals, the same layout as Cybercab. Nearly two years later, Robovan still has no confirmed production timeline and has not shown up in any factory footage, which makes Thursday’s render one of the only recent looks at the vehicle in any form.
Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.
And it will be stunningly beautiful. pic.twitter.com/4NweOqTL7y
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2026
Optimus has moved further along. Tesla began converting Fremont’s old Model S and Model X assembly line into a Gen 3 Optimus production line earlier this year, and Musk visited the site on July 1 to mark the changeover. A second, larger Optimus plant is under construction at Giga Texas, targeting volume production in summer 2027 and eventual capacity of 10 million units a year. Tesla AI lead Ashok Elluswamy said this month the robot has “big shoes to fill” in replacing the S and X line, while Musk has repeatedly called Optimus the company’s biggest product of any kind, with a long-term price he has pegged between $20,000 and $30,000.
Check out the “Robovan” from @Tesla
📸: @Teslarati pic.twitter.com/D4es2i9NUe
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 11, 2024
“Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far,” Musk wrote alongside the clip. “And it will be stunningly beautiful.”
One quote post summed up the reaction: “Futuristic scene with RoboVan + Cybercab + Tesla Semi + Optimus.”
Beyond the vehicles, the architecture wrapped around them stands out too. The building’s facade is canted at sharp angles, with illuminated horizontal bands running through what appears to be a multi level interior visible from outside. Below the elevated roadway, pedestrians walk along a plaza next to a reflecting pool, and the skyline behind the campus is dotted with angular spires that read more like sculpture than infrastructure, a departure from the strictly utilitarian look of Gigafactory Texas or Starbase.
The timing tracks with what Terafab representative Riley Trennell told Grimes County residents on Wednesday, when he said renderings of the facility would be released “within days.” Musk’s post followed less than 24 hours later, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott’s office sent out its own release Thursday confirming the project. As Teslarati reported this morning, Terafab’s tax abatement agreements with Grimes County are now signed and active, and SpaceX has sent the county its first $10 million payment under that deal. The dollar figure tied to this phase of construction, per Reuters, is $16.8 billion, one of the first hard capital expenditure numbers attached to Terafab since Musk unveiled the joint Tesla-SpaceX-xAI venture in March.Reaction on X ranged from enthusiastic to skeptical. “God Bless Texas! Everything is bigger and better in Texas!” one reply read. Another was more measured: “Terafab in a decade…..”
Whether the finished building matches the render is a separate question from whether Musk wanted people talking about the render itself. Less than a day after posting, the video had already crossed 5.5 million views.
Cybertruck
Tesla Cybertruck production snaps back after ugly supplier fight
Cybertrucks are piling up again at Giga Texas after Tesla’s court win against a parts supplier.
Cybertruck production at Giga Texas is showing its first visible recovery since Tesla sued a supplier last month over withheld manufacturing tooling.
Aerial observer Joe Tegtmeyer flew over the Austin factory Wednesday morning and counted roughly 100 or more Cybertrucks filling the outbound lot, a sharp jump from the thin numbers seen in recent weeks. The flyover came a day after a judge granted Tesla a temporary restraining order against Angstrom Automotive Group, the parts supplier at the center of the dispute.
Tesla filed an emergency lawsuit in late July after Angstrom told the automaker it planned to close the Troy, Texas facility where Tesla’s die-cast tools, trim dies and other Cybertruck stamping equipment were housed. According to Tesla’s complaint, a shipment of 700 finished parts never left the building, and when Tesla sent representatives to retrieve its equipment, accompanied by law enforcement, they were turned away. Angstrom allegedly then asked for an extra $250,000 a week to keep operating, which Tesla’s filing described as holding its own property for ransom.
TESLA: U.S. District Judge Christopher R. Wolfe of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, Waco Division granted Tesla a Temporary Restraining Order and Writ of Replevin in its dispute with Angstrom Automotive (Case No. 6:26-cv-00477).
The order authorizes… https://t.co/E1DKcQSxMn pic.twitter.com/LR8aAiV2Og
— S.E. Robinson, Jr. (@SERobinsonJr) August 5, 2026
The restraining order gives Tesla immediate right of entry to Angstrom’s facility to recover the tooling. It is temporary, with a fuller hearing still to come, but the speed of Wednesday’s rebound suggests the Angstrom shortage was indeed the main bottleneck limiting Cybertruck output. Outbound lot counts are an imperfect measure of actual production, since finished trucks can sit for days before shipping, but a lot that full after a lean stretch is a meaningful signal.
Cybertruck output at Giga Texas has fluctuated all year as Tesla worked through supply issues and introduced new trims, including a cheaper Dual Motor AWD version that drew strong early demand.
The Boring Company’s newest Vegas Station has a permit quietly waiting behind it
Tesla’s mysterious Robovan makes a sneak peek with Optimus in Terafab video
