SpaceX Just Did The Impossible...

Kind: captions Language: en In this week's episode, Starship is coming home, the Tesla Roadster is finally ready, the Terafab is beginning to take shape, and Tesla ghost Superchargers are coming to life. We are starting off with a story that for a couple of weeks there looked like it might not have a happy ending. SpaceX just pulled off its first ever ocean recovery of an intact Starship rocket, and the way it got there is genuinely a little dramatic. So, the typical flight plan that we've been watching for years now involves the ship launching from Texas, going up to space, coming back down on the other side of the world where it hovers down to the surface of the Indian Ocean before dramatically tipping over for an explosive conclusion. But then, on flight 13, Starship did something it had never done before. It tipped over into the water and it floated. A fully intact spaceship about the size of a large building just floating out there in the open sea. Now, that's a great sign for the ship's durability, but it's an even better opportunity for SpaceX engineers to get their first close-up look at the effects of a suborbital flight on their design. But floating in the ocean and actually getting home are two very different things. We know that Starship lands right around the tip of this point off the northwest coast of Australia, which is about 1,000 mi away from the mainland. That is very far to travel for a vehicle designed for outer space, not the open ocean. The SpaceX recovery team had to reach the ship, secure it, keep it afloat, and then tow a 170-ft long spacecraft all the way back to port. But the ocean was not ready to cooperate. For days, the SpaceX crew fought increasingly rough seas trying to keep the vehicle under control in one of the most remote stretches of water on the planet. Then came the low point. Elon Musk himself, usually the most optimistic person in any room, posted that ship recovery was not looking good. At that point, it seemed like ship 40 would be gone, lost somewhere in the Indian Ocean, and that the whole recovery attempt was about to become an expensive lesson. Except, that didn't happen. And it's because the ship didn't go to Australia, it went in the opposite direction. After roughly 24 days at sea, the recovery team guided Starship all the way to a spot just off the coast of Christmas Island, which is also part of Australia, where a team of SpaceX engineers is heading out now to study it in calmer water before bringing it the rest of the way home to Starbase, Texas. Photos from Christmas Island show that ship 40 is almost there, ready to be retrieved. So, the Starship that looked like it might be lost is coming home after all, and this time Musk's update was a whole lot simpler and a whole lot happier. Starship is being recovered from the sea. Now, let's talk about a car that we've been waiting on so long it's almost become a myth, the next-generation Tesla Roadster. Tesla first revealed the car back in 2017, nearly 9 years ago, and promised to be the most insane production car in automotive history. Deliveries were supposed to start in 2020, but obviously that did not happen. And since then, several cars, including the Model S Plaid, have already matched or beaten the original acceleration target of 1.99 seconds, while the Roadster itself has remained stuck in the any day now category. But now there is a good reason to keep hope alive. According to a report from The Information, Tesla could finally unveil the redesigned Roadster as early as this month. That's August 2026, which at this time of writing is half over, so that's pretty soon. Now, if the report is accurate, the unveiling event won't exactly be a normal Tesla product event, either. Here is where it gets wild. That demo is expected to happen at SpaceX's rocket engine test site in McGregor, Texas, and the car is reportedly going to lift off the ground remotely using cold gas thrusters developed with SpaceX. Not a marketing trick, actual thrusters, the same thing SpaceX uses to steer rockets bolted onto a car. The noise and force of the Roadster's thrusters is reportedly so intense that the demo has to be done at the SpaceX site. And there is an important detail that seems to be getting lost in a lot of the discussion. There are two different Roadsters here, and they are not the same car. The first one is the extreme version. It is a limited SpaceX branded edition, and it is the one with the thruster package. This is the car that lifts off in Texas, but it's reportedly not street legal, and it could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, if not millions. Think of it as the ultimate demonstration of what Tesla can build when there are almost no practical limits. The other is the Roadster regular customers would actually be able to buy. Tesla is reportedly developing that version alongside the more extreme model with a similar design, but without the full thruster system. Underneath both of them is a genuinely different car than the one from 2017. The program got torn up and rebuilt along the way. Tesla reportedly scrapped an earlier version based on Model S plaid parts and started over as a carbon fiber hypercar, the lightweight material used in race cars and fighter jets. Elon Musk has said with the SpaceX thruster package that 0 to 60 time could drop below 1 second, which is an incredible claim, but there is one very important caveat. This is still a report, not a confirmed Tesla event, and Roadster has had more delayed launch dates than almost any other Tesla product. So, the timing should still be treated as reportedly this month. But, if it does happen, and if that car really does lift off the ground in Texas after 9 years, that would be quite a way to finally show up. Now, for anyone who wants to go deeper than what we can fit into one video, if you have not signed up for the Tesla Space newsletter yet, this is a really good week to do it because for a limited time, there's also a special surprise awaiting in your welcome email when you do. It's our way of saying thanks for being here. The link is down in the description. Go grab it before this runs out and then let's get back to the video. Now, let's check back in on Terafactory, the enormous Tesla and SpaceX collaboration ship factory we've been closely tracking. This week there's a genuinely strange twist to the scale of this thing because it turns out Elon might be trying to build it before he even owns all the land it will sit on. Here's what's happening on the ground. Out in Grimes County, Texas, about 100 miles from Giga Texas, crews have started clearing parts of the Terafactory site. Drone footage from Tesla watcher Joe Teague Myer shows machines already at work knocking down trees and grinding them into mulch piles. But the size of the project becomes much easier to understand when you look at the land itself. According to Teague Myer's tracking, Tesla and SpaceX currently own around 6,640 acres for the site with another 2,300 acres in the final stages of being recorded. Even after that, he estimates they will need another 2,000 to 3,000 acres before the full facility can be completed. Think about what that means. Construction has already started, but the companies are still buying thousands of more acres simply to finish assembling the site. The reason is the sheer length of this thing. The main building is planned to run more than 4 miles from end to end, so the land underneath it is being bought in stages plot by plot as the design pushes outward. And the terrain isn't making the job any easier. This is not the flat easy ground that Giga Texas was built on. The Terafactory site is heavily forested and includes ponds, streams, cattle ranches, hills, and valleys that all have to be transformed into the level ground required for a semiconductor facility. There is even a large man-made lake sitting directly in the footprint of the core building, which means the water has to be drained and the area filled before construction can continue there. On top of that, there are power lines, gas pipelines, and buried utilities running straight through the footprint, all of which have to be relocated first. That is a big reason the project is broken into 10 separate phases, with the first phase alone costing about 17 billion dollars. When it is all finished across every phase, the estimates run as high as 120 billion dollars. So, the takeaway is almost unreal. Terafab is a building so massive that Tesla and SpaceX are clearing forests, draining a lake, and shopping for thousands of more acres all at the same time just to make room for it. Tesla's long fight with Sweden's unions is finally over, and Tesla won. It started back in October of 2023 when the Swedish union IF Metall demanded that Tesla sign what is known as a collective agreement, essentially a union-wide labor contract. Tesla declined, arguing that unionization is optional. So, IF Metall went on strike and then called on other Swedish unions to join the fight. Dockworkers stopped unloading Tesla vehicles at ports, postal workers stopped delivering license plates, making it impossible to register new cars, cleaners, painters, and electricians also joined the action. The strategy was pretty straightforward. If the unions couldn't force Tesla to sign the agreement directly, they would make it increasingly difficult for the company to operate around them. And here is where Tesla Superchargers come in, because this is the part that is genuinely insane. As part of the blockade, Sweden's electricians refused to connect Tesla's new Supercharger stalls to the power grid, but Tesla kept building them anyway. It bolted the stations together, finished them completely, and then just left them sitting there fully built but inactive, waiting for power that the unions would not let flow. Some eventually went online using Megapack batteries, but many remained completely dark. EV drivers in Sweden started calling them ghost stations. More than 250 stalls across 20 locations, some of them standing there finished and frozen since 2023. Now, think about how stubborn that is on both sides. For nearly 3 years, Tesla refused to sign and the unions refused to plug in the chargers. But time was not on the union's side. Over 90% of Tesla's own Swedish workers just kept showing up to work. The Model Y stayed the best-selling car in the country, and one by one the strikers ran out of steam. The group that started at 130 people dwindled down to about 70, then 21, until finally only a handful of strikers were left. And this week, after 1,021 days, it ended. I have metal called off the entire action. Tesla bought out the last of the strikers, and after nearly 3 years, more than a dozen unions and a case that reached Sweden's Supreme Court, Tesla never signed a single collective agreement. The union's own leadership flatly called the outcome a failure. But the most fitting part of the story is what happens next. With the blockade lifted, all of those ghost stations are finally waking up. Tesla is switching on more than 250 Superchargers that have sat dark for years, expanding its entire Swedish network by more than 20% practically overnight. The chargers the unions tried hardest to keep off are coming online all at once, and electric car drivers in Sweden are about to get better support.