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SpaceX Super Heavy booster returns to launch pad after major repairs
SpaceX has returned its newest Super Heavy to Starbase’s orbital launch site (OLS) after rapidly repairing damage the booster suffered during its first round of testing.
Super Heavy Booster 7 (B7) left the High Bay it was assembled in for the first time on March 31st and rolled a few miles down the road to nearby Starship launch and test facilities on a set of self-propelled mobile transporters (SPMTs). On April 2nd, the roughly 67-meter-tall (~220 ft; 69m w/ Raptors) rocket was installed on top of Starbase’s lone orbital launch mount (OLM), setting the stage for crucial qualification testing.
The start of that process was exceptionally successful. On April 4th, after a smooth launch mount installation, SpaceX quickly filled Booster 7’s propellant tanks with a relatively benign cryogenic fluid (liquid nitrogen, liquid oxygen, or both) to simulate the thermal and mechanical characteristics of real flammable propellant. Despite the fact that the test marked the first time SpaceX had fully filled a Super Heavy prototype’s tanks, Booster 7 sailed through the ‘cryoproof’ without any obvious issue.
On April 8th, SpaceX moved Super Heavy B7 from the orbital launch mount to a structural test stand that had been installed and modified just a few hundred feet away in the weeks prior. This is where Booster 7’s near-perfect start to qualification testing took a bit of a turn. Booster 7 is only the third full-size Super Heavy prototype SpaceX has tested since July 2021. Like Booster 3 and Booster 4 before it, Booster 7 features some major design changes that ultimately make the prototype a pathfinder, necessitating extensive qualification testing.
To name just a few of the changes, Super Heavy B7 is the first booster fitted with a 33-engine puck and the first finished Starship prototype of any kind designed to use new Raptor V2 engines. With all 33 engines installed and operating a full thrust, Booster 7’s entire structure – and its aft thrust section especially – would be subjected to around 40% more thrust and stress than Booster 4, which indirectly completed structural testing with the help of a sacrificial test tank. Beyond differences in thrust and mechanical stress, Booster 7 is also the first Super Heavy to reach the test stand with secondary ‘header’ tanks meant to store landing propellant.
It’s unclear if those header tanks were fully filled and drained during Booster 7’s cryoproof, but they would not be quite as cooperative during a different kind of cryogenic testing on the structural test stand. The stand SpaceX modified specifically for Super Heavy B7 was outfitted with 13 hydraulic rams to simulate the full thrust of the booster’s central Raptor V2 engines – up to almost 3000 tons (~6.6M lbf) compared to Booster 4’s ~1700 tons (~3.7M lbf) with a smaller cluster of nine engines.
Implosion at the Structural Test Stand
After a few false starts and minor tests on the stand, Booster 7 finally managed some significant testing on April 14th. Judging by the rhythmic shattering of ice that built up on Super Heavy’s tanks, the test stand was able to simulate the thrust of Raptors to some degree and subject the booster to major mechanical stress that was felt from tip to tail. Within a few days, Booster 7 was removed from the test stand and returned to the high bay on April 18th. Around April 21st or 22nd, an image was leaked showing extensive damage inside Booster 7, confirming that the Super Heavy’s test campaign had been forced to end prematurely.
Right away, the damage shown in the photo hinted at an operational failure, meaning that mistakes made by the rocket’s operators may have been more to blame than a possible design flaw. The photo shows a short portion of B7’s liquid methane (LCH4) transfer tube that runs through the booster’s new liquid oxygen (LOx) header tank, which itself sits inside Super Heavy’s main LOx tank at the aft end of the rocket – a tube inside a small tank inside a large tank, in other words. Super Heavy’s LCH4 transfer tube generally does what it says, allowing methane to safely fly down through the main LOx tank and fuel up to 33 Raptor engines. At full thrust, that tube would need to supply around 20 tons (~45,000 lb) of methane per second.
However, on top of merely transferring methane through the oxygen tank, Booster 7 introduced a design change that allows some or all of that tube to change functions and become a header tank mid-flight. That would require a system of valves that could seal off the main LCH4 tank once it was emptied, turning the transfer tube into a sort of giant steel straw filled with enough LCH4 to fuel Super Heavy’s boost-back and landing burns.
The damaged transfer tube in the leaked photo of Booster 7 doesn’t look that unlike what one might expect to see if they sucked through one end of a straw while blocking the other end, collapsing the center. Translated to the scale of Super Heavy, after an otherwise successful day of structural testing, SpaceX operators may have accidentally closed or opened the wrong valves while draining the booster’s transfer tube of liquid oxygen or nitrogen. As the heavy liquid drained from the tube, a lack of pressure equalization could have quickly drawn a vacuum and caused the tube to implode.
On April 29th, a SpaceX fan turned analyst published an analysis that convincingly pinpointed the moment Booster 7’s transfer tube collapsed. Simultaneously, because it showed that the transfer tube likely imploded during detanking, the analysis more or less confirmed the above speculation that the failure had been caused by a degree of operator error or poor test design. Of course, it’s possible that a hardware or software design flaw contributed to or caused the anomaly or that something like a pressure differential in the LOx header tank and LCH4 header tube could also explain the damage, but the accidental formation of a vacuum during detanking is arguably the simplest (obvious) explanation.
After the image of the internal damage leaked, the immediate consensus among fans and close followers was that Booster 7 was beyond repair. Instead, SpaceX appears to have proven those assumptions wrong and somehow managed to repair the upgraded Super Heavy to the point that it was worth testing again less than three weeks after returning to the high bay. On May 6th, B7 was rolled back to the launch site and installed, for the second time, on the orbital launch mount.
Prior to the failure, the general expectation was that SpaceX would begin installing Raptor V2 engines as soon as Booster 7 passed structural testing. It remains to be seen if SpaceX wants to repeat Booster 7’s cryoproof or structural testing to ensure that its quick repairs did the job before proceeding into static fire testing as previously planned. Nonetheless, hope lives on for the Super Heavy prototype and new test windows have been scheduled from 10am to 10pm on May 9th, 10th, and 11th.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Elon Musk says SpaceX will finally retire Falcon 9 once Starship flies reliably every week.
Elon Musk gave the clearest timeline yet for retiring Falcon 9, SpaceX’s workhorse rocket.
The comment came in a reply on X, where Musk wrote that “once Starship is flying reliably several times per week, it makes sense to shift super scarce SpaceX engineering and production resources to Starship to get launch rate to several times per day, which means winding down Falcon.” He was responding to physicist Casey Handmer, who noted that NASA is reportedly uneasy about SpaceX phasing out Falcon after building what Handmer called the most successful launcher ever, with the fleet nearing 1,000 total launches.
Now @SciGuySpace reports NASA is in a tizzy because after running the most successful launcher ever for more than a decade and nearing 1000 launches, @SpaceX is planning to retire Falcon in favor of Starship in a few years.
Sorry, NASA, you’ve had 15 years to burn down the… https://t.co/uCNoMwK0v9
— Casey Handmer (@CJHandmer) August 22, 2026
Falcon 9 is still SpaceX’s busiest vehicle by far. The company is on pace for roughly 140 to 145 Falcon flights this year, following 165 in 2025, president Gwynne Shotwell told Time earlier in 2026. She has already said Falcon flights would “tail off” as Starship comes online, while reports indicate that SpaceX has stopped booking new Falcon 9 launches past 2028 and halted production of some expendable Falcon hardware, according to Bloomberg.
It’s worth noting that Musk’s post is a condition, and not a countdown on when Falcon will retire. Starship has not yet flown weekly, let alone daily. Its most recent flight in July ended with a soft splashdown in the Indian Ocean, a milestone Musk pointed to earlier this month when he said the vehicle’s heat shield problem was effectively solved. SpaceX towed that ship to Christmas Island for inspection, and the next flight, Flight 14, is aimed at putting Starship into orbit for the first time. A tower catch attempt for the upper stage has been pushed back to what Musk has called “a few months” away.
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
The gap between Falcon’s role today and Starship’s promised role tomorrow matters most to NASA. Falcon and its Dragon capsule remain the only way the agency rotates astronauts to and from the International Space Station, and Starship is not certified to carry NASA crews. Musk’s post did not address how that handoff would work if Falcon winds down before a crew-rated Starship variant exists. The timing lines up with Musk’s other recent Starship comments. Two days before the Falcon post, he told a different X user that SpaceX is aiming for more than 30 Starship launches a day by 2030, or roughly 10,000 a year, a figure tied to the Trump administration’s new push for higher national launch cadence. Falcon, which took over a decade to reach its first 100 launches, was never built to approach that kind of volume.
For now, Falcon 9 keeps flying at a near-record pace while Starship works to prove it can do the job Musk has already picked out for it.
Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
Elon Musk just set a condition that could end Falcon 9 as we know it
Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
