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Watch SpaceX’s last launch and landing of 2020 live [webcast]
Update: Despite no plans for a preflight static fire, SpaceX remains on track to attempt its last launch and landing of 2020 as early as 9 am EST (14:00 UTC), Thursday, December 17th.
After performing a routine preflight wet dress rehearsal (WDR) and booster static fire prior to every launch since September 2016, SpaceX has gradually begun to loosen the requirement for flight-proven rockets in 2020. Instead, if a prior flight or post-flight inspection reveal issues, static fires will serve more as a data-driven diagnostic tool. For flight-proven boosters with a clean bill of health, so to speak, SpaceX appears to be confident enough to skip the procedure on a few internal Starlink launches and the odd customer mission.
Now, despite NROL-108 begin the NRO’s first direct launch contract with SpaceX and first flight on a flight-proven Falcon 9 rocket of any kind, let alone the four-flight booster assigned to support it, the espionage agency apparently has equal faith in SpaceX. Falcon 9 B1059, a new upper stage and payload fairing, and the unspecified NROL-108 payload(s) went vertical at Kennedy Space Center (KSC) Launch Complex 39A on December 16th – far too late for any WDR or static fire testing prior to an early December 17th launch attempt.
The mission will be SpaceX’s 26th and final launch of 2020 and – barring a major surprise – the last orbital US launch of the year. As usual, SpaceX will broadcast the launch live, with coverage beginning around 15 minutes prior to liftoff (8:45 am EST/UTC-5).
The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) says that SpaceX remains on track to attempt its last Falcon 9 launch and landing of the year after an almost two-month delay.
Originally scheduled to launch as early as October, the secretive orbital espionage agency’s NROL-108 launch plans were quietly revealed in routine communication permission requests filed by SpaceX with the FCC. Unfortunately, those plans came around the same time as a Falcon 9 booster engine issue aborted a SpaceX launch at the last second and forced the company to undergo a quick but extensive anomaly investigation. As it turns out, the Falcon 9 booster assigned to support NROL-108 (B1059) was practically siblings with the three new boosters affected by the investigation.
SpaceX may have had to swap some of the nine Merlin 1D engines on B1059, although a far less likely outcome given that B1059 had successfully completed four launches and landings at that point. Ultimately, while nothing is known for sure, payload-side issues with the NROL-108 satellite(s) are the most likely cause of most of the eight-week delay that followed. Now, confirmed by the NRO on December 14th, SpaceX is scheduled to launch its second mission for the spy agency no earlier than (NET) 9 am to 12 pm EST (14:00-17:00 UTC) on Thursday, December 17th.
For SpaceX, this will be the third time in a single month that a customer has effectively leapfrogged several Falcon 9 booster reuse milestones, once again exhibiting an extreme amount of confidence in the company’s expertise with flight-proven rockets. On December 6th, Falcon 9 booster B1058 lifted off for the fourth time in support of SpaceX’s CRS-21 space station resupply mission for NASA, marking the space agency’s first launch on a twice- or thrice-flown booster.
On December 13th, carrying a large communications satellite for Sirius XM, another Falcon 9 booster lifted off for the seventh time, becoming the first private customer to launch on a five-flight or six-flight SpaceX rocket.
As few as four days after SXM-7, SpaceX is now scheduled to launch the mysterious NROL-108 mission. It will be the first time the NRO has launched a payload on a flight-proven commercial rocket of any kind, as well as its first launch on a two-flight, three-flight, or four-flight booster – by far the biggest numerical leap a SpaceX customer has ever taken. NRO’s first and only SpaceX launch – technically contracted by spacecraft provider Bell Aerospace, not NRO itself – was completed in May 2017.
While less significant, NROL-108 will also be SpaceX’s first US government launch on a four-flight Falcon 9 booster, yet another indication that even its most conservative customers have fully bought into the value and technical viability of reusable rockets.
After launch, Falcon 9 B1059 will flip around and head back towards the Florida coast for a landing at one of SpaceX’s two East Coast Landing Zones. Deploying a minute or so after booster separation, Falcon 9’s two payload fairing halves are expected to splash down some 330 km (~205 mi) downrange, where SpaceX recovery ships GO Search and GO Ms Tree will attempt recovery.
Elon Musk
Ford CEO Farley says Tesla is not who to look at for EV expertise
Interestingly, Farley has been one of the most hellbent CEOs in terms of a legacy automaker standpoint to push the EV effort. It did not go according to plan, as Ford took a $19.5 billion charge and retreated from its EV push in late 2025.
Ford CEO Jim Farley said in a recent podcast interview that Tesla is not who Americans should look at to beat Chinese carmakers.
The comments have sparked quite a bit of outrage from Tesla fans on X, the social media platform owned by Elon Musk.
Farley said that Chinese automakers are better examples of how to beat competitors. He said (via the Rapid Response Podcast):
“If you’re an American and you want us to beat the Chinese in the car business, you’re all going to want to pay attention, not necessarily to Tesla. Nothing against Tesla—they’ve been doing great—but they really don’t have an updated vehicle. The best in the business for us, cost-wise and competition-wise, supply chain, manufacturing expertise, and the I.P. in the vehicle, was really BYD. In this next cycle of EV customers in the U.S., they want pickups and utilities and all these different body styles. But they want them at $30,000, not $50,000. Like the first inning, they want them affordably.”
Despite Farley’s synopsis, it is worth mentioning that Tesla had the best-selling passenger vehicle in the world last year, and in China in March, as the Model Y continued its global dominance over other vehicles.
Musk responded to Farley’s comments by stating:
“This is before Supervised FSD is approved in China. Limiting factor is production output in Shanghai.”
This is before supervised FSD is approved in China. Limiting factor is production output in Shanghai.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 19, 2026
Interestingly, Farley has been one of the most hellbent CEOs in terms of a legacy automaker standpoint to push the EV effort. It did not go according to plan, as Ford took a $19.5 billion charge and retreated from its EV push in late 2025.
Ford cancels all-electric F-150 Lightning, announces $19.5 billion in charges
Instead, Ford is “doubling down on its affordable” EVs and said it would pivot from its previous plans.
Reaction from Tesla fans was pretty much how you would expect. Many said they have lost a lot of respect for Farley after his comments; others believe he is the last CEO anyone should be taking advice on EVs from.
Nevertheless, Farley’s plans are bold and brash; many consider Tesla the most ideal company to replicate EV efforts from. It will be interesting to see if Ford can rebound from this big adjustment, and hopefully, Farley’s plans to replicate efforts from BYD work out the way he hopes.
Elon Musk
SpaceX wins its first MARS contract but it comes with a catch
NASA awarded SpaceX a $175 million Mars rover contract while the White House proposes cutting the mission.
NASA just signed a $175.7 million contract with SpaceX to launch a Mars rover that the White House is simultaneously trying to defund. The contract, awarded on April 16, 2026, tasks SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy with launching the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Rosalind Franklin rover from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, no earlier than late 2028. It would mark the first time SpaceX has ever sent a payload to Mars.
Under NASA’s Rosalind Franklin Support and Augmentation project, known as ROSA, the agency is providing braking engines for the rover’s descent stage, radioisotope heater units that use decaying plutonium to keep the rover warm on the Martian surface, additional electronics, and a mass spectrometer instrument, as noted by SpaceNews.
Those nuclear heating units are the reason an American rocket was required at all. U.S. export controls on radioisotope technology mean any payload carrying them must launch on a domestic vehicle, which narrowed the field to SpaceX and United Launch Alliance. Falcon Heavy’s pricing made it the practical choice.
SpaceX is quietly becoming the U.S. Military’s only reliable rocket
Falcon Heavy debuted in February 2018 and has 11 launches to its record. The rocket has not flown since October 2024, when it sent NASA’s Europa Clipper toward Jupiter. The three-core design, built from modified Falcon 9 first stages, gives it the lift capacity needed for deep space planetary missions that a single Falcon 9 cannot reach.
The Rosalind Franklin rover has been sitting in storage in Europe for years. It was originally due to launch in 2022 as a joint mission with Russia, but Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ended that partnership, leaving the rover built but stranded without a launch vehicle or landing hardware. NASA stepped back in through a 2024 agreement with ESA to rescue the mission. The rover is designed to drill up to two meters below the Martian surface in search of evidence of past life, a science objective no previous mission has attempted at that depth.
The contradiction at the center of this story is hard to ignore. The White House’s fiscal year 2027 budget proposal included no funding for ROSA and did not mention the mission at all in the detailed congressional justification document released April 3.
Musk has long argued that reaching Mars is not optional. “We don’t want to be one of those single planet species, we want to be a multi-planet species.” Whether this particular mission survives Washington’s budget fight, the Falcon Heavy contract means SpaceX is now formally on record as the rocket that could get humanity’s next Mars science mission off the ground.
The timing of this contract carries extra weight given that SpaceX filed confidentially with the SEC in early April and is targeting an IPO roadshow in the week of June 8. It would be the largest public offering in history.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) is set to hold its Earnings Call for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday, and there are a lot of interesting things that are swirling around in terms of speculation from investors.
With the company’s executives, including CEO Elon Musk, answering a handful of questions that investors submit through the Say platform, fans want to know a lot of things about a lot of things.
These five questions come from Retail Investors, who are normal, everyday shareholders:
- When will we have the Optimus v3 reveal? When will Optimus production start, since we ended the Model S and Model X production earlier than mid-year? What’s the expected Optimus production rate exiting this year? What are the initial targeted skills?
- What milestones are you targeting for unsupervised FSD and Robotaxi expansion beyond Austin this year, and how will that drive recurring revenue?
- How will Hardware 3 cars reach Unsupervised Full Self-Driving?
- When do you expect Unsupervised Full Self-Driving to reach customer cars?
- When will Robotaxi expand past its current limited rollout?
Additionally, these are currently the three questions that are slated to be answered by Institutional Firms, which also answer a handful of questions during the call:
- Now that FSD has been approved in the Netherlands and is expected to launch across Europe this summer, can you discuss your Robotaxi strategy for the region?
- What enabled you to finish the AI5 tapeout early and were there any changes to the original vision? Last week, Elon said AI5 will go into Optimus and the Supercomputer, but one month ago said it would go into the Robotaxi. Has AI5 been dropped from the vehicle roadmap?
- Given the recent NHTSA incident filings, can you update us on the Robotaxi safety data? If safety validation remains the primary bottleneck, why not deploy thousands of vehicles to accelerate the removal of the safety driver?
The questions range through every current Tesla project, including FSD expansion and Optimus. However, many of the answers we will get will likely be repetitive answers we’ve heard in the past.
This is especially pertinent when the questions about when Unsupervised FSD will reach customer cars: we know Musk will say that it will happen this year. Is Tesla capable of that? Maybe. But a more transparent answer that is more revealing of a true timeline would be appreciated.
Hardware 3 owners are anxiously awaiting the arrival of FSD v14 Lite, which was promised to them last year for a release sometime this year.
The Earnings Call is set to take place on Wednesday at market close.
Ford CEO Farley says Tesla is not who to look at for EV expertise
SpaceX wins its first MARS contract but it comes with a catch
