News
SpaceX gears up for busiest April yet
SpaceX says it’s finished encapsulating 40 spacecraft inside a Falcon 9 rocket’s payload fairing, paving the way for the company’s fourth Transporter rideshare mission early next month.
Scheduled to lift off no earlier than 12:24 pm EDT (16:24 UTC) on Friday, April 1st, Transporter-4 will be the first of as many as six Falcon 9 launches in April. In fact, SpaceX actually wants to launch all but one of those six missions in the first 19 days of the month – tying its existing cadence record if the company can pull it off.
SpaceX managed to complete a record five orbital Falcon 9 launches in ~18.5 days in December 2021. Including one additional mission in late November, SpaceX actually launched six times in 27 days. The company then nearly repeated that record the very next month, launching six times in 28 days in January and February 2022. SpaceX has yet to literally launch six times in the same month but it’s already more than demonstrated the ability to do so if the timing is right.
April might be that month. Following Transporter-4, SpaceX has two Crew Dragon missions – Axiom-1 with four private astronauts and Crew-4 with four government astronauts – scheduled to launch from Kennedy Space Center Pad 39A on April 6th and April 19th. In the middle, SpaceX intends to launch Starlink 4-14 – the month’s only planned Starlink mission – on April 14th. On April 15th, SpaceX is scheduled to launch the National Reconnaissance Office’s (NRO) NROL-85 spy satellite out of California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base. Finally, SpaceX could launch Egypt’s Nilesat 301 geostationary communications satellite on April 30th.
While it won’t break its internal cadence record, April should continue to demonstrate that five or six launches in one month are increasingly becoming the norm for SpaceX – not just some one-off feat requiring an extraordinary effort. That’s made even more clear by the fact that three of April’s launches will either be carrying humans or military spy satellites – both requiring the utmost care and explicit approval from two of SpaceX’s strictest customers.
Curiously, SpaceX has decided to recover Transporter-4’s Falcon 9 booster at sea despite a relatively small payload of just 40 satellites, likely meaning that the mission will require the rocket’s upper stage to perform at least three or four burns in orbit. One payload in particular – Germany’s EnMAP Earth observation satellite – both weighs far more than any other satellite aboard (~900 kg or ~2000 lb) and will likely take precedence, meaning that it will probably be delivered to a very specific orbit at the end of the mission’s deployment sequence.
Extra burns and longer coasts in orbit require significantly more propellant, which quickly cuts into the unforgiving margins needed for return-to-launch-site (RTLS) Falcon booster landings. In April, only NROL-85 will permit an RTLS landing, meaning that all five other launches will need to share SpaceX’s two East Coast drone ships – not impossible but far from easy. SpaceX’s record drone ship turnaround time is 13 days, while Starlink 4-14 will require a 13-day turnaround and Crew-4 a 14-day turnaround almost simultaneously.
-
Elon Musk is, in many respects, one of the biggest and most influential figures in modern-day artificial intelligence.
Given that Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI are all looked at in their respective fields as leaders to an extent, each of them has a heavy influence on the future of AI, even though two of them are not thought of, at face value, as AI companies.
Musk has grand expectations for what is to come with AI, not only as a form of assistance to make human lives easier, but to make humans multiplanetary and solve some of the biggest issues that face us today. But even he is astounded by AI’s pace of progress.
He believes that in two years, AI will be so mind-blowing it might be unrecognizable.
Given that AI from 2 years ago feels so old that it should be in a museum, then obviously AI 2 years from now will be mind-blowing https://t.co/TcsKZ8o8OE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) July 30, 2026
This progress can be seen in a variety of ways, but perhaps the most popular way people have shown AI’s progress, especially on social media, is through an incredibly arbitrary way of watching Will Smith eat spaghetti:
The progression in AI of Will Smith eating spaghetti (2023 – 2026) pic.twitter.com/VDv82mB5gs
— internet hall of fame (@InternetH0F) February 10, 2026
This is a great way to show people how AI is improving, especially from a perspective that examines how it can manufacture images and video from prompts. AI is an incredibly complex concept, however, and it goes much deeper than Will Smith eating Italian food.
Musk’s most widely adopted method of AI is likely Tesla Full Self-Driving, which impacts millions of people as they utilize it to increase safety with their travel. Musk has routinely pushed incredibly aggressive timelines for self-driving, especially unsupervised.
Perhaps this perspective is why he feels that things will be solved in a timeframe that is much more aggressive than most of us would think. Regardless, the progress of AI is moving fast, and it seems that Musk’s expectations for it could be high.
But if it can actually achieve full-length motion pictures and even more realistic production value, it will be hard to distinguish between reality and AI very soon.
Tesla just officially confirmed it has built its 10 millionth car, a major milestone for the company that started producing sustainable electric powertrains less than two decades ago.
In that time, Tesla has truly revolutionized the automotive industry, disrupting the idea of what a car should be, how it should be fueled, and how it truly impacts day-to-day life.
10 million vehicles produced globally.
Congrats to all Tesla teams! pic.twitter.com/JkcraR63bs— Tesla Manufacturing (@gigafactories) July 30, 2026
Tesla achieved this feat across four production facilities: the Fremont Factory in Fremont, California, Gigafactory Shanghai in China, Gigafactory Berlin in Germany, and Gigafactory Texas in Austin, Texas.
The 10 millionth vehicle was a Diamond Black Model Y.
Over the course of the past roughly 18 years, Tesla has evolved its lineup from a sporty sedan built on a Lotus body to a lineup of various body styles, performance metrics, and other characteristics that make each one unique.
This is an incredible achievement for a company that is young compared to what it goes up against. When Tesla entered the automotive market, Ford, GM, and Stellantis widely dominated the playing field. Since then, Tesla has caused such a disruption that these three massive brands had to scramble to create EV projects of their own.
Despite their best efforts, they have not been able to match the prowess or the effectiveness of Tesla. They are all reliant on Tesla’s charging infrastructure, their software is inferior, and their self-driving projects are elementary in comparison.
Tesla felt its fair share of growing pains over the years as well. As recent at 2019, there were complaints about build quality, paint quality, and overall luxuriousness. These things have all been improved upon through the company’s maturity, and these strides in quality have led to this 10 million vehicle production achievement, something that other small-and-scrappy EV makers will hope to accomplish one day.
SpaceX just picked up another $1.6 billion from the Pentagon, with the U.S. Space Force awarding two task orders worth $1.6 billion to fly 18 Falcon 9 missions from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California through the end of 2027. The launches will carry satellites for the Space Based Sensing and Targeting portfolio, a set of programs meant to help the military detect and track airborne threats and relay that information across forces in near real time.
The award falls under National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1, the Space Force’s faster, commercial style procurement track for missions that do not require the military’s most demanding certification process. It is also the largest single order publicly disclosed under that program so far, and the first task order issued since the Space Force nearly tripled Lane 1’s contract ceiling from $5.6 billion to $17 billion on July 17.
SpaceX to become America’s Military data backbone for missiles, drones, and warfighters
Eric Zarybnisky, the Space Force’s acting portfolio acquisition executive for space access, said the entire process, from identifying the requirement to signing the contract, took about two months, including a month set aside for companies to prepare proposals.
SpaceX is not just launching these satellites. It already holds the contracts to build two of the programs within the same portfolio, $4.16 billion for the Space Based Airborne Moving Target Indicator system and $2.29 billion for the Space Data Network Backbone, which Teslarati covered in May. That means SpaceX is now responsible for both building key pieces of the military’s next generation sensing network and getting them into orbit.
With this latest award, SpaceX’s Pentagon contract total for 2026 alone tops $8 billion, adding to a defense portfolio that already includes the Golden Dome missile defense software group SpaceX joined in April and a string of GPS launches it inherited after ULA’s Vulcan rocket ran into a booster anomaly, which we detailed in March.
Lane 1’s vendor pool technically includes seven companies: SpaceX, ULA, Blue Origin, Rocket Lab, Stoke Space, Impulse Space, and Relativity Space. In practice, SpaceX remains the only provider with the combination of launch cadence, flight proven Falcon 9 hardware, and West Coast infrastructure to support a campaign requiring roughly one Vandenberg launch a month for the next year and a half.
Some lawmakers have flagged the growing concentration of national security launches with one company as a risk worth watching. For now, the Space Force keeps backing SpaceX, with it being the company that shows up ready to launch.
Elon Musk has a crazy prediction about AI in two years
Tesla just built it 10 millionth car
