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SpaceX’s Starbase environmental review suffers third delay
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has announced that the completion of a crucial ‘environmental assessment’ SpaceX needs to begin orbital-class Starship launch attempts out of South Texas has been delayed for the third time.
Official known as a programmatic environmental assessment or PEA, the FAA says it started the process in late June 2021 with the goal of verifying that SpaceX’s Starbase orbital launch site (OLS) was mostly benign before the end of 2021. Compared to a regular EA, the programmatic nature of SpaceX’s Starbase review would theoretically allow the company to start small and gradually expand and add new facilities and capabilities without having to restart the arduous review process for each change.
Along those lines, SpaceX’s first draft PEA requested permission for no more than five full-stack Starship launches per year compared to the maximum of 12 Falcon 9 launches or nine Falcon 9 and three Falcon Heavy launches out of Boca Chica that SpaceX had already received permission for from the FAA in 2014.
Unfortunately, even at the time that the start of the process was announced, completing a full PEA in half a year was already unbelievably optimistic. No comparable review, of which there are effectively none, has been completed anywhere close to that quickly. In the face of substantial local opposition, like in the case of Georgia’s Camden Spaceport, even an FAA environmental review for a relatively small rocket launch facility can make little progress after years of tooth-and-nail fighting.
However, the best possible comparison has always been SpaceX’s own environmental assessment for an almost identical orbital-class Starship launch site at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center. Despite the fact that no untouched ground would be broken and even with the apparent might of NASA behind it, it took the FAA and SpaceX about a full year to complete a Pad 39A EA for up to 24 Starship launches per year. As such, the idea that the FAA would be able to complete a PEA for Boca Chica Starship launches in six months was always almost unimaginable.
It should come as no surprise, then, that nine months after SpaceX and the FAA began their Starbase PEA, they appear to be only marginally closer to completing the review. Days before the original December 31st, 2021 deadline, the FAA announced a delay to February 28th, 2022. On February 14th, the FAA announced a second delay to March 28th. Most recently, on March 25th, the FAA announced a third delay to April 29th.
Put simply, the FAA is effectively saying that it is actually further away from completing SpaceX’s South Texas Starship PEA than it was in December 2021. The extraordinarily opaque nature of the process also means that anyone outside of the loop or without internal sources is left to simply guess what is causing those delays or why the FAA keeps pushing the goalposts back just one or two months at a time when it’s unclear that anyone can actually predict when the process will be completed.
Without journalists filing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests, the full extent of public knowledge about what is causing those delays would be the FAA’s scant few statements on the process. The most valuable information provided thus far is that the FAA is “reviewing the Final PEA,” which does seem to imply some degree of progress. Nonetheless, the agency still included a boilerplate statement noting that it’s “completing consultation and coordination with agencies at the local, State, and Federal level,” making it hard to actually say if any progress has been made. In February 2022, the FAA said it was “continuing consultation and coordination with other agencies.”
In December 2021, the FAA stated that it was “continuing consultation and coordination with other agencies at the local, State, and Federal level” while “SpaceX continues to prepare the Final PEA for…FAA review and acceptance.” By using such vague and unspecific language, the FAA makes what little it does say virtually impossible to parse and barely better than nothing. Solely thanks to documents secured through FOIA, we know that the FAA itself may not actually be to blame for most or all of the PEA’s four months of delays.
Instead, the US Department of the Interior (DOI), Fish and Wildlife Services (FWS), and National Park Services (NPS) may be partially responsible through their required coordination with the FAA, which they appear to be taking full advantage of to exert some form of control over the outcome. Bureaucrats are being bureaucratic, in other words.
Outside of email chains and boardrooms, however, it’s no longer clear that completing the PEA and securing an FAA launch license are the limiting factor for the first orbital Starship test flights. SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently announced that SpaceX is changing the prototypes assigned to the first full-stack launch – likely to Booster 7 and Ship 24. Super Heavy B7 has yet to begin any kind of testing and Starship S24 is still in several pieces, so it’s safe to say that SpaceX’s new pair are months of concerted testing away from launch readiness.
If anything goes wrong during those tests, any significant design issues are discovered, or any damage is caused, it’s entirely possible that what Elon Musk says could take as few as two months will actually take more like four to six. Only time will tell. For now, the FAA likely has a few months before Starship’s South Texas PEA and full-stack launch license truly become the limiting factor for the rocket’s first orbital launch attempt.
Tesla released the Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ suite to owners of Hardware 3 or AI3 vehicles today, adding several new features to the vehicles that were once believed to be capable of unsupervised self-driving.
Now, Tesla has released this modified suite to older Tesla vehicles, adding plenty of new features and capabilities.
Here are the full release notes for the suite:
- Distilled the intelligence from HW4 V14 into HW3. This allows HW3 to directly learn how to handle scenarios using HW4 V14 as a guide. This process unlocks the improvements that have been made to HW4 including Reinforcement Learning (RL) and offline models for HW3.
- Improved both proactive and reactive responsiveness across a wide variety of categories including navigation handling, merges and forks, pedestrian interactions, traffic lights, and vehicle cut-in scenarios.
- Improved general comfort in nominal scenarios through fewer false slowdowns, smoother steering and more consistent lane centering.
- Introduced parking, unparking, and reversing capabilities.
- Added Arrival Options for you to select where FSD should park: in a Parking Lot, on the Street, in a Driveway, or at the Curbside.
- Speed Profiles are now available at all times, to further customize driving style preference.
These improvements, according to Tesla’s Head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, help distill the driving behavior from AI4’s v14 series into both the camera and compute configurations of AI3.
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ for older cars finally gets released
He added:
“It includes destination options and speed profiles on city roads, but more importantly significantly improved safety. We hope you’ll enjoy it, once the build ships wide.”
FSD v14 Lite is now rolling out to AI3 early-access customers. Based on the feedback, will rollout to more customers over the next few weeks.
This build distills the driving behavior from AI4’s v14 series into both the camera and compute config of AI3. It includes destination…
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) June 29, 2026
Tesla will continue to roll out the v14 Lite suite more widely in the coming weeks, the company said.
Tesla has finally released its Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ suite for older cars that equip the Hardware 3 or AI 3 chip, which have not been able to handle the newest versions of the company’s driver assistance software.
Tesla officially started releasing the v14 Lite suite to owners in the Early Access Program last night. The company’s Head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, said that the rollout will continue over the next few weeks. The build distills the driving behavior from AI4’s v14 series into both the camera and compute configurations of an AI3 car.
🚨 Tesla is releasing v14 Lite for AI3 owners who are in early-access
This will give AI3 cars the ability to experience new FSD features like parking preferences. https://t.co/pp6Q5FOKoz pic.twitter.com/tqexMB8SVy
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) June 29, 2026
It also includes a variety of new features that were available to AI4 cars running v14, including:
- Start Self-Driving from Park
- Arrival and Parking Options
- Speed Profiles
The release is highly anticipated because those owners with AI3 vehicles were early adopters into the FSD platform and were promised that their cars would be capable of achieving Full Self-Driving.
However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk admitted during the company’s recent Q1 Earnings Call that these vehicles would not be capable of achieving unsupervised Full Self-Driving, which is what Tesla had originally said.
Owners were not pleased with this answer, or the idea that their commitment to buying the suite outright for thousands of dollars would not yield the ability to drive without operating the car. Tesla gave some solutions for this, including a discount on a new car, or an upgrade to an AI4 or AI5 self-driving computer and new, upgraded cameras.
Tesla owners do not seem pleased with these options, as they require giving the company more money.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that Tesla came through for owners here by releasing v14 Lite before the end of Q2, something it had promised owners during the previous Earnings Call. Tesla has had trouble keeping up with timelines, but this is a big achievement for the team.
Tesla released what analysts believe the company will report in terms of deliveries and energy deployments for Q2, but the figures seem to confirm a long-standing theory on the company’s vehicle division.
For years, Tesla was just looked at as a car company. Now that it has established itself as a powerhouse in energy, AI, and tech as a whole, the company is now less hellbent on achieving quarterly growth, on a sequential basis, at least from a major standpoint.
Tesla topped out its annual deliveries in 2023 at 1.81 million, and in the two years since, the company has reported a decrease in deliveries for the entire 12-month term both times.
With Tesla delivering 358,023 cars in Q1, a 6.3 percent increase over Q1 2025, but falling short of Wall Street expectations at 365,000-370,000 units, the narrative around vehicle deliveries and their importance continued to change earlier this year. Some might say it is convenient, but others might say it is the typical evolution of a company that continues to change over time.
For Q2, Tesla’s delivery consensus estimates sit at 406,024 units, analysts believe. They were surveyed from Daiwa, DB, Wedbush, Cowen, Canaccord, Baird, Wolfe, BMP Paribas, Goldman Sachs, RBC, Evercore ISI, Barclays, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, Morgan Stanley, Truist, UBS, Jefferies, JPM, Needham & Co., HSBC, and William Blair.
Credit: Tesla
Tesla is also expected to report deployments of 13.8 GWh this quarter.
The change to Tesla’s overall narrative now leans less on vehicle deliveries and more on its other projects. Most notably, Tesla’s Robotaxi project has taken the priority over most of its other business ventures, and investors and the public are more concerned about the deployment of vehicles into the fleet, the operation of a driverless ride-hailing service, Cybercab production and operation, and expansion into new cities.
Tesla analyst realizes one big thing about the stock: deliveries are losing importance
This big narrative switch happened when Tesla indicated it was looking at making transportation a service by launching a ride-hailing service that will operate using Tesla’s Full Self-Driving suite. Once unsupervised operation begins, Robotaxi could be a new way for people to get around, all without a driver in their car.
Instead, they will rely on the billions of miles Tesla has accumulated from its real-world fleet.
It is important to note that Tesla remains significant in the automotive sector, and deliveries must continue as they have for years. Tesla still has a strong automotive business and needs to execute further on all facets to keep its investors happy.
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ Release Notes: new capabilities and features
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ for older cars finally gets released
