SpaceX
SpaceX builds new orbital Starship sections as Starhopper loses its engine
Amidst the growing buzz centered around the imminent second launch of Falcon Heavy, SpaceX’s South Texas team has continued to work on Starhopper and the first orbital Starship prototype. wrapping up the first major tests of the former and making new progress on the latter’s aeroshell.
For unknown reasons, SpaceX technicians uninstalled Starhopper’s Raptor – the second full-scale engine ever built – shortly after the vehicle’s first true hop test and proceeded to package it up for shipment elsewhere, likely McGregor’s test facilities or the Hawthorne factory. Simultaneously, the third completed Raptor (SN03) was recently installed in McGregor according to photos and observations published by NASASpaceflight.com, preparing to continue to the engineering verification tests that began in February. Once those tests are complete and the engine design is modified to account for the lessons learned with Raptor SN01, SpaceX’s next step will be to begin ramping Raptor production in preparation for multi-engine Starhopper testing and – eventually – the completion of the first orbit-capable Starship prototype.
Needless to say, SpaceX is juggling a lot of interconnected projects in an effort to speed its Starship/Super Heavy (formerly BFR) development program, none of which are being discussed by the company in more than a cursory manner. What follows is thus meant to be an informed but speculative estimate of what is currently going on and what is next for BFR.
Starhopper slips the surly bonds
Over the course of the last two weeks, SpaceX has been almost continuously testing the first integrated Starship prototype, a partial-fidelity vehicle known as Starhopper. The testing primarily involved almost a dozen wet dress rehearsals (WDRs) in which the rocket was filled with some quantity of liquid oxygen and methane propellant and helium for pressurization as engineers and technicians worked through several bugs preventing Raptor from safely operating. According to CEO Elon Musk, some form of ice – potentially methane, oxygen, or even water – was forming in or around parts known as “prevalves”, likely referring to valves involved in the process of supply rocket engines with the right amount of fuel and oxidizer.
Less than 24 hours later, those valve issues were apparently solved as Starhopper’s Raptor ignited for the first time in a spectacular nighttime fireball. 48 hours after that first ignition, SpaceX once again fueled Starhopper and ignited its Raptor engine, lifting a spectacular handful of feet into the air before reaching the end of its very short tethers. According to Musk, the first Raptor ignition was completed with “all systems green”. After the second test, no additional comments were made. Less than three days later, SpaceX technicians uninstalled Starhopper’s Raptor (SN02) and shipped it somewhere offsite, indicating that it may have suffered a fault similar to the one that caused relatively minor damage to Raptor SN01 at the end of its February test campaign. Regardless, it appears that this development will keep Starhopper grounded for the indefinite future barring the imminent shipment of Raptor SN04 or the completion of SN01’s refurbishment.
The Raptor pack grows
Starhopper’s unplanned grounding ties
While the exact strategy behind SpaceX’s Raptor and BFR propulsion development programs
Regardless, the somewhat buggy behavior exhibited by the integrated Raptor and Starhopper indicate the obvious: both are fairly immature hardware still in some form of development, be it the late (Raptor) or the very earliest stages (Starhopper). By performing even more testing and continuing to optimize and gain familiarity with the hardware at hand, the fairly predictable process of development will arrive at more or less finished products.
Starship’s first orbital prototype
Last but not least, work continues on what will hopefully become the first orbit-capable Starship prototype, built in full-scale out of sheets of stainless steel that are far thinner than the metal used to construct Starhopper. This, too, is a normal process of development – as progress is made, prototypes will gradually lose an emergency cushion of performance margins, a bit like a sculptor starting with a solid block of marble and whittling it down to a work of art. Starhopper is that marble block, with inelegant, rough angles and far more material bulk than truly necessary.
As seen above, the orbital prototype – just the second in a presumably unfinished series – is already dramatically more refined. Instead of the first facade-like nose cone built for Starhopper, Starship’s nose section is being built out of smoothly tapered stainless steel panels that appear identical to those used to assemble the rocket’s growing aeroshell and tankage. As of now, there are five publicly visible Starship sections in various forms of fabrication, followed by a half-dozen or so tank dome segments waiting to be welded together as finished bulkheads.
Intriguingly, the only quasi-public official render of SpaceX’s steel Starship features visible sections very similar to those seen on the orbital prototype’s welded hull. They aren’t all visible in the render, but those that are are a distinct match to the aspect ratio of the welded sections visible in South Texas.
Extrapolating from this observation, Starship, as rendered, is comprised of approximately 16 large cylinder sections and 4-8 tapered nose sections. Based on the real orbital prototype, each large section is 9m in diameter and ~2.5m tall. Assuming Starship is 55 meters (180 ft) tall, this would translate into 22 2.5m sections, a nearly perfect fit with what is shown in the official render. Back in South Texas, SpaceX has 6 tapered sections and 7 cylinder sections in work, meaning that they would reach around 32.5m (~105 ft) – about 60% of a Starship hull – if stacked today.
If we assume that SpaceX follows Falcon procedures to build the seven-Raptor thrust structure separately (~2 sections) and excludes most of the cargo bay (~2-3 sections) on the first orbit-capable Starship, those ~13 in-work sections could be just a tapered nose cone away from the prototype’s full aeroshell. Time will tell…
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News
SpaceX tells the FCC that Starship Flight 14 is going to orbit
SpaceX filed with the FCC for Starship Flight 14, its first true orbital launch attempt.
SpaceX has asked the Federal Communications Commission for permission to fly Starlink terminals during Starship’s fourteenth flight test, and the filing lays out a genuine trip to orbit, something the program has never attempted.
Every Starship flight so far, including Flight 13’s successful splashdown in the Indian Ocean on July 24, has flown a suborbital arc that ends with the ship reentering the atmosphere within the same hour it launches. The FCC paperwork describes a mission profile built around an actual orbital insertion instead.
The payload is the other half of the story. Flight 13 carried 20 production Starlink V3 satellites, but because that mission never reached orbit, the satellites reentered along with the ship rather than joining the constellation, something Teslarati covered in detail after SpaceX released footage shot from one of those satellites as it drifted away from Starship in space. Flight 14 is designed to close that gap. If the orbital insertion holds, the roughly 20 V3 satellites onboard would separate into an operational orbit and could eventually go into service, each one rated for about 1 terabit per second of downlink capacity by SpaceX’s own account.
SpaceX announces new Starbase for ‘thousands of Starship launches annually’
Elon Musk first flagged the orbital attempt during SpaceX’s August 4 earnings call, the company’s first as a public entity following its June IPO under the ticker SPCX. He also floated catching the ship with the Starbase tower on the same flight, an idea he walked back on August 20, saying the catch attempt would more likely come “in a few months,” as Teslarati reported at the time. Flight 14 will instead target a splashdown for the ship in the Indian Ocean, the same recovery method used since Flight 12.
Hardware has been catching up to the ambition. Booster 21 completed a full 33-engine static fire on August 28, and Ship 41 finished its own six-engine test the week before. An airspace briefing circulated to pilots on August 20 listed September 15 as the target date, later than the end of August window Musk mentioned on the earnings call, though SpaceX has not confirmed a launch date publicly and Starship schedules routinely slip while hardware and FAA paperwork line up.
The FCC filing itself does not guarantee a launch date. It covers communications authority, and not flight readiness, considering SpaceX still needs Ship 41 fully stacked and cleared by the FAA before Flight 14 can fly. But the filing is a real marker of intent and it puts a specific regulatory process behind what had so far only been Musk’s word on the earnings call.
Elon Musk recently restated a fact that still defines SpaceX’s origin story: if Falcon 1’s fourth launch had failed, the company would not exist. The comment answered a reminder that after three consecutive losses, SpaceX had money for only one more attempt.
On X, Peter Diamandis said that the present-day acknowledgement of SpaceX’s success does not discount the rough start the company had. “Almost nobody remembers that Elon’s first rocket failed three times, and there was money for exactly only one more attempt.”
Musk said, “If the 4th launch had failed, SpaceX would not exist.”
If the 4th launch had failed, SpaceX would not exist
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 30, 2026
In late 2008, the firm was nearly out of cash. Another failure would have ended payroll, closed the Hawthorne factory, and left the Falcon 9 and Dragon programs as unfinished drawings.
The first flight lifted off from Omelek Island on 24 March 2006. Thirty-three seconds later, a corroded aluminum fitting on a fuel line leaked. Kerosene ignited around the Merlin engine, control was lost, and the vehicle came apart. The small DARPA payload, FalconSAT-2, survived the short flight only to land on a storage shed near the pad. Investigators later traced the fitting to a materials mix-up that should never have reached the rocket.
Flight 2, on 21 March 2007, looked far better at first. The first stage burned cleanly and handed off to the Kestrel-powered upper stage. The vehicle crossed 100 kilometers and reached a peak of about 289 kilometers. Then propellant slosh in the second-stage tank started a circular coning motion that grew until the engine shut down. Telemetry faded as the stage tumbled, and SpaceX had reached space but not orbit. Over the next year, the team redesigned everything from the ground up, including tanks, baffles, and the new regeneratively cooled Merlin 1C.
That engine flew on Flight 3 on 2 August 2008. The first stage performed almost perfectly and reached 217 kilometers. After main-engine cutoff, leftover fuel in the cooling channels produced a faint residual thrust, roughly 10 pounds per square inch of chamber pressure. On a Texas test stand, the effect was invisible beneath ambient air pressure. In vacuum it was enough to push the spent first stage back into the second stage after separation. The stages collided, the upper stage spun, and the mission was lost. Musk later said a slightly longer delay before staging would have saved the flight.
Six weeks later, the team assembled Flight 4 from remaining parts and flew it on 28 September 2008 at 23:15 UTC. The payload was Ratsat, a 165-kilogram aluminum mass simulator built in-house. Staging was delayed so residual thrust could decay. The Kestrel ignited, the fairing split away, and nine and a half minutes after liftoff the vehicle was in orbit. After a coast, the second stage restarted, settling into a 621-by-643-kilometer path at 9.35 degrees inclination. Falcon 1 became the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach Earth orbit. Musk called the insertion “middle of the bull’s-eye.”
SpaceX restores a Falcon 1 rocket for 10th anniversary of first launch success
That success unlocked NASA’s Commercial Resupply Services award later that year. Without it, there would have been no Falcon 9, no reusable first stages, and no Dragon cargo or crew flights to the International Space Station. Launch prices would have remained far higher. Starlink’s constellation would not exist; broadband from low Earth orbit would still be a paper concept.
Ride-share markets, high launch cadence, and the current pace of lunar and Mars hardware would be years behind. Communications, Earth observation, and the cost of putting anything into space would look more like the 2000s than the 2020s.
One extra second of residual thrust in August 2008 would have written a different decade.
Elon Musk
OpenAI cites distrust of SpaceX in decision to drop Cursor partnership
OpenAI will cut SpaceX-owned Cursor’s model access in November, citing Musk’s history of broken contracts.
OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, announced late Friday that it is ending its partnership with Cursor, cutting off the coding tool’s access to its models on November 12. The move comes two weeks after SpaceX completed its $60 billion acquisition of Cursor’s parent company, Anysphere, folding the popular AI coding assistant into Elon Musk’s growing SpaceXAI division.
In a post on its website, OpenAI said the decision came down to trust, not technology. “We cannot be confident that SpaceX will use our technology within our terms of service, based on our experience with Elon Musk’s companies violating contracts,” the company wrote. OpenAI pointed to two specific incidents: X, now part of SpaceX, allegedly breaking the terms of an existing OpenAI contract after Musk bought Twitter.
That lawsuit is the backdrop for all of this. Musk cofounded OpenAI in 2015, left the board in 2018, and sued Sam Altman and Greg Brockman in 2024, arguing they abandoned the company’s nonprofit mission for profit. A federal jury sided with OpenAI in May, finding Musk waited too long to sue rather than ruling on the merits of his claims. Musk said at the time he would appeal to the Ninth Circuit, calling the outcome a “calendar technicality” rather than a real judgment.
SpaceX’s interest in Cursor predates that verdict by weeks. The company first struck a deal with Cursor in April, securing an option to acquire it for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for joint development work instead. As Teslarati reported at the time, the logic was straightforward: Cursor was paying retail prices to Anthropic and OpenAI, two of its most direct competitors, every time a developer used its product, while SpaceX had idle capacity on its Colossus supercomputer, roughly the equivalent of a million Nvidia H100 GPUs, that Cursor could use to train its own models instead. SpaceX exercised the option in June, days after its own IPO, and the deal closed in mid-August.
Once it closed, Musk moved fast. On an all-hands call with more than 1,000 Cursor employees, he reportedly told staff that SpaceXAI’s Grok was playing catchup in the AI race, unlike Tesla and SpaceX in their own markets, and singled out Anthropic as the company to catch. Cursor CEO Michael Truell now reports directly to Musk inside SpaceXAI.
Losing OpenAI’s models leaves Cursor leaning harder on Anthropic’s Claude, which has its own compute agreement with SpaceX, and on Cursor’s in-house Composer model, the one SpaceX’s compute was supposed to accelerate in the first place. OpenAI framed the November deadline as maximum notice under its contract, and said it wants to “go above and beyond” to help developers through the transition. Whether Anthropic makes the same call is now the open question in AI coding.
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