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[Update: fully stacked] SpaceX speeds up work on Starship with “hundreds” of upgrades
Update: Less than 24 hours after publishing, SpaceX began installing Starship SN15’s nose section, stacking the significantly upgraded rocket to its full 50m (~165 ft) height.
Excluding the installation of a few minor ‘aerocover’ surfaces used to smooth out the interface between Starship’s hull and four flaps, SN15 will effectively be complete and ready to roll to the launch pad as soon as its nose and tank sections have been welded together. Historically, for SN8-SN11, that process – including visual and radiographic (x-ray) inspections for quality assurance – has taken as few as one or two days, meaning that SN15 could technically be ready to roll out as early as Monday, April 4th.
Of note, SpaceX has already scheduled a road closure from 7am to noon CDT (UTC-5) on Monday – likely to transport a crane to the pad but potentially enough to get both a crane and SN15 to the launch site. Simultaneously, an upgraded or modified hydraulic ram – used to simulate the thrust of three Raptors – was already moved to the pad and installed on one of two suborbital launch mounts on Saturday, April 3rd, meaning that the pad will likely be ready for SN15’s installation tomorrow.
If SpaceX manages to complete both transport tasks on Monday, odds are very good that SN15 will be able to get through one or several qualification tests – including an ambient-temperature pressure test, cryogenic proof, wet dress rehearsal, and static fire – by the end of the week. Stay tuned for updates!
Beginning almost immediately after Starship SN11’s midair explosion earlier this week, SpaceX has accelerated work on a new Starship prototype upgraded with “hundreds of improvements.”
In November 2020, Musk first revealed plans to implement “major [Starship] upgrades” as early as prototype SN15, though the improvements involved in the first apparent Starship ‘block’ change were never detailed. On 30 March 2021, the same day as Starship SN11’s foggy, ill-fated launch debut, Musk confirmed that the SN15+ block upgrade would feature “hundreds of design improvements [to] structures, avionics, software, and [Raptor engines].”
Around the same time, after more than two months of little to not visible activity, work on Starship SN15 rapidly restarted in an apparent bid to achieve Musk’s stated goal of rolling the rocket to the launch pad “in a few days.”
Possibly due to a significant shift in focus from Starship mass-production to the construction of Boca Chica’s first orbital-class launch pad and flight tests of prototypes SN8 through SN11, Starship SN15 has been in the stacking and assembly phase since the turn of the new year. About a month ago, in early March, the rocket’s tank section was stacked to its full height and has been making slow progress in the weeks since – clearly not a pressing priority.
The day after SN11 exploded, SpaceX stacked the last two pieces of Starship SN11’s nose and joined their plumbing and avionics runs, more or less completing the upper third of the prototype. Both nosecone flaps were installed a few days prior. On the same day, March 31st, SpaceX rolled Starship SN15’s tank section (the bottom two-thirds of the rocket) out of Boca Chica’s ‘mid bay’ assembly building and installed both after flaps before moving the vehicle into the ‘high bay.’
With those steps complete, Starship SN15 should be just a few days away from nose installation, at which point it will need just a few more days of work before SpaceX will be ready to install the rocket on a transporter and roll it to the launch pad. It’s not implausible that that move will happen as early as next week, perhaps even leaving enough time for an acceptance test or two before the weekend.
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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
