SpaceX
SpaceX’s Starship, Starhopper prototypes continue slow and steady progress
The last few weeks of SpaceX’s work on Starship and Starhopper prototypes has been marked by less visible progress relative to the past few months. The changes that are visible, however, confirm that its Boca Chica engineers are working around the clock to complete the first orbital Starship prototype.
At the same time, it appears that SpaceX’s South Texas facilities are preparing for a rapid period of expansion and build-up. New work around the ad-hoc Starhopper pad has recently begun, while construction of a second concrete jig for concurrent prototype fabrication and what will likely be a more permanent hangar and control facility are also ramping up. Things have been quiet news-wise for SpaceX’s McGregor and Hawthorne facilities but there is reason to believe that Raptor production and testing is going smoothly.
And over at its pal’s place, the orbital prototype (and the build-up of another jig)
?@BocaChicaGal
Dedicated Updates: https://t.co/FYHRkwZ2dd pic.twitter.com/glg8Yr6oO6— Chris B – NSF (@NASASpaceflight) April 20, 2019
Starship Alpha
The most obvious visible progress made in April is centers around SpaceX’s first orbital Starship prototype, soon to begin its third month of active construction. As of mid-March, the shells of two large steel barrel sections – together about 18 m (60 ft) tall – were fully erected at the build site, with a handful of other sections in various states of welding. The height of those two cylinders has remained unchanged since then but it’s safe to assume that a ton of work has been going on inside them, invisible to anyone viewing from public perspectives since drones were effectively banned in March. In other words, the two pieces – most likely the barrel sections of Starship’s liquid methane and liquid oxygen (LOX) tanks – are likely being carefully transformed into actual propellant tanks.
There is also a good reason for their height differential: the larger (LOX) section is almost exactly a third larger than the small section (methane) in part because of the physical reality that Starship will need almost exactly 33% more LOX than methane by volume. Large propellant tanks – particularly those meant for cryogenic fluids and spaceflight applications – are often quite complex, with the vast majority of that complexity happening under the hood. The above render was made while SpaceX was still planning on carbon fiber tanks and also appears to be significantly simplified, but it still offers a small look at some of that complexity.
Aside from successfully completing thousands of welds throughout the assembly, a lot of the effort of building an advanced tank is put into plumbing – both internal and external – needed to load, unload, pressurize, depressurize, and generally manage cryogenic (i.e. super cold) liquid propellant. SpaceX decided to utilize a partial balloon tank design to keep the steel skins of its stainless steel Starship and Super Heavy as thin as possible, adding yet another level of internal work due to the need for stringers and longerons on top of baffles and hardware to mount COPVs or header tanks.
Adding further complexity to the internal structure of Starship is the presence of major aerodynamic surfaces and landing legs, both of which will need to survive extreme stresses if they are to function as intended. Those structures must be aerodynamically streamlined and attach to the outside of Starship’s hull, likely requiring significant structural reinforcements both inside the spacecraft’s nose and rearmost propellant tank.
Super Heavy?
SpaceX began construction of a second concrete fabrication jig just a handful of days ago. Effectively a copy of a jig occupied with the larger of the two barrel sections of the orbital Starship prototype, the simple structure acts as a mount and includes a large door that allows scissor lifts to get inside the steel structure. The new jig is being built directly adjacent to Starship’s smaller barrel section, suggesting that it could simply be a way to concurrently work on both the LOX and methane tanks. Given the inherent simplicity of a concrete jig, it could also end up being used to support the simultaneous assembly and integration of the first Super Heavy booster prototype.
Back in December 2018, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk indicated that the first Super Heavy prototype would start production in “spring” (i.e. NET April 2019). Musk has also indicated that Starship and Super Heavy will be simultaneously built both in Boca Chica, Texas and Cape Canaveral, Florida. In general, SpaceX is clearly beginning another round of expansion and improvement for its Boca Chica facilities, including the new concrete jig and an entirely new building on the same plot of land.
Starhopper
Last but not least is SpaceX’s Starhopper prototype. After completing an inaugural round of multiple wet dress rehearsals (WDRs) and two Raptor static fires/hops, SpaceX technicians removed the vehicle’s lone Raptor engine on April 8th. Starhopper has remained more or less inactive in the last two weeks, aside from some work going on inside the vehicle (per the open access hatch).
Without a Raptor engine, there is admittedly not a whole lot that SpaceX can do with Starhopper, aside from additional WDRs if the first handful of tests were not enough. Instead, some minor work has been going on around the Hopper’s ad hoc pad, mainly taking the appearance of dirtmoving. Without aerial views, its hard to tell what exactly is taking shape, but it’s safe to say that Starhopper is simply waiting for additional Raptors to be produced, tested, and delivered to Boca Chica. Once more Raptors are ready, it’s understood that SpaceX will move into multi-engine (likely 3+) hop tests, perhaps loosing Starhopper from its tethers.
Check out Teslarati’s Marketplace! We offer Tesla accessories, including for the Tesla Cybertruck and Tesla Model 3.
-
SpaceX will report second quarter results after the market closes on Tuesday, August 4, marking the first time the company has opened its books to the public since its record IPO in June. Management will host a live audio only webcast at 4:30 p.m. ET, streamed on X, with no dial in option.
The debut carries more weight than a typical first quarter as a public company. Two trading days after the release, on August 6, the first tranche of SpaceX’s lockup expires, freeing roughly 911.5 million insider and employee shares, worth well over $100 billion at current prices and the largest such release in Wall Street history. A second, larger tranche tied to the stock trading 30 percent above its $135 IPO price never triggered, since shares have spent most of July trading below that price.
Wall Street’s models point to revenue near $6.9 billion for the quarter, up sharply from the $4.69 billion SpaceX reported in the first quarter, with a narrower per share loss than the $1.27 posted three months earlier, according to estimates compiled by Motley Fool. Those numbers will be the first look at how SpaceX’s three segments, Starlink, launch and AI, are performing independently.
SpaceX scores another massive Pentagon deal to support military satellites
Investors heading into the call have a specific list of questions. How many net new Starlink subscribers did SpaceX add after ending March with 10.3 million, and is average revenue per user holding up as the service expands into lower income markets. How much of the AI segment’s revenue reflects contract signings with Anthropic, Google and Reflection AI this year, deals that combined could annualize to nearly $28 billion if fully ramped. Whether capital expenditures, which nearly doubled in the AI segment alone between 2024 and 2025, are still accelerating or starting to plateau. And whether management offers any forward guidance at all, something SpaceX has never done publicly.
The report will also land days after Elon Musk publicly denied a Wall Street Journal report describing internal planning to separate Tesla’s China business ahead of a potential Tesla-SpaceX merger. Whether Musk or SpaceX executives address that speculation on the call, even indirectly, maybe something investors will be listening for on Tuesday.
As Teslarati reported after Musk’s own warning to short sellers last week, the CEO has made clear he expects skeptics to be proven wrong over time. Tuesday will be the first chance for the numbers themselves to make that case.
Elon Musk
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
SpaceX released new footage of Starship in space captured by the Starlink satellites it deployed.
SpaceX released a new video Friday evening showing Starship from an angle showcased by its own Starlink satellites, watching the rocket drift away in orbit.
The 65 second clip, posted on X, stitches together footage from four cameras mounted on a single Starlink V3 satellite. It opens with a close view of Starship’s 171 foot upper stage, still catching sunlight, then pulls back as the two spacecraft separate.
The footage comes from Starship’s 13th flight test, which launched July 24 from Starbase after a scrubbed attempt and an abort caused by an engine issue the week before. When Flight 13 finally flew, it carried the first batch of functional Starlink V3 satellites Starship has ever deployed, twenty of them, with six equipped with cameras meant to scan the ship’s heat shield during reentry.
View of Starship in space from a Starlink V3 satellite on Flight 13.
This composite is made of imagery from four separate cameras on a single satellite. Six of the satellites were equipped with cameras to scan Starship’s heat shield and transmit imagery down to operators to… pic.twitter.com/sNTHHz5vLr
— SpaceX (@SpaceX) July 31, 2026
Flight 13 checked most of its boxes. Starship deployed all 20 satellites, relit a Raptor engine in space, and splashed down softly in the Indian Ocean off Western Australia. Musk’s longer term plan calls for a Starlink V3 constellation of 100,000 satellites, according to a recent FCC filing, with Starship as the only vehicle capable of launching them at the volume that requires. Each Starship flight is designed to carry up to 60 V3 satellites once the vehicle reaches routine service, well beyond what Falcon 9 can carry in a single mission.
Starship is next expected to fly with an attempt at catching the ship itself with the launch tower’s mechanical arms, a maneuver SpaceX has so far reserved for the Super Heavy booster.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
SpaceX’s biggest test yet arrives this week and it’s not a rocket launch
SpaceX’s Starship just got filmed by its own cargo
