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SpaceX to attempt to crush Starship test tank
A week after rolling a different ‘test tank’ from its South Texas Starship factory to nearby launch and test facilities, SpaceX has moved a second test tank to the pad.
Hearkening back to a period in 2020 where SpaceX built and tested six different Starship test tanks in a period of six months, the company appears to be preparing to test another batch of tanks in the hopes of qualifying Super Heavy booster design changes and clearing the way for a significant upgrade to all Starship tank domes. The sequencing of the latest tank raises some questions, however.
Known unofficially as the “EDOME” tank in reference to a cryptic label on the side of one of its halves, the first new test tank’s purpose is much more cut and dry. While its steel rings appear to be unchanged from current Starship and Super Heavy prototypes, the tank’s two domes share almost nothing in common with the dozens of domes SpaceX has built and tested over the last three years of development. The new domes are much simpler and should be easier to manufacture than the domes SpaceX is familiar with. Thanks to their more spherical shape, they should also be more efficient, allowing future Starship tanks to store a bit more propellant while taking up the same amount of vertical space. SpaceX has yet to begin testing the EDOME tank since its June 8th rollout and does not appear to be much closer to starting 12 days later.
On June 16th, SpaceX rolled a second test tank to the launch site, which eventually joined the EDOME tank at a staging area that used to be a Starship landing pad. Whereas the EDOME tank is more of a generic test article, the second tank – known as B7.1 – is specifically designed to test Super Heavy booster design changes.
B7.1 is a bit like a miniature Super Heavy. Its three-ring top section is mostly similar to the top section of a booster and is reinforced with dozens of external stringers. Oddly, it is missing cutouts for grid fins, and the tank’s forward dome does not have the reaction frame those hypothetical grid fins would anchor to. On the tank’s bottom half, the same stringers are present, and the tank features a new design that squeezes four slightly shorter rings into the same height as three. The Super Heavy thrust dome those rings enclose is also a new design that expands the number of central Raptor engines from 9 to 13.
It’s unsurprising that SpaceX wants to test those significant design changes. SpaceX did technically conduct a similar test in mid-2021 with a test tank known as BN2.1, but that tank featured a thrust dome with room for 9 older Raptors that would have generated about ~1700 tons of thrust. B7.1’s testing will go a step further than BN2.1 and use a structural test stand that should allow SpaceX to simulate the compressive forces Super Heavy boosters might experience in flight, adding another dimension of stress on top of the 13 hydraulic rams that will simultaneously subject the test tank to the equivalent of ~3000 tons (~6.6M lbf) of thrust.
And lift over to the crusher for a nice bit of torture. pic.twitter.com/SxV3BTs7ry— Chris Bergin – NSF (@NASASpaceflight) June 19, 2022
What is surprising, however, is the fact that SpaceX has waited so long to build and test a tank like B7.1. SpaceX has already completed an entire Super Heavy booster (B7) with all the design changes B7.1 is meant will test and recently installed 33 new Raptor 2 engines on that prototype. A second upgraded booster, B8, is also nearly finished. In that sense, B7.1 is quite unusual and feels more like a reluctant afterthought than part of a methodical development process. If B7.1 suffers an unintentional failure during testing, SpaceX could be forced to abandon two nearly-finished Super Heavy boosters, wasting months of assembly and testing and rendering prototypes that are likely worth tens of millions of dollars all but useless.
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The design changes B7.1 is meant to test are not exactly radical, but it’s still unclear why SpaceX has chosen to conduct those tests after building two entire Super Heavy boosters. Earlier on in Starship development, SpaceX regularly used test tanks to qualify significant design changes before applying those changes to full prototypes, limiting the amount of resources that could be wasted on any unproven prototype. Thankfully, Super Heavy Booster 7 may have already completed similar Raptor thrust simulation tests on the same test stand B7.1 was recently installed on, meaning that SpaceX’s confidence may have been well-placed. However, if the first use of the ‘can crusher’ stand on a Super Heavy test tank finds any problems or ends in failure, B7 and B8 could still be easily rendered unusable or incapable of flight, significantly delaying Starship’s first orbital launch attempt.
Lately, SpaceX has been focused on preparing Starship S24 and Super Heavy B7 for static fire tests that could eventually qualify the pair to support the first orbital test flight. It’s not clear if or when SpaceX will be able to set aside time and evacuate Starbase’s busy orbital launch site to test B7.1 or the EDOME tank.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that flying cars will be coming to the market, something that his own company has hinted at previously.
Musk said on X, in response to a post that read, “We were promised flying cars and all we got is infinite superintelligence for everyone,” “You will get flying cars.”
You will get flying cars
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 12, 2026
The post rang back to when Musk teased flying and hovering capabilities for the Tesla Roadster, the company’s supercar that has been delayed more times than anyone cares to count. It was set for an unveiling earlier this year, but it was then pushed back to August. There is still no sign of it coming.
However, that does not mean it won’t. But one of the biggest features of the Roadster that was teased was a SpaceX package that featured cold gas thrusters on the rear end that would help with white-knuckle acceleration. Another set would face the ground and would help the Roadster gain small bits of altitude, potentially helpful to jump over obstacles.
Elon Musk hints at Tesla Roadster’s “hovering” abilities in SpaceX package
But it is not a straightforward thing for Musk. As a serial entrepreneur, he tends to spend his time on major disruptors; currently, his largest projects are artificial intelligence and compute power, as well as SpaceX’s launches that will eventually make life multiplanetary.
In the past, he has been critical of flying cars and has been in favor of tunnels, one of the big reasons he started the Boring Company. In 2017 at a TED talk, he said:
“There is a challenge with flying cars in that they’ll be quite noisy. The wind force generated will be very high. Let’s just say that if something’s flying over your head, if there are a whole bunch of flying cars all over the place, that is not an anxiety-reducing situation…You’re thinking, ‘Did they service their hubcap? Or is it going to come off and guillotine me as they’re flying past?'”
However, he’s never been against them. He has also said he’s in favor of both tunnels and flying cars.
Contrary to press reports, I’m not against flying cars. Just said it was important to consider both pros and cons.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 24, 2015
Most recently, Musk said that anyone who wants a flying car should be able to get one. This was stated last October on the Joe Rogan Experience:
“My friend Peter Thiel once reflected that the future was supposed to have flying cars, but we don’t have flying cars… I think if Peter wants a flying car, we should be able to buy one.”
Whether the Roadster will be Tesla’s flying car or potentially another one remains in the mind of Musk. Of course, the Roadster will have to make its way to production lines before we find out.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
Elon Musk told SpaceX staff AI revenue will soon dwarf rockets and Starlink combined entirely.
Elon Musk told SpaceX employees this week that artificial intelligence, not rockets, will soon carry the company’s revenue. In a roughly 29 minute internal address posted on SpaceX’s X account on Tuesday, Musk said AI revenue will pass every other line of business at SpaceX “probably in September” and pull further ahead by the fourth quarter.
The numbers he gave are specific. SpaceX currently runs 1.4 gigawatts of AI compute capacity. Musk wants that at 10 gigawatts by the end of 2027, a jump he tied directly to revenue: “if we bring 10GW of AI online by the end of next year, it will be $300 billion to $500 billion a year in revenue.” He called those “big numbers,” which undersells a projection larger than what most countries produce in a year.
We made rockets reusable and are rebuilding the internet in space. The next challenge: making life multiplanetary and understanding the true nature of the universe
Watch @ElonMusk deliver a company update to @SpaceX employees pic.twitter.com/5c8rxoCQfu
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 11, 2026
Musk went further on where AI fits into SpaceX’s future. “Probably in four or five years, AI will be 99% of the value of SpaceX,” he told staff, adding that digital intelligence would eventually run “a trillion times” ahead of biological intelligence as computing scales. He tied that growth to the company’s founding mission, telling employees “we must win on AI, because the future is overwhelmingly AI and robots,” with the payoff meant to help fund Starship and a Mars program that increasingly runs through Terafab, the joint Tesla, SpaceX and xAI chip plant.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
None of this is entirely new territory. SpaceX told investors much the same story during its first earnings call as a public company on August 4, where Musk moved the company’s $1 trillion revenue target up a year to 2030 and said Starlink could someday carry a majority of the world’s internet. What the all hands video adds is a hard deadline and a specific power figure Musk had not given publicly before, along with a franker pitch to his own workforce that AI, not launch cadence, is now the thing SpaceX is betting its future on.
The AI revenue itself is not coming from SpaceX training its own models. It is largely Starlink acting as the network layer for xAI’s workloads, plus SpaceX renting out compute capacity directly, the same approach behind the roughly $16 billion the company spent on AI infrastructure in a single quarter.
Musk closed the video with a pitch aimed at recruiting and retention rather than investors, telling employees that anyone who helps SpaceX win the AI race will eventually get the chance to go to the moon or Mars themselves. Whether SpaceX can turn 1.4 gigawatts into 10 in seventeen months is the more immediate question, and one that will show up in quarterly numbers well before anyone leaves Earth.
In a new note to investors on Tuesday, Morgan Stanley analyst Andrew Percoco said that Tesla has one big financial question to answer for investors regarding its Robotaxi rollout, Full Self-Driving software, and Optimus.
Percoco said in the note that, for the most part, investors are still very positive about the direction the company is headed. However, there are some things the firm would like to see, and they have to do with financials.
Tesla (TSLA) Q2 2026 earnings results: miss on EPS, beat on revenue
Tesla bulls are more than convinced that the company’s Full Self-Driving software is proof it can develop physical AI. Financially, however, there are still some questions, especially on elevated spending, which CEO Elon Musk said would occur as the company works to roll out Robotaxi faster and continue developing its Optimus robot.
The latter two are where Tesla will have to prove progress to investors, as Percoco writes that both projects “will require clearer evidence that Robotaxi is scaling and more tangible Optimus proof points to support the ROI on elevated capex.”
Percoco said the second quarter earnings call did not change his long-term thesis of where Tesla is positioned in the AI race, which is out in front. However, there are concerns that weaker gross margins and higher R&D spend will stress financials, and that has “sharpened our (and investors’) focus on measurable progress across Robotaxi and Optimus.”
Additionally, Robotaxi still needs to be proven with more operation in existing cities while maintaining safety but improving how many rides it gives in any given time, he said. For Optimus, Percoco wrote that he is “still looking for evidence beyond commentary around SOP.”
Morgan Stanley put Percoco in charge of covering Tesla after long-time analyst Adam Jonas transitioned to the automotive side.
Currently, Morgan Stanley has a $415 price target on Tesla and a ‘Hold’ rating on the stock. It is trading at around $330 at the time of publication, which was 2:30 P.M. on the East Coast.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk says flying cars are coming
SpaceX’s next trillion dollar bet has nothing to do with rockets, Musk tells staff
