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SpaceX rolls Starship launch tower section, giant water tank to orbital pad
After a brief pause, SpaceX is once again shipping pad hardware from its Boca Chica, Texas rocket factory to Starship’s rapidly growing orbital launch site (OLS).
A few days of delays aside, the latest transport simultaneously rolled a massive 12m (40 ft) wide water tank and another prefabricated section of SpaceX’s skyscraper-sized orbital launch tower to a nascent orbital launch site adjacent to two well-worn suborbital pads.
Those suborbital pads have been through dozens of ground tests of Starship test tanks, hoppers, and high-altitude prototypes over the last ~20 months, recently culminating in Starship SN15 launching to 10 km (6.2 mi), free-falling back to earth, and becoming the first prototype of its kind to successfully touch down. Since that May 5th milestone, Starship SN15 has been moved to an empty lot – likely to be put permanently on display – and SpaceX’s focus has quite clearly shifted towards Starship’s first orbital test flights.
To even be able to attempt those test flights, which will involve a Starship installed on top of the world’s most powerful rocket booster, several things must be in order. Relative to the three-engine, medium-altitude Starship prototypes SpaceX has the most experience with, CEO Elon Musk has implied that even the very first flightworthy Super Heavy boosters will be outfitted with 29 Raptor engines, representing an almost order-of-magnitude leap in lift-off thrust. In other words, SpaceX’s proven suborbital launch mounts are wholly inadequate for even a rudimentary orbital launch attempt.
Aside from being unable to withstand the immense stress of at least ~5800 metric tons (12.8 million lbf) of thrust, SpaceX’s suborbital pad also has far too little propellant storage capacity to fuel an orbital launch attempt. Enter SpaceX’s first South Texas orbital launch site.
In response, SpaceX has been gradually building out brand new orbital-class launch facilities for around nine months. Work on the pad began to significantly accelerate earlier this year, including the delivery of Starship-derived propellant storage tanks, the rapid assembly of even larger insulation ‘sleeves’ for those custom tanks, the even faster construction of multiple prefabricated launch tower segments, finishing touches on a tall six-legged ‘launch mount,’ the completion of a massive cryogenic propellant pumphouse, miles of wire and pipe runs, and far more.
As it turns out, the second propellant storage tank ‘sleeve’ is actually a massive water tank, indicating that Starship’s first orbital launch site will have some form of water deluge system to limit the damage Super Heavy’s 29 Raptors can do to the pad and rocket itself at liftoff. The tank measures 12m (40ft) wide and approximately 36m (~120ft) tall, meaning that it should be able to hold more than a million gallons (~4000 cubic meters) of water.
Additionally, SpaceX delivered the third prefabricated launch tower segment, leaving the tower more than half its full ~143m (469ft) height once installed. Two more sections are already more than half finished, likely meaning that the tower’s structural skeleton could be fully assembled by July or August.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s X goes down as users report major outage Friday morning
Error messages and stalled loading screens quickly spread across the service, while outage trackers recorded a sharp spike in user reports.
Elon Musk’s X experienced an outage Friday morning, leaving large numbers of users unable to access the social media platform.
Error messages and stalled loading screens quickly spread across the service, while outage trackers recorded a sharp spike in user reports.
Downdetector reports
Users attempting to open X were met with messages such as “Something went wrong. Try reloading,” often followed by an endless spinning icon that prevented access, according to a report from Variety. Downdetector data showed that reports of problems surged rapidly throughout the morning.
As of 10:52 a.m. ET, more than 100,000 users had reported issues with X. The data indicated that 56% of complaints were tied to the mobile app, while 33% were related to the website and roughly 10% cited server connection problems. The disruption appeared to begin around 10:10 a.m. ET, briefly eased around 10:35 a.m., and then returned minutes later.
Previous disruptions
Friday’s outage was not an isolated incident. X has experienced multiple high-profile service interruptions over the past two years. In November, tens of thousands of users reported widespread errors, including “Internal server error / Error code 500” messages. Cloudflare-related error messages were also reported.
In March 2025, the platform endured several brief outages spanning roughly 45 minutes, with more than 21,000 reports in the U.S. and 10,800 in the U.K., according to Downdetector. Earlier disruptions included an outage in August 2024 and impairments to key platform features in July 2023.
News
Tesla wins top loyalty and conquest honors in S&P Global Mobility 2025 awards
The electric vehicle maker secured this year’s “Overall Loyalty to Make,” “Highest Conquest Percentage,” and “Ethnic Loyalty to Make” awards.
Tesla emerged as one of the standout winners in the 2025 S&P Global Mobility Automotive Loyalty Awards, capturing top honors for customer retention and market conquest.
The electric vehicle maker secured this year’s “Overall Loyalty to Make,” “Highest Conquest Percentage,” and “Ethnic Loyalty to Make” awards.
Tesla claims loyalty crown
According to S&P Global Mobility, Tesla secured its 2025 “Overall Loyalty to Make” award following a late-year shift in consumer buying patterns. This marked the fourth consecutive year Tesla has received the honor. S&P Global Mobility’s annual analysis reviewed 13.6 million new retail vehicle registrations in the U.S. from October 2024 through September 2025, as noted in a press release.
In addition to overall loyalty, Tesla also earned the “Highest Conquest Percentage” award for the sixth consecutive year, highlighting the company’s continued ability to attract customers away from competing brands. This achievement is particularly notable given Tesla’s relatively small vehicle lineup, which is largely dominated by just two models: the Model 3 and Model Y.
Ethnic market strength and conquest
Tesla also captured top honors for “Ethnic Market Loyalty to Make,” a category that highlighted especially strong retention among Asian and Hispanic households. According to the analysis, Tesla achieved loyalty rates of 63.6% among Asian households and 61.9% among Hispanic households. These figures exceeded national averages.
S&P Global Mobility executives noted that loyalty margins across categories were exceptionally narrow in 2025, underscoring the significance of Tesla’s wins in an increasingly competitive market. Joe LaFeir, President of Mobility Business Solutions at S&P Global Mobility, shared his perspective on this year’s results.
“For 30 years, this analysis has provided a fact-based measure of brand health, and this year’s results are particularly telling. The data shows the market is not rewarding just one type of strategy. Instead, we see sustained, high-level performance from manufacturers with broad portfolios. In the current market, retaining customers remains a critical performance indicator for the industry,” LaFeir said.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft is heading to jury trial
The ruling keeps alive claims that OpenAI misled the Tesla CEO about its charitable purpose while accepting billions of dollars in funding.
OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft will face a jury trial this spring after a federal judge rejected their efforts to dismiss Elon Musk’s lawsuit, which accuses the artificial intelligence startup of abandoning its original nonprofit mission. The ruling keeps alive claims that OpenAI misled the Tesla CEO about its charitable purpose while accepting billions of dollars in funding.
As noted in a report from Bloomberg News, a federal judge in Oakland, California, ruled that OpenAI Inc. and Microsoft failed to show that Musk’s claims should be dismissed. U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers stated that while the evidence remains unclear, Musk has maintained that OpenAI “had a specific charitable purpose and that he attached two fundamental terms to it: that OpenAI be open source and that it would remain a nonprofit — purposes consistent with OpenAI’s charter and mission.”
Judge Gonzalez Rogers also rejected an argument by OpenAI suggesting that Musk’s use of an intermediary to donate $38 million in seed money to the company stripped him of legal standing. “Holding otherwise would significantly reduce the enforcement of a large swath of charitable trusts, contrary to the modern trend,” Judge Gonzalez Rogers wrote.
The judge also declined to dismiss Musk’s fraud allegations, citing internal OpenAI communications from 2017 involving co-founder Greg Brockman. In an email cited by the judge, fellow OpenAI board member Shivon Zilis informed Musk that Brockman would “like to continue with the non-profit structure.”
Just two months later, however, Brockman wrote in a private note that he “cannot say that we are committed to the non-profit. don’t want to say that we’re committed. if three months later we’re doing b-corp then it was a lie.”
Marc Toberoff, a member of Musk’s legal team, said Judge Gonzalez Rogers’s ruling confirms that “there is substantial evidence that OpenAI’s leadership made knowingly false assurances to Mr. Musk about its charitable mission that they never honored in favor of their personal self-enrichment.”
OpenAI, for its part, maintained that Musk’s legal efforts are baseless. In a statement, the AI startup said it is looking forward to the upcoming trial. “Mr. Musk’s lawsuit continues to be baseless and a part of his ongoing pattern of harassment, and we look forward to demonstrating this at trial. We remain focused on empowering the OpenAI Foundation, which is already one of the best-resourced nonprofits ever,” OpenAI stated.
Elon Musk’s X goes down as users report major outage Friday morning
Tesla wins top loyalty and conquest honors in S&P Global Mobility 2025 awards
