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SpaceX reveals Starship “marine recovery” plans in new job postings

Super Heavy on YOUR drone ship? It's more likely than you think! (Richard Angle/Teslarati/SpaceX)

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4 years ago

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In a series of new job postings, SpaceX has hinted at an unexpected desire to develop “marine recovery systems for the Starship program.”

Since SpaceX first began bending metal for its steel Starship development program in late 2018, CEO Elon Musk, executives, and the company itself have long maintained that both Super Heavy boosters and Starship upper stages would perform what are known as return-to-launch-site (RTLS) landings. It’s no longer clear if those long-stated plans are set in stone.

Oddly, despite repeatedly revealing plans to develop “marine recovery” assets for Starship, SpaceX’s recent “marine engineer” and “naval architect” job postings never specifically mentioned the company’s well-established plans to convert retired oil rigs into vast floating Starship launch sites. Weighing several thousand tons and absolutely dwarfing the football-field-sized drone ships SpaceX recovers Falcon boosters with, it goes without saying that towing an entire oil rig hundreds of miles to and from port is not an efficient or economical solution for rocket recovery. It would also make very little sense for SpaceX to hire a dedicated naval architect without once mentioning that they’d be working on something as all-encompassing as the world’s largest floating launch pad.

That leaves three obvious explanations for the mentions. First, it might be possible that SpaceX is merely preparing for the potential recovery of debris or intact, floating ships or boosters after intentionally expending them on early orbital Starship test flights. Second, SpaceX might have plans to strip an oil rig or two – without fully converting them into launch pads – and then use those rigs as landing platforms designed to remain at sea indefinitely. Those platforms might then transfer landed ships or boosters to smaller support ships tasked with returning them to dry land. Third and arguably most likely, SpaceX might be exploring the possible benefits of landing Super Heavy boosters at sea.

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Through its Falcon rockets, SpaceX has slowly but surely refined and perfected the recovery and reuse of orbital-class rocket boosters – 24 (out of 103) of which occurred back on land. Rather than coasting 500-1000 kilometers (300-600+ mi) downrange after stage separation and landing on a drone ship at sea, those 24 boosters flipped around, canceled out their substantial velocities, and boosted themselves a few hundred kilometers back to the Florida or California coast, where they finally touched down on basic concrete pads.

Unsurprisingly, canceling out around 1.5 kilometers per second of downrange velocity (equivalent to Mach ~4.5) and fully reversing that velocity back towards the launch site is an expensive maneuver, costing quite a lot of propellant. For example, the nominal 25-second reentry burn performed by almost all Falcon boosters likely costs about 20 tons (~40,000 lb) of propellant. The average ~35-second single-engine landing burn used by all Falcon boosters likely costs about 10 tons (~22,000 lb) of propellant. Normally, that’s all that’s needed for a drone ship booster landing.

For RTLS landings, Falcon boosters must also perform a large ~40-second boostback burn with three Merlin 1D engines, likely costing an extra 25-35 tons (55,000-80,000 lb) of propellant. In other words, an RTLS landing generally ends up costing at least twice as much propellant as a drone ship landing. Using the general rocketry rule of thumb that every 7 kilograms of booster mass reduces payload to orbit by 1 kilogram and assuming that each reusable Falcon booster requires about 3 tons of recovery-specific hardware (mostly legs and grid fins) a drone ship landing might reduce Falcon 9’s payload to low Earth orbit (LEO) by ~5 tons (from 22 tons to 17 tons). The extra propellant needed for an RTLS landing might reduce it by another 4-5 tons to 13 tons.

Likely less than coincidentally, a Falcon 9 with drone ship booster recovery has never launched more than ~16 tons to LEO. While SpaceX hasn’t provided NASA’s ELVPerf calculator with data for orbits lower than 400 kilometers (~250 mi), it generally agrees, indicating that Falcon 9 is capable of launching about 12t with an RTLS landing and 16t with a drone ship landing.

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This is all to say that landing reusable boosters at sea will likely always be substantially more efficient. The reason that SpaceX has always held that Starship’s Super Heavy boosters will avoid maritime recovery is that landing and recovering giant rocket boosters at sea is inherently difficult, risky, time-consuming, and expensive. That makes rapid reuse (on the order of multiple times per day or week) almost impossible and inevitably adds the cost of recovery, which could actually be quite significant for a rocket that SpaceX wants to eventually cost just a few million dollars per launch. However, so long as at-sea recovery costs less than a few million dollars, there’s always a chance that certain launch profiles could be drastically simplified – and end up cheaper – by the occasional at-sea booster landing.

If the alternative is a second dedicated launch to partially refuel one Starship, it’s possible that a sea landing could give Starship the performance needed to accomplish the same mission in a single launch, lowering the total cost of launch services. If – like with Falcon 9 – a sea landing could boost Starship’s payload to LEO by a third or more, the regular sea recovery of Super Heavy boosters would also necessarily cut the number of launches SpaceX needs to fill up a Starship Moon lander by a third. Given that SpaceX and NASA have been planning for Starship tanker launches to occur ~12 days apart, recovering boosters at sea becomes even more feasible.

In theory, the Starship launch vehicle CEO Elon Musk has recently described could be capable of launching anywhere from 150 to 200+ tons to low Earth orbit with full reuse and RTLS booster recovery. With so much performance available, it may matter less than it does with Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy if an RTLS booster landing cuts payload to orbit by a third, a half, or even more. At the end of the day, “just” 100 tons to LEO may be more than enough to satisfy any realistic near-term performance requirements.

But until Starships and Super Heavy boosters are reusable enough to routinely launch multiple times per week (let alone per day) and marginal launch costs have been slashed to single-digit millions of dollars, it’s hard to imagine SpaceX willingly leaving so much performance on the table by forgoing at-sea recovery out of principle alone.

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Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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Tesla Full Self-Driving v14.3 rolls out: here’s what’s new

We are in EAP and will be on the road with v14.3 in the coming hours, so we’ll have a lot of things to discuss over the next few days, especially coming from v14.2.2.5, which I called the most “confusing” FSD release of all time.

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27 minutes ago

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April 7, 2026

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Tesla has officially started rolling out Full Self-Driving v14.3 to Early Access Program (EAP) members, and there are a lot of new improvements.

We are in EAP and will be on the road with v14.3 in the coming hours, so we’ll have a lot of things to discuss over the next few days, especially coming from v14.2.2.5, which I called the most “confusing” FSD release of all time.

Tesla brought out a lot of improvements, according to the v14.3 release notes, which list a vast number of fixes, new features, and new capabilities.

Here’s what Tesla’s release notes for the v14.3 release state:

  • Improved parking location pin prediction, now shown on a map with a P icon.
  •  Increased decisiveness of parking spot selection and maneuvering.
  • Rewrote the Al compiler and runtime from the ground up with MLIR, resulting in 20% faster reaction time and improving model iteration speed.
  • Enhanced response to emergency vehicles, school buses, right-of-way violators, and other rare vehicles.
  • Mitigated unnecessary lane biasing and minor tailgating behaviors.
  • Improved handling of small animals by focusing RL training on harder examples and adding rewards for better proactive safety.
  • Improved traffic light handling at complex intersections with compound lights, curved roads, and yellow light stopping – driven by training on hard RL examples sourced from the Tesla fleet.
  • Upgraded the Reinforcement Learning (RL) stage of training the FSD neural network, resulting in improvements in a wide variety of driving scenarios.
  • Upgraded the neural network vision encoder, improving understanding in rare and low-visibility scenarios, strengthening 3D geometry understanding, and expanding traffic sign understanding.
  • Improved handling for rare and unusual objects extending, hanging, or leaning into the vehicle path by sourcing infrequent events from the fleet.
  • Improved handling of temporary system degradations by maintaining control and automatically recovering without driver intervention, reducing unnecessary disengagements.

Tesla also listed a handful of future improvements as well:

  • Expand reasoning to all behaviors beyond destination handling
  • Add pothole avoidance
  • Improve driver monitoring system sensitivity with better eye gaze tracking, eye wear handling, and higher accuracy in variable lighting situations

CEO Elon Musk has said that v14.3 could be “where the last big piece of the puzzle finally lands.” We have high expectations for this release because, in a lot of ways, v14.2’s final version was extremely disappointing and seemed to be a regression more than anything.

Nevertheless, Full Self-Driving v14.3 is going to be quite an interesting test, considering this is also the first time Musk has stated it will feel like the car will be “sentient.”

Reasoning will be a bigger piece of the puzzle with this release, although there were some elements of it in v14.2.

Tesla AI Head says future FSD feature has already partially shipped

We plan to travel plenty of miles with it over the next few days, so we’ll keep you posted on what our thoughts are.

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Tesla Model Y ownership review after six months: What I love and what I don’t

I pay about $25 more a month than I did for my Bronco Sport for my Tesla. It was a no-brainer to switch. Like any car, it isn’t perfect, but my Tesla has more things right than any other car I’ve owned, and that makes it truly incredible.

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5 hours ago

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April 7, 2026

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Credit: Joey Klender

It has been just over six months since I took delivery of my Diamond Black Tesla Model Y Premium Long Range (at that time, it was called the Tesla Model Y Long Range All-Wheel-Drive).

In those six months, I have had the opportunity to experience true and pure electric vehicle ownership, what comes with it after driving a gas vehicle for my entire life, and, to be completely frank, there are not many things I would change.

Owning a Tesla was something I never thought I’d do until I owned a house, simply to take advantage of the advantage of home charging. However, I had to take the chance last year with the elimination of the $7,500 electric vehicle tax credit, as well as to avoid the mountainous stack of repair bills that were presenting themselves with my Ford Bronco Sport.

There are a lot of things I love about my Model Y, and there are a handful of things I wish I could change. In this piece, I plan to break down the ownership experience through about six months with my Tesla Model Y, hoping to provide you with enough insight to potentially make a change — or stick with what you have.

Things I Love About My Tesla Model Y

Driving Experience

Tesla really pushes Full Self-Driving and autonomy, but there are times that, as an owner, I feel I need to drive this car manually. Tesla put so much effort into the Model Y’s engineering and driving experience that it feels like a bit of a disservice to have it drive itself around all the time.

The suspension in this vehicle, as well as its ability to handle sharp corners, its quick acceleration, and its ability to hug the road at spirited speeds, is truly something you need to feel for yourself. I personally have never had a car that was truly geared toward driving this way. Other than a short-lived ownership experience with a Honda Civic a few years back (something I won’t ever do again), all of my vehicles have been SUVs or compact crossovers.

Credit: Joey Klender

Having a car that offers both a fun driving experience and cargo space is what the Model Y truly is all about. It’s a fun car to drive, but it also has a lot of functionality.

It is always a treat when it’s a little warmer out, I can roll the windows down, and take my Model Y to a tight back road in Pennsylvania to have some fun. I have never loved driving in the traditional sense. I don’t hate it, but it’s not necessarily “fun” to me, but that’s probably because I never had a car that was engineered to make the driving experience enjoyable.

This has truly changed my perspective on driving, and the Model Y is probably the second-most-fun car I’ve ever had the pleasure of driving. The first? The Tesla Model S.

Home Charging and Supercharging

Now, Home Charging is relatively new to me, and I covered my process for figuring that out in another article, which is linked here.

Waking up in the morning and having some additional range is really a great feeling — and with gas prices going through the stratosphere, the money I’m saving on gas is something quite special.

Supercharging is also a fun experience for me. Do I wish it were a faster experience? Sure. But there’s plenty to do in the car: Netflix, Hulu, Tesla Arcade, or head into whatever convenience store is nearby, use the restroom, and grab a bite to eat.

I have come to enjoy the evenings that I’ll head over to the Supercharger and plug my car in for half an hour before a longer drive the next day (if I didn’t plug in soon enough at home and need some fast-charging).

Tesla also added a new Supercharging “Wrapped” feature at the end of the year, gamifying the entire Supercharging experience. I’m excited to see all the places I’ve charged at the end of 2026.

Sporty, Clean, and Fun Interior

The interior of my Tesla is probably one of the most underrated features of my car, but it’s definitely my favorite. With vehicles I’ve purchased in the past, the big selling point is the inside for me, not the outside. Of course, I want my car to look good to others, but ultimately, I’m paying the payment and I’m spending 100% of the time I’m using the car on the inside of it.

This highlights the need for a comfy, cozy, and capable cabin that has all the features I could want. In Pennsylvania, we have cold winters and hot and humid summers. The Model Y has heated seats and a steering wheel, as well as A/C seats. The HVAC is incredibly capable, customizable, and comfortable for all passengers, allowing them to make adjustments wherever needed.

At night, the black interior coupled with the accent lighting makes for one of the coolest, spaceship-like interiors on the market. Tesla always called it a “Rave Cave,” and it truly feels like it.

Tech: From Full Self-Driving to Other Features

Tech is really the biggest part of owning a Tesla; it is so advanced that it almost feels like it’s not even a car. Full Self-Driving is obviously such a huge advantage, and I’ve talked about it in great detail, both positively and negatively.

I could write 1,000 words on FSD, but I don’t want to focus on it solely, because there are so many other things that need to be highlighted.

One thing Tesla really has over others is the ability to improve its cars continually. Simple features like a charging adjustment, new modes, or activating features that weren’t quite ready previously are all things Tesla has added through Over-the-Air updates.

I don’t know if I could pick just one as a favorite, but in the six months I’ve had my car, the most useful thing I’ve come across outside of FSD is Summon. While it is hit or miss a lot of the time, there are little features, like moving the car forward or back from the Tesla App, that are incredibly useful. Adjusting a park job, making snow shoveling around the car easier, or even moving the car slightly when I’m taking photos or video is incredibly seamless with this functionality.

Cargo and Interior Space

One of my big concerns when going from a Bronco Sport to a Model Y was cargo space, only to find out the Model Y has more space than the Bronco Sport. I always have something in the trunk, whether it is luggage, my golf bag, shoes, or groceries. I’ve never felt like I’ve needed more space in this car, although I’m sure that day will come when I get the boys together for a golf trip and I am driving.

I’ve packed luggage for my Fiancèe and a few of her friends on a trip to Disney with no issues. Four girls going to Disney for five days is a challenge that will frighten even the most capable vehicles. I had no issues.

But what is also great about the Model Y is that it has the room to do other things, like fit an entire mattress for camping. SNUUZU makes an amazing Tesla mattress that I have thrown in the car to watch sunsets. This Summer, I’ll do some camping with it.

It’s one of the many things about this car that I really love.

Things About My Tesla Model Y I Do Not Love

Winter Range

There’s no getting around the fact that owning this car without a faster charging option at home in the winter is truly frustrating. I was charging much more frequently in January and February than in any other month.

I took a 40-mile round-trip drive to grab some hot wings with friends in January. It took about 105 miles of range.

The cold weather was truly a frustrating time to own an EV, and my problems would have been solved with a Level 2 charger at home. Even still, the drives that were a few hours long were going to be fit with 10-15 minute stops to grab some range at a Supercharger.

Navigation

I really think that Tesla could have the best navigation out there. They always talk about licensing FSD, but if they were to license their Navigation software, I think it could overtake Apple Maps, Waze, and others. With a weather radar, live traffic updates, satellite imagery, and more, the Navigation system is truly the best around.

However, the Navigation itself, meaning the routing, is absolutely abysmal. It doesn’t learn from mistakes, it doesn’t learn more ideal routing, and it doesn’t seem to improve at any point. It still tries to leave my neighborhood by turning left out of a right-turn-only exit. It routinely takes some of the most head-scratching routes to local destinations.

Consistently using the FSD disengage feature to report the problems to Tesla’s AI Team doesn’t seem to yield much of a result. It would be great if there were a “Learn” mode so that it could be less on Tesla to refine things, and the car would just learn automatically.

Cup Holders

This is a really trivial and nitpicky point of criticism, but boy, do these cupholders need to be larger. Many of my reusable water bottles do not fit in them, so I had to grab a $25 cup holder “adapter” from Amazon. It obstructs the center console from opening comfortably, but it is what it is. It fits standard cups, soft drink containers from fast food restaurants, and bottles of water, at least for the most part.

It would be nice if Tesla could think about something for the next Model Y refresh here, although I may be the only one to really complain about them.

Final Thoughts

I pay about $25 more a month than I did for my Bronco Sport for my Tesla. It was a no-brainer to switch. Like any car, it isn’t perfect, but my Tesla has more things right than any other car I’ve owned, and that makes it truly incredible.

Sometimes I am still baffled that this is my car. It feels crazy to drive something that is so far ahead of any other car I’ve driven. Three of my friends own Teslas now, all of us bought them at the same time last year, and all four of us don’t know if we’d ever consider going back.

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Elon Musk’s Terafab project locks up massive new partner

Terafab, first revealed by Musk in March, is a massive joint-venture semiconductor complex planned for the North Campus of Giga Texas in Austin.

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7 hours ago

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April 7, 2026

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Credit: SpaceX

Elon Musk’s Terafab project just locked up a massive new partner, just weeks after the new project was announced by Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, the three companies that will be direct benefactors from it.

In a landmark announcement on April 7, Intel joined Elon Musk’s Terafab project as a key partner alongside Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI. The collaboration focuses on refactoring silicon fabrication technology to deliver ultra-high-performance chips at unprecedented scale.

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan hosted Musk at Intel facilities the prior weekend, underscoring the partnership’s momentum with a public handshake.

Terafab, first revealed by Musk in March, is a massive joint-venture semiconductor complex planned for the North Campus of Giga Texas in Austin. Valued at $20–25 billion, it aims to consolidate the entire chip-making pipeline, design, fabrication, memory production, and advanced packaging in a single location. It should eliminate a majority of Tesla’s dependence on third-party chip fab companies.

The facility will manufacture two primary chip types: energy-efficient edge-inference processors optimized for Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (FSD) systems, Cybercab and Robotaxi, and Optimus humanoid robots, and high-power, radiation-hardened variants for SpaceX satellites and xAI’s orbital data centers.

Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry

The project’s audacious goal is to produce 1 terawatt (TW) of annual compute capacity, roughly 50 times current global AI chip output.

Production is expected to begin modestly and scale rapidly, addressing Musk’s warning that chip supply could soon become the biggest constraint on Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI growth. By vertically integrating manufacturing tailored to their exact needs, Terafab eliminates supply-chain bottlenecks and accelerates iteration for AI training, inference at the edge, and space-based computing.

Intel’s participation is strategically vital. The company will contribute expertise in advanced process technology, high-volume fabrication, and packaging to help Terafab achieve its aggressive targets. For Intel, the deal strengthens its foundry business and positions it as a critical U.S. player in the AI hardware race.

For Musk’s ecosystem, it secures domestic, purpose-built silicon at a time when global capacity meets only a fraction of projected demand for hundreds of millions of robots and orbital AI infrastructure.

This is the latest chapter in Intel-Tesla ties. In November 2025, Musk publicly stated at Tesla’s shareholder meeting that partnering with Intel on AI5 chips was “worth having discussions,” amid concerns about TSMC and Samsung capacity.

Exploratory talks followed, with Intel eyeing custom-AI opportunities. The Terafab integration transforms those conversations into concrete collaboration.

The Intel-Terafab alliance carries broader implications. It bolsters U.S. semiconductor sovereignty, drives innovation in cost- and power-efficient AI silicon, and supports Musk’s vision of exponential progress in autonomy, robotics, and space.

As AI compute demand surges, this partnership could reshape the industry, delivering the silicon backbone for a new era of intelligent machines on Earth and beyond.

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