News
SpaceX customer iSpace updates Falcon 9-launched Moon lander, rover plans
Japanese commercial space company iSpace has provided an updated schedule for its first private missions to the Moon, both set to launch on Falcon 9 rockets and land on the Moon as early as 2021 and 2023.
iSpace’s goal is to understand and map lunar resources (particularly water ice) and eventually gather and process those materials into resources that could help enable far more ambitious lunar exploration, up to and including a partially self-sustaining lunar outpost capable of supporting astronauts. Known as Hakuto-R (“white rabbit” reboot), iSpace began as a team pursuing the Google Lunar XPRIZE before its cancelation in 2018 after several postponements pushed competing teams well past the prize deadline.
We also announced an updated mission schedule for the HAKUTO-R Program. We will perform a lunar landing in 2021 and a lunar landing and rover deployment in 2023. https://t.co/jGaZ3eqRRE— HAKUTO-R (@HAKUTO_Reboot_e) August 22, 2019
Despite the death of the Lunar XPRIZE, iSpace managed to not only survive but thrive in a more entrepreneurial environment. The company managed to convince several major investors of the potential value of commercial space exploration and became one of a select few spaceflight startups – certainly the only space resources startup – that has raised almost $100 million.
Relative to similar startups Planetary Resources (purchased by a blockchain company; effectively dead) and Deep Space Industries (acquired by Bradford Space), iSpace is in an unprecedentedly healthy position to realize its space resource ambitions.
NewSpace, OldProblems
One could likely climb to the Moon with nothing more than a printed stack of all the studies, analyses, white papers, and hollow promises ever published on the utilization of space-based resources, an ode to the simultaneous promise and pitfalls the idea poses. As many have discovered, developing the ability to acquire, refine, and sell space resources is one of the most long-lead problems in existence. Put another way, funding a space exploration company on the promise of (or income from) space resources is a bit like paying for a solid-gold ladder by selling the fruit you needed it to reach.
For such an enterprise to make economical sense, one must either have access to ladders that are cheaper than their weight in gold or be able to sell the harvested fruit at breathtaking premiums. The point of this analogy is to illustrate just how challenging, expensive, and immature deep space exploration is relative to the possible resources currently within its grasp. There is also a bit of a circular aspect to space resource utilization: to sell the resources at the extreme premiums needed to sustain their existence, there must be some sort of established market for those resources – ready to purchase them the moment they’re available.
To build a market on space resources, one must already possess space resources to sell. This is the exact thing that government space agencies like NASA should develop, but entrenched and greedy corporate interests have effectively neutered NASA’s ability to develop technology that might transcend the need for giant, ultra-expensive, expendable rockets.
The need to secure funding via investors – investors expecting some sort of return – is the biggest roadblock to space resource utilization. Really, the only conceivable way to sustainably raise funding for space resource acquisition is to already have a functional and sustainable company as a base. SpaceX is a prime example: the company hopes to fund the development of a sustainable city on Mars with income from its launch business and Starlink internet constellation.
Ambitious plans, solid funding
Given all of the above, it’s extremely impressive that iSpace has managed to raise nearly $100M in just a few years and has done so without the involvement of one or several ultra-wealthy angel investors. Of course, it must still be acknowledged that the cost of iSpace’s longer-term ambitions can easily be measured in the tens of billions of dollars, but given an extremely lean operation and rapid success, $100M could plausibly fund at least one or two serious lunar landing attempts.
In the realm of flight tests, iSpace previously planned to perform a demonstration launch in 2020, in which a simplified lander would be used to orbit the Moon but not land. In the last year or so, the company has decided to entirely forgo that orbital test flight and instead plans to attempt a Moon landing on its first orbital flight, scheduled to launch on Falcon 9 no earlier than (NET) 2021. If successful, this inaugural landing would be followed as few as two years later (2023) by a lander and a lunar rover. Assuming a successful second landing, iSpace would move to ramp its production rates, launch cadence, and general ambitions, prospecting all over the Moon in 5-10+ separate lander missions.
iSpace will still face the brick wall that all space resource companies eventually run into. Even if the company can successfully demonstrate a Moon landing and resource prospecting, it will need additional funding (and thus a commercially sustainable plan to sell investors on) to continue work and eventually, just maybe, get to a point where selling space-based resources can become a sustainable source of income.
Regardless of iSpace’s long-term business strategy, the early 2020s will be jam-packed with attempted commercial lunar landings, including Hakuto-R, Astrobotic, Intuitive Machines, and perhaps several other companies’ attempts. By all appearances, the exceptional mix of high performance and low cost offered by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket will serve as a major enabler, allowing companies to put most of their funding into their landers instead of launch costs.
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Tesla has spent years trying to engineer its way out of the automotive paint shop, one of the most expensive, space-consuming, and environmentally costly steps in vehicle manufacturing. With the Cybercab, Tesla confirmed on X this week that a new reaction injection molding process will embed color directly into the panel itself during production.
“Our new reaction injection molding (RIM) process shrinks Cybercab paint cycles from hours to minutes. This cuts those parts’ manufacturing and supply chain emissions by 35% and eliminating 100% of paint volatile organic compounds (VOCs) emitted in traditional paint methods.” noted Tesla.
While the RIM process isn’t necessarily new and has existed since the 1960s, what makes Tesla’s application notable is how it is being used specifically for exterior body panels that traditionally required a separate paint process after forming.
Tesla’s RIM approach integrates the color directly into the panel material during the molding process itself. The pigment is part of the polymer mix injected into the mold, meaning the panel comes out of the mold already colored, with no separate paint application required. The clear coat or protective layer can be applied at the mold stage or through a much faster post-process than traditional multi-stage painting. Tesla claims this compresses what was a multi-hour paint cycle into minutes per panel.
Tesla’s obsession with killing the paint shop is one of the most consistent threads running through the company’s manufacturing philosophy going back years. As far back as 2018, Musk was trimming paint color options to simplify production, tweeting at the time: “Moving 2 of 7 Tesla colors off menu on Wednesday to simplify manufacturing.” Two years later, in a 2020 Automotive News interview, Musk laid out his broader vision, saying he believed Tesla factories could one day be 1,000 times more efficient than conventional plants, and pointing to the paint shop as one of the biggest sources of waste, cost, and complexity. The Cybertruck was the most extreme expression of that thinking. Tesla chose an unpainted stainless steel exterior partly because it would eliminate the need for a $200 million paint facility at Gigafactory Texas. The stainless approach proved harder and more expensive than anticipated, but the underlying ambition never changed. The Cybercab is what happens when that same ambition meets a manufacturing process that delivers on it.
Lifestyle
Tesla app update makes Robotaxi ownership make a lot more sense
Tesla’s app now shows a live indicator when your car is actively driving itself.
A recent Tesla app update, released last week (4.58.5), gives visibility on whether a vehicle is navigating in its semi-autonomous mode or being drive by a human driver. The updated app now displays a live “Self-Driving” indicator in bright blue text directly beneath the vehicle’s speed readout whenever Full Self-Driving is actively engaged, along with the signature glowing blue navigation path that FSD users see on the main touchscreen. It is a small visual update with meaningful implications for how Tesla owners monitor their vehicles remotely.
The feature was first spotted in the wild by X user Jordan Camina, who shared video of a Hardware 3 Model S displaying the new animation through the app while driving. That detail is significant because it confirms the update is not limited to newer HW4 vehicles. It works across hardware generations, and Tesla confirmed it will eventually support all vehicles regardless of chip platform once both the app and vehicle software are updated. The vehicle side requires software version 2026.20.6.1, which has reached nearly 40% of the fleet so far, as monitored by NotaTeslaApp.
The feature makes the most practical sense when viewed through the lens of Tesla’s expanding robotaxi operation. In a robotaxi context, the owner of a vehicle generating ride revenue has a direct financial and safety interest in knowing whether their car is operating under autonomous control at any given moment. The app’s new FSD indicator gives fleet owners exactly that visibility, the same way a logistics company monitors whether a delivery driver is following the planned route. It also carries implications for Tesla’s insurance model. Tesla’s own insurance product prices premiums in part based on FSD engagement rates, and real-time visibility into when FSD is active creates a feedback loop that could eventually tie directly into policy pricing. For individual owners who have opted their personal vehicles into the robotaxi network, the update effectively turns the Tesla app into a fleet management dashboard, one that tells you whether your car is earning money, whether it is driving itself to do it, and whether everything is operating the way it should from wherever you happen to be.
Tesla expands Robotaxi to Florida, marking its third state for autonomy
As Teslarati has reported, Tesla launched unsupervised robotaxi rides in Miami this summer, a milestone that makes a remote FSD status indicator significantly more practical than a cosmetic feature. When a vehicle is operating as a robotaxi without a driver present, the owner or fleet operator needs a reliable way to confirm autonomy is engaged. The app now provides exactly that.
As noted by NotATeslaApp, The update also arrived alongside a hint buried in the same app version that Tesla plans to use the cabin camera to verify driver identity before FSD can be activated. Pairing identity verification with a live autonomy status indicator points toward the infrastructure Tesla is building for a fleet of driverless vehicles that owners can monitor the way you would track a package delivery.
Elon Musk
California snubs Tesla in its newly passed EV incentive that favors Rivian and Lucid
California passed a $135 million EV incentive that rewards Rivian and Lucid while sidelining Tesla
California just drew a line in the EV incentive sand to put Tesla on the wrong side of it. The state recently passed a $135 million program offering first-time electric vehicle buyers a direct incentive with no application required, but the rules were written in a way that leaves Tesla at a structural disadvantage compared to Rivian and Lucid.
The program caps eligible vehicles at $50,000 for new EVs and $25,000 for used ones. That pricing threshold rules out a significant portion of Tesla’s lineup, though some lower-priced Model 3 and Model Y configurations would still qualify. California-based automakers are exempt from the price cap entirely, regardless of what their vehicles cost. Rivian, headquartered in Irvine, and Lucid, based in the San Francisco Bay Area, both benefit from that exemption. Rivian’s R2 starts at roughly $45,000 but has versions above the cap. Lucid’s Air and Gravity start at $70,990 and $79,990 respectively, well above any threshold a non-California company would face.
California hits Tesla Cybercab and Robotaxi driverless cars with new law
Tesla built its reputation and a significant portion of its early market share in California, where EV adoption has consistently led the nation. The company operates its original factory in Fremont, California, and the state was home to Tesla’s headquarters for most of its existence. That changed in 2021 when Tesla moved its corporate headquarters to Austin, Texas. Since then, the relationship between the company and California Governor Gavin Newsom has been openly adversarial, with Musk and Newsom trading public criticism on multiple occasions.
California’s EV incentive landscape has shifted repeatedly in recent years, and Tesla has previously lost eligibility for state-level programs as its vehicles exceeded income-adjusted price thresholds. The federal $7,500 EV tax credit, which Tesla models have qualified for and lost depending on policy cycles, is no longer available after it expired without renewal, making state-level programs more meaningful to buyers than they have been in years.
The practical impact for buyers is more nuanced than the headline suggests. California residents purchasing a Tesla under $50,000 for the first time can still access the incentive. But the exemption written for California-based manufacturers is a structural advantage that rewards where a company plants its headquarters flag rather than where it builds its products, and Tesla moved that flag to Texas.
The secret behind Tesla’s Cybercab Gold goes well beyond just the color
Tesla app update makes Robotaxi ownership make a lot more sense
