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SpaceX rolls Starship to the launch pad five days after last flight test
Update: Less than five days after Starship serial number 10 (SN10) briefly became the first prototype to launch and land in one piece, SpaceX has rolled its successor – Starship SN11 – from factory to launch pad.
The goal: complete cryogenic proof and static fire testing within the next 4-7 days to clear the way for another Starship launch as early as next week. Already outfitted with three Raptor engines, SN11 may have a limited chance of hitting SpaceX’s ambitious schedule targets, but the experiences of Starships SN8, SN9, and SN10 suggest that a launch sometime before the end of March is a more reasonable expectation. Stay tuned for updates as SpaceX prepares to install Starship SN11 at the launch pad and put its cryogenic proof test on the calendar.
NASASpaceflight.com reports that SpaceX – already scheduled to transport a new Starship to the launch pad on Monday, March 8th – wants that prototype ready to launch as early as next week.
According to the same report, SpaceX – having already installed three Raptor engines on Starship serial number 11 (SN11) – aims to more or less wrap up all qualification testing by the end of the week. No different than the test campaigns that all other flightworthy Starships had to pass before being cleared for launch, that process includes – at minimum – a good cryogenic proof test and a combined wet dress rehearsal (WDR) and static fire.
Excluding Starhopper, of the five Starship prototypes that have taken flight, SpaceX has consistently managed to speed up the process of preparing each vehicle for flight, but the average time spent from rollout to liftoff is still more than a month. In other words, even accounting for the general improvements SpaceX seems to make between tests, readying Starship SN11 for flight within a week or two of the prototype arriving at the launch pad would be anywhere from a factor of two to five faster than any prior test campaign.
Repost – this time with Data Labels! pic.twitter.com/BohWYiuiJc— BocaCharts (@BocaCharts) March 6, 2021
Still, it’s not entirely impossible. If SpaceX can borrow from the most efficient Starship launches and test campaigns its completed and combine them all with a few new, unspecified efficiencies, it’s reasonable to conclude that Starship SN11 could be ready to fly near the end of next week (around March 19th). More specifically, SpaceX would have to complete a successful static fire on the first try within a week of SN11’s scheduled March 8th rollout, followed by a brisk two or three-day turnaround for a launch attempt.
While not impossible, it’s safe to say that that scenario is unlikely. Nevertheless, assuming SpaceX continues to find ways to expedite preflight processing like it has with SN8, SN9, and SN10, it’s reasonable to assume that Starship SN11 could be ready for an inaugural launch attempt as early as the last week of March.
All the above ignores the possibility that SpaceX will choose to physically modify Starship SN11 to mitigate the possibility of some or all aspects of Starship SN10’s hard landing and subsequent explosion from recurring. If that is the plan, those changes will have to be done at the launch site after Starship SN11’s scheduled Monday, March 8th rollout.
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
