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SpaceX’s upgraded Starship factory begins to take shape in South Texas
After a few months of foundation work, SpaceX has begun assembling the first section of a vast new Starship manufacturing building that will eventually replace a series of tents also known as ‘sprung structures’.
SpaceX and its contractors began erecting those tents in late 2019 after a mostly successful series of tests involving Starhopper – a steel rocket built on an unprotected concrete lot – and shortly before a less successful attempt at testing the first truly Starship-esque prototype. Inside and around those new tents, SpaceX took steps to significantly upgrade its Starship production methods and assembly facilities, ultimately settling on a process that is still very familiar more than two years later.
Nonetheless, in typical SpaceX fashion, the company appears to have outgrown those tents and set its sights on constructing a brand new Starship manufacturing facility – traditional roof and all – that will likely replace most or all temporary Starbase structures in the near future.
As previously discussed on Teslarati, documents submitted to a Florida water management agency have already revealed plans for a similar East Coast Starship factory and shed light on what the first unofficially named ‘Starfactory’ might look like in Texas.
“According to RGV Aerial Photography, SpaceX…aims to replace all of Starbase’s tents with a single 300,000 square-foot (~28,000 square-meter) building that will be about 18 meters (60 ft) tall and likely measure around 800 feet (250m) long and 400 feet (120m) wide. Starbase’s tents are roughly the same height, but their tented roofs mean that only a fraction of that height can be used for ring work and only a fraction of the floor space for taller nose work.
In comparison, a 300,000 square-foot building would have almost two and half times as much covered floor space as Starbase’s three tents – all of which can theoretically be used for ring and nose section assembly. In fact, with a mostly flat 18-meter roof, SpaceX could feasibly expand most ‘stacks’ by a ring or two, which would reduce the number of sections (and thus stacking operations) needed to assemble a ship or booster.”
Teslarati.com – March 4th, 2022
A month and a half later, SpaceX (or its contractors) began raising the first steel beams of the new building and made significant progress in just a handful of days. The first vertical beam was erected on April 19th. Around 48 hours later, several roof beams measuring a good 200+ feet (60+ meters) wide were assembled out of smaller pieces and installed on top of the structure’s vertical beams. As-is, the structure likely represents a good view of the front profile of the first of three new Starship production buildings that will eventually be joined to form one giant, monolithic rocket factory.
Notably, the skeleton of the building appears to be closer to 40-50 feet tall instead of the 60 feet predicted – short enough that it likely won’t allow SpaceX to increase the height of the different sections of stacked steel rings that make up most of Starship and Super Heavy. It’s possible that another level will be added for utilities and bridge cranes but the framework currently being installed will likely cap the height of Starship sections at five standard rings (9m/30ft tall). It’s not impossible that yet-to-be-constructed sections of the new factory will be taller, but that would run counter to SpaceX’s established method of production, in which Starship sections move through multiple tents throughout assembly and outfitting.
Construction of the new factory began adjacent to Starbase’s existing tents. As work progresses and the framework turns into a real building, it remains to be seen if SpaceX will use the first building to trial a number of production upgrades, fill it with new Starship production equipment under the same paradigm as existing methods, or physically relocate an existing assembly line inside it.
For a century, the car has asked the same thing of its owner, which is basically to pay attention. Even the best ride-hailing app like Uber or Lyft only moved the problem into someone else’s hands. You stopped driving, but you still sat in a stranger’s car, while half listening, and wondering whether to take a phone call in the car without being rude. The Cybercab has no wheel, no pedals and no driver. With Grok @bot now live inside it, it becomes something else entirely, and I think that matters more than the fleet count that everyone is tracking.
Grok @bot is an agent, not a voice assistant. A rider signs in once, and from then on can say what they need and watch it happen. Order dinner from a favorite restaurant. Fill the grocery cart. Move money, answer email, adjust a calendar, push a work project forward. Tesla engineer Yun-Ta Tsai confirmed it is enabled across every Cybercab and the rest of the Model Y fleet, and Tesla’s own pitch is that Full Self-Driving handles the commute while Grok handles the errands.
Think about what that does to a thirty minute ride. Uber sells you a trip, while Waymo sells you the same trip in a more private setting. Tesla is selling the thirty minutes themselves, returned to you with an assistant attached. Errands that used to eat a Saturday get done between pickup and drop off. The ride stops being dead time between two places and becomes a place of its own.
Tesla integrates Grok Bot into its vehicles for the ultimate personal assistant
Best of all, your Bots follow you into any Cybercab, and presumably your own Tesla, then logs you out automatically when you step out. Anyone can bolt a chatbot onto a screen, but much harder to own the vehicle, the autonomy stack and the assistant at once. It also quietly ties SpaceX’s Super Intelligence business to Tesla’s fleet, after Tesla converted its xAI stake into SpaceX equity. The relationship between those two companies is getting harder to describe as separate.
This is also where the hard questions start, because an agent that can spend your money in a vehicle other people also ride in needs some answers. How does it handle a voice it shouldn’t trust? What gets recorded, who can see it, and for how long? What happens when a rider leaves halfway through a task?
If Tesla gets those answers right, the scoreboard changes. We have been counting Cybercabs and wait times. The more telling number may be what riders accomplish per trip. That is data almost no one else will ever have, and it is the real reason to watch Grok @bot.
What do you think? Leave me a comment.
News
Why Elon Musk’s target date for buying an Optimus robot is harder than it sounds
Musk says China’s magnet export ban cost Optimus months, and robot hands remain shockingly hard.
Elon Musk says China’s export curbs on magnets used in electric motors set back Tesla’s Optimus program by two to three months, and that the robot’s hands remain the hardest part of the project. He made the comments Saturday during a live interview with Tesla Owners Silicon Valley at the X Takeover event at Giga Texas, in front of roughly 2,000 attendees. The Optimus discussion begins around the 49 minute mark of the stream.
On the hands, Musk was blunt and noted that a general purpose humanoid needs fine motor skills that are “incredibly difficult to get right. Shockingly difficult,” he said in the interview. He pointed to a problem he says no one has demonstrated yet: “One of the hardest things also generally is to do precision and force at the same time,” such as driving a small self tapping screw into wood. Touch sensors add another layer, since it is “actually kind of hard to get touch sensors that elastically deform and can handle high cycle life and it won’t just break after a few thousand cycles.”
He also took aim at rival robot videos. “Any complicated looking robot demo, it’s a canned demo. It’s not real,” Musk said, adding that real AI means showing a robot something it has never seen and watching it still cope, the way FSD handles a city it has never driven.
Musk expects the Optimus ramp to be slower than a new vehicle production ramp. “The initial part of that S curve of production ramp is going to be very slow at the beginning,” Musk said, partly because “unlike cars, there’s no pre existing supply chain for robot stuff.” That echoes his July reply on X that Optimus production “will be extremely slow at first, as everything is new.”
The magnet disclosure puts a number on a problem Musk first raised in 2025. He said China “prevented the export of magnets for use in electric motors” and that it “set back the Optimus program by like two or three months.” Then he added: “We had robots with no arms.” Tesla’s fix is to bring the supply chain home. “You’ve got to be able to make all the parts domestically,” he said. Teslarati reported in April 2025 that Musk tied the issue to permanent magnets in the arm actuators, where motors have to be as small as possible.
Tesla Optimus V3 hand and arm details revealed in new patents
Production is moving regardless, with a reported internal goal of more than 1,000 a week by the end of 2026. Teslarati recently covered how Tesla is certifying supply partners in China for Optimus parts, while the company’s hand design has been the subject of new patent filings.
Musk has said he wants Optimus available to the public by late 2027, though Tesla has not confirmed that date or published updated production figures.
Investor's Corner
Elon Musk drops a Thanksgiving hint about Starship’s biggest test yet
Elon Musk says Starship Flight 15 will try to catch the ship itself, a first.
Elon Musk says SpaceX’s next Starship flight will try something nobody has done before, by catching the ship itself. Speaking to roughly 2,000 people at the X Takeover event at Giga Texas on Saturday, Musk said Flight 15 is about four to six weeks away and “probably launches a little bit before Thanksgiving, is my guess.”
That is a slip from earlier reporting, which had pointed to a launch as early as October 19. Musk explained why the date keeps moving. “We’re making a bunch of improvements to the rocket between every flight,” he said, adding that there are often hundreds, sometimes thousands, of small changes. This time the list is short, “but some of them take a fair bit of work and we’ve got to go inside the tank to make some of these changes.”
“We’re going to try to catch the ship, which is a super big deal,” Musk said. “If we do so, that’ll be the first time that there’s been full recovery of an orbital class rocket.” SpaceX has already caught the Super Heavy booster with the tower’s mechanical arms, and has talked about catching the ship since late 2025, but the upper stage has never been caught.
Musk also laid out what comes after. “The next big milestone would be to refly both the booster and the ship,” he said, describing a Flight 16 where “all parts of an orbital rocket are reflown.”
The reason SpaceX wants this comes down to cost and cadence. Every Starship ship so far has ended its flight in the ocean, and SpaceX expects most of those water landings to end in fireballs. A ship that returns to Starbase intact can be inspected and flown again. SpaceX’s IPO filing, says Starship V3 is designed to deliver 100 metric tons to orbit in a fully reusable configuration, that SpaceX aims to cut the cost to reach orbit by 99% or more versus the historical average, and that tower catches should allow “multiple launches per day.”
The payoff goes beyond cheaper launches. The next generation Starlink V3 satellites are too large for Falcon 9 and can only fly on Starship, which can carry up to 60 per flight. Flight 14 on September 28 deployed the first 26 of them after Starship reached orbit despite an early engine shutdown, as Teslarati reported. Musk blamed engine computer software, and said the heat shield “was extremely robust,” which he claimed in August had solved Starship’s biggest challenge.
NASA’s Moon plans depend on the same capability. NASA’s inspector general has described a lander mission that needs a propellant depot in low Earth orbit and more than 10 tanker flights, with SpaceX targeting one tanker launch every six days. That schedule only works if ships and boosters come back fast and fly again. Also, ship to ship propellant transfer has not been attempted yet.
One interesting hurdle yet to be explored is bringing the ship back to the launch site, with reentry over land, which will undoubtedly come with a lot of aviation safety reviews.
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Elon Musk drops a Thanksgiving hint about Starship’s biggest test yet
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