Elon Musk: “Path to Petawatts is Mass drivers on Moon”
SpaceX’s Lunar Mass Driver is a planned electromagnetic launch system on the Moon, similar to a giant coilgun-style catapult, designed to launch solar-powered AI compute satellites into orbit or deep space at extremely low cost
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 the largest chip manufacturing facility ever, with the goal of producing over 1 terawatt of compute per year
The future is built in Texas
On January 15, 2025, Falcon 9 successfully deployed Firefly Aerospace’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 and ispace’s RESILIENCE lunar landers on a trajectory to the Moon from pad 39A in Florida.
For most of our missions, we plan a controlled deorbit of the Falcon second stage so it safely reenters over the ocean. For higher energy missions like those to a lunar transfer orbit, nearly all performance on the vehicle is devoted to successfully placing the payload in the intended orbit, and a controlled disposal maneuver is not always possible.
We actively work to be as responsible as possible with hardware left in space to ensure space safety, including for more complex missions. In this case, over time, solar activity and gravity led the second stage toward the Moon. Impacts like this are rare, but they can happen with objects in these types of orbits, and we worked with NASA on the optimal disposal solution.
Our focus remains on advancing reliable access to space while working toward even more sustainable operations with Starship in the future. As a fully reusable vehicle, Starship is designed to eliminate expendable upper stages entirely, reducing hardware left in orbit and enabling even more missions to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.