News
Elon Musk says SpaceX’s second Starship booster prototype is almost finished
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that the second Starship booster prototype is “almost done” and has revealed that work on the first flightworthy booster has yet to begin.
For unknown reasons, SpaceX has recently changed the naming scheme for Starship and Super Heavy boosters. The booster SpaceX is currently assembling in Boca Chica has been referred to as “Booster 2” by Musk himself but, according to NASASpaceflight, is internally known as Booster 3 or B3, replacing its former Booster Number 3 (BN3) designation.
Regardless, SpaceX began stacking the Super Heavy booster prototype now known as B3 in mid-May. Around six weeks later, 23 or 24 rings have been stacked to create a partially finished prototype 9m (~30 ft) wide and approximately 42m (~140 ft) tall.
Just like Super Heavy ‘pathfinder’ BN1, which was scrapped almost the instant it reached its full height last March, Booster 3 appears to destined to stand 36 rings – 65m (~215 ft) – tall once complete. While drastically oversimplifying the process of vertically assembling the largest rocket booster ever built, that means that Super Heavy B3 is just shy of two-thirds (~65%) complete.
By simply averaging the time it’s taken for SpaceX to stack B3 to a height of 42 meters, the booster could reach its full height around three weeks from now (July 15th, give or take a week). For the most part, the most challenging and unfamiliar parts of Super Heavy B3 manufacturing and assembly have already been completed. Relative to Starship, which SpaceX has now built more than half a dozen prototypes of, Super Heavy is just a stretched Starship with no flaps, no nosecone, a far more complex engine section, and a forward dome section that needs to support car-sized grid fins.
Super Heavy’s larger propellant tanks also require a methane transfer tube – used to carry methane through the booster’s lower liquid oxygen tank – more than twice as tall as anything built for Starship. By all appearances, that ~35m (~115 ft) tall transfer tube has already been safely installed inside B3’s incomplete tanks. Around June 14th, B3’s lower two-thirds were effectively completed when its LOx tank stack was mated to the booster’s 29-Raptor engine section.
Outfitted with complex structural modifications to support massive grid fins and the first advanced ‘hot gas’ maneuvering thrusters ever spotted in public, Booster 3’s forward dome is already in the process of being welded to a stack of three steel rings. Once complete, the rest of Super Heavy B3 integration is fairly simple as far as rocket assembly goes and will require four more welding operations. Like BN1, there’s a good chance that SpaceX will mate Booster 3’s upper (methane) tank separately and then install the ~24m (~80 ft) tall, 13-ring section on top of the LOx stack to effectively complete the booster’s main structure
Of course, after the structure is complete, SpaceX will still need to finish plumbing, wiring, and generally outfitting a Super Heavy booster for the first time ever. Finally, while it remains to be seen just how finished B3 will actually find itself before heading to the launch pad, that process could also involve installing and testing four massive steel grid fins and, most importantly, up to 29 Raptor engines – a figure only beaten by the Soviet Union’s ill-fated N1 rocket.
Perhaps most significantly, Musk also revealed that B3 is not the Super Heavy booster assigned to Starship’s first orbital launch attempt, meaning that SpaceX will have to complete Booster 3 testing and build Booster 4 before that orbital test flight can occur. Given that Booster 3 assembly is on track to take more than nine weeks, Starship’s first orbital launch attempt is thus unlikely to happen before late August or September.
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS –Â $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues –Â $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow –Â $1.444 billion
- Profit –Â $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
