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SpaceX is building Starship’s first orbital-class booster at a breakneck pace
Within the last week, SpaceX’s South Texas Starship factory appears to have kicked things into high gear and are now assembling the first orbital-class Super Heavy booster prototype at a breakneck pace.
While the assembly of the Super Heavy known as Booster 4 (B4) wasn’t too dissimilar to what CEO Elon Musk described as a “very hard” build of Booster 3 up to last week, work on the rocket has visibly accelerated. Since January 2020, the process of building Starships and Super Heavy boosters has been fairly simple. Both onsite and offsite, raw materials (mostly sheet steel) are cut, bent, and welded into relatively small parts that then make their way to (or around) Boca Chica by truck, forklift, or crane.
With the help of jigs and good amount of automation, the resulting hardware is then welded together to form domes, header tanks, transfer tubes, tank barrels, flaps, and more. Once subassembly is complete, those integrated rocket sections are reinforced with stringers, ribs, and baffles and outfitted with mechanisms, hardpoints, brackets, plumbing, and more. Finally, final assembly – better known as stacking and by far the most visible step – can begin and technicians stack each of those premade segments on top of each other to form a complete Starship or Super Heavy.
While part fabrication and subassembly integration take weeks or months on their own, those earlier steps can be done concurrently, meaning that SpaceX can prepare sections for several different ships and boosters at the same time. For the last six or so months, at any given moment, SpaceX has had 40-60+ rings in work as part of 15-20+ different ring ‘sections’ visible all across Starbase.
Respectively, each Starship and Super Heavy booster require 20 and 36 rings apiece, while each of the propellant storage tanks SpaceX itself is building for the rocket’s first orbital launch pad require 12-15. All told, SpaceX usually has a combination of around 3-5 ships, boosters, and GSE tanks in some stage of assembly. Unsurprisingly, some assembly tasks are harder than others and building the first in a series of prototypes has almost invariably taken far longer than building those that follow.
Booster 3 Booster 4 LOx tank start May 20th July 16th LOx tank finish June 18th July 30th CH4 tank start June 24th July 28th CH4 tank finish June 27th July 29th Final stack June 29th Aug 1st?
In that sense, it’s not a huge surprise that SpaceX’s Booster 4 assembly has quickly surpassed the pace set with Booster 3 less than a month earlier. SpaceX began stacking Super Heavy B3 around May 20th, starting with the rocket’s aft liquid oxygen (LOx) tank. Five separate stacks are required to turn the LOx tank’s 23 steel rings into a single structure – a process that took SpaceX about a month with Booster 3.
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Booster 3 methane (CH4) tank assembly began a few days after the LOx tank’s completion but proceeded far more quickly, wrapping up just a few days later. Two days after that, those two tank sections were then mated and welded together to complete Booster 3’s full ~65m (~210 ft) tall airframe.
Now, just four weeks after Booster 3 was rolled to the launch pad for proof and static fire testing, Super Heavy Booster 4 is well on its way to reaching its full ~65m height almost twice as quickly. With work beginning around July 16th, B4’s oxygen tank is now just missing an (extremely complex) engine section and the booster’s methane tank was stacked to completion – 13 rings tall – in less than two days. That leaves SpaceX’s first potentially flightworthy, orbital-class Super Heavy booster just two stacks away from completion less than two weeks after its assembly began.
If SpaceX can sustain that pace for another few days, Booster 4 assembly will be the fastest of any full-height prototype ever built at Starbase, most of which have been Starship prototypes that are half to about three quarters the size of Super Heavy.
SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
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Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
SpaceX released new footage of Starship in space captured by the Starlink satellites it deployed.
SpaceX released a new video Friday evening showing Starship from an angle showcased by its own Starlink satellites, watching the rocket drift away in orbit.
The 65 second clip, posted on X, stitches together footage from four cameras mounted on a single Starlink V3 satellite. It opens with a close view of Starship’s 171 foot upper stage, still catching sunlight, then pulls back as the two spacecraft separate.
The footage comes from Starship’s 13th flight test, which launched July 24 from Starbase after a scrubbed attempt and an abort caused by an engine issue the week before. When Flight 13 finally flew, it carried the first batch of functional Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever deployed, twenty of them, with six equipped with cameras meant to scan the ship’s heat shield during reentry.
View of Starship in space from a Starlink V3 satellite on Flight 13.
This composite is made of imagery from four separate cameras on a single satellite. Six of the satellites were equipped with cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to… pic.twitter.com/sNTHHz5vLr
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 31, 2026
Flight 13 checked most of its boxes. Starship deployed all 20 satellites, relit a Raptor engine in space, and splashed down softly in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Musk’s longer term plan calls for a Starlink V3 constellation of 100,000 satellites, according to a recent FCC filing, with Starship as the only vehicle capable of launching them at the volume that requires. Each Starship flight is designed to carry up to 60 V3 satellites once the vehicle reaches routine service, well beyond what Falcon 9 can carry in a single mission.
Starship is next expected to fly with an attempt at catching the ship itself with the launch tower’s mechanical arms, a maneuver SpaceX has so far reserved for the Super Heavy booster.
Tesla flexed the new features of the Model Y L with a dedicated media event at the company’s Diner on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles.
The Model Y L is the extended-wheelbase version of the all-electric crossover, which has been voted the best-selling car in the world on three occasions. The vehicle is already rolling off production lines at Gigafactory Texas, and first deliveries are slated to take place later this year.
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Teslarati was invited to the event, but due to some scheduling conflicts, we could not make it to Los Angeles. Instead, we will have our hands on a media unit sometime in August, so we’ll be able to spend some more extended time with the Model Y L.
However, plenty of those who made it to LA shared some cool features that set the Model Y L apart from the Model Y.
Multi-Row Climate Control
Tesla fitted the Model Y L with full climate control on all three rows on the front screen. It can be adjusted by selecting which row you’d like to modify on the right-hand side of the touch screen:
The Model Y L has a little row of icons on the right side of the climate screen so the front passenger can more quickly jump to whatever row they want to control. pic.twitter.com/uJS44mgCvk
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 30, 2026
Better Rear Window Visibility
One of the strangest things about the Model Y, especially the Juniper iteration, is the rear window has extremely limited visibility when looking into the rearview mirror.
Tesla has improved upon this with the Model Y L:
This is a drastic difference. https://t.co/wTdhitD5aA pic.twitter.com/z6hFs0Jkss
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) July 30, 2026
PowerShare will be included
Model Y L will come with PowerShare in North America, with an 11.5kW output to your home. Tesla said it would require Powerwall 3 for operation.
Wireless Charging Pad
There has been some speculation that Tesla would upgrade the wireless charging pads in the United States, but this is not the case.
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Tesla confirmed that it does not come with the cooled pads as the Y L in China does. This is because North America has not adopted Qi charging yet.
Thermal Management Improvements
These improvements in the Model Y L were seen with thermal management:
- Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
- +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather, 7 miles of real-world range gained
- 8x more solar energy reflection off of glass roof
- 30% reduction in solar energy entering the cabin
Some of the thermal management improvements in the new Model Y L Premium:
• Up to 15% faster cabin cooling
• Up to 15 min faster cabin cooling in sunny conditions
• +23% thermal efficiency gained in hot weather +7 miles of real-world range gained
• +10 miles recovered after… pic.twitter.com/jZirFWFdtO— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) July 31, 2026
Demand
Tesla said the Model Y L is almost sold out in the U.S. It comes with
- 1 year of FSD Supervised
- 1 year of Supercharging
- 1 year of Premium Connectivity
- Free exterior paint color, interior, and wheel option at no additional cost
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
