News
SpaceX reveals Starship “marine recovery” plans in new job postings
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.
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.
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.
Investor's Corner
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
New drone footage shows Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory steel frame nearing completion at Giga Texas.
Tesla’s dedicated Optimus factory at Gigafactory Texas is closing in on a finished steel frame, according to drone footage posted Thursday afternoon by longtime site observer Joe Tegtmeyer. In the video, Tegtmeyer said structural steel assembly is now about five column grids away from reaching the building’s north perimeter beam, putting the primary skeleton in its final stretch roughly six months after Tesla broke ground on the North Campus site in late March.
The Giga Texas Optimus Factory latest update … construction keeps moving fast!
Steel assembly is now only about 5 column grids from the north perimeter beam. Concrete is going in on the three upper floors, rebar is still being laid for more pours, and footing / grade-beam work… pic.twitter.com/qvFPvwnYzW
— Joe Tegtmeyer 🚀 🤠🛸😎 (@JoeTegtmeyer) September 17, 2026
Tegtmeyer’s footage shows concrete already going in on three upper floors while crews continue laying rebar and pouring grade beam footings at ground level. That kind of parallel work, steel rising at one end of the site while concrete sets at the other, is a scheduling approach Tesla used at the original Giga Texas building and appears to be repeating here to save time before the plant’s targeted 2027 production start.
Teslarati has tracked the building’s progress since Tesla confirmed construction was officially underway in May, when the first steel structure went up on what was then bare, reclaimed land. The facility is part of a more than 5.2 million square foot expansion of Giga Texas’s North Campus that Tesla has said will eventually run nearly the length of the existing vehicle factory, over 4,000 feet, while sitting somewhat narrower. Musk has pegged the long term output target at 10 million Optimus units a year once the line is running at full capacity, a volume that would dwarf the one million unit pilot line Tesla is standing up separately at its Fremont, California factory.
Tesla Giga Texas to feature massive Optimus V4 production line
The Texas facility sits alongside another major buildout on the same campus. Terafab, the joint Tesla and SpaceX chip fabrication plant that will eventually supply the silicon running Optimus units in the field. Housing robot assembly and chip production on the same grounds is a deliberate supply chain decision, cutting down on the shipping and lead time that would otherwise sit between the two.
Tesla has not given an updated timeline beyond its previously stated goal of bringing high volume Optimus production online at the site in the summer of 2027. Fremont’s smaller pilot line began mass producing the current Gen 3 robot in January, with that plant expected to build tens of thousands of units this year primarily to generate the real world data Tesla needs to refine the robot’s software before Giga Texas ramps up. Six months of visible construction progress, tracked almost entirely through Tegtmeyer’s recurring drone flights, gives the clearest outside look yet at how seriously Tesla is treating that 2027 deadline.
Investor's Corner
Tesla and SpaceX take “Terafab” Trademark fight to Federal Court
Tesla and SpaceX sue a small Illinois firm after cease and desist letters over Terafab.
Tesla and SpaceX are asking a federal judge to rule that their planned Terafab chip factory does not infringe a small Illinois company’s trademark, a request that arrives only after months of quiet negotiation broke down this summer.
The dispute traces to May 18, when Tesla filed three U.S. trademark applications for “Terafab” and “Tesla Terafab,” covering semiconductor chips and related chip making services. TERA-print LLC, a nanotechnology company that has held a federal trademark for “Tera-Fab” since 2021, responded five days later with a cease and desist letter. According to the lawsuit, first reported by Reuters, TERA-print argued that Tesla and SpaceX’s use of “Terafab” would confuse consumers familiar with its own trademark, which covers a desktop photolithography printer sold to researchers for sensor and bioengineering work.
What stands out in the filing is the timing of TERA-print’s own paperwork. One day before sending that cease and desist letter, on May 22, TERA-print applied to expand its existing registration to cover semiconductor materials, silicon chips, nanoelectronic devices and AI design services, categories it had not previously claimed. Tesla and SpaceX call that filing opportunistic in their complaint, noting it arrived two months after Tesla’s public Terafab announcement and just days after Tesla’s own trademark applications went in.
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
By June 10, TERA-print was threatening to sue for federal trademark infringement, false designation of origin and unfair competition, the complaint states. Rather than wait to be sued, Tesla, SpaceX and SpaceXAI met with TERA-print six separate times between June and August trying to resolve the dispute directly. Those talks collapsed, and the companies filed for declaratory judgment this week in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Texas, asking a judge to find that “Terafab” does not infringe TERA-print’s mark before TERA-print can file a claim of its own.
TERA-print isn’t backing down. The company told PCMag it discussed a settlement with Tesla as recently as September 2 and feels misled by what it called Tesla’s professed interest in settling. Its CTO, Andrey Ivankin, said TERA-print holds a Defense Department contract to fabricate semiconductors and partially owns Mattiq Inc., an AI company built on TERA-print’s products, and that the company will vigorously defend its rights.
Tesla and SpaceX argue the overlap is superficial. Terafab is planned as a $16.8 billion complex spanning roughly 100 million square feet at the Grimes County site SpaceX confirmed last month, built to produce chips for Optimus robots, Tesla’s AI computing needs and SpaceX’s orbital data center ambitions, a scale and purpose the companies say no reasonable consumer would confuse with a tabletop lab printer. TERA-print’s product line has stayed focused on lithography tools for biological and sensor research since it registered its mark in 2021.
The trademark fight is the second legal dispute tied to the Terafab project in the past week, following a separate SpaceX suit aimed at keeping company records about the facility out of public view, as KBTX reported. Whether construction proceeds under the Terafab name now depends on a federal judge in Austin.
News
NHTSA just escalated its Tesla Cybercab investigation in a big way
NHTSA escalated its Cybercab audit into a sworn Special Order with a September 30 deadline.
Federal regulators have moved from asking Tesla questions about its Cybercab to demanding sworn answers. The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration issued a Special Order that requires a Tesla officer to sign an affidavit attesting to the completeness of the company’s responses, with a deadline of September 30.
The order builds on Audit Query AQ26002, which NHTSA opened on September 3, the same day Tesla began commercial Cybercab service in Austin. Teslarati covered that initial inquiry when it surfaced, noting the agency wanted to understand how Tesla certified a vehicle with no permanently attached steering wheel, pedals, or mirrors as compliant with Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards. A Special Order is a different tool and converts a fact finding review into a legally enforceable demand, the same mechanism NHTSA used against Tesla in 2023 during its Autopilot investigation.
Several of the 21 requests target a specific gap in Cybercab’s design. One asks whether Tesla used temporarily attached human controls at any point to help certify the vehicle, and if so, which standards depended on that equipment being present. Another quotes an existing rule directly: “The service brakes shall be activated by means of a foot control.” Cybercab has no foot pedal. NHTSA wants a detailed explanation of how the vehicle satisfies that requirement, and how it complies without the kind of exemption granted to Zoox in July under Part 555, the regulatory pathway built for steering wheel free vehicles.
The order does not claim Cybercab is unsafe or that Tesla broke a rule. It requires Tesla to explain, under oath, the reasoning behind decisions the company already made when it self-certified the vehicle. That distinction matters, but so does the exposure. Motor1’s reporting, summarized here, put potential civil penalty exposure as high as $139 million if NHTSA later finds the certification was flawed, on top of whatever criminal risk comes with a false sworn statement.
Tesla has not said publicly how it plans to respond. Cybercab is still carrying passengers in Austin through the Robotaxi app while the September 30 deadline approaches, and the company has continued expanding the vehicle’s footprint even as the regulatory question remains open. The Special Order does not pause any of that and just sets a date by which Tesla has to put its certification logic on the record, with a company officer’s name attached to it.
New drone video shows Tesla’s Optimus Factory reaching a turning point
Tesla and SpaceX take “Terafab” Trademark fight to Federal Court
