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SpaceX just finished Starship’s 100th Raptor engine
SpaceX says its Hawthorne, California rocket factory and headquarters has completed the assembly of Starship and Super Heavy’s 100th Raptor engine.
SpaceX began developing Raptor behind the scenes as far back as 2012 and 2013, when a small team successfully tested a full-scale Raptor preburner – a small but important subcomponent – at NASA’s Stennis Space Center (SSC) facilities. Three years later, in September 2016, CEO Elon Musk revealed the first integrated static fire of a Raptor prototype – though it would later become clear that that prototype was a subscale engine about the same size as Falcon 9’s Merlin 1D.
After two and a half years of subscale testing that helped SpaceX refine startup and shutdown sequences and the general operation of what quickly became the world’s most thoroughly tested full-flow staged combustion engine, SpaceX graduated to full-scale testing. Designed to produce about twice the thrust (~200 tons/440,000 lbf) of its subscale predecessors, the first full-scale Raptor engine shipped to SpaceX’s McGregor, Texas test facilities and completed its first static fire days later on February 3rd, 2019.
Notably, the very first full-scale Raptor prototype (SN1) not only survived its first test but lived long enough to complete several more, ultimately reaching SpaceX’s minimum thrust target four days after its first static fire. A vibration issue would soon require several months of troubleshooting and iterative build-test-fail cycles but Raptor was ultimately ready to support its first brief Starhopper hop tests in July and August.
Approximately 15 months after Raptor’s first flight, Starship prototype SN8 successfully lifted off with three engines, one of which performed a near-flawless four-minute burn to apogee. Eventually, six months after SN8’s successful ascent but failed landing, Starship SN15 successfully landed, demonstrating Raptor’s ability to reignite mid-flight. Since SN15’s May 2021 success, SpaceX appears to have completed anywhere from 20 to 35+ new Raptors as part of a dramatic acceleration in production to meet the needs of at least two imminent orbital Starship test flights – both of which will need approximately 35 engines each.
For additional information on Booster 3's engine placement. Refer to this diagram below!
Massive thanks to @StarshipGazer for providing super high resolution and detailed pictures which allowed me to figure these positions out. pic.twitter.com/j1s5qHoGJ2— Artzius (@artzius) July 21, 2021
Per its label, RB16 – now better known as the 100th Raptor engine overall – is the 16th Raptor Boost engine built by SpaceX. “Boost” refers to the particular variant – in this case, a Raptor engine specifically designed for an outer ring of 20 engines on each Super Heavy booster. Unlike Raptor Center (RC) engines, the outer ring of Raptor Boost engines are fixed in place against the rocket’s skirt and aren’t designed to vector their thrust (i.e. gimbal). According to Musk, all sea level-optimized Raptor engines will ultimately produce approximately 230 tons (~510,000 lbf) of thrust.
Relative to almost any other large-scale engine development program in the last half-century, Raptor’s 29-month 100-engine milestone is an extraordinary achievement. The closest comparable engine is Blue Origin’s BE-4, which is expected to produce up to ~240 tons (~540,000 lbf) of thrust, uses an efficient (albeit slightly less so) combustion cycle, and relies on the same methane and oxygen propellant. Full-scale BE-4 testing began 16 months before Raptor in October 2017 and Blue Origin has reportedly only built and tested nine prototypes in the almost four years since. According to Musk, as of May 2021, SpaceX is now building more than a dozen Raptors – including prototypes and flight engines – every month.
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 – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $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
