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SpaceX’s Starship Super Heavy booster needs a custom assembly tower
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk has confirmed that Starship’s Super Heavy rocket booster will get its own tower-like vehicle assembly building (VAB) – and work on the structure may have already begun.
While the only visible work SpaceX has thus far completed on its next-generation Starship launch vehicle is related to the more complex and unproven upper stage of the rocket, its Super Heavy first stage (booster) is just as critical. For SpaceX, Starship was the perfect starting point, itself following on the footsteps of a largely successful multi-year Raptor engine development program. Substantially smaller than Super Heavy and requiring 5-10 times fewer engines, Starship serves as a testbed for an almost entirely new suite of technologies and strategies SpaceX is employing to build massive rockets out of commodity steel.
In recent months, particularly following the first successful pressure test of a full-scale Starship tank section in April, SpaceX has effectively proven that those uncharacteristically cheap and simple materials and methods can, in fact, build rocket structures that should stand up to orbital spaceflight. In theory, aside from the booster’s 31-engine thrust structure, the same methods and materials used to build Starships can be applied unchanged to manufacture Super Heavy. The booster’s almost unfathomable size, however, will necessitate its own dedicated assembly facilities.
While Starship itself is not exactly small at ~50m (165 ft) tall and 9m (30ft) wide, the Super Heavy booster tasked with launching the ship on its way to orbit will easily be the largest individual rocket stage ever built. Currently expected to measure 70m (230 ft) tall, Super Heavy – just the first stage of the Starship launch vehicle – will already be as tall as an entire Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy and weigh roughly three times more than the latter triple-booster rocket when fully fueled. At liftoff, Super Heavy will produce more than triple the thrust of Falcon Heavy and double the thrust of Saturn V, the most powerful liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit.
Thanks to the sheer size of the booster, SpaceX’s existing Starship-sized vehicle/vertical assembly building (VAB) is far too small for Super Heavy and is even too short to fully stack a ~50m Starship. SpaceX’s contractor of choice started assembling that VAB around January 15th and the facility was able to begin supporting its first Starship stacking and welding operations on March 2nd, just a month and a half later, with the structure fully completed by March 18th. As such, assuming the in-work foundation is as close to completion as it seems and SpaceX uses the same contractor for the next building, Super Heavy’s VAB could be ready to build the first massive booster prototype as early as July or August. Things could take a bit longer given that Musk says the booster VAB will be 81m (265 ft) tall, nearly twice the height of Starship’s VAB, but likely by no more than a few weeks.
That timeline meshes well with a senior SpaceX engineer and executive’s recent suggestion that the first orbital Starship launch attempt could still happen before the end of the year. Of course, for Super Heavy to become a genuine priority for SpaceX and receive the resources necessary to achieve that extremely ambitious goal, Starship will have to perform almost flawlessly during a series of increasingly challenging tests planned over the next few months. First up, SpaceX needs to finish repairing the launch pad after Starship SN4 exploded during testing and Starship SN5 needs to be transported to the pad to complete acceptance tests, static fire(s), and its first 150m (~500 ft) hop test. After that, SpaceX will either move on to a 2 km (1.25 mi) hop or a more ambitious 20 km (12.5 mi) flight designed to test Starship’s skydiver-like approach to landing.
If Starship SN5 or SN6 manage to complete those aforementioned tests, the horse may actually be in front of the cart for Super Heavy prototype production and Starship’s first orbital launch attempt.
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SpaceX performed a secret test on a specific portion of Starship with its recent 13th test flight last week, CEO Elon Musk revealed.
Starship’s 13th test flight took place last Friday, and in many aspects, it was one of the most overwhelmingly successful launches in the project’s history.
All of the mission objectives were met without incident, both the Super Heavy Booster and Ship managed to perform safe splashdowns in the Gulf of America and the Indian Ocean, respectively, and the deployment of Starlink satellites came and went without any complications.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
However, there was more on the agenda for SpaceX with Flight 13. Musk revealed an internal test of the ship’s heat shield tiles, as the space exploration company wanted to push them to the limits after previous issues.
Many noticed that Starship’s initial launch seemed to be more accelerated than normal, and that was not a mistake. Musk revealed that SpaceX decided to give Flight 13 an intentionally aggressive acceleration rate in an effort to test how well the tiles would remain attached to the ship:
This flight intentionally had much higher acceleration to test how well the heat shield tiles would remain attached at high dynamic pressure.
Test was successful.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 25, 2026
SpaceX had issues with some of the heat shield tiles remaining attached early on in the Starship program. The first six test flights presented some kind of anomaly with them, so the company’s big focus with them was to figure out a way to keep them intact through the duration of the flight.
Things truly improved as Flight 10 showed that ceramic tiles generally stayed attached to the ship far better due to refined attachment, as SpaceX utilized pins instead of adhesives. Flights 10 through 13 truly showed some clear progress with the heat shield tiles, and this latest test seems to be where some real progress was noticed, especially by Musk.
The 13th Starship launch last Friday was the second with Starship V3, SpaceX’s latest and greatest iteration of the spacecraft. Goals and ambitions are getting even grander as the project continues to progress. Musk has already hinted that SpaceX will likely try to catch Starship with Flight 14.
Elon Musk
Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride
Tesla owner David Moss just pushed his intervention free FSD streak past 20,000 miles total.
Tesla Model 3 owner David Moss has spent the better part of eight months turning his vehicle into a rolling stress test for Full Self-Driving, and this week he pushed his single, continuous FSD streak past 20,000 miles without a human intervening.
Moss, a Tacoma, Washington resident who sells LiDAR scanning equipment for a living, first drew wide attention in December 2025 when he logged 10,000 consecutive miles on FSD v14.2. Days later he drove from the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, covering 2,732 miles in two days and 20 hours with zero disengagements, the first verified coast to coast autonomous drive in Tesla’s history. Tesla even featured the trip as an official customer story in March. That original streak eventually reached 12,961 miles across 30 states before ending in rural Wisconsin in January, when snow and single digit temperatures forced Moss to take over.
Tesla FSD successfully completes full coast-to-coast drive with zero interventions
He started over, and this run has gone further. In late May, Moss drove 3,760 miles across Canada with two companions, from Horseshoe Bay in Vancouver to a Tesla showroom in Halifax, again without a single intervention, a trip Tesla AI software VP Ashok Elluswamy publicly congratulated him for on X. In June, he pushed the same unbroken streak south, aiming to link the Canadian border to the Mexican border, and crossed 10,000 miles on Tesla’s newly added in car streak counter along the way, the first driver to do so since Tesla began showing confetti animations for the feature.
20,000 Mile Tesla FSD Screen Streak!
Special thank you to @DevinOlsenn, @scotsrule08, & @OwenSparks for helping co drive during all these fun adventures these last couple of months
Also thank you to @wholemars for always tracking me along the journey verifying it all with his… pic.twitter.com/CZ2yO6Ev0X
— David Moss (@DavidMoss) July 27, 2026
It’s worth noting that every mile is logged through the FSD Database, a community run tracker built by Tesla influencer Omar Qazi, well known as @WholeMars on X, that pulls telemetry straight from the car and records disengagements down to a tenth of a mile. That verification is what separates Moss’s numbers from casual claims on social media.
The streak itself is a fairly recent addition to Tesla’s software. FSD v14.2 introduced a Self Driving Stats panel tracking the ratio of autonomous to manual miles, and v14.3.4 added the live streak counter in June, which resets the moment a driver brakes, wrenches the wheel or cancels navigation. Reaching 20,000 miles on that counter means a single Tesla drove itself through countless highways, city grids, construction zones and Supercharger stalls without a single reset.
Moss has said the goal was never to set a record for its own sake, but to show, mile by verified mile, what the software can already do.
Elon Musk told The Economist that artificial intelligence will likely surpass the combined intelligence of every human on Earth within about five years, and that humans may not remain in charge once that happens. In a wide-ranging interview with editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes, recorded at Giga Texas for the outlet’s Insider series, Musk compared the widening gap between AI and human intelligence to the gap between humans and chimpanzees.
“It’s hard to imagine that the chimpanzee would be in charge,” he said, addressing what happens to human authority once AI moves far beyond us.
Elon Musk reiterates his most optimistic prediction yet with “UHI” forecast
Musk’s timeline stretches out from there. Five years for AI to out-think humanity combined, ten years before humans lose meaningful control, and by 2036, he says, money itself may stop mattering.
Musk notes that if robots and AI produce more goods and services than people could ever consume, currency loses its purpose. He told Beddoes that governments could respond with direct payments, what he called “universal high income,” a term he first used in an X post last August describing a future where “everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else.”
There will be universal high income (not merely basic income).
Everyone will have the best medical care, food, home, transport and everything else.
Sustainable abundance.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 24, 2025
He also floated a more surprising prediction that deflation, and not inflation, would become the bigger economic problem, since expanding the supply of goods and services faster than the money supply grows would push prices down rather than up.
None of this is new territory for Musk, who has spent years describing an “age of abundance” built on Optimus and autonomous vehicles. What’s notable is the timing. The interview landed the same week Tesla shares dropped roughly 19 percent following a second quarter earnings report that beat on revenue but missed badly on profit, and as SpaceX stock continues to slide from its post-IPO peak.
Musk’s own net worth has fallen close to $700 billion since mid-June, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, even as he describes a future where personal wealth stops being the point.
Musk did not dodge the risk side of the equation either. He put the odds of AI contributing to human extinction somewhere in the 10 to 20 percent range, then arrived at what he called his “philosophical conclusion” since the technology cannot realistically be stopped and the arguably better response is to keep building it and hope the outcome leans toward abundance rather than catastrophe. “I’ve gone from exhilaration to terror regarding AI,” he told Beddoes, “even intraday.”
Elon Musk reveals SpaceX performed secret Starship test on Flight 13
Tesla FSD takes owner on a 20,000+ mile joy ride
