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NASA snubbed SpaceX, common sense to overpay Boeing for astronaut launches, says audit
A detailed government audit has revealed that NASA went out of its way to overpay Boeing for its Commercial Crew Program (CCP) astronaut launch services, making a mockery of its fixed-price contract with the company and blatantly snubbing SpaceX throughout the process.
Over the last several years, the NASA inspector general has published a number of increasingly discouraging reports about Boeing’s behavior and track-record as a NASA contractor, and November 14th’s report is possibly the most concerning yet. On November 14th, NASA’s Office of the Inspector General (OIG) published a damning audit titled “NASA’s Management of Crew Transportation to the International Space Station [ISS]” (PDF).
Offering more than 50 pages of detailed analysis of behavior that was at best inept and at worst deeply corrupt, OIG’s analysis uncovered some uncomfortable revelations about NASA’s relationship with Boeing in a different realm than usual: NASA’s Commercial Crew Program (CCP). Begun in the 2010s in an effort to develop multiple redundant commercial alternatives to the Space Shuttle, prematurely canceled before a US alternative was even on the horizon, the CCP ultimately awarded SpaceX and Boeing major development contracts in September 2014.
NASA awarded fixed-cost contracts worth $4.2 billion and $2.6 billion to Boeing and SpaceX, respectively, to essentially accomplish the same goals: design, build, test, and fly new spacecraft capable of transporting NASA astronauts to and from the International Space Station (ISS). The intention behind fixed-price contracts was to hold contractors responsible for any delays they might incur over the development of human-rated spacecraft, a task NASA acknowledged as challenging but far from unprecedented.
Off the rails
The most likely trigger of the bizarre events that would unfold a few years down the road began in part on June 28th, 2015 and culminated on September 1st, 2016, the dates of the two catastrophic failures SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has suffered since its 2010 debut. In the most generous possible interpretation of the OIG’s findings, NASA headquarters and CCP managers may have been shaken and not thinking on an even keel after SpaceX’s second major failure in a little over a year.
Under this stress, the agency may have ignored common sense and basic contracting due-diligence, leading “numerous officials” to sign off on a plan that would subvert Boeing’s fixed-price contract, paying the company an additional $287 million (~7%) to prevent a perceived gap in NASA astronaut access to the ISS. This likely arose because NASA briefly believed that SpaceX’s failures could cause multiple years of delays, making Boeing the only available crew transport provider for a significant period of time. Starliner was already delayed by more than a year, making it increasingly unlikely that Boeing alone would be able to ensure continuous NASA access to the ISS.
As NASA attempted to argue in its response to the audit, “the final price [increase] was agreed to by NASA and Boeing and was reviewed and approved by numerous NASA officials at the Kennedy Space Center and Headquarters”. In the heat of the moment, perhaps those officials forgot that Boeing had already purchased several Russian Soyuz seats to sell to NASA or tourists, and perhaps those officials missed the simple fact that those seats and some elementary schedule tweaks could have almost entirely alleviated the perceived “access gap” with minimal cost and effort.
The OIG audit further implied that the timing of a Boeing proposal – submitted just days after NASA agreed to pay the company extra to prevent that access gap – was suspect.
“Five days after NASA committed to pay $287.2 million in price increases for four commercial crew missions, Boeing submitted an official proposal to sell NASA up to five Soyuz seats for $373.5 million for missions during the same time period. In total, Boeing received $660.7 million above the fixed prices set in the CCtCap pricing tables to pay for an accelerated production timetable for four crew missions and five Soyuz seats.”
NASA OIG — November 14th, 2019 [PDF]
In other words, NASA officials somehow failed to realize or remember that Boeing owned multiple Soyuz seats during “prolonged negotiations” (p. 24) with Boeing and subsequently awarded Boeing an additional $287M to expedite Starliner production and preparations, thus averting an access gap. The very next week, Boeing asked NASA if it wanted to buy five Soyuz seats it had already acquired to send NASA astronauts to the ISS.
Bluntly speaking, this series of events has three obvious explanations, none of them particularly reassuring.
- Boeing intentionally withheld an obvious (partial) solution to a perceived gap in astronaut access to the ISS, exploiting NASA’s panic to extract a ~7% premium from its otherwise fixed-price Starliner development contract.
- Through gross negligence and a lack of basic contracting due-diligence, NASA ignored obvious (and cheaper) possible solutions at hand, taking Boeing’s word for granted and opening up the piggy bank.
- A farcical ‘crew access analysis’ study ignored multiple obvious and preferable solutions to give “numerous NASA officials” an excuse to violate fixed-price contracting principles and pay Boeing a substantial premium.
Extortion with a friendly smile
The latter explanation, while possibly the worst and most corruption-laden, is arguably the likeliest choice based on the history of NASA’s relationship with Boeing. In fact, a July 2019 report from the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) revealed that NASA was consistently paying Boeing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of “award fees” as part of the company’s SLS booster (core stage) production contract, which is no less than four years behind schedule and $1.8 billion over budget. From 2014 to 2018, NASA awarded Boeing a total of $271M in award fees, a practice meant to award a given contractor’s excellent performance.
In several of those years, NASA reviews reportedly described Boeing’s performance as “good”, “very good”, and “excellent”, all while Boeing repeatedly fumbled SLS core stage production, adding years of delays to the SLS rocket’s launch debut. This is to say that “numerous NASA officials” were also presumably more than happy to give Boeing hundreds of millions of dollars in awards even as the company was and is clearly a big reason why the SLS program continues to fail to deliver.
Ultimately, although NASA’s concern about SpaceX’s back-to-back Falcon 9 failures and some combination of ineptitude, ignorance, and corruption all clearly played a role, the fact remains that NASA – according to the inspector general – never approached SpaceX as part of their 2016/2017 efforts to prevent a ‘crew access gap’. Given that the CCP has two partners, that decision was highly improper regardless of the circumstances and is made even more inexplicable by the fact that NASA was apparently well aware that SpaceX’s Crew Dragon had significantly shorter lead times and far lower costs compared to Starliner.
This would have meant that had NASA approached SpaceX to attempt to mitigate the access gap, SpaceX could have almost certainly done it significantly cheaper and faster, or at minimum injected a bit of good-faith competition into the endeavor.
Finally and perhaps most disturbingly of all, NASA OIG investigators were told by “several NASA officials” that – in spite of several preferable alternatives – they ultimately chose to sign off Boeing’s demanded price increases because they were worried that Boeing would quit the Commercial Crew Program entirely without it. Boeing and NASA unsurprisingly denied this in their official responses to the OIG audit, but a US government inspector generally would never publish such a claim without substantial confidence and plenty of evidence to support it.
According to OIG sources, “senior CCP officials believed that due to financial considerations, Boeing could not continue as a commercial crew provider unless the contractor received the higher prices.” A lot remains unsaid, like why those officials believed that Boeing’s full withdrawal from CCP was a serious possibility and how they came to that conclusion, enough to make it impossible to conclude that Boeing legitimately threatened to quit in lieu of NASA payments.
All things considered, these fairly damning revelations should by no means take away from the excellent work Boeing engineers and technicians are trying to do to design, build, and launch Starliner. However, they do serve to draw a fine line between the mindsets and motivations of Boeing and SpaceX. One puts profit, shareholders, and itself above all else, while the other is trying hard to lower the cost of spaceflight and enable a sustainable human presence on the Moon, Mars, and beyond.
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Elon Musk
Tesla’s Q1 delivery figures show Elon Musk was right
On the surface, the numbers reflect a mature EV market facing competition, softening demand, and the loss of certain incentives. Yet they also quietly validate a prediction Elon Musk has repeated for years: Tesla’s traditional auto business is becoming far less central to the company’s future.
Tesla reported its Q1 delivery figures on Thursday, and the figures — solid but unspectacular — show that CEO Elon Musk was right about what the company’s most important production and division would be.
We are seeing that shift occur in real time.
Tesla delivered 358,023 vehicles in the first quarter of 2026, according to the company’s official report released April 2.
The figure represents modest year-over-year growth of roughly 6 percent from Q1 2025’s 336,681 deliveries but a sharp sequential drop from Q4 2025’s 418,227. Production reached 408,386 vehicles, while energy storage deployments hit 8.8 GWh.
On the surface, the numbers reflect a mature EV market facing competition, softening demand, and the loss of certain incentives. Yet they also quietly validate a prediction Elon Musk has repeated for years: Tesla’s traditional auto business is becoming far less central to the company’s future.
Musk has long argued that vehicles alone will not define Tesla’s value.
Optimus Will Be Tesla’s Big Thing
In September 2025, Musk stated bluntly on X that “~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus,” the company’s humanoid robot.
He has described Optimus as potentially “more significant than the vehicle business over time.” Those comments were not abstract futurism. In January 2026, during the Q4 2025 earnings call, Musk announced the end of Model S and X production, framing it as an “honorable discharge,” he called it.
Those are the biggest factors.
~80% of Tesla’s value will be Optimus.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) September 1, 2025
The Fremont factory space, once dedicated to those flagship sedans, is being converted into an Optimus manufacturing line, with a long-term target of one million robots per year from that single facility alone.
The Q1 2026 numbers arrive at precisely the moment this strategic pivot is accelerating. Model 3 and Y deliveries totaled 341,893 units, while “other models” (including Cybertruck, Semi, and the final wave of S/X) added 16,130.
Growth is no longer explosive because Tesla is no longer chasing volume at all costs. Instead, the company is reallocating capital and factory floor space toward autonomy, energy storage, and robotics, businesses Musk believes will command far higher margins and enterprise value than incremental car sales.
Delivery Hits and Misses are Becoming Less Important
Wall Street’s pre-release consensus had pegged deliveries near 365,000. Coming in below that estimate might have rattled investors focused solely on automotive metrics. Yet Musk’s thesis has never been about maximizing quarterly vehicle shipments.
Tesla, he has insisted, “has never been valued strictly as a car company.”
The modest Q1 auto performance, paired with the deliberate wind-down of legacy programs and the ramp of Optimus, underscores that point. While EV demand stabilizes, Tesla is building the infrastructure for Robotaxis and humanoid robots that could dwarf today’s car business.
The future is here, and it is happening. It’s funny to think about how quickly Tesla was able to disrupt the traditional automotive business and force many car companies to show their hand. But just as fast as Tesla disrupted that, it is now moving to disrupt its own operation.
Cars, once the only recognizable and widely-known division of Tesla, is now becoming a background effort, slowly being overtaken by the company’s ambitions to dominate AI, autonomy, and robotics for years to come.
Critics may still view the shift as risky or premature. But the Q1 figures, solid but unspectacular in the auto segment, illustrate exactly what Musk has been signaling: the era when Tesla’s valuation rose and fell with every Model Y delivery is ending.
The company’s long-term bet is on AI-driven products that turn vehicles into high-margin robotaxis and factories into robot foundries. Thursday’s delivery report did not just meet the market’s tempered expectations; it proved Elon Musk was right all along.
The car business, once everything, is quietly becoming an important piece of a much larger puzzle.
Investor's Corner
Tesla reports Q1 deliveries, missing expectations slightly
The figure, however, fell short of Wall Street’s consensus estimate of 365,645 units, reflecting ongoing headwinds in the global EV market.
Tesla reported deliveries for the first quarter of 2026 today, missing expectations set by Wall Street analysts slightly as the company aims to have a massive year in terms of sales, along with other projects.
Tesla delivered 358,023 vehicles in the first quarter of 2026, marking a 6.3 percent increase from 336,681 vehicles in Q1 2025.
The figure, however, fell short of Wall Street’s consensus estimate of 365,645 units, reflecting ongoing headwinds in the global EV market. Production reached approximately 362,000 vehicles, with Model 3 and Model Y accounting for the vast majority. The results come as Tesla navigates softening demand, intensifying competition in China and Europe, and the expiration of key U.S. federal tax incentives.
🚨 BREAKING: Tesla delivered 358,023 vehicles in Q1 2026
Tesla also reported record energy deployments of 8.8 GWh
Wall Street had delivery consensus estimates of 365,645 pic.twitter.com/EVNAu5L3UT
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 2, 2026
Energy storage deployments provided a bright spot, hitting a record 8.8 GWh in Q1. This underscores the accelerating momentum in Tesla’s energy segment, which has become a critical growth driver even as automotive volumes stabilize.
Year-over-year, the energy business continues to outpace vehicle sales, with analysts noting strong backlog demand for Megapack systems amid rising grid-scale needs for renewables and AI data centers.
Looking ahead, analysts project full-year 2026 vehicle deliveries in the range of 1.69 million units—a modest 3-5% rise from roughly 1.64 million in 2025.
Growth is expected to accelerate in the second half as production ramps and new incentives emerge in select markets. However, risks remain: persistent high interest rates, price competition from legacy automakers and Chinese EV makers, and potential margin pressure could cap upside.
Tesla has not issued official full-year guidance, but executives have signaled confidence in sequential quarterly improvements driven by cost reductions and refreshed lineups.
By the end of 2026, Tesla plans several major product launches to reignite momentum. The refreshed Model Y, including a new 7-seater variant already rolling out in select markets, is expected to boost family-oriented sales with updated styling, efficiency gains, and interior enhancements.
Autonomous ambitions remain central to Tesla’s mission, and that’s where the vast majority of the attention has been put. Volume production of the Cybercab (Robotaxi) is targeted to begin ramping in 2026, potentially unlocking new revenue streams through unsupervised Full Self-Driving (FSD) deployment.
A next-generation affordable EV platform, possibly under $30,000, is also in advanced planning stages for 2026 or 2027 introduction. On the energy front, the Megapack 3 and larger Megablock systems will drive further deployment scale.
While Q1 highlights transitional challenges in autos, Tesla’s diversified roadmap, spanning refreshed consumer vehicles, commercial trucks, Robotaxis, and explosive energy growth, positions the company for a stronger second half and beyond. Investors will watch Q2 closely for signs of sustained recovery, especially with new vehicles potentially on the horizon.
Elon Musk
NASA sends humans to the Moon for the first time since 1972 – Here’s what’s next
NASA’s Artemis II launched four astronauts toward the Moon on the first crewed lunar mission since 1972.
NASA’s Space Launch System rocket launches carrying the Orion spacecraft with NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, commander; Victor Glover, pilot; Christina Koch, mission specialist; and CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen, mission specialist on NASA’s Artemis II mission, Wednesday, April 1, 2026, from Operations and Support Building II at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. NASA’s Artemis II mission will take Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen on a 10-day journey around the Moon and back aboard SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft launched at 6:35pm EDT from Launch Complex 39B. (NASA/Bill Ingalls)
NASA launched four astronauts toward the Moon on April 1, 2026, marking the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 in December 1972. The Artemis II mission lifted off from Kennedy Space Center aboard the Space Launch System rocket at 6:35 p.m. EDT, sending commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, mission specialist Christina Koch, and Canadian astronaut Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day journey around the far side of the Moon and back.
The mission does not include a lunar landing. It is a test flight designed to validate the Orion spacecraft’s life support systems, navigation, and communications in deep space with a crew aboard for the first time. If the crew reaches the planned distance of 252,000 miles from Earth, they will set a new record for the farthest any human has ever traveled, surpassing even the Apollo 13 distance record.
As Teslarati reported, SpaceX holds a central role in what comes next. The Starship Human Landing System is under contract to carry astronauts to the lunar surface for Artemis IV, now targeting 2028, after NASA restructured its mission sequence due to delays in Starship’s orbital refueling demonstration. Before any Moon landing happens, SpaceX must prove it can transfer propellant between two Starships in orbit, something no rocket program has done at this scale.
The last time humans left Earth’s orbit was 53 years ago. Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt of Apollo 17 were the final people to walk on the Moon, a record that stands to this day. Elon Musk has long argued that returning is not optional. “It’s been now almost half a century since humans were last on the Moon,” Musk said. “That’s too long, we need to get back there and have a permanent base on the Moon.”
The Artemis program involves 60 countries signed onto the Artemis Accords, and this mission sets several firsts beyond distance. Glover becomes the first person of color to travel beyond low Earth orbit, Koch the first woman, and Hansen the first non-American astronaut to reach the Moon’s vicinity. According to NASA’s live mission updates, the spacecraft’s solar arrays deployed successfully after liftoff and the crew completed a proximity operations demonstration within the first hours of flight.
Artemis II is step one. The Moon landing and the permanent lunar base come later. But after more than five decades, humans are heading back.
Tesla’s Q1 delivery figures show Elon Musk was right
Tesla reports Q1 deliveries, missing expectations slightly
NASA sends humans to the Moon for the first time since 1972 – Here’s what’s next
Elon Musk says Tesla is developing a new vehicle: ‘Way cooler than a minivan’
Elon Musk launches TERAFAB: The $25B Tesla-SpaceXAI chip factory that will rewire the AI industry
