News
SpaceX almost drops finished Starship prototype – but it might be salvageable
Less than 48 hours after Starship SN8’s (successful) demise, something on or around a metal stand holding up SpaceX’s next completed Starship collapsed, causing the rocket to rapidly tilt sidewise and smash into the assembly building containing it.
Put simply, launch vehicles very rarely designed or expected to survive the kind of structural loads the fall and impact put Starship SN9 through and the early prognosis – prior to any up-close observation – was not not great. Weighing at least 50-70 metric tons (110,000-155,000 lb), any other rocket – and possibly even Starship itself – should have been damaged beyond repair from anything less than a minor bump.
Instead, Starship SN9 – fully assembled and perhaps just a few days away from a scheduled transport to the launch pad – shifted some 10 degrees (~10 m/30 ft) in a few seconds, seemingly coming to rest against scaffolding and the interior wall of SpaceX’s “high bay” assembly building. Had Starship fallen 180 degrees in the opposite direction, the results could have been catastrophic, potentially falling without a wall to stop it onto a Super Heavy booster section that could have had workers inside it. Luckily, the (hopeful) wakeup call was apparently benign, with SpaceX escaping loss of life or limb and avoiding any catastrophic damage.
Perhaps even worse, less than a day prior, a number of VIPs, SpaceX executives, investors, and even Elon Musk himself were touring the company’s Starship factory and standing feet away from SN9 itself. The most likely culprit of SN9’s fall may even be visible in photos taken by Steve Jurvetson, one such investor. In a few of those photos, Starship’s steel work stand – a staple of SpaceX’s Starship factories for ~18 months – appears to be precariously balanced upon five or six jacks with nothing more than gravity, SN9’s own mass, and some counterweights hold them together.
If those jacks – as they appear to be – weren’t bolted to the high bay’s concrete foundation or Starship SN9’s work stand, it could have been unintuitively easy to trigger a collapse like the one that occurred, perhaps requiring a minor bump with a forklift, a particularly extreme gust of wind, or some other kind of lateral force.
Regardless of why it happened, the end result was the same. Somewhat miraculously, Starship SN9 – as photos would soon show – appeared to be almost entirely unscathed, baring no obvious hull damage. The rocket’s fore and aft starboard flaps, however, were clearly crumpled. In fact, it’s possible that the crumpling of those largely empty, thin-skinned flaps acted just like the crumple zones designed into modern cars, essentially soaking up the energy of SN9’s impact with the wall and saving the rest of the rocket.
Still, the reality is that Starship SN9’s prognosis is still unlikely to be good, even if crumpling flaps seemingly prevented the rocket from becoming an unequivocal write-off. Depending on how strong SN9’s flaps were, the force of the impact could have easily been transferred into the structural hinges that connect them to Starship, warping internal stiffeners, the hinge mechanism itself, or even the entire curvature of its cylindrical steel hull.
If somehow limited to just the hinges or, even less likely, if the flaps took almost all of the impact energy, SN9 might be repairable. Even then, it’s unlikely that SpaceX will be able to hold to the schedule previously discussed on Teslarati, meaning that Starship SN9’s journey to the launch pad probably isn’t going to happen on Monday, December 14th. In the meantime, SpaceX will likely kick work on Starship SN10 – perhaps just a week or two behind SN9 – into full gear.
Energy
Tesla Semi factory is getting a celebration nobody expected
Tesla will inaugurate its Nevada Semi factory September 24, five months after production quietly began ramping.
Tesla says it will officially inaugurate its new Semi factory in Nevada next month. The Tesla Semi account posted the announcement on X, sharing a graphic titled “Semi Rollout” with a date of September 24. No further details were given about the format of the event or who would attend.
While Tesla’s dedicated Semi plant in Sparks, adjacent to Gigafactory Nevada, opened back in April, with the first trucks rolling off the high volume line on April 29, the timing for the factory inauguration comes at a surprise. The ribbon cutting event five months into production is a break from how Tesla has usually handled its other factories, where the first truck or car off the line typically served as the milestone moment.
Inauguration of new Semi factory in Nevada next month pic.twitter.com/a8kAlxrOOn
— Tesla Semi (@tesla_semi) August 24, 2026
The 1.7 million square foot factory was built as part of a $3.6 billion expansion Tesla announced in early 2023, and it shares a site with the battery cell lines that feed the Semi’s structural pack, a decision meant to remove the supply bottleneck that delayed the truck for years. The plant is designed for 50,000 trucks a year at full ramp. Semi program director Dan Priestley has said production “is now ramping” rather than claiming it has reached scale.
Nine years passed between the Semi’s 2017 unveiling and this stage of production, with the truck slipping from an original 2019 target through hand built pilot units for PepsiCo and a slow build out of the Nevada plant. An inauguration event now gives Tesla a stage to talk up that ramp and reset expectations for how many trucks it can begin delivering at scale.
The September date also lines up with the Semi’s next milestone. Tesla confirmed the truck is heading to Europe with a full unveiling at the IAA Transportation trade show in Hannover, Germany, running September 15 through 20. Between the Nevada event and the Hannover reveal, Tesla has roughly a week and a half in September to make the case that the Semi is now a truck being built and sold on two continents rather than tested in a handful of fleets.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Elon Musk says SpaceX will finally retire Falcon 9 once Starship flies reliably every week.
Elon Musk gave the clearest timeline yet for retiring Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket.
The comment came in a reply on X, where Musk wrote that “once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon.” He was responding to physicist Casey Handmer, who noted that NASA is reportedly uneasy about SpaceX phasing out Falcon after building what Handmer called the most successful launcher ever, with the fleet nearing 1,000 total launches.
Now @SciGuySpace reports NASA is in a tizzy because after running the most successful launcher ever for more than a decade and nearing 1000 launches, @SpaceX is planning to retire Falcon in favor of Starship in a few years.
Sorry, NASA, you’ve had 15 years to burn down the… https://t.co/uCNoMwK0v9
— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) August 22, 2026
Falcon 9 is still SpaceX’s busiest vehicle by far. The company is on pace for roughly 140 to 145 Falcon flights this year, following 165 in 2025, president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier in 2026. She has already said Falcon flights would “tail off” as Starship comes online, while reports indicate that SpaceX has stopped booking new Falcon 9 launches past 2028 and halted production of some expendable Falcon hardware, according to Bloomberg.
It’s worth noting that Musk’s post is a condition, and not a countdown on when Falcon will retire. Starship has not yet flown weekly, let alone daily. Its most recent flight in July ended with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, a milestone Musk pointed to earlier this month when he said the vehicle’s heat shield problem was effectively solved. SpaceX towed that ship to Christmas Island for inspection, and the next flight, Flight 14, is aimed at putting Starship into orbit for the first time. A tower catch attempt for the upper stage has been pushed back to what Musk has called “a few months” away.
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
The gap between Falcon’s role today and Starship’s promised role tomorrow matters most to NASA. Falcon and its Dragon capsule remain the only way the agency rotates astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and Starship is not certified to carry NASA crews. Musk’s post did not address how that handoff would work if Falcon winds down before a crew-rated Starship variant exists. The timing lines up with Musk’s other recent Starship comments. Two days before the Falcon post, he told a different X user that SpaceX is aiming for more than 30 Starship launches a day by 2030, or roughly 10,000 a year, a figure tied to the Trump administration’s new push for higher national launch cadence. Falcon, which took over a decade to reach its first 100 launches, was never built to approach that kind of volume.
For now, Falcon 9 keeps flying at a near-record pace while Starship works to prove it can do the job Musk has already picked out for it.
Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
Tesla Semi factory is getting a celebration nobody expected
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
