Tesla adds ‘spaceship’ to future potential products to work on for its designers

Tesla hints at more SpaceX collaboration as it adds “spaceship” to future potential products to work on for its future designers.

We recently reported on how Tesla and SpaceX have been ramping up synergy with more workers moving between the companies and more equipment purchases between the two.

Now Tesla is hinting at continued cooperation between the two companies.

In a new senior vehicle designer role listed on its career website (hat tip to u/tdoesstuff), Tesla mentioned “spaceship design” as a potential task:

Using your considerable production design experience and innovative thinking, you will primarily be tasked with creating designs for future cars, but may also be called upon for other design tasks (product design, spaceship design, etc) based on your skillset. Our design team prides itself on being multi-talented and flexible, and we look for the same in our potential candidates. You will report to the Senior Manager of Vehicle Design, and this position resides in Tesla’s Design Studio in Hawthorne, California.

The position is based at Tesla’s Hawthorne Design Studio, which is directly next door to SpaceX’s headquarters.

This mention in the new job listing comes as SpaceX is developing Starship, a fully reusable super heavy-lift launch vehicle and large capacity spacecraft.

It is expected to be the vehicle that SpaceX will use to colonize Mars and CEO Elon Musk has also talked about using the spacecraft for extremely fast travel on earth from and to different spaceports.

If Tesla ends up designing some features of the new spaceship, it wouldn’t be the first Tesla products inside the vehicle.

Earlier this year, we reported on SpaceX using Tesla battery packs in the new “Starship” Mars vehicle prototype.

Furthermore, Tesla and SpaceX have a joint material team to create new materials to use on Earth and in space.

Electrek’s Take

This is not too surprising. I expect that there’s going to be a lot of design work in Starship that SpaceX is not used to doing.

We are talking about living quarters and things of the sort.

While this is not exactly Tesla’s expertise either, it is much closer to a car than it is to rockets.

As an example, it has been rumored that Tesla helped SpaceX with the interior design, especially the seats, of the Dragon Spacecraft that was recently used to carry astronauts to the space station.

The new job listing could also just be an extension of that. We will see.