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European spacecraft converge on the US for rides on SpaceX rockets
Thanks in large part to delays suffered by Arianespace’s next-generation Ariane 6 rocket, a small fleet of European satellites are simultaneously converging on the United States to hitch rides into orbit with SpaceX.
SpaceX launching European payloads is nothing new. The company has occasionally launched spacecraft built in Europe for European space agencies or companies, but the combination is exceedingly rare. For several reasons, however, what was once alien is beginning to become commonplace, and that fact is about to be made even clearer over the remainder of 2022.
SpaceX kicked off a string of six or seven launches of spacecraft built by or for Europe on October 15th. Over the weekend, the company’s workhorse Falcon 9 rocket – 70 meters (230 ft) tall, 3.7 meters (12 ft) wide, and capable of producing up to 770 tons (1.7M lbf) of thrust at liftoff – successfully launched the Hotbird 13F communications satellite into a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) for the French satcom company Eutelsat.
Hotbird 13F is the first of three Eutelsat satellites the company secretly agreed to launch on SpaceX rockets. Hours after its twin’s launch, Hotbird 13G arrived in Florida in a custom Airbus Beluga XL transport jet (its first visit to the US since 2009) and will soon begin preparing for its own ride on a SpaceX rocket as early as November 2022. Eutelsat 10B, also on track to launch on a Falcon 9 rocket sometime in November, likely left France for Florida on an oceangoing Arianespace ship on October 12th.
Normally, selecting the launch provider for communication satellites that cost eight or nine figures is accompanied by a press release and plenty of celebration. That the European Space Agency, Eutelsat, Airbus, and Thales Alenia said next to nothing until the last moment says a lot about how all parties involved really feel about transferring three of their satellites onto SpaceX rockets. Originally, all three were intended to launch on Arianespace’s rockets: Eutelsat 10B on one of the last Ariane 5s and Hotbird 13F and 13G on one of the first Ariane 6s.
It’s not entirely clear why Ariane 5 wasn’t able to launch Eutelsat 10B, but it’s unsurprising that partners ESA, Thales Alenia, Airbus, and Eutelsat decided to move Hotbird 13F and 13G to Falcon 9. The Ariane 6 rocket meant to launch both satellites simultaneously is years behind schedule, and its launch debut recently slipped even further from late 2022 to sometime in 2023. Originally scheduled to debut in mid-2020, it’s now possible – if not likely – that Ariane 6 won’t be ready to launch until the second half of next year (or even later).
Thanks to those delays, the new rocket will enter the scene with a very busy 2023 and 2024 manifest packed with high-value institutional and commercial payloads from all across Europe. In other words, a pair of semi-commercial communications satellites like Hotbird 13F/13G could have easily been forced to wait for a year or more to launch on Ariane 6. Adding insult to injury, Hotbird 13F and 13G are the first two satellites built under the joint European Space Agency and Airbus Eurostar Neo program, and will now be flying on an American rocket built by a company that is almost singlehandedly responsible for ending a golden era of competitive European launch services.
With confidence in Ariane 6’s debut timing lower than ever, a NASA official recently revealed that ESA is even studying the possibility of launching Euclid – a next-generation two-ton space telescope – on SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Euclid was originally scheduled to launch on one of Arianespace’s Russian-built Soyuz 2.1 rockets (or Ariane 6) in mid-2022. That contract was signed in 2020, six years after Russian President Vladimir Putin reminded the world of his instability, recklessness, and brutality by illegally and unofficially invading Ukraine. In February 2022, after months of obvious buildup, Russia doubled down on its Ukraine offensive with an openly genocidal full-scale invasion. In the aftermath, it kidnapped a batch of European OneWeb satellites, requisitioned a Soyuz rocket the company had already paid for, kneecapped a joint European-Russian Mars mission, and (while mostly mutual) revoked its support of European Soyuz launches.
That has effectively removed Russia as a serious option for European launches or collarboration, leaving several European missions and companies in limbo. Britain’s OneWeb, for example, had an exclusive contract with Russia to launch its entire low Earth orbit (LEO) internet satellite constellation on up to 21 Soyuz rockets. After losing $230 million in the process, the company was forced to abruptly shift gears, and is now on track to launch its first batch of satellites since early 2022 on an Indian SLV-3 rocket. One of at least two SpaceX Falcon 9 missions could follow as early as December 2022. Unless Ariane 6 aces its launch debut in the near future, many more European payloads could find themselves in similar positions in 2023 and 2024.
Meanwhile, several other European-made payloads are preparing for Falcon 9 launches. While these payloads have been assigned to SpaceX rockets from the start, they still demonstrate just how big of a bite the US startup has taken out of the European launch industry. Most recently, the joint NASA-ESA-CSA Surface Water and Ocean Topography (SWOT) spacecraft was flown from France to California on October 17th. Falcon 9 will launch SWOT from the California coast as early as December 2022.
Soon, Japanese startup ispace’s first HAKUTO-R Moon lander – largely assembled, tested, and propellant by France’s ArianeGroup – will be transported from Germany to Florida for a November 2022 SpaceX launch. Germany’s second and third SARah radar satellites could head to the US shortly for a Falcon 9 launch tentatively scheduled as early as the final days of 2022 or early 2023. Finally, SpaceX could complete its first OneWeb launch around the same time.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is now the centerpiece of the company’s newly revised Referral Program, which launched on October 29.
Instead of referring people to purchase vehicles and the referrer receiving $250 in Tesla Credit, the new program now incentivizes Full Self-Driving subscriptions.
If a Tesla owner is on an FSD trial and uses a referral code to subscribe to Full Self-Driving, the person whose Referral Link was used will receive one month of FSD (Supervised). Their code can be utilized 12 times per year, with January 1 marking the reset date.
Realistically, this means that if your Referral Code is used by 12 Tesla owners on an FSD trial, you will receive a full year of FSD for free.
🚨 Here is Tesla’s new Referral Program for Full Self-Driving (Supervised):
When someone subscribes to FSD using your link, you’ll get a month free. Up to a year of FSD is available to you for free!
If you’d like to use my link: https://t.co/g00IX9OCE3 https://t.co/GFBzEO2jjS
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 30, 2026
The previous program made it pretty difficult to get referrals; buying a vehicle is obviously a much larger financial strain than subscribing to Full Self-Driving for a month.
Of course, the previous Referral Program also offered a tangible benefit: $250 in credits you could use on Service, Supercharging, or anything in the Tesla Shop. It truly could pay for someone’s travel for a year. It recently bought me a new backpack and a T-shirt.
However, this new program is much more attainable for those who do not have a massive online presence of a slew of friends in the Tesla community who will use the code and max out subscriptions for vehicle purchases.
Woke up to maxed out Referrals! Thank you guys, that’s awesome!
Share your referral link below so others can use it! https://t.co/kesbwTcoTV
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 30, 2026
The Full Self-Driving suite will now be the keystone of the Referral Program, which makes it more inclusive and more fun for everyone with an awesome benefit.
It also gives the impression that Tesla is truly focused on FSD subscriptions, something that saw a tremendous increase in volume in Q3, as 75 percent of deliveries for the quarter came with an FSD subscription attached.
Full Self-Driving data is so instrumental to the suite’s improvement that this kind of program benefits Tesla as much as it does the consumer.
Elon Musk
Tesla made napping in a Robotaxi easier with its latest update
Tesla’s quiet mode reaches Model Y Robotaxis, blacking out the screen for riders wanting rest.
Tesla’s quiet mode, the setting that blacks out the screen for riders who want to rest, has moved beyond the Cybercab. A video posted Thursday by Spencer (@scotsrule08) shows the feature running in a Model Y Robotaxi on a night ride that appears to be in Dallas.
New quiet mode now on @Robotaxi https://t.co/2cM2eM9NeN — Spencer (@scotsrule08) October 29, 2026
The rider taps a small crescent moon icon in the bottom right corner of the map screen. The map, media player, app shortcuts and Grok prompt disappear, leaving a dark display with “Arriving soon,” the destination and a line reading “Tap display to exit quiet mode.” Controls a passenger may still need, including Pull Over, cabin temperature, volume and Support, stay visible. One tap anywhere brings the full map back.
Quiet mode first showed up in the Cybercab last week, which Teslarati reported alongside a new rear camera view. Tesla has been trimming cabin noise in other ways too. On October 25, Spencer reported that Robotaxi turn signals now chime for the first four blinks and then go silent. Tesla has not published release notes for either change.
Elon Musk has been pitching this use for more than a decade. In October 2014, he said that “maybe five or six years from now I think we’ll be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination,”
By 2017 he was setting a higher bar. Speaking at TED, Musk said the hard part was not making self-driving work 99.9 percent of the time, “because, like, if a car crashes one in a thousand times, then you’re probably still not going to be comfortable falling asleep. You shouldn’t be, certainly.”
Owners asked for something similar in their own cars. In December 2019, a Tesla owner requested a Nap Mode that would keep the climate running and wake the occupant with an alarm, and Musk answered “Ok,” as Teslarati covered at the time.
The line returned when the Cybercab was unveiled at the We, Robot event in October 2024. “We’ll move from supervised Full Self-Driving to unsupervised Full Self-Driving, where you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination,” Musk said. On Tesla’s first quarter earnings call in April 2025, he called it the deciding measure: “The acid test is, can you go to sleep in your car and wake up in your destination and I’m confident that will be available in many cities in the US by the end of this year,”
Tesla has run driverless Model Y rides in Dallas and Houston since April, so a passenger dozing off on the way home is now a realistic use of the button. Tesla is also offering new riders a free first trip in both cities, according to an in-app screen shared by tracker Ethan McKanna, and said on its third quarter call that Cybercab rides would launch in Dallas next month.
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FCC green lights SpaceX’s move to a showdown with Verizon and AT&T
The FCC advanced plans opening 482 MHz to satellite phone service, boosting SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile.
The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to move forward with a proposal that would open an additional 482 MHz of spectrum to satellite service beamed directly to ordinary phones, a step that could widen the road for SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile to compete with the country’s largest wireless carriers.
The commission adopted the notice of proposed rulemaking at its October open meeting in Washington, Reuters reported. The proposal would raise the number of bands eligible for Supplemental Coverage from Space from five to 13, according to the FCC fact sheet. Commissioners also advanced a companion item proposing an auction of 25 MHz in the 1675 to 1695 MHz and 2020 to 2025 MHz bands, which could be used for terrestrial service, direct to device service or both.
Thursday’s vote does not hand any spectrum to SpaceX. It opens a public comment period, and final rules will come later. Under the draft, comments would be due 60 days after the notice is published in the Federal Register. The FCC had not released the adopted text at the time of writing, so it is not yet clear whether any bands were changed before the vote.
That question is where the fight now moves. AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, through industry group CTIA, asked the FCC to drop the 2.5 GHz and 3.45 GHz bands, which make up 290 MHz of the 482 MHz on the table, as Teslarati reported ahead of the vote. T-Mobile argued satellite interference could wipe out up to 96% of a cell site’s uplink coverage area. SpaceX asked the commission to go the other way and add the 902 to 928 MHz band.
The rule change that matters most to SpaceX may be a structural one. Today, a satellite operator must lease spectrum from every carrier holding co-channel licenses across an entire region such as the contiguous United States. The proposal would replace that with a certification that the operator has coexistence agreements covering only the areas it plans to serve, or that it holds the terrestrial licenses itself.
SpaceX has spent this year building that second path. It bought EchoStar’s AWS-4 and H-block licenses in a deal worth roughly $17 billion, and earlier this month agreed to acquire Grain Management’s nationwide 800 MHz portfolio, which the company said would pave the way for Starlink to become a major US mobile carrier. The FCC approved SpaceX’s purchase of three unused AWS-3 licenses from Tristar on October 21, and cleared its plan for 15,000 next generation direct to cell satellites on October 6.
The regulator has not always sided with SpaceX. In April, the FCC dismissed a SpaceX petition seeking access to Mobile Satellite Service spectrum held by incumbents, and it rejected 2.5 GHz for satellite coverage when it first adopted the framework in 2024.
The carriers are also building their own defenses. In May, the three companies agreed in principle to form a joint venture pooling spectrum for satellite service, and T-Mobile remains SpaceX’s US launch partner for Starlink Mobile even as it leads the push to keep satellites out of 2.5 GHz. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has said service on SpaceX’s own airwaves is targeted for early 2028.
Tesla Full Self-Driving becomes main pillar of new Referral Program
Tesla made napping in a Robotaxi easier with its latest update
