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SpaceX installs first ‘Mechazilla’ arm on Starship launch tower
One month after SpaceX stacked Starship’s South Texas ‘launch tower’ to its full height, the company has installed the first arm on what amounts to the backbone of ‘Mechazilla.’
At the end of July, after less than four months of work, a team of SpaceX workers and contractors installed the final prefabricated section of a ~145m (~475 ft) tall tower meant to support orbital Starship launches. Above all else, SpaceX’s first custom-built ‘launch tower’ is a sort of backbone or anchor point for several massive, mechanical arms that will accomplish the actual tasks of servicing – and, perhaps, catching – Starships and Super Heavy boosters.
Work on all three of the arms expected to make up what SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has described as “Mechazilla” has been visibly underway since the last week of June as a small army of welders carefully assembled dozens of sections of heavy-duty steel pipe into house-sized frames. Almost exactly two months later, SpaceX has installed the first of those three arms on the exterior of Starship’s skyscraper-sized launch tower.
Known as the tower’s quick-disconnect or QD swing arm, the standalone structure is reportedly designed to accomplish a few different tasks. First, as its unofficial name might suggest, the QD arm will hold a quick-disconnect umbilical connector that will temporarily attach to the base of Starships to load them with fuel, oxidizer, and other consumables and link them to ground power and networking. For years, it appeared that SpaceX planned to fuel Starship upper stages through their Super Heavy boosters, which will themselves be connected to umbilical panels on a table-like launch mount that sits beside the tower.
However, once work began on Starship S20, the first potentially space-capable prototype, it was clear that SpaceX had foregone the umbilical plate normally installed at the base of Starship skirts and moved that connection to the ship’s lower back. Musk later confirmed as much in interviews and tweets, revealing that longstanding plans to dock Starships aft to aft for in-space refueling were also up in the air. As of late, aside from reiterating that the launch pad itself (“Stage Zero,” per Musk) is even more complex and difficult than Starship or Super Heavy, SpaceX’s CEO has also repeatedly stated a desire to offload as many systems as possible onto the launch pad – seemingly regardless of the complexity of the alternative.
Enter the building-sized robot informally known as Mechazilla. While the relatively simple swinging ‘QD arm’ that will fuel Starship and stabilize both stages of the rocket is a common feature of rockets and launch pads, the only experience SpaceX itself has with umbilical swing arms is the Crew Access Arm (CAA) that allows astronauts and cargo to board Dragon spacecraft after Falcon 9 goes vertical – a structure with near-zero umbilical utility. Technically, the transporter/erectors (T/Es) that cradle Falcon rockets, lift them vertical, and fuel them before launch have some similarities with swing arms but SpaceX has always used simpler and more reliable passive mechanisms whenever possible.
A step further, though, SpaceX has also seemingly foregone the installation of a basic crane on top of its Starship tower and Musk himself has developed an almost infamous aversion to the inclusion of something as seemingly simple as landing legs on Super Heavy boosters – and, eventually, perhaps even (some) Starship variants. Instead of adding rudimentary legs to Super Heavy prototypes, Musk has seemingly pushed SpaceX to turn Starship’s launch tower into a complex, vulnerable, and fragile rocket recovery system. Beyond the comparatively mundane QD arm, Musk says that SpaceX will ultimately install a pair of massive house-sized steel arms mounted on a sort of external elevator. Those arms will apparently be capable of actuating and moving up and down the tower with the speed, precision, and reliability needed to quite literally catch Super Heavy boosters – and, eventually, Starships – out of mid-air.
The team tasked with designing and building those rocket-catching arms have affectionately deemed them “chopsticks” – a nod towards the kind of nuanced actuation they’ll need to recover the world’s largest rocket boosters and upper stages without missing or destroying them. Having really only just perfected propulsive vertical landing with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy boosters, SpaceX thus intends to throw a few extra points of failure into the mix.
To SpaceX and Musk’s credit, whether the company’s second attempt at catching rockets goes as well as the first, some version of the massive ‘chopstick’ arms SpaceX is working on was likely going to be necessary just to rapidly turn around boosters and Starships – and do so regardless (within reason) of weather conditions. By replacing a tower crane with giant arms, SpaceX will hopefully be able to stack Starship on Super Heavy (and Super Heavy on the launch mount) even in the high winds that are almost always present on the South Texas Gulf Coast. If SpaceX can also reliably catch boosters with those arms, it could be a significant upgrade for the operations side of Starship reusability. For now, though, only time will tell.
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
