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SpaceX to move Starship and Super Heavy production to Texas as hop tests near [updated]

SpaceX's Starhopper seen in a January render and a January photo. (SpaceX/Elon Musk)

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SpaceX announced today that plans to ultimately build BFR (now known as Starship/Super Heavy) in the Port of Los Angeles have at least initially been replaced with a decision to move that development to South Texas, although details about the new facilities and their timelines remain have yet to be shared.

Drawn to one possible conclusion, this could mean that SpaceX no longer intends to build a BFR factory in the Port of Los Angeles, while all Falcon 9/Heavy, Merlin, and Raptor manufacturing will remain in the company’s Hawthorne, CA headquarters for the foreseeable future. However, the statements do not preclude the possibility that SpaceX still plans to develop an oceanside factory in the near future for Super Heavy, Starship, or both.

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Update: CEO Elon Musk stated on Twitter that the Los Angeles Times’ original report and a partial miscommunication on behalf of SpaceX misconstrued an official statement that early-stage Starship and Super Heavy prototype construction and development would stay in South Texas for the time being. It appears that SpaceX’s Port of LA plans remain largely unchanged.

“To streamline operations, SpaceX is developing and will test the Starship test vehicle at our site in South Texas. This decision does not impact our current manufacture, design, and launch operations in Hawthorne and Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Additionally, SpaceX will continue recovery operations of our reusable Falcon rockets and Dragon spacecraft at the Port of Los Angeles.” – SpaceX, January 16th, 2019

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In early 2018, SpaceX announced that it had required a new berth in Port of San Pedro with the specific intention of building a brand-new BFR factory. By keeping BFR production in Los Angeles and locating it directly adjacent to its transportation mode of choice (a barge from California to Texas), the official hope was to retain the best aerospace talent in the US (generally centered around central California) and ensure that its main Hawthorne factory was just a short drive away while still being able to relatively affordably transport massive 9m/30 foot-diameter BFR spaceships and boosters between California and Texas.

Also speaking in 2018, COO and President Gwynne Shotwell noted that the estimated cost of moving a BFR-sized object from its main Hawthorne factory to Port of LA would average $5M for a one-way trip. For context, that is almost 10% of the list price of an entirely new Falcon 9 rocket ($62M) just to perform basic, necessary logistics. As a result, SpaceX decided to build a permanent factory at a Port of LA dock, where the company had already sprung a giant tent to begin prototype fabrication. Known as Berth 240, it’s now unclear whether SpaceX will retain and still develop the Port of San Pedro plot into a permanent facility, estimated to cost a few tens of millions of dollars to complete.

 

In the company’s approved environmental impact assessment, the implication was that the BFR factory could double as dedicated post-recovery processing and refurbishment facility for regular Falcon 9 missions and provide a far more spacious dock for drone ship Just Read The Instructions and support vessel NRC Quest. That sort of facility could easily still provide significant value to SpaceX, although it may be the case that it would not earn its keep nearly well enough to account for the redundancy of refurbishing at Port of LA instead of simply shipping recovered Falcon 9 boosters to the main Hawthorne factory, which can already host the refurbishment of at least two Falcon 9 boosters simultaneously.

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SpaceX may also still want to have LA facilities capable of affordably supporting Starship and Super Heavy structures development and production in the event that some of its excellent staff of engineers and technicians are not interested in moving from Los Angeles to the sparsely-populated southeast tip of Texas. In the meantime, the company continues to work towards the completion of its first flightworthy(ish) Starship prototype at its rapidly expanding South Texas facilities, with CEO Elon Musk indicating that hop tests of the vehicle could begin as early as February or March 2019.

Expect a new article on the recent Starship hopper progress very soon!


Check out Teslarati’s newsletters for prompt updates, on-the-ground perspectives, and unique glimpses of SpaceX’s rocket launch and recovery processes!

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Eric Ralph is Teslarati's senior spaceflight reporter and has been covering the industry in some capacity for almost half a decade, largely spurred in 2016 by a trip to Mexico to watch Elon Musk reveal SpaceX's plans for Mars in person. Aside from spreading interest and excitement about spaceflight far and wide, his primary goal is to cover humanity's ongoing efforts to expand beyond Earth to the Moon, Mars, and elsewhere.

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Lucid unveils Lunar Robotaxi in bid to challenge Tesla’s Cybercab in the autonomous ride hailing race

Lucid’s Lunar robotaxi is gunning for Tesla’s Cybercab in the autonomous ride hailing race

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Lucid Lunar robotaxi concept [Credit: Rendering by TESLARATI]

Lucid Group pulled back the curtain on its purpose-built autonomous robotaxi platform dubbed the Lunar Concept. Announced at its New York investor day event, Lunar is arguably the company’s most ambitious concept yet, and a direct line of sight toward the autonomous ride haling market that Tesla looks to control.

At Lucid Investor Day 2026, the company introduced Lunar, a purpose-built robotaxi concept based on the Midsize platform.

A comparison to Tesla’s Cybercab is unavoidable. The concept of a Tesla robotaxi was first introduced by Elon Musk back in April 2019 during an event dubbed “Autonomy Day,” where he envisioned a network of self-driving Tesla vehicles transporting passengers while not in use by their owners. That vision took another major step in October 2024 when, Musk unveiled the Cybercab at the Tesla “We, Robot” event held at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank, California, where 20 concept Cybercabs autonomously drove around the studio lot giving rides to attendees.

Tesla unveils the Robovan at ‘We, Robot’ event

Fast forward to today, and Tesla’s ambitions are finally materializing, but not without friction. As we recently reported, the Cybercab is being spotted with increasing frequency on public roads and across the grounds of Gigafactory Texas, suggesting that the company’s road testing and validation program is ramping meaningfully ahead of mass production. Tesla already operates a small scale robotaxi service in Austin using supervised Model Ys, but the Cybercab is designed from the ground up for high-volume, low-cost production, with Musk stating an eventual goal of producing one vehicle every 10 seconds.

At Lucid Investor Day 2026, the company introduced Lunar, a purpose-built robotaxi concept based on the Midsize platform.

Into this landscape steps Lucid’s Lunar. Built on the company’s all-new Midsize EV platform, which will also underpin consumer SUVs starting below $50,000. The Lunar mirrors the Cybercab’s core philosophy of having two seats, no driver controls, and a focus on fleet economics. The platform introduces Lucid’s redesigned Atlas electric drive unit, engineered to be smaller, lighter, and cheaper to manufacture at scale.

Unlike Tesla’s strategy of building its own ride hailing network from scratch, Lucid is partnering with Uber. The companies are said to be in advanced discussions to deploy Midsize platform vehicles at large scale, with Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi publicly backing Lucid’s engineering credentials and autonomous-ready architecture.

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In the investor day event, Lucid also outlined a recurring software revenue model, with an in-vehicle AI assistant and monthly autonomous driving subscriptions priced between $69 and $199. This can be seen as a nod to the software revenue stream that Tesla has long championed with its Full Self-Driving subscription.

Tesla’s Cybercab is targeting a price point below $30k and with operating costs as low as 20 cents per mile. But with regulatory hurdles still ahead, the window for competition is open. Lucid’s Lunar may not have a launch date yet, but it arrives at a pivotal moment, and when the robotaxi race is no longer viewed as hypothetical. Rather, every serious EV player needs to come to bat on the same plate that Tesla has had countless practice swings on over the last seven years.

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Brazil Supreme Court orders Elon Musk and X investigation closed

The decision was issued by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes following a recommendation from Brazil’s Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet.

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Gage Skidmore, CC BY-SA 4.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court has ordered the closure of an investigation involving Elon Musk and social media platform X. The inquiry had been pending for about two years and examined whether the platform was used to coordinate attacks against members of the judiciary.

The decision was issued by Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes following a recommendation from Brazil’s Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet.

According to a report from Agencia Brasil, the investigation conducted by the Federal Police did not find evidence that X deliberately attempted to attack the judiciary or circumvent court orders.

Prosecutor-General Paulo Gonet concluded that the irregularities identified during the probe did not indicate fraudulent intent.

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Justice Moraes accepted the prosecutor’s recommendation and ruled that the investigation should be closed. Under the ruling, the case will remain closed unless new evidence emerges.

The inquiry stemmed from concerns that content on X may have enabled online attacks against Supreme Court justices or violated rulings requiring the suspension of certain accounts under investigation.

Justice Moraes had previously taken several enforcement actions related to the platform during the broader dispute involving social media regulation in Brazil.

These included ordering a nationwide block of the platform, freezing Starlink accounts, and imposing fines on X totaling about $5.2 million. Authorities also froze financial assets linked to X and SpaceX through Starlink to collect unpaid penalties and seized roughly $3.3 million from the companies’ accounts.

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Moraes also imposed daily fines of up to R$5 million, about $920,000, for alleged evasion of the X ban and established penalties of R$50,000 per day for VPN users who attempted to bypass the restriction.

Brazil remains an important market for X, with roughly 17 million users, making it one of the platform’s larger user bases globally.

The country is also a major market for Starlink, SpaceX’s satellite internet service, which has surpassed one million subscribers in Brazil.

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FCC chair criticizes Amazon over opposition to SpaceX satellite plan

Carr made the remarks in a post on social media platform X.

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Credit: @SecWar/X

U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Chairman Brendan Carr criticized Amazon after the company opposed SpaceX’s proposal to launch a large satellite constellation that could function as an orbital data center network.

Carr made the remarks in a post on social media platform X.

Amazon recently urged the FCC to reject SpaceX’s application to deploy a constellation of up to 1 million low Earth orbit satellites that could serve as artificial intelligence data centers in space.

The company described the proposal as a “lofty ambition rather than a real plan,” arguing that SpaceX had not provided sufficient details about how the system would operate.

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Carr responded by pointing to Amazon’s own satellite deployment progress.

“Amazon should focus on the fact that it will fall roughly 1,000 satellites short of meeting its upcoming deployment milestone, rather than spending their time and resources filing petitions against companies that are putting thousands of satellites in orbit,” Carr wrote on X.

Amazon has declined to comment on the statement.

Amazon has been working to deploy its Project Kuiper satellite network, which is intended to compete with SpaceX’s Starlink service. The company has invested more than $10 billion in the program and has launched more than 200 satellites since April of last year.

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Amazon has also asked the FCC for a 24-month extension, until July 2028, to meet a requirement to deploy roughly 1,600 satellites by July 2026, as noted in a CNBC report.

SpaceX’s Starlink network currently has nearly 10,000 satellites in orbit and serves roughly 10 million customers. The FCC has also authorized SpaceX to deploy 7,500 additional satellites as the company continues expanding its global satellite internet network.

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