techno-ag said:

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Terafab will be built in Grimes County, Texas

In April, we broke ground on our research fab on the North Campus of Giga Texas – the precursor to Terafab.

Both Tesla & SpaceX will need far more chips than current & future global production can supply.

This is why we're building… pic.twitter.com/je4jKXuQrY

— Tesla (@Tesla) August 6, 2026

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Rusty and KBTX are in mourning today.

They spent months doing their best to get the project killed.

Governor Abbott's announcement regarding Terafab:

https://gov.texas.gov/news/post/governor-abbott-announces-spacex-expansion-in-grimes-county

techno-ag said:

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Terafab Texas will be the largest and most valuable building on Earth by far.

And it will be stunningly beautiful. pic.twitter.com/4NweOqTL7y

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2026

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That will be one magnificent facility. This is going to change College Station forever. It is incredibly exciting to see what Musk is doing and how integral the BCS region will be in the process.

I am thankful that Californians were Californians and pushed Musk to move to Texas, and thankful we are a red state with the best business climate in the country.

Yes, it did!

KPLO began observations ~30 min. prior to the impact and, through orbit control, passed over the impact site multiple times. https://t.co/8SKNVmvCm0 pic.twitter.com/qHMTCIU9g4

— 🚀conspiracy_slayer🌕 (@conspiracyslyr) August 6, 2026

Mildly surprised Boring Company wasn't at least nodded to during the hype video.

Every Prufrock that leaves the factory has over 1,000 changes from the one before it.

Before it ships, we put it through a full Porpoise Test (PT) in Bastrop — a short test tunnel (typically under 200 rings) that lets both the design team and the test team gather real data on… pic.twitter.com/USaxtztNsb

— Mike Baier (@Mike__Baier) August 5, 2026

TexAgs91 said:

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pic.twitter.com/eMjhOtsNVM

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 6, 2026

ELON! What's your deal lately?

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I don't know how closely you observe Elon but the dude stays up half the night reposting stuff several days a week. His sleep schedule is nuts.

I have no idea how he keeps going with all of his companies but it doesn't seem healthy.

I highly recommend the Eric Berger books talking about SpaceX origins and then Starship. I read another biography as well that had a lot of insights. The dude is wired much differently than the rest of us to say the least.

A new operations planning power point presentation has been posted today on the compass website with an FAA slide saying that Starship flight 14 is planned to launch as soon as Friday August 28th. As always this can change and it's always best to wait for the official… pic.twitter.com/XYf5vzICSr

— Starship Gazer (@StarshipGazer) August 6, 2026

It first showed up as August 13th, then August 20th, now August 28th. I'd expect more changes as SpaceX finalizes work on the vehicles and prepares for the flight. With a potential ship catch on the cards for this flight, they may try and be more cautious to ensure its success. https://t.co/icjf0v88Al

— 🏳️‍🌈Alejandro Alcantarilla Romera (Alex) (@Alexphysics13) August 6, 2026

Would be pretty awesome turnaround time.

What an astute observation.

It is precisely a 420 mile drive from Starbase pic.twitter.com/IHvrX1MSPJ

— L'Carpetron (@carpetron_d) August 6, 2026

The SpaceX Recovery team is still working to recover Flight 13’s Starship from the Indian Ocean. They’ve been overcoming challenging conditions and increasingly rough seas as they attempt to guide the 52m long spacecraft to port pic.twitter.com/ECT5FyCvr7

— SpaceX (@SpaceX) August 7, 2026

Came here to post this, but then....

Unfortunately, ship recovery is not looking good right now.

Nonetheless, we were able to obtain close-up photos of critical regions of the heat shield and engines for future upgrades.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 7, 2026

Humans for scale:

Never Bet Against Elon...

The day Apollo legends got SpaceX dead wrong.

In 2011, Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan testified before Congress, warning that private spaceflight was an unreliable dream and claiming startups like SpaceX "didn't know what they didn't know."

Fast… pic.twitter.com/4IFnwx0YWT

— Ellie in Space 🚀💫 (@esherifftv) August 8, 2026

I don't really see the need for this gal to point out how Neil Armstrong didn't correctly predict the future 15 years ago.

I'm not a big fan of hers, but I think she's right here.

Its not that those Niel and Gene were right or wrong. I think the bigger disappointment is their taking the position that a private startup can't or couldn't do it, and asserting that the government funding anything that wasn't the old guard and traditional way was wrong. Even moreso that giving a startup a shot was a mistake.

If, based on that clip, those two had their way... Soyuz would STILL be the only ride to and from the ISS. Or maybe with a few more billion Boeing could finally get around to testing and fixing their thrusters. Well... after they fixed their mission clock. That still only flies on bought Russian engines.

It's less Elon being right or wrong and more about a mindset that certain companies own or deserve a monopoly on access because of 60 year old laurels.

As part of our capstone class at A&M we got to interview someone fairly high up in NASA around 2011-2012. They basically had the same opinion that safety and effectiveness would be sacrificed for profit and that it wouldn't work. For the way we did spaceflight, I agree.

Automation changed the game though. Elon and SpaceX can do dozens of paid, customer launches with more leeway to test and iterate because no lives are at stake. They just haul satellites over and over until they're confident in the systems. Elon said himself that they have advantages over space shuttle because of that. The strict safety requirements for every flight being manned paradoxically make them less safe.

I remember how crushed Elon was when that interview came out with Neil.

Neil and Gene might have been right if one of the commercial launch companies hadn't been SpaceX. I think the most we could have expected out of the other commercial launch companies would have been a very slightly more innovative status quo rocket. And it would have taken much longer to see results.

Decay said:

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As part of our capstone class at A&M we got to interview someone fairly high up in NASA around 2011-2012. They basically had the same opinion that safety and effectiveness would be sacrificed for profit and that it wouldn't work. For the way we did spaceflight, I agree.

Automation changed the game though. Elon and SpaceX can do dozens of paid, customer launches with more leeway to test and iterate because no lives are at stake. They just haul satellites over and over until they're confident in the systems. Elon said himself that they have advantages over space shuttle because of that. The strict safety requirements for every flight being manned paradoxically make them less safe.

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It's an insanely stupid take though. It's Boeing not driven to make a profit? Is Lockheed not driven to make a profit? Do their stockholders not care if the stock tanks?

Jokes aside about both of those companies failures...

Safety isn't dictated by the contractor. Safety is determined by who writes and enforced mission rules. Safety is dictated by NASA. NASA has final say with their facilities, with their astronauts, and with their space station. Who wanted Challenger to launch? Who was pushing back?

Respect to Gene and Neil, but they were stubbornly wrong here.

I just don't think they had the foresight to think that a private company would be capable of launching hundreds of rockets when NASA was only barely capable of it with the combined efforts of hundreds of thousands of people and billions upon billions of dollars. They were wrong but their take was defensible I think.

Very few at the time thought SpaceX would deliver on the F9 program. It came within a single failure of collapsing, of course, so it was not an unreasonable belief that it 'wouldn't work.' But some see it as a rivalry which, in reality for human spaceflight they had to partner with Nasa initially to learn the 'rules' essentially.

There is still great skepticism within certain corners of Nasa as well that the starship can ever become human rated, as there is no intent to provide an abort mechanism for the people on it.

Anyway, NET Aug 28th, fwiw. I think the plan will be to launch it and then catch the upper stage roughly 12 hours later.

A new operations planning power point presentation has been posted today on the compass website with an FAA slide saying that Starship flight 14 is planned to launch as soon as Friday August 28th. As always this can change and it's always best to wait for the official… pic.twitter.com/XYf5vzICSr

— Starship Gazer (@StarshipGazer) August 6, 2026

Nancy Roman Grace FH is Aug 30th right now. I believe that is going to expend the core but RTLS for the boosters for anyone lucky enough to be down around the Cape for it.

BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: NASA has invited me to attend both the Falcon Heavy launch of the Nancey Grace Roman Telescope (August 30th) and Crew-13 (September 12th)! I’ll be there to report on both launches.

Travel and lodging aren’t cheap, so I need your help. Please subscribe — it… pic.twitter.com/Zsq7mT5uPD

— S.E. Robinson, Jr. (@SERobinsonJr) August 6, 2026

nortex97 said:

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Very few at the time thought SpaceX would deliver on the F9 program. It came within a single failure of collapsing, of course, so it was not an unreasonable belief that it 'wouldn't work.' But some see it as a rivalry which, in reality for human spaceflight they had to partner with Nasa initially to learn the 'rules' essentially.

There is still great skepticism within certain corners of Nasa as well that the starship can ever become human rated, as there is no intent to provide an abort mechanism for the people on it.

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Doesn't that mean NASA will not allow it to launch people? I've never looked into it, but not having NASA required criteria when the goal is to get people to Mars seems odd.

Edit: Went through Grok to get more info.

So Starship doesn't have the Launch Escape System, but NASA doesn't require specifically LES, just the ability to abort and obviously reduce risk with testing redundancy, etc. The stated capacity for starship is around 100 people, so LES would not work.

Starship does have multiple abort capabilities, including what we saw when not enough engines lit, starship separation if the booster fails, etc. To think about it another way, LES was designed to meet the abort requirement, not a requirement itself.

Two main issues are that for Nasa astronauts/man-rating starship would have to (a) provide a manual control option in all flight phases, and (b) crew escape options. Discussion of the latter below. SpaceX intends to operate it privately for human launches I think until a safety track record is sufficient to overcome that for Nasa, but these just are not chosen/inherent options for the Starship program, respectively.
https://www.youtube.com/live/K2uWK8-QF9M

bthotugigem05 said:

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I just don't think they had the foresight to think that a private company would be capable of launching hundreds of rockets when NASA was only barely capable of it with the combined efforts of hundreds of thousands of people and billions upon billions of dollars. They were wrong but their take was defensible I think.

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Turns out MASA and bureaucrats were the problem, not private companies.

The shuttle did not have an abort option. After challenger they came up with that rod that they could slide down that gets them away from the orbiter and then they'd parachute away, but I think that had pretty limited usage and they ended up launching without it.

Yeah I won't go too far on the shuttle, but it was always a dangerous vehicle (and I feel the same way about Artemis/SLS today). Maybe a decent concept/tech. for the 70's military mission out of Vandenberg it was designed to be capable of.

The parachute stuff was ridiculous. Elon has talked about the manual control, abort options not being part of starship because they would just make it more dangerous, not really worth getting into again imho, but to say I agree.

Again there is still a sizable nasa bureaucratic faction that is anti-privatization and resents SpaceX most of all. If Democrats win either chamber, let alone the presidency in 2028, they will have a lot of headaches again within 12-24 months relative to their launch cadence plans (and hence shareholders will take an absolute beating).

SpaceX is still thinking about using offshore facilities to launch and catch Starship.

Last month, the Bureau of Ocean Energy Management (BOEM) published a formal Request for Information. They asked the public and industry for input on using the Outer Continental Shelf (federal… pic.twitter.com/WQ6Vf3fw6U

— Robin (@xdNiBoR) August 8, 2026

Spacex: "We don't need more/new rules."

I'm just mentioning the shuttle to say it doesn't look like there's an abort system requirement to be man rated.

WTF is the bureau of oceanic energy management?

That one was a new one to me too!

ETA, part of the Dept of the Interior.
https://www.boem.gov/

TexAgs91 said:

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The shuttle did not have an abort option. After challenger they came up with that rod that they could slide down that gets them away from the orbiter and then they'd parachute away, but I think that had pretty limited usage and they ended up launching without it.

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The shuttle had various abort options that were determined by how far into the launch the vehicle was. At least one, return to landing site (RTLS), was quite precarious and probably wouldn't have been successful. They even used the abort to orbit (ATO) option once, when the engines shut down prematurely.

Of course the real danger turned out to be that the crew was attached to the side of the stack as opposed to the top, leaving no recourse should the booster or fuel tank fail catastrophically.

Malachi Constant said:

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WTF is the bureau of oceanic energy management?

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Are they responsible for making the waves when you go to the beach?

nortex97 said:

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That one was a new one to me too!

ETA, part of the Dept of the Interior.
https://www.boem.gov/

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I'm pulling a blank on their old name, but they changed to BOEM after the Deepwater Horizon blowout if I recall.

Malachi Constant said:

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WTF is the bureau of oceanic energy management?

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This department needs to go to the President of Argentina an let him purge it

double aught said:

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TexAgs91 said:

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The shuttle did not have an abort option. After challenger they came up with that rod that they could slide down that gets them away from the orbiter and then they'd parachute away, but I think that had pretty limited usage and they ended up launching without it.

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The shuttle had various abort options that were determined by how far into the launch the vehicle was. At least one, return to landing site (RTLS), was quite precarious and probably wouldn't have been successful. They even used the abort to orbit (ATO) option once, when the engines shut down prematurely.

Of course the real danger turned out to be that the crew was attached to the side of the stack as opposed to the top, leaving no recourse should the booster or fuel tank fail catastrophically.

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Ah yes of course. And I even worked on a trainer for those. I was thinking more of an ejection/LAS (launch abort system) option.

Our government can really be comical most of the time. Of course the outer continental shelf is regulated by the department of the interior. Obviously it's run by political appointees which is good for now but charting 'course toward a quieter acoustic footprint in offshore operations' is not something I think that will be organically friendly toward Starship V4 launches some day.

It sounds like gov't busy-bodies who, frankly, should have no oversight of space flight operations at all. This isn't about extracting oil/gas/minerals. The acting director looks like a nice guy, but also apparently could be in his mid-20's. I doubt he's functionally running a tight ship over the careerists, so to speak.

They've received nearly 12,000 comments. Some are comical such as the Santa Barbara county environazi one, some seem motivated to figure out a way to suck money from SpaceX for 'research' I think such as this one from an 'Ole Miss National Center for physical acoustics' department;

Again, I just have to laugh/shake my head.