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SpaceX tweaks Starship's Super Heavy rocket booster as design continues to evolve
CEO Elon Musk says that SpaceX continues to evolve the design of its next-generation Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket booster, a process of continuous improvement the company has successfully used for a decade.
Designed to place more than 100 metric tons (220,000 lb) of payload into Low Earth Orbit (LEO), Starship would effectively double (and possibly triple) the expendable performance of SpaceX’s existing Falcon Heavy rocket. Critically, it would be able to dramatically outclass Falcon Heavy (and Falcon 9 even more so) in a fully reusable configuration, meaning that both the Starship upper stage and Super Heavy booster could be recovered and reused.
Since SpaceX first publicly revealed its next-generation launch vehicle and Mars ambitions in September 2016, the path to realizing the dream of a fully-reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle has been decidedly windy. After making the radical decision to move entirely from carbon composites to stainless steel in late 2018, the Starship design has remained relatively similar, coalescing around a specific concept that has matured to full-scale tank tests. Now, Musk says that Super Heavy’s design was tweaked slightly to make the booster even taller than before, while he later noted that Starship’s design also continues to “[evolve] rapidly.”
According to Musk, the Super Heavy booster will be stretched by a steel ring or two, reaching a new height of ~70m (230 ft). In other words, Starship’s first stage alone will measure as tall as the entirety of a Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rocket – first stage, second stage, and payload fairing included. Powered by up to 37 Raptor engines, a Super Heavy booster could produce more than ~90,000 kN (19,600,000 lbf) of thrust at liftoff – an incredible 12 times as much thrust as SpaceX’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket.
Starship, meanwhile, will be a beast of an orbital-class upper stage on its own, measuring at least 50m (165 ft) tall and weighing some 1350 metric tons (3 million lb) fully-fueled. Stacked on top of Super Heavy, a Starship ‘stack’ would reach a staggering 120m (395 ft) and weigh more than 5000 metric tons (11 million lb) once loaded with liquid oxygen and methane propellant.
In simple terms, Starship/Super Heavy should be the tallest, heaviest, and most powerful launch vehicle ever assembled once it heads to the launch pad for the first time. While SpaceX is making great daily progress its ever-growing South Texas rocket factory, built up from next to nothing in a matter of months, it could still be quite some time before that milestone is within reach.
SpaceX’s process of continuously tweaking and improving the design and production of its rockets does typically have that effect. However, it’s more a symptom of the company’s approach to hardware and software development. Instead of working slowly and carefully from nothing to a preconceived finished product, SpaceX typically seeks to design, build, and test the minimum viable product, gradually improving (or entirely replacing) past ideas, designs, and hardware until overarching goals are fully achieved.
With Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, this meant beginning with Falcon 1, a dead-simple proof-of-concept rocket. After successfully reaching orbit, SpaceX expanded its Falcon 9 development program, itself focused initially on the minimum viable product – a full-scale expendable rocket. Since Elon Musk founded SpaceX in 2002, the goal has always been to build a fully-reusable rocket – the company has simply chosen the far more sustainable and practical approach of tackling only a select few problems at a time.
The Starship and Falcon development programs aren’t directly comparable but it’s safe to say that Starship is currently still in the very early stages of hardware development. Shortly after revealing Super Heavy’s height growth, Musk noted that Starship’s design is also being tweaked.
Sketching out a rough series of upgrades that could feasibly be made to the reusable spacecraft’s currently design, Musk thinks that Starship’s conical tank domes (and thus Super Heavy’s, too) could be flattened. That might allow an extra ~3m (10 ft) of propellant tank space to be squeezed into the same 50m Starship length, improving performance by simply using the vehicle’s fixed volume more efficiently.
With a nascent factory quite literally churning out Starship hardware, these tweaks are a whole different animal. Thanks to data and insight gathered from testing actual full-scale Starship tanks, up to and including fully-assembled tank sections, SpaceX will be able to guide its continuous improvement with even greater precision, honing in on the next-generation rocket’s orbital launch debut.
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Tesla pulls back the curtain on Cybercab mass production
Tesla’s Cybercab drives itself off the Gigafactory Texas line in a striking new production video.
Tesla has provided a first look from inside a production Cybercab as it drove itself off the assembly line at Gigafactory Texas. The video footage, posted on X, opens on the factory floor with robotic arms and assembly equipment visible through the Cybercab windshield, and follows the car through a branded tunnel marked “Cybercab”, before autonomously navigating itself to a holding lot.
The first Cybercab rolled off the Giga Texas production line on February 17, 2026, with Musk writing on X, “Congratulations to the Tesla team on making the first production Cybercab.” April marked the official shift to volume production. The Giga Texas line is being prepared to produce hundreds of units per week, with 60 units already spotted on the Gigafactory campus earlier this month.
Purpose-built for autonomy
Cybercab in production now at Giga Texas pic.twitter.com/Y9qG3KyWBa
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 23, 2026
The Cybercab was first revealed publicly at Tesla’s “We, Robot” event in October 2024 at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, where 20 pre-production units gave attendees rides around the studio lot. Musk said he believed the average operating cost would be around $0.20 per mile, and that buyers would be able to purchase one for under $30,000. The two-seat design is deliberate. Musk noted that 90 percent of miles driven involve one or two people, making a compact two-passenger vehicle the most efficient configuration for a fleet-scale robotaxi. Eliminating rear seats also removes complexity and cost, supporting that sub-$30,000 target.
Tesla’s annual production goal is 2 million Cybercabs per year once several factories reach full design capacity. The Cybercab has no steering wheel, no pedals, and relies entirely on Tesla’s vision-based FSD system. What the video shows is the first evidence of that system working not as a demo, but as a production reality, driving itself off the line and into the world.
🚗 Our first ride in Tesla Cybercab last October: pic.twitter.com/kGqIqgJPRn https://t.co/BITCXFhbVd
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2025
Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
Elon Musk confirmed the Roadster as Tesla’s last manually driven car, with a debut coming soon.
During Tesla’s Q1 2026 earnings call on April 22, Elon Musk made a brief but notable comment about the long-awaited next generation Roadster while describing Tesla’s future vehicle lineup. “Long term, the only manually driven car will be the new Tesla Roadster,” he said. “Speaking of which, we may be able to debut that in a month or so. It requires a lot of testing and validation before we can actually have a demo and not have something go wrong with the demo.”
That single statement is the entire Roadster update from yesterday’s call, and while it represents another timeline shift, it comes as no surprise with Tesla heads-down-at-work on the mass rollout of its Robotaxi service across US cities, and the industrial scale production of the humanoid Optimus.
The fact that Musk specifically framed the Roadster as the last manually driven Tesla is significant on its own. As the rest of the lineup moves toward full autonomy, the Roadster becomes something rare in the Tesla-sphere by keeping the driver in control. Driving enthusiasts who buy a $200,000 supercar are not doing so to be passengers. They want the physical connection to the road, the feel of acceleration under their own input, and the experience of controlling something with that level of performance. FSD, however capable it becomes, removes that entirely. The Roadster signals that Tesla understands this distinction and is building a car specifically for the people who consider driving itself the point.
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
The specs for the Roadster Musk has teased over the years are genuinely unlike anything in production. The base model targets 0 to 60 mph in 1.9 seconds, a top speed above 250 mph, and up to 620 miles of range from a 200 kWh battery. The optional SpaceX package takes it further, rumored to add roughly ten cold gas thrusters operating at 10,000 psi, borrowed directly from Falcon 9 rocket technology. With thrusters, Musk has claimed 0 to 60 mph in as little as 1.1 seconds. In a 2021 Joe Rogan interview he went further, stating “I want it to hover. We got to figure out how to make it hover without killing people.” Tesla filed a patent for ground effect technology in August 2025, suggesting the hover concept has not been abandoned. The starting price remains $200,000, with the Founders Series requiring a $250,000 full deposit. Some reservation holders placed those deposits in 2017 and are approaching a full decade of waiting.
With production now targeted for 2027 or 2028 at the earliest, the Roadster remains Tesla’s most audacious promise and its longest-running delay. But if what Musk is testing lives up to even half of what he has described, the demo alone should be worth waiting for.
Elon Musk says the Tesla Roadster unveiling could be done “maybe in a month or so.”
He said it should be an extraordinary unveiling event. pic.twitter.com/6V9P7zmvEm
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
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.
Tesla pulls back the curtain on Cybercab mass production
Elon Musk’s last manually driven Tesla will do something no other production car will do
