Night footage dated April 15 from SpaceX’s rocket test site at McGregor, Texas, showing an object rising inside a shrouded structure, was circulated over the weekend as evidence that work tied to Tesla’s Roadster was under way there five months before the car’s scheduled unveiling.
The X user who posted it says the motion is a gantry lift rather than flight, and nothing in the frames confirms that the object is the Tesla Roadster.
The date is what gave the clip its force.
April 15 fell two weeks after the April 1 demonstration Elon Musk had floated at Tesla’s November shareholder meeting, saying the date gave him “deniability because I can say I was just kidding”, and after he had said in March that the car would “probably” be unveiled in late April.
Neither date held. Tesla announced the unveiling on Saturday, for October 1.
The Clip
The video ran 25 seconds and was posted on Saturday under the words “I’ll just put this out there”.
It includes a Roadster wordmark — which was revealed earlier this year — and a side-profile silhouette laid over a tall structure wrapped in white sheeting.
The video then runs the footage without the overlay, captioned “Early Morning April 15 2026” and watermarked NSF, for NASASpaceflight, which films the site.
The connection to the Roadster is the overlay and the timing, with the sideview appearing similar to the trademark image recently filed.
The Poster’s Correction
“This is starting to blow up so before anyone goes insane (again), it’s not flying here, this tarp structure has a very large gantry inside it, the article is being lifted by said gantry,” wrote ‘TheSpaceEngineer’, an account whose profile describes him as a 3D artist and former software engineer.
“This structure is at McGregor and has existed for about a year and a half,” the user added.
‘TheSpaceEngineer’ attached a photograph of the structure uncovered, showing a steel lattice tower. He has posted further corrections since.
Asked why the movement was vertical, he wrote: “This is being lifted by a gantry, not it flying.” Asked how the object got back down: “The same gantry that lifted it up.”
On the May 5 segment he was explicit about what he was not claiming. “If it is in fact the car and the test at the end of the video is in fact one of those thrusters on it, it’s loud as f—, this camera is over a mile away,” he wrote, posting a measurement putting NASASpaceflight’s camera 1.14 miles from the structure.
Why McGregor
The Information reported in August, citing people familiar with the plans, that Tesla intended to demonstrate a Roadster lifting off the ground at McGregor using cold-gas thrusters developed with SpaceX, operated remotely with nobody inside and with spectators held several hundred yards back because of the noise.
The package is internally known as A71 and the car carrying it is not expected to be street-legal.
Musk set out the hardware seven years ago.
On January 9, 2019 he posted an animation of the hovering DeLorean from Back to the Future with the words “The new Roadster will actually do something like this”.
Asked by the tech reviewer Marques Brownlee whether he was joking, he replied: “I’m not. Will use SpaceX cold gas thruster system with ultra high pressure air in a composite over-wrapped pressure vessel in place of the 2 rear seats.”
A composite overwrapped pressure vessel is a carbon-wrapped high-pressure tank of the kind SpaceX builds for its rockets, and putting one where the rear seats go makes the thruster car a two-seater, which matches The Information‘s account of a limited edition that is not street-legal.
Tesla’s teaser on Saturday carried the words “Go for launch”, the date 10.01 and four plume-like lights, with the hidden line “Where we’re going” set into the darkened strip beneath them and legible only when the contrast is pushed. It completes the reference Musk started with that 2019 post. He replied to the teaser: “New Tesla Roadster Unveil 10.01.”
Invitations sent to reservation holders, copies of which were shared on X, name Waco at 8:30 p.m. Eastern on October 1, about 20 to 30 minutes from McGregor.
Tesla has not named a site or confirmed McGregor.
