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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.

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

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!

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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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Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing

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(Credit: Starlink | X)

Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.

Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.

Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.

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The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.

A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.

Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.

Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.

Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.

The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.

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Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration

Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.

The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.

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Tesla just made its headlights even better through a software update

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Credit: @jojje167 on X

Tesla just upgraded its headlights through a software update, making them even better without any physical or hardware upgrade.

Tesla’s latest software update is quietly improving nighttime driving for a small number of owners. Version 2026.38 includes a new capability called Dynamic Headlight Leveling.

The feature automatically adjusts the aim of the low beams in response to driving conditions and nearby traffic, with the goal of giving the driver more usable light on the road while reducing glare for oncoming vehicles and traffic ahead.

Unlike Tesla’s matrix high-beam system, which selectively dims individual LED segments to create shadows around other cars, Dynamic Headlight Leveling physically tilts the low-beam projectors. Internal motors respond to changes in vehicle pitch.

When the car accelerates hard, climbs a steep grade, or carries extra weight in the rear, the headlights can otherwise point higher than intended. The software counters that movement in real time so the beam stays aimed at the road surface rather than into the eyes of other drivers.

Early indications reveal the update is reaching a limited set of vehicles, including certain Model 3 and Cybertruck examples in the United States and the United Arab Emirates. The rollout does not appear tied to a single hardware revision, and Tesla has not published a broader schedule. It is simply a common waiting game until your car receives it.

The change arrives against a backdrop of wider complaints about headlight glare. Some earlier Model 3 and Model Y vehicles were the subject of an NHTSA recall related to excessive low-beam glare; the software adjustment offers a potential mitigation for cars equipped with the necessary leveling hardware. It does not replace adaptive high beams where those are already available, nor does it alter the basic low-beam pattern itself.

Instead, it keeps an existing beam pointed where it is most useful.

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For drivers who have received the update, the system requires no new settings or user input. The headlights simply respond as road conditions and traffic change. As the feature reaches more vehicles, it adds another example of Tesla using over-the-air software to refine existing hardware rather than waiting for a new model year. Nighttime visibility and reduced glare for others are the practical results owners are expected to notice first.

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Tesla teases “Halloween Mode” update with Optimus rising from a graveyard

Tesla’s Halloween teaser hides a covered vehicle and an Optimus hand rising from the ground.

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Tesla has started teasing a Halloween software update for its vehicles, with  a short clip on X that reads, “Halloween is coming.” The clip opens on a glowing pumpkin before pulling back to the car’s center touchscreen, where the usual parked visualization has been replaced by a graveyard scene, and the vehicle draped with a white sheet so it reads as a cartoon ghost.

The second detail is a robotic hand clawing its way out of the dirt like a zombie, which looks to be the hand of Tesla’s latest Optimus V3 humanoid robot. While Tesla still has not formally shown Optimus Gen 3 walking around in service, renders pulled from Tesla’s Android app last month gave the clearest look yet, including far more refined hands that Tesla has said carry 22 degrees of freedom. The hand has been the hardest part of the program. Musk has called it the majority of the robot’s engineering difficulty, and Tesla’s patents describe a design driven by tendons with the actuators moved into the forearm.

Tesla Optimus V3 hand and arm details revealed in new patents

Optimus also has a Halloween track record. Last October the robot handed out candy in Times Square, and a costumed “zombie” Optimus shuffled around the Tesla Diner in Los Angeles on Halloween night.

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On the software side, Tesla’s 2025 Holiday Update expanded Santa Mode with a Santa sleigh, snowmen, snow effects, and a festive lock chime, so it wouldn’t be too far fetched if we saw something similar but themed for a  Halloween Mode.

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