The machine that builds the machine

🐢 New road delay — Texas State Highway 4 Saturday, October 3rd 2026 23:59 → 4th 04:00 CDT — Production to Port Saturday, October 3rd 2026 23:59 → 4th 04:00 CDT — Masseys to Production starbase.texas.gov/beach-roa…

Big hardware for a big mission. This week, the 130-foot-tall liquid hydrogen tank for Artemis IV made its way to the vertical assembly building at NASA Michoud. Up next, teams will attach roll rings to the hardware in preparation for primer application. The rings allow technicians to rotate the tank to gain access to various areas during the production process. As part of the SLS (Space Launch System) core stage, the tank will hold thousands of gallons of super-cold propellant to fuel the rocket’s four RS-25 engines, helping generate more than 2 million pounds of thrust at launch.

S46 getting its tiles installed

It's time for the 6-month time-lapse update of construction at the Giga Texas Optimus Factory! This time-lapse shows the site from approximately the same perspective on a weekly basis over the 1st six months. At the current pace, I estimate major building construction to fully assemble the entire super structure will continue well into the spring and possibly summer of 2027. During this time, utilities, concrete flooring, ground slab, roofing, exterior walls & steel assembly will be the primary visible effort. Perhaps the biggest construction project that has not yet begun (but is critical for this factory to be able to function) is the electrical conduits and cables from the electrical switchyard. I have not yet observed this project starting. The distance to the electrical switchyard is almost a mile ( ~ 1.6 Km) so this in itself is a major project that I am watching for to begin. I hope you enjoy this 6-month timelapse of progress.

Here’s a construction update on the Giga Texas Advanced Tech Chip Fab (ATCF) The 1st steel columns have now been installed & expect the vertical assembly speed to be rapid with now 7 huge cranes set up & large sections of the foundation now poured with a thick reinforced & pier supported slab & spread-footing or pile-cap-and-pedestal system. The N end is where the foundation is growing now, while the S end completes the footing construction. This joint @SpaceX & @Tesla facility broke ground in April & its purpose is a research fab & the precursor to Terafab located about 100 miles (~ 160 Km) to the east in Grimes County. The ATCF is a ~$3B, ~ 490,000 sq ft (~ 45,500 sq m) facility built to iterate logic, memory, packaging and test under one roof, making only a few thousand wafers/month to try ideas, not feed production. Expect to see limited ops targeted late 2027.

A new external Vertical Reciprocating Conveyor (VRC) is going up on the east side of Giga Texas, next to the Body-in-White shop and the six new receiving docks that replaced the old glass secondary entrance. A VRC is a heavy industrial lift, not a people elevator. A platform loads a pallet or rack at one level, travels straight up or down, and unloads at another. “Reciprocating” just means it shuttles between floors instead of running continuously like a belt. Mounting it outside the wall adds vertical capacity without cutting into production floor inside the Body-in-White (BIW), the Cybercab line or General Assembly (GA). This one helps solve a long-standing issue of managing & moving Giga Castings. These have been staged in outdoor racks on the E & NE sides of the casting section, then moved through several forklift & truck steps before they reach the various production lines. The VRC should automatically move castings straight into the multi-level BIW & Cybercab areas, cutting yard storage, forklift traffic, & handling time as Cybercab, Model Y, & Cybertruck volume rises. A similar external system is already in use at Giga Berlin. As of September 30, the main lifting structure is in place on one of the two halves, with mechanism steel still going on beside the new dock aprons. Permits cover both the external frame and the internal tie-ins; most permit inspections are still ahead, which is normal while assembly is underway.

B24 is stacking really fast. Sections have been coming out at record pace. B24 started stacking on the 25th of September and now the transfer tube has rolled out. This usually takes 2-3.5 weeks on recent boosters but B24 has done it in just 8 days. Credit: @LabPadre piped.video/watch?v=inCQ49QG…

Perhaps the best technical update Neuralink has ever given:

Went from knowing very little about hot air balloons, to joining a crew at the biggest show on earth. It’s already epic and it hasn’t even started. Here you see the dawn crew, that flies early. There will be over 550 flying today.

I don’t think many of us would have thought that an old, legacy oil and gas field along the coast would make for a good Spaceport, but it certainly has shown to have its advantages over a canal-free, pristine marsh. This couldn’t be more evident when looking at the first permit application filed by SpaceX. Rather than the jigsaw puzzle of canals and spoil banks being a logistical burden, SpaceX is using this footprint for initial access to remote areas of the property for equipment staging and future construction. This is very smart as, without using the canals, there would be significantly more marsh impacts required to get to these far reach places. Dredging through that much marsh would be extremely difficult to permit and much more costly to mitigate. And it’s not just the legacy canals they are using in this application, but also the old wharf area along the Freshwater Bayou Canal south of the locks (also known as Freshwater City). The Freshwater Bayou Canal will be a critical artery for transporting material to the future launch complex, and refurbishing and repurposing the old wharf may be the first order of business for SpaceX. It’s also perhaps the easiest thing to permit in this whole project as agencies are very friendly when it comes to improving previously disturbed areas. So what are their plans for Freshwater City? Let’s break it down… SpaceX needs a large, elevated area to offload and store equipment and materials transported in by barge. To achieve this, they are planning on building a ~ 130-acre open yard, 8 feet above sea level, all within the Freshwater City limits. They will also add a 3,500 ft bulkhead along the waterfront and a 1,000 ft wide slip. Since the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers only dredges the 125 ft wide navigational channel in the middle of the canal, SpaceX will also partake in its own dredging activities to connect the 16 ft deep channel to the proposed dock. This dock is even more critical when you consider the existing canal locks just to the north. This was built many moons ago to keep freshwater in and saltwater out. While most barges can probably fit within the 84 ft wide locks, some larger vessels or ships certainly can’t pass through. That is one of the reasons why SpaceX is building this dock here (though they are also building a temporary laydown yard on the north side of the locks too). So when will they get authorization to start construction on these activities? That is a whole other conversation…

MISSION SUCCESS: NROL-97 launched yesterday on a @SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from @NASA KSC! NRO’s first Falcon Heavy flight showcased the strength of the NRO and @USSpaceForce @USSF_SSC partnership in advancing national security. Press release: bit.ly/3U7RJiB

BORING NEWS: The Boring Company is negotiating two stations, one for each tunnel, inside the Nashville Yards with Southwest Value Partners, the developer of the 19-acre downtown district. Nashville Yards is a mixed-use development in downtown Nashville. It includes the Grand Hyatt Nashville and the historic Union Station Nashville Yards, The Pinnacle live-music venue, and residential towers The Emory and The Everett. Office tenants include Amazon, Creative Artists Agency, Pinnacle Financial Partners, and Bass, Berry & Sims. The site also has restaurants, retail, and more than 7 acres of plazas and green space, including Ascension Saint Thomas Landing. It sits along Rosa L. Parks Boulevard, next to the downtown end of the Music City Loop. More Elon Musk companies news in the EC below!

Heavy rain, fully autonomous. This is what end-to-end neural nets buy you: photons in, controls out, trained on fleet data and sharpened with RL. Brutally hard to make reliable. Unstoppable once you do. Optimus is next. Same recipe.

Someday, probably soon, most people will take booster returns for granted. I will always watch in awe.

Nooo my competition is entering the ring (Seriously though I hope you guys support David, great dude and incredible photographer)

Robotaxi operating hours moved from 10pm to 11pm. The main thing we’re trying to solve is making sure that we don’t run over pets when they’re hard to see at night. Literally trying to avoid grey kittens on grey tarmac in the dark.

This is the main concept for Neuralink I've been so excited about for the past 5 years- using their *fleet* of brain implants to learn much more about the brain and ultimately recreate an artificial brain. Neuralink's access to detailed brain data will far exceed any other company or academic lab. This means the ability to pattern match when people are developing early signs of dementia or have particular aptitude for something will be easy to spot. This will enable earlier diagnosis and treatment. This will enable better, more optimized skill training. The possibilities are quite literally limitless.

The weather doesn’t bother the cabs

Most Cybertruck comparisons are about how the trucks drive. This one is not. I put my 2024 Foundation Series Premium AWD, the original roughly $100K truck, next to a 2026 Standard AWD ordered in the end-of-February promotion at $59,990. On March 1 the price went to $69K. It is now $74,990. The promo truck was the deal. The question is whether the Standard is still the value leader. I skipped drive impressions. Those mostly come down to the driver. I wanted the bill of materials, plus a conversation with Cybertruck Chief Engineer Wes Morrill. From a few steps back the trucks match. Stainless body, proportions, glass, tonneau, lighting. The only obvious difference is the wheels. Premium uses a HEPA filter. Standard does not. The HVAC unit is the same part number. The difference is mostly software. The roof glass changed with the supplier. Morrill’s account: the new supplier had a different process and a heat oven large enough for this glass, which had been hard to source. The tonneau stays. L-track, the larger bed LEDs, and the lidded under-bed bin do not. Fender camera housings and mirror plastics are revised. The real cut is suspension. Air hardware is deleted for coil springs. Control arms, wishbones, and steering knuckles carry over. Premium moves from Entry to Extract. Standard sits at one height. Interior diverges more: textile instead of vegan leather, simpler console, heated fronts only, no rear screen, 7 speakers instead of 15, no cabin 120V outlets. Rear window switches moved about 30 cm forward. I hope you find this comparison video helpful. piped.video/fnEIK7sTKGk