News
SpaceX rapidly shipping upgraded Raptor engines to Starbase
SpaceX appears to have opened the floodgates and begun shipping upgraded ‘Raptor V2’ engines to Starbase en masse in preparation for crucial Starship and Super Heavy testing.
The first functional Raptor engine delivery in around half a year and the first Raptor V2 delivery ever appeared to arrive at Starbase on March 30th. About a month and a half prior, SpaceX brought an early Raptor V2 prototype damaged during testing to serve as a backdrop for CEO Elon Musk’s February 10th Starship presentation, marking the first time the public was allowed to see or photograph the engine up close.
Less than three months later, Raptor V2 engines that passed proof testing without damaging or destroying themselves have begun to rapidly pile up inside one of Starbase’s three main production tents.
Though Raptor V2 has plenty in common with its Raptor V1 and V1.5 predecessors and, for the most part, looks very similar, Musk has repeatedly stated that the engine represents a major evolution from past Raptors. Most importantly, Raptor V2 was designed to significantly cut production cost and time. To achieve that, almost every major component was either fully redesigned, tweaked, or refined in some way to make Raptor simpler and more compact.
One example is the decision to slash the number of flanges (mechanical joints) in the engine’s plumbing by replacing them with welds. Making plumbing more monolithic could remove dozens of parts, seals, and potential leak points and significantly speed up manufacturing at the cost of making it harder – if not impossible – for SpaceX to inspect and replace certain pipes or pipe sections in a modular manner.
That process was repeated throughout each Raptor system, resulting in an engine that looks more streamlined than earlier variants. As a result of its more refined design and improvements to other critical components, Musk says that even though Raptor V2 now costs about half as much to build as V1.5, it’s also “much more…reliable.”
Despite significantly improving Raptor’s reliability, simplicity, and cost, SpaceX also managed to boost its maximum thrust by almost 25%. Raptor V2 engines now “routinely” operate at record-breaking main combustion chamber pressures of 300+ bar (~4400 psi) and are able to produce up to 230 tons (~510,000 lbf) of thrust at sea level. The older Raptor V1.5 engines that flew on Starships SN8-SN11 and SN15 and were installed on Super Heavy Booster 4 and Ship 20 were designed to produce around 185 tons (~410,000 lbf) at 250 bar (~3600 psi).
Following the premature retirement of Super Heavy Booster 4 (B4), which was meant to help send Starship S20 to space on the rocket’s first orbital launch attempt, that orbital launch debut is now guaranteed to use a different booster and ship powered by Raptor V2 engines. Ship 24 is a strong candidate for the mission’s Starship, while it remains to be seen if SpaceX will fully repair and attempt to proceed with Booster 7 or if Booster 8 – which is almost complete – will take point.
Either way, the pair will need at least 39 qualified Raptor V2 engines to begin integrated testing, pass several major static fire milestones, and prepare for flight. Since SpaceX appeared to kick off Raptor V2 deliveries to Starbase on March 30th, a photo shared by Musk on April 26th revealed that the company has managed to deliver at least 18 of the upgraded engines in the last four weeks. At least one more engine was also delivered on April 28th.
That means that SpaceX already has enough engines to begin static fire tests with a full cluster of 13 central Raptors on Super Heavy B7 or B8. By the time Ship 24 is fully assembled, Booster 7 is repaired, or Booster 8 is completed, there’s a good chance that SpaceX will have all the engines it needs to fully outfit a Starship and Super Heavy pair – not quite by the end of April, as Musk predicted, but not far off.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk posted a photo of himself standing with the Optimus production team inside Tesla’s Fremont factory, arms crossed amid workers in hard hats and safety vests. The image captures a pivotal industrial shift: the same facility space once dedicated to building Tesla’s flagship Model S sedan and Model X SUV is now home to the company’s humanoid robot manufacturing line.
Walking the Optimus production line in Fremont pic.twitter.com/ABS0tuRibW
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 1, 2026
Tesla’s Fremont Factory, acquired in 2010 from the former NUMMI joint venture between Toyota and GM, has been the company’s original U.S. manufacturing hub since Model S production began in 2012.
The Model X followed soon thereafter. These premium vehicles offered lower annual volumes, recently around 30,000 combined, compared to the high-volume Model 3 and Model Y lines that continue around the site. Over their combined run, the S and X accounted for roughly 610,000 units.
In late January 2026, during Tesla’s Q4 2025 earnings call, Elon Musk announced the end of Model S and Model X production in Q2 2026. The final vehicles rolled off the line in early May. Rather than retooling for another vehicle, Tesla chose to convert the dedicated S/X assembly area into a dedicated Optimus Gen 3 production line.
Model 3 and Y manufacturing remains unaffected. Tesla’s official Fremont Factory page now lists Optimus alongside the 3 and Y as core products.
The conversion was executed with remarkable speed. After production stopped, crews dismantled the existing vehicle line and installed entirely new modular equipment—including lines sourced from Germany and dozens of sub-lines for actuators, batteries, and other components—in roughly four months.
Musk described the timeline as “insanely fast,” noting it would be unprecedented for any other manufacturer. Initial Optimus output is expected to ramp slowly due to the robot’s roughly 10,000 unique parts and the brand-new production processes involved. The Fremont line targets an eventual capacity of 1 million Optimus units per year.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Optimus Development Timeline
- August 19, 2021: Optimus (then called Tesla Bot) formally announced at Tesla’s first AI Day. A concept video showed a person in a suit demonstrating the vision for a general-purpose humanoid capable of dangerous, repetitive, or boring tasks using the same AI architecture as Full Self-Driving.
- 2022: Early prototypes displayed. At the second AI Day in September, semi-functional units demonstrated walking across a stage and basic arm movements
- 2023: September videos showed improved capabilities, including sorting colored blocks, precise limb awareness, and holding a Yoda pose.
- 2024-early 2025: Factory integration videos showed Optimus navigating workspaces and handling objects like battery cells.
- January 2026: Gen 3 mass-production activities began at Fremont, with reports of over 1,000 Gen 3 units already operating inside the factory for real-world learning and AI training
- April 2026: Musk confirms Optimus production on converted Fremont line would begin in late July or August 2026. The Gen 3 reveal, originally eyed for Q1, was pushed closer to production start. A second, much larger Optimus factory at Giga Texas is under construction, with volume production targeted for Summer 2027 and long-term capacity of 10 million units annually
- July 1, 2026: Musk’s on-site visit and team photo confirm the Optimus line is operational and the transition is actively progressing
Tesla positions Optimus as potentially its largest project ever, leveraging vertical integration, AI expertise, and car-like manufacturing know-how to scale humanoid robots first for its own factories and later for broader industrial and consumer use.
The Fremont conversion serves as a critical proving ground for this ambitious new chapter in Tesla’s already-rich history.
Investor's Corner
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
Tesla short seller Michael Burry, the subject of the film “The Big Short,” where he was portrayed by Steve Carell, has revealed he has opened a new bet against the stock.
In a new update to his Substack newsletter in a post titled “Trading Post June 30, 2026,” Burry revealed a new set of bets against Tesla, Caterpillar, NVIDIA, Applied Materials Inc., and the iShares Semiconductor ETF.
In regard to Tesla, Burry wrote:
“And finally I shorted Tesla at 416.22. Happy it jumped back to this level.”
This means Burry likely opened his new short position after the company’s recent rally on Wall Street, which saw Tesla shares sink in mid-May, only to recover to well over the $400 mark. Currently, shares trade at around $427.
The company saw a big Tuesday as shares climbed considerably, over 10 percent. The size of the Tesla short was not provided, nor did Burry give any information on the position’s structure, the number of shares, dollar value, or whether options were used in the short.
The Tesla and SpaceX merger everyone is talking about is quietly building
Over the years, Burry has been one of the more vocal critics of Tesla, calling its share price “media inflated,” and saying it was “ridiculously overvalued” as recently as December.
The company has largely transitioned away from being known as an automotive company and instead is much more widely regarded as an AI play, mostly due to its Full Self-Driving efforts, Optimus robot development, and data collection related to both.
This has not pulled those skeptics away from being vocal about their distaste for how Tesla is valued, but there’s no denying that the company is a global force in many things, including sustainable energy, automotive, and AI.
Wedbush Securities is initiating stock coverage on SpaceX (NASDAQ: SPCX), marking the first comments on the company since it went public several weeks ago. Wedbush and its analyst handling coverage, Dan Ives, are widely bullish on fellow Musk company Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA).
Ives wrote his first note initiating coverage of SpaceX shares on Wednesday with a $190 price target and an ‘Outperform’ rating. The firm believes the company is well positioned off of its IPO because of its wide array of projects, including AI compute power and infrastructure, connectivity projects, and launches.
“We view SpaceX as one of the most differentiated assets within the tech market with a strong footprint across its three core markets, with Starlink driving success with connectivity,” Ives wrote, “Starship launches leading to a demand flywheel and increasing deal flow for its Colossus clusters.”
Elon Musk called it Epic: The full story of SpaceX’s Starship Flight 12
Wedbush leans heavily on Starlink, which they say is the “profitability driver given the strength of its recurring revenue base of ~12 million subscribers as of June 5th.” Ives believes Starlink is still in the “early innings” of penetrating the global telecommunications and broadband market, as it only holds less than a 1 percent share. However, this number is sure to increase over time.
It also highlights the importance of Starship, which it says is an “essential layer” of SpaceX’s overall success. SpaceX developing and displaying the ability to reuse rockets is a major cost and reliability advantage “as it reduces the necessary hardware launch costs while generating a feedback loop for future flights to improve their launch flight rate without accelerating capex spend.”
Finally, SpaceX’s recent AI/Compute projects are also very elementary, Ives writes. It is worth mentioning Wedbush said its $190 price target is derived from a valuation forecast that sees the company yielding roughly $2.48 trillion of implied enterprise value.
There are also some factors that Wedbush did not take into account with its initial coverage. The firm wrote in the note:
“We note that there is optional value coming from Starship’s accelerating scale towards sub-$200/kg unit economics, orbital data centers, and enterprise AI monetization as these factors could drive meaningful upside but these face major hurdles, so we do not take that into account with our valuation.”
SpaceX shares are down just over 2 percent today, trading at around $167 at the time of publication.
Tesla Optimus project fires up as Musk sees production line progress
Tesla gets its latest short from Michael Burry: ‘Happy it jumped back to this level’
