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SpaceX Starship eyes Tuesday launch after FAA communication breakdown causes delays
Two new sourced reports suggest that SpaceX’s fast-moving approach to Starship development and a shocking level of naivety and ineptitude on behalf of the FAA’s regulatory responsibilities combined to delay the latest Starship test flight.
As previously discussed on Teslarati, SpaceX was clearly and publicly targeting a Starship launch as early as 12pm to 5pm on Monday, March 29th after unknown issues delayed a Friday attempt. Those plans were writ large on SpaceX’s own website and via CEO Elon Musk’s tweets a full three days before launch and confirmed by road closures, notices to mariners, and the FAA’s own flight restrictions and advisories 24-48 hours prior. Around 11am CDT Monday, Musk revealed that SpaceX had been forced to call off the day’s launch attempt because an FAA-required inspector was “unable to reach” Boca Chica in time.
Now, per reports separately corroborated by The Verge reporter Joey Roulette and Washington Post reporter Christian Davenport, a clearer picture of what exactly transpired is available.
Roulette first broke the news, offering a better look at a portion of the debacle. Per “a source,” SpaceX had apparently told the FAA inspector – who had been waiting all week for Starship SN11’s launch debut – that plans for a Monday recycle had been canceled. The inspector then flew home to Florida. However, as things often do and have, the situation rapidly changed and SpaceX suddenly found itself in a position to launch on Monday.
According to the apparent FAA-side source, SpaceX dropped that change of plans on the agency’s lap late on Sunday, leading the inspector to “[scramble]” onto a Monday flight that was somehow too late to arrive before the 5pm CDT end of Starship’s test window. In a statement, the FAA chided SpaceX, stating that the company “must provide adequate notice of its launch schedule to allow for a safety inspector to travel to Boca Chica.”
Under that description of events, it would be hard not to find SpaceX clearly in the wrong. Mere hours of notice – and only offered late on Sunday evening – would make it difficult for anyone to abruptly arrange a 1300-mile, multi-stop flight. At the same time, though, someone capable of singlehandedly scrubbing an entire rocket launch attempt on a whim (or an accident) is obviously not just “anyone” and a functional regulatory apparatus probably wouldn’t leave the entirety of that substantial responsibility up to a single employee.
As it so happened, Roulette’s source only offer part of the picture. According to Christian Davenport and his sources, SpaceX (or someone) did tell the FAA inspector that it was safe to head home on Friday because the company was struggling to secure road closures from Cameron County for a Monday launch attempt. Apparently, the issue was so extreme that SpaceX wasn’t sure if a launch on any day of the next week would be possible.
However, sometime early on Sunday morning, SpaceX secured a road closure for a Monday Starship launch attempt. According to Davenport, SpaceX emailed the FAA inspector but he “didn’t see the email,” which presumably served as a notice of plans for a Starship launch attempt. Logically, SpaceX then began attempting to call the FAA (inspector?) but didn’t get an answer or call back until “late Sunday night.”
Via Cameron County’s explicitly public road closure announcement website, Monday’s road closure was granted no later than 11am CDT. Assuming SpaceX emailed the FAA inspector around then, that email effectively served as a notice of launch plans more than 24 hours before the window was scheduled to open. If SpaceX didn’t somehow forget to email until hours later, Davenport’s description implies that it took SpaceX hours of constant phone calls before the FAA finally responded.
If that series of events is accurate, as it seems to be, it’s a searing indictment of systematic ineptitude and laziness on behalf of the FAA. Having changed SpaceX’s Starship launch license to necessitate the presence of an FAA inspector mere weeks ago, thus giving a single person the power to scrub an entire launch attempt, the regulatory agency appears to have entrusted the entirety of that responsibility to a single “inspector.” Knowing full well that SpaceX works continuously with multiple shifts after almost two years of managing Starhopper and Starship tests, hops, and launches, the FAA then failed to ensure that some kind of communications infrastructure was in place to keep SpaceX appraised about the availability of a single inspector it now fully hinged on for all future Starship launches.
If, as the phrasing in both reports suggests, the FAA allotted a single government inspector to preside over all future Starship launches, that alone would bely a ridiculous level of ineptitude and naivete (or ignorance). To then trust that single person with nearly all of the responsibility of maintaining contact with SpaceX, day and night, would be akin to the FAA consciously guaranteeing that a disruptive breakdown in communications like this one would happen.
All told, SpaceX likely also needs to do some recalibration to better mesh and coexist with the FAA’s glacial reaction time and pace of work. However, the FAA is not going to be winning any favors if it continues to manage SpaceX’s Starship licensing in a manner as inept and cavalier as it has been. Far more importantly, if the FAA – one of the largest, best-funded regulatory bodies responsible for ensuring the safety of some of the most complex systems and vehicles on Earth – is unable to perform tasks as rudimentary as scheduling and contingency planning, it’s difficult to imagine how that same office could be trusted to regulate – and make safer – systems as extraordinarily complex as launch vehicles.
With any luck, the FAA will prove that the last four months have been minor bumps in the road to reliably and professionally licensing and regulating SpaceX’s Starship launch vehicle. However, after two separate demonstrations of systematic mismanagement over a mere four Starship launch attempts, it’s becoming harder and harder to soundly argue that the FAA still deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Assuming the FAA inspector is on schedule, Starship SN11’s next launch attempt is now scheduled between 7am and 3pm CDT (UTC-5) on Tuesday, March 30th.
Elon Musk
Google just picked SpaceX for its first step into orbital AI
Google will launch its first Project Suncatcher AI satellite on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare next week.
Google is about to put its own AI chips into orbit for the first time, and it is paying SpaceX to get them there.
The company said Thursday that the first in-orbit test of Project Suncatcher, its research effort to find out whether space can host large-scale AI computing, will fly next week on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 rideshare mission.
The satellite, called MVP, is about the size of a refrigerator and carries four of Google’s Tensor Processing Units, the same chips Google runs in its ground data centers. Google originally planned to launch two custom satellites in 2027, but chose to move faster by integrating its chips into a satellite.
MVP’s solar panels supply about one kilowatt of power, and Google will run Gemini models on the TPUs only in bursts of roughly 15 minutes before the chips shut down so the radiators can shed heat. In a blog post, Google said its Trillium TPUs survived vibration testing that mimicked sustained launch loads of up to 10g, with individual components seeing 50 to 100g, and handled a radiation dose greater than a five year mission would deliver.
SpaceX and Google mull massive partnership on Musk’s orbital data dream: report
Next week’s flight, slated for October 1, follows a relationship that became public in May, when Teslarati reported that Google was in talks with SpaceX for a launch deal tied to orbital data centers. Google also holds a stake of roughly 6% in SpaceX.
The two companies are chasing the same idea from very different starting points. SpaceX’s own orbital compute program is built around the AI1 satellite, a roughly 70 meter structure derived from Starlink V3 hardware that is designed for 150 kW of peak compute, about 150 times the power MVP will draw. Elon Musk has brushed off concerns about crowding orbit with those satellites, and SpaceX is building its Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, to produce them, targeting an annualized rate of about 1 GW of space compute by the end of 2027.
Musk also posted on X on Thursday that “the amount of compute in space will obviously round up to 100% of all compute.”
Google has been more cautious in public. Its research estimates that launch prices need to fall below about $200 per kilogram before an orbital data center can compete with a ground facility on energy cost, a threshold the company believes could be reached around the mid 2030s. The Suncatcher team has said it expects the effort to remain a project rather than a product for years, which leaves the first real test of its hardware riding on a rocket from the company with the most aggressive timeline in the field.
Tesla has taken another concrete step toward owning its battery supply chain, and it’s doing so with what is perhaps the most important vehicle in its short-but-storied history.
On September 23, Tesla announced that it has officially built the first Cybercab with cathode material produced in-house at the company’s first cathode plant in the U.S., and the first in the U.S. overall.
First Cybercab made using our in-house cathode material – from the first cathode plant in the Americas pic.twitter.com/X95aVXsT9H
— Robotaxi (@robotaxi) September 23, 2026
Active cathode material is the most expensive piece of a lithium-ion battery cell, and it often accounts for more than a third of cell cost. For years, the industry sourced a majority of it from Asia, but Tesla’s decision to make it in the United States bodes well for the Cybercab project. This is the latest chapter in Tesla’s vertical integration strategy, which began in public at Battery Day in 2020.
At the Battery Day Event, Elon Musk said the company would build a North American cathode plant and overhaul the process to cut costs and waste, while also making some of the most powerful and long-lasting cells in the industry.
The Austin facility took years to appear. Tesla filed permits for “Project Cathode” in 2022 on land near Giga Texas. By mid-2022, the building frame was up and Tesla later invested hundreds of millions of dollars as part of a larger expansion of the Giga Texas plant. The company stated it was operating the first large-scale cathode production facility in North America to supplement 4680 cell production.
One month later, that material reached a finished Cybercab.
Made with nickel cathode manufactured locally at Gigafactory Texas! https://t.co/DqMm5fZV3n
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 24, 2026
The timing of this breakthrough is monumental for the Cybercab program. As Tesla officially launched the first Cybercab rides to the public earlier this month, production of the ride-hailing-geared vehicle is moving forward on the planned S-curve that CEO Elon Musk told everyone to expect.
Nevertheless, packs of Cybercab units have been spotted throughout the United States, in an effort to potentially activate the fleet as soon as the company gains regulatory approval in various geographic areas.
On top of that, Tesla owning the cathode step and pairing it with its own in-house lithium from the Gulf Coast refinery shortens the supply chain that once stretched thousands of miles and subjects every pack to fewer external price shocks and geopolitical risks.
Tesla is not yet independent of all of its foreign suppliers, as some precursor metals come from mines and chemical plants. But the first in-house cathode Cybercab shows the company is closing the most expensive and most concentrated gap in its battery production efforts. For a vehicle like Cybercab to operate at a high utilization within the Robotaxi network, that control over cost is so crucial.
It is arguably as important as the software that drives it.
Tesla is set to inaugurate its dedicated Semi factory in Sparks, Nevada, this evening, but drone footage has already started to show who is expected on the handover stage.
Zanegler, a drone operator who regularly documents Tesla Semi operations in Nevada, filmed a row of new-generation Semi units parked outside of the plant with customer branding applied. The liveries visible in the video include companies like PepsiCo, U.S. Foods, Einride, DHL, WattEV, and others that have committed to utilizing Tesla’s Class 8 electric truck in their fleets.
Tesla Semi Pre-Reveal Revealed!
Excited to share this segment of the drone flight one day prior to the Tesla Semi Reveal event.
They have added branding to several Tesla new generation semis.
Including:
Pepsico
US Foods
Einride
LTS
Nevoya
OK Produce
ABF Freight
DHL
WattEV… pic.twitter.com/KoFOg2FouR— Zanegler (@HinrichsZane) September 24, 2026
Several of those company names already sit within Tesla’s public ordering book, including PepsiCo, which has been the program’s primary anchor customer since the first Semi deliveries in December 2022. PepsiCo now runs dozens of Tesla Semi units in daily service, with drivers completing regional routes.
Einride placed a 500-unit order in August, which was, at the time, the largest single Semi commitment. First deployments of their Semi units are planned for this month and will eventually span across California, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, and Georgia. Meanwhile, IMC Logistics announced a 50-truck California order this week.
Tesla Semi lands the biggest electric truck deal in U.S. history
Other names, like LTS, OK Produce, and HMD, have not been widely confirmed as firm buyers, but their presence on the lot is perhaps the clearest signal that Tesla intends to expand on that list this evening at the event.
Tesla first unveiled the Semi back in 2017 with a 2019 production target.
Limited pilot builds reached PepsiCo in late 2022, and high-volume production began at the new 1.7-million-square-foot plant that sits logically positioned next to Tesla’s Gigafactory Nevada. Tesla Semi program director Dan Priestley has said that Tesla expects to build “many thousands” of Semi units this year, but as with every Tesla release, there have been set expectations of an S-curve ramp.
Outside estimates still put 2026 deliveries in the 5,000-to-15,000 range, but it will ultimately depend on Tesla’s readiness to put those units out, as well as how smoothly production is moving internally.
Tesla’s Semi Rollout event is set to start tonight at the Sparks factory, and it will be livestreamed on X starting at 6 p.m. PDT / 9 p.m. ET.
Google just picked SpaceX for its first step into orbital AI
Tesla Cybercab gets initial tie-in to localized, in-house cathode plant
