Starship development continues apace. They’re planning to launch the latest starship vehicle to 50km altitude next week and then perform their difficult landing maneuver 15km from the launch site.

I believe the sweating skin idea has been dropped. See this one hour video for a detailed breakdown of the current state of the design:

https://youtu.be/-8p2JDTd13k

It's being launched up to 15km, that's pretty close to 50000 feet, so you might have mixed up the units.

Oooh I see. The tweet I read said 15km/50k ft altitude and I misread that as 15km translation and 50km altitude. Thanks for the correction!

The “sweating” feature was the best idea for the spacecraft.

When I first heard of it, I was thinking, this must be a bad April Fool’s joke, or an incredibly great idea. Turns out, it was the former.

Next launch is 15km (not 50).

The latest we have is that it will sweat only where the heat shield can't hold up on its own: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1107380559834046465 .