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SpaceX to shrink, tweak Starship’s forward flap design, says Elon Musk
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says that there is a “slight error” with the current design of Starship’s forward flaps, necessitating a few small but visible changes on future prototypes of the spacecraft.
Measuring 9m (30 ft) wide and approximately 50m (~165 ft) from tip to tail, Starship is the combined upper stage, spacecraft, tanker, and lander of a two-stage, fully-reusable rocket with the same name. While SpaceX has a long ways to go to achieve it, the company’s ambition is for Starship and its Super Heavy booster to be the most easily and quickly reusable spacecraft and rocket booster ever built, nominally enabling the same-day reuse of both.
Beyond a Space Shuttle-style heat shield of blankets and ceramic tiles, the Starship upper stage is meant to achieve that reusability by descending through the atmosphere and landing unlike any other spacecraft, plane, or rocket ever flown. Instead of flying, gliding, or knifing through the atmosphere nose or tail-first, Starship freefalls perpendicular to the ground for the last few dozen kilometers (~10-20 mi) before aggressively flipping into a vertical orientation at the last second and landing propulsively on its tail. Now, according to Elon Musk, two of the four ‘flaps’ that largely make that exotic maneuver possible are set for a small but significant redesign.
Probably slightly further forward, smaller, more inward. No funny looking static aero at top, as static aero no longer directly in flow.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 18, 2021
Over the course of five suborbital test flights of full-scale Starship prototypes completed between December 2020 and May 2021, SpaceX took that exotic landing concept from the drawing board and subscale wind tunnel testing to reality. Though four of those five tests ended in destruction, their respective Starship prototypes really only failed in the last 15-30 seconds of test flights that were more than six minutes long.
After reaching an apogee of 10-12.5 km (~6.2-7.8 mi) over the course of some four and a half minutes, all five Starship prototypes successfully shut down their Raptor engines, tipped over onto their bellies, and then used a combination of small pressurized gas thrusters and four large flaps to stably fall back to Earth. Much like a skydiver can tweak their body, arms, and legs to control their orientation and attitude, Starship uses two pairs of forward and aft flaps to achieve a very similar level of control.
Thanks to Starship’s significant surface area and relatively low mass shortly before landing, that unprecedented freefall-style descent naturally slows the rocket to just 100-200 mph (~50-100 m/s) while simultaneously allowing SpaceX to avoid the massive complexity and added mass of structural wings or fins like those on the Space Shuttle. Further, whereas the Shuttle used its wings to glide (albeit like a brick) and land on very long runways, Starship is designed to use three of its six Raptor engines to flip into a vertical orientation and land much like SpaceX’s own spectacularly successful Falcon boosters.
During the actual process of reentry, in which Starship uses a heat shield made up of ~15,000 ceramic tiles to slow from orbital (Mach 25 or ~7.5 km/s) to subsonic speeds, those same flaps also come in useful to control the vehicle’s angle of attack and thus the degree of extreme heating experienced. According to Musk, to improve the moment arm (i.e. leverage or, all else equal, torque) of Starship’s forward flaps and reduce or remove undesirable aerodynamic characteristics, SpaceX is going to shrink those forward flaps further, move them closer together and more towards the tip of Starship’s nose, and angle them toward the ship’s leeward side (back).
Apparently, those relatively minor changes mean that a portion of Starship’s forward flaps will no longer be directly subjected to reentry heating, potentially allowing SpaceX to entirely remove static “aerocovers” that wrap around the ship’s flaps to prevent superheated plasma and gas from reaching sensitive components. Ironically, SpaceX’s thermal protection team completed the installation of heat shield tiles on one of those forward flap aerocovers for the first time ever just a few days ago – a structure and portion of heat shield that will apparently no longer be needed on future Starships.
For now, though, it looks like Ship 20 will attempt Starship’s first orbital launch with its now-outdated forward flaps. Depending on how far along Ship 21 production is, the next prototype could feasibly sport that new flap design.
Elon Musk
The Boring Company’s latest Tesla tunnel truck mod “fits like a glove”
The Boring Company has modified a Tesla powered tunnel truck to carry freight containers underground.
The Boring Company has found a second job for the Tesla hardware it already runs underground. In a post on X, Elon Musk’s tunneling company showed its latest Prufrock Liner Truck modified to carry a standard 20 foot shipping container. “Using TBC tunnels to transport freight,” the company wrote. “The latest Prufrock Liner Truck (using Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units) has been modified to carry a standard 20′ shipping container. Fits like a glove!”
The photo shows a red container sitting on a long, low white chassis parked outside, with drive hardware visible at one end. The Boring Company did not say where or when freight hauling would start, which customers it has in mind, or how many trucks it is converting.
Using TBC tunnels to transport freight.
The latest Prufrock Liner Truck (using Tesla Model 3 batteries and drive units) has been modified to carry a standard 20’ shipping container.
Fits like a glove! https://t.co/VV0phWK4fc
— The Boring Company (@boringcompany) October 19, 2026
Until now, the liner trucks have hauled concrete. Teslarati reported in August on Liner Truck 3, which uses Model 3 battery packs and drive units to move more than 22,000 pounds of precast tunnel segments to the boring machine. It has 28 miles of range, tops out at 12 mph, and is piloted remotely from the company’s operations center in Texas. The freight version appears to be the same platform with a different bed, and The Boring Company has not said whether it will also be remotely piloted.
Freight has been on the company’s menu for years. When TBC updated its product lineup in 2021, its freight tunnel was described as sized to fit a standard shipping container, “barely.” The company later used the idea at Tesla’s own factory, where Prufrock 3 dug a tunnel to Giga Texas that now moves finished Cybertrucks away from the production line.
The Boring Company closed a $3 billion Series D in September at a $23 billion valuation, and Teslarati has covered how that money is tied to a UAE tunneling push and a faster Nashville build. In Nashville, Prufrock MB1 and MB2 are mining at the same time, and a third machine is expected to launch in late October. Each machine needs a steady supply of liner trucks, so any design that works for segments and containers alike gives the company more use out of the same Tesla parts.
The Vegas Loop remains the only Boring Company system open to the public, and it moves passengers in Tesla vehicles. A freight service would be a separate product, and the post gave no indication that one is close to launch. For now, it is a truck, a container and a short caption saying they fit together.
Elon Musk said he is planning to give “every one of his SpaceX shares to every kid in America” in 2027, stating that “this will be the first of many.”
SpaceX went public earlier this year, and its stock price has been relatively stable since leveling off shortly after its IPO. Based on its current price, it’s a gift of just over $10 billion to children across the United States.
It appears to be closely related to President Donald Trump’s bank accounts for children, which were set up earlier this year as Trump Accounts.
Just hours earlier, Anthropic had announced the establishment of its Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, “a new wholly-owned entity dedicated entirely to public benefit.” Musk responded by stating he recommended “giving the shares directly to the public,” and that he would be doing it that way.
Just a little bit later, Musk said children across the U.S. would be getting a share from him:
Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America.
This will be the first of many.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026
There are roughly 70 million children, meaning someone under the age of 18, in the United States, according to the Federal Interagency Forum on Child and Family Statistics. Musk’s ownership of SpaceX stock shows he has around 849 million Class A shares of SpaceX stock, according to filings with the SEC.
Elon Musk revealed in a post on X that “Permits were impossible to get,” explaining the fate of The Boring Company’s most ambitious East Coast proposal.
The comment responded to a query about what became of his July 20, 2017 announcement that he had “just received verbal govt approval” for an underground Hyperloop connecting New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C., capable of carrying passengers from the Big Apple to the Nation’s Capital in just 29 minutes.
The Boring Company receives verbal ‘approval’ to build NY to DC Hyperloop tunnel
The 2017 post, which envisioned city-center stations and multiple elevators in each city, sparked immediate scrutiny. Local and state officials in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and D.C. said they had no knowledge of any approval. A White House spokesperson confirmed only “promising conversations” about the transformative infrastructure.
Musk clarified shortly after that there was “still a lot of work” to do for formal approvals.
@cybrtrkguy Permits were impossible to get
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 19, 2026
Limited progress followed, as Maryland Governor Larry Hogan’s administration issued a conditional utility permit and supported work near Fort Meade. In 2018, Washington, D.C., granted a preliminary permit for site preparation and excavation on a vacant lot at 53 New York Ave. NE in the NoMa neighborhood, which The Boring Company said could become a station.
A draft environmental assessment for a D.C.-Baltimore segment was released in 2019. Yet, by April 2021, the company had removed the project from its website, and the Federal Highway Administration reported receiving no indication of further interest. Communication with Maryland officials had ceased.
The full corridor would have required coordination among the District of Columbia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York, the Federal Highway Administration, the Army Corps of Engineers, the National Park Service, and other agencies.
Environmental reviews under the National Environmental Policy Act, utility clearances, and approvals for novel infrastructure added to the overall complexity of the project and its approval.
Speculation on the permitting barriers centers around a few factors, but a multi-state, multi-level route involving unproven high-speed vacuum-tube technology inherently triggers exhaustive safety, environmental, and engineering reviews that can stretch for years, even for conventional projects.
There are also other elements, of course, like officials who may face political exposure if a privately funded, untested system encountered anything such as cost overruns, delays, or safety issues. On the outset of this project, there were limited things such as engineering plans or demonstrated technology maturity, which also added to the potential skepticism.
The East Coast vision for Boring Co., once framed as a privately funded revolution that could reshape Northeast travel, quietly ended without construction of the promised network. Musk’s recent statement frames the outcome as a regulatory impasse, unfortunate but not unexpected.
The Boring Company’s latest Tesla tunnel truck mod “fits like a glove”
Elon Musk will give ‘every kid in America’ a SpaceX share in 2027
Elon Musk reveals why Boring Co’s biggest East Coast project never happened
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