SpaceX
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy win $297M in US military launch contracts
SpaceX and competitor United Launch Alliance (ULA) have been awarded three US military launch contracts apiece with an overall value of $297M (SpaceX) and $442M (ULA). While unconfirmed, this could mark the fourth launch contract awarded to Falcon Heavy in just half a year.
Set to nominally launch between 2021 and 2022, SpaceX received two contracts from the National Reconnaissance Office (NROL-85 and -87) and one from the USAF (AFSPC-44), while ULA received two missions from the USAF (SBIRS-5 and -6) and one from NRO (SILENTBARKER). While the announcement did not specify launch vehicle arrangements, it’s safe to assume that ULA will be flying SBIRS on Atlas V, while SpaceX will likely fly both NROL payloads on Falcon 9.
JUST IN: Air Force awards $739 million in launch contracts to ULA and SpaceX – https://t.co/6tMHINEk57 https://t.co/NYI2qbF68Y
— Sandra Erwin (@Sandra_I_Erwin) February 19, 2019
“SpaceX is proud that the Air Force has chosen our company to support our country’s defense with these critical national security space launches and to continue providing the best value in launch with the proven Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles.” – SpaceX President & COO Gwynne Shotwell, 02/19/2019
“This is a full and open competition. … At present, ULA is the only launch provider certified for the SILENTBARKER and AFSPC-44 missions. However, it is anticipated that in the near future SpaceX will be launching the Falcon Heavy, which may be capable of meeting the SILENTBARKER and AFSPC-44 requirements.” – USAF SMC, 02/02/2018
In official comments made in a follow-up to the finalized RFP (requests for proposals) for the launch contracts the US military awarded On Feb. 19, 2019, the USAF Space and Missile Systems Center (SMC) offered some insight into the thought processes going on behind the scenes of the procurement initiative. While almost nothing is known about the payloads themselves, SMC appeared to confirm that SILENTBARKER (believed to be NROL-107) and AFSPC-44 could only be launched on ULA rockets at the time (Feb. 2018), although SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy was also reportedly an option. Provided just a few days before Falcon Heavy’s launch debut, SMC’s tentative inclusion of FH was understandable.
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- After launching NROL-76 in May 2017, B1032 returned to Landing Zone-1 for a successful landing. (SpaceX)
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- Atlas V 551 prepares to launch USAF satellite AEHF-4. (ULA)
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- SBIRS GEO 3 (Flight 4) encapsulation. (USAF)
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- GPS III SV01 is encapsulated in Falcon 9’s fairing. (SpaceX)
For a bit of historical context, SpaceX completed its first NRO mission (NROL-76) in May 2017 for an unknown sum, although safe estimates peg the Falcon 9 launch cost somewhere around $80-100M. SpaceX’s first official USAF EELV mission, the first upgraded GPS III satellite, was completed in December 2018 for around $82M (2016) and won an additional three GPS III launch contracts at an average per-mission value of ~$97M. Each GPS III satellite is estimated to cost no less than $573M, while the last four SBIRS (Space-Based Infrared System) geostationary satellites infamously wound up costing more than $1.7 billion apiece as a consequence of prime contractor Lockheed Martin incurring multiple delays and breaching price targets. SBIRS-5 and -6 were said by a Lockheed Martin executive to likely cost “20% less” than SBIRS 1-4, implying that each spacecraft will carry a price tag of at least $1.4B.
Given the sheer cost of the spacecraft and the Air Force’s stance on the SBIRS constellation being a critical part of ballistic missile early-warning defenses, it’s not particularly surprising that Atlas V was chosen over Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy, a decision likely made to minimize latent risk – however little.
Falcon Heavy – contract #6?
In June 2018, the USAF announced that it had officially certified Falcon Heavy for Air Force missions and awarded SpaceX’s newest launch vehicle a $130M contract to launch its Air Force Space Command-52 spacecraft (AFSPC-52) in 2020. Weighing around 6350 kg (14,000 lbs), Falcon Heavy is tasked with placing the spacecraft into a geostationary transfer orbit of 185 by 35,188 kilometers (115 by 21,900 miles), a mission profile that curiously should be within the performance capabilities of an expendable Falcon 9. If AFSPC-44 is similar to -52, it could be launched by either SpaceX rocket and SMC’s vague $297M award fails to answer any questions thanks to the uncertainty of SpaceX NRO contract pricing. Still, it can be easily determined that SpaceX’s average launch cost ($99M) trounces ULA’s ($147M) by nearly 50%, potentially saving the US government and taxpayer a bit less than $150M.
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- SpaceX Facebook group member Joshua Murrah also captured what is likely the third Falcon Heavy booster’s Florida arrival. (Joshua Murrah, 02/11/19)
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- SpaceX Facebook group member Joshua Murrah captured two great photos of the second Falcon Heavy side booster to arrive in Florida in the last month. (Joshua Murrah, 01/17/19)
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- The second (and third) flight of Falcon Heavy is even closer to reality as a new side booster heads to Florida after finishing static fire tests in Texas. (Reddit /u/e32revelry)
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- Falcon Heavy clears the top of the tower in a spectacular fashion during its debut launch. (Tom Cross/Pauline Acalin)
Aside from AFSPC-52 and perhaps AFSPC-44, Falcon Heavy received an additional two commercial contracts from Swedish communications firm Ovzon and US company Viasat in October 2018. Following its February 2018 debut, the rocket’s next two missions (Arabsat 6A and USAF STP-2) are also imminent, with current info pointing to launch targets in March and April 2019, respectively. Combined, Falcon Heavy may now have six solid launch contracts manifested from 2019 to 2021. Meanwhile, NASA and international partners ESA and JAXA (among others) continue to express interest in and work towards the creation of a miniature crewed space station (“Gateway”) in an unusual orbit around the Moon, an aspiration the success of which will heavily depend on affordable commercial launches of a variety of Gateway components and resupply missions, at minimum.
If NASA’s Gateway and crewed Moon lander programs survive the United States’ 2020 election cycle, Falcon Heavy could be called into action as early as 2022 and have numerous additional contract opportunities in the 4+ years following. Ultimately, the US military’s Feb. 19 launch awards confirm that the taxpayer continues to reap the benefits of competition SpaceX has reintroduced into the monopolized US launch industry, while also reiterating the health and commercial value of SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy investment.
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SpaceXAI announced today that it had signed an agreement with Anthropic to give the company access to its Colossus 1 data center in Memphis, Tennessee.
It is a monumental deal as Anthropic will gain access to all of the compute at the plant, delivering more than 300 megawatts of power and over 220,000 NVIDIA GPUs within the month.
Anthropic’s Claude AI account on X announced the partnership:
“We’ve agreed to a partnership with SpaceX that will substantially increase our compute capacity. This, along with our other recent compute deals, means that we’ve been able to increase our usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API.”
The company is also:
- Doubling Claude Code’s 5-hour rate limits for Pro, Max, and Team plans;
- Removing the peak hours limit reduction on Claude Code for Pro and Max plans; and
- Substantially raising its API rate limits for Opus models.
We’ve agreed to a partnership with @SpaceX that will substantially increase our compute capacity.
This, along with our other recent compute deals, means that we’ve been able to increase our usage limits for Claude Code and the Claude API.
— Claude (@claudeai) May 6, 2026
SpaceX also published its own release on the new agreement, noting that it is “the only organization with the launch cadence, mass-to-orbit economics, and constellation operations experience to make orbital compute a near-term engineering program rather than a research concept.”
CEO Elon Musk also commented on the partnership and shed light on intense meetings he had with senior members of Anthropic last week, stating, “nobody set on my evil detector.”
Same here.
By way of background for those who care, I spent a lot of time last week with senior members of the Anthropic team to understand what they do to ensure Claude is good for humanity and was impressed.
Everyone I met was highly competent and cared a great deal about…
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 6, 2026
This has turned the argument that SpaceX is as much an AI company as a space exploration company into a very valid argument:
SpaceX is following in Tesla’s footsteps in a way nobody expected
Nevertheless, this is an incredibly valuable and important move in the grand scheme of things. AI scaling is fundamentally bottlenecked by compute, and demand for Claude has surged, bringing terrestrial power grids, land, and cooling operations hitting limits everywhere.
Anthropic has been aggressively signing multiple large-scale deals to be competitive in the space, including:
- Up to 5GW with Amazon
- 5GW with Google and Broadcom
- Strategic $30b Azure deal with Microsoft/NVIDIA
- $50b U.S. infrastructure investment with Fluidstack
Access to Colossus 1 gives Anthropic immediate relief on NVIDIA GPU capacity. For SpaceXAI, it turns its rapid buildout into revenue. It also showcases its ability to deliver at world-leading speed and scale.
Most importantly, it plants the seed that its much larger vision, orbital AI compute, is totally viable.
Starlink V3 satellites could enable SpaceX’s orbital computing plans: Musk
Within the month, Anthropic will begin using 100 percent of Colossus 1’s compute, directly expanding capacity for Claude Pro and Max subscribers and the API. This means fewer limits, faster responses, and support for heavier workloads.
In the long term, meaning 2026 and beyond, there will be a continued rollout of other multi-GW deals Anthropic has signed, and an early exploration of orbital compute with SpaceXAI.
Elon Musk
SpaceX Board has set a Mars bonus for Elon Musk
SpaceX has given Elon Musk the goal to put one million people on Mars.
SpaceX’s board approved a compensation plan for Elon Musk that ties his pay directly to colonizing Mars and building data centers in outer space. The details surfaced this week after Reuters reviewed SpaceX’s confidential registration statement filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, making it one of the first concrete looks inside the company’s financials ahead of a public offering.
The pay package will reportedly award Musk 200 million super-voting restricted shares if the company hits a market valuation milestone, with the most ambitious targets going further. To unlock the full award, SpaceX would need to reach a $7.5 trillion valuation and help establish a permanent human settlement on Mars with at least one million residents. Additional incentives are tied to developing space-based computing infrastructure capable of delivering at least 100 terawatts of processing power.
SpaceX wins its first MARS contract but it comes with a catch
Long before SpaceX filed anything with the SEC, Elon Musk had already spent years framing Mars colonization as an insurance policy against human extinction. The philosophy traces back to at least 2001, when Musk first began researching Mars missions independently, before SpaceX even existed. By 2002 he had founded the company with Mars as the stated long-term goal.
In a 2017 presentation at the International Astronautical Congress, Musk outlined the specific vision that still underpins SpaceX’s architecture today. He described a self-sustaining city on Mars requiring roughly one million people to become viable, the same number now written into his compensation package.
SpaceX’s Starship, still in active development, was designed from the ground up to support the eventual colonization of Mars. Musk has stated publicly that getting the cost per ton to Mars below $100,000 is necessary to make mass migration economically feasible. Everything from Starship’s payload capacity to its full reusability targets flows from that single constraint. One can say that Musk’s latest compensation package has put a formal valuation on Mars for the first time.
SpaceX is targeting an IPO around June 28, Musk’s birthday, at a valuation of approximately $1.75 trillion. Between the Mars rover contract, the Golden Dome software group, Space Force satellite launches, and now a pay structure built around interplanetary colonization, SpaceX has become the single most consequential contractor in American space and defense. The IPO will put a public price tag on all of it for the first time.
News
UPDATE: SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy that launched a Tesla into space is back on a mission
SpaceX Falcon Heavy returns after 18 months away to deliver a satellite that only it could carry.
UPDATE: 10:29 a.m. et: SpaceX is standing down from today’s Falcon Heavy launch of the ViaSat-3 F3 mission due to unfavorable weather. A new target date will be shared once confirmed.
After an 18-month absence, SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy is returning to mission on Monday morning when it’s scheduled to lift off from Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center at 10:21 a.m. EDT.
The mission is called ViaSat-3 F3, and the heavy satellite payload needs to reach geostationary orbit, sitting 22,236 miles above Earth where its speed matches the planet’s rotation. Getting a satellite that heavy to that altitude demands more thrust than a single-core Falcon 9 can deliver.
This marks the Falcon Heavy’s 12th flight overall since its debut in February 2018, and its first since NASA’s Europa Clipper mission in October 2024.
Arguably, the most exciting element for spectators will be watching the booster recoveries in action when the two side boosters, B1072 and B1075, will attempt simultaneous landings at Landing Zone 2 and the newer Landing Zone 40 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, while the center core will be expended over the ocean.
SpaceX wins its first MARS contract but it comes with a catch
Following satellite deployment, expected roughly five hours after launch, ViaSat-3 F3 will spend several months traveling to its final orbital slot before undergoing in-orbit testing, with service entry expected by late summer 2026
As Teslarati reported, NASA awarded SpaceX a $175.7 million contract on April 16, 2026, to launch the ESA Rosalind Franklin Mars rover aboard a Falcon Heavy no earlier than late 2028, which would mark the first time SpaceX has ever sent a payload to Mars. That contract came on top of an already deep pipeline that includes the Roman Space Telescope, the Dragonfly Saturn mission, and multiple national security payloads.
SpaceX executed 165 missions in 2025 and now accounts for approximately 85% of all global orbital launches. With Starlink surpassing 10 million subscribers and an IPO targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation still ahead, Monday’s launch is one more data point in a company that has quietly become the backbone of both commercial and government space access worldwide.
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SpaceXAI signs agreement with Anthropic for massive AI supercomputer access
