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SpaceX’s next West Coast Falcon 9 landing could be decided by baby seals
SpaceX and the Canadian Space Agency (CSA) have – at long last – officially announced a launch date for the Radarsat Constellation Mission (RCM), a ~$1B trio of Earth observation satellites.
Delayed from November, February, March, and May, RCM is now scheduled to launch on a flight-proven Falcon 9 booster from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base (VAFB) no earlier than June 11th. The three flight-ready spacecraft were shipped from Canada in September 2018 and have now been awaiting launch in a Southern California storage facility for more than half a year. The blame for such an egregious delay can be largely placed on SpaceX, but CSA and launch customer Maxar Technologies are also partially responsible. On a lighter note, the location of RCM’s subsequent Falcon 9 landing might end up being decided by seal pupping – baby harbor seals, in other words.
Although RCM’s slip from 2018 to 2019 remains unexplained, the mission’s journey from mid-February to mid-June is a different story. Still, next to nothing is publicly known about the process SpaceX launch customers go through after contracts have been signed, particularly with respect to how Falcon boosters are assigned to missions. This is further stymied by the fact that – to date – the ~$1 billion RCM is probably the most valuable payload SpaceX has ever attempted to launch, making it a clear outlier. But, as they say, “damn the epistemological torpedoes!”
Rocket logistics hell
RCM’s logistical hell and ~6 months of delays began on December 5th, 2018 when Falcon 9 Block 5 booster B1050 – having just completed its inaugural launch debut – experienced a hydraulic pump failure. The first of its kind, B1050’s pump failure killed grid fin control authority and forced the booster to abort into the Atlantic Ocean, where it somehow pulled off a landing soft enough to leave the rocket almost entirely intact. Even more surprisingly, B1050 was safely towed back to port, lifted onto dry land, and shipped off to one of SpaceX’s many Florida hangars for inspection.
Despite its near-miraculous survival, B1050 was immediately removed from SpaceX’s fleet of flightworthy boosters. Set to become the least flight-proven flight-proven Block 5 booster yet after supporting a low-energy Cargo Dragon mission, SpaceX and CSA/Maxar had apparently reached an agreement to launch RCM on B1050.2. Despite the availability of other boosters at the time, all available cores had completed two launches (B1046, 47, and 48) or were assigned to a second launch in the near-term (B1049). This is the only rational explanation for the delays that followed.
B1049 completed its second launch in mid-January 2019 and has since floated around various SpaceX facilities while waiting for its third mission. Had CSA/Maxar been okay with a twice-flown Falcon 9, B1049 could have likely supported RCM’s launch as early as March or April. Instead, the customer – as was apparently their right – concluded that being a booster’s third launch would be an unacceptable risk, whereas launching on a once-flown booster was acceptable. The only possible solution to those demands was to manifest RCM on Falcon 9 B1051, assigned to Crew Dragon’s launch debut.
Quite possibly the worst booster one could pick for schedule preservation, Crew Dragon’s launch debut slipped – to the surprise of very few – from January to February and finally to March 3rd. B1051 launched, landed without issue, and returned to Port Canaveral a few days later, where it was transported to Pad 39A for refurbishment. The relatively gently-used booster required a bit less than 8 weeks of inspection and refurbishment before being packaged and shipped to California near the end of April (see above). By now, B1051 is likely safely inside SpaceX’s SLC-4E integration hangar, preparing for upper stage integration and a routine pre-launch static fire test.
In short, an untimely Falcon 9 anomaly and customer preferences conspired to delay the launch of Canada’s Radarsat Constellation Mission by nearly four months, from February 18th to June 11th. With any luck, the mission’s flow will be issue-free and suffer no additional delays.
FCC launch communications licenses currently show that SpaceX plans to return Falcon 9 B1051 to the launch site (RTLS) after launch, rather than landing aboard drone ship Just Read The Instructions (JRTI). With a total launch mass likely around 5000 kg (11,000 lb), Falcon 9 should easily be able to manage a RTLS recovery. However, SpaceX’s West Coast LZ-4 use permit prevents the company from landing rockets at the pad during harbor seal pupping season, typically March thru June. The sonic booms and noise generated during Falcon 9’s spectacular landings might end up stressing endangered harbor seals, potentially causing parents to abandon their seal pups in confusion. As such, JRTI may be forced to get some exercise after spending almost five months in port. Anything for the baby seals!
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Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS – $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues – $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow – $1.444 billion
- Profit – $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
