SpaceX
SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy shown launching NASA Orion spacecraft in fan render
A spaceflight fan’s unofficial render has offered the best look yet at what SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy could look like in the unlikely but not impossible event that NASA decides to launch its uncrewed Orion demonstration mission on commercial rockets.
Oddly enough, the thing that most stands out from artist brickmack’s interpretation of Orion and Falcon Heavy is just how relatively normal the large NASA spacecraft looks atop a SpaceX rocket. The render also serves as a visual reminder of just how little SpaceX would necessarily need to change or re-certify before Falcon Heavy would be able to launch Orion. Aside from the fact that NASA’s Launch Services Program (LSP) is not quite ready to certify the full launch vehicle for NASA missions, very few hurdles appear to stand in the way of Orion launching on a commercial rocket – be it on Falcon Heavy or ULA’s Delta IV Heavy.
In a wholly unexpected announcement made by NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine during a March 13th Congressional hearing, the agency leader revealed that NASA was seriously analyzing the possibility of launching Orion’s uncrewed lunar demonstration mission – known as Exploration Mission 1 (EM-1) – on commercial launch vehicles instead of the agency’s own Space Launch System (SLS) rocket.
The purpose: maintain the missions launch schedule – 2020 – in the face of a relentless barrage of delays facing the SLS rocket, the launch debut of which has effectively been slipped almost three years in the last 18 or so months, with the latest launch date now featuring a median target of November 2021. Some subset of NASA leaders, Congressional supporters, and White House officials have clearly begun to accept that SLS/Orion’s major continued delays are simply unacceptable to both the taxpayer and maintaining appearances, despite the fact that those delays continue to make SLS/Orion an extremely successful example of both corporate welfare and a jobs program.
As it currently stands, a median target of November 2021 for the SLS launch debut guarantees that there is almost certainly no chance of the rocket launching at any point in 2020, even if NASA took the extraordinary step of completely cutting a full-length static fire of the entirely unproven rocket prior to its debut. Known as the “Green Run”, the ~8-minute long static fire test is planned to occur at NASA’s Stennis Space Center on the B2 test stand, which NASA – despite continuous criticism from OIG before and after the decision – has spent more than $350M to refurbish. Stennis B2’s refurbishment was effectively completed just two months ago after the better part of seven years of work.
Put simply, even heroics verging on insanity would be unlikely to get SLS prime contractor Boeing to cut ~12 months off of the rocket’s schedule prevent additional unplanned delays in the 18 or so months between now and an even minutely plausible launch debut target. Admittedly, NASA’s proposed commercial alternative for Orion’s lunar launch debut also offers a range of different but equally concerning risks for the program and mission assurance.
Major challenges remain
On one hand, the task of successfully launching NASA’s Orion spacecraft around the Moon with Delta IV Heavy and Falcon Heavy rockets has a lot going for it, regardless of which rockets launch Orion to LEO or launch the fueled upper stage to boost it around the Moon. In 2014, NASA and ULA successfully launched a partial-fidelity Orion spacecraft to an altitude of 3700 miles (~6000 km), testing some of Orion’s avionics, general spacefaring capabilities, and the craft’s heat shield, although Lockheed Martin has since significantly changed the shield’s design and method of production/installation. Regardless, the EFT-1 test flight means that a solution already more or less exists to mate Orion and its service module (ESM) to a commercial rocket and launch the duo into orbit.
If ULA is unable to essentially produce a Delta IV Heavy from scratch in less than 12-18 months, Falcon Heavy would be next in line to launch Orion/ESM, a use-case that might actually be less absurd than it seems. Thanks to the fact that SpaceX’s payload fairing is actually wider than the large Orion spacecraft (5.2 m (17 ft) vs. 5 m (16.5 ft) in diameter), any major risks of radical aerodynamic problems can be largely retired, although that would still need to be verified with models and/or wind-tunnel testing. The only major change that would need to be certified is ensuring that the Falcon second stage is capable of supporting the Orion/ESM payload, weighing at least ~26 metric tons (~57,000 lb) at launch. The heaviest payloads SpaceX has launched thus far were likely its Iridium NEXT missions, weighing around 9600 kg (21,100 lb).
However, the most difficult aspects of Bridenstine’s proposed alternative are centered around the need for the EM-1 Orion spacecraft to somehow dock with a fueled upper stage meant to be launched separately. Orion in its current EM-1 configuration does not currently have the ability to dock with anything on orbit, a challenge that would require Lockheed Martin and subcontractors to find a way to install the proper hardware and computers and develop software that was – prior to this surprise announcement – only planned to fly on EM-3 (NET 2024). As such, Lockheed Martin – notorious for slow progress, cost overruns, and delays throughout the Orion program – would effectively become the critical path in finishing and installing on-orbit docking capabilities on Orion in less than 12-18 months.
The only alternative would be to have either SpaceX or ULA retrofit some sort of docking mechanism onto one of their upper stages, perhaps less difficult than getting Lockheed Martin to work expediently but still a major challenge for such a short developmental timeframe. Put simply, completing the tasks at hand in the time allotted could easily be beyond the capabilities of old-guard NASA contractors like LockMart and Boeing. Ironically, the upper stage that was designed for EM-1 and is already more or less complete – known as the interim cryogenic propulsion stage (ICPS) – is built by Boeing, the same company that has the most to lose if NASA chooses to make the SLS rocket – which Boeing also builds – functionally redundant with a commercial dual-launch alternative.
Second render in this series. Commercial transport for Orion from LEO to TLI in a dual-launch profile (this part is much harder in the near term, really need ACES unless the goal is only a flyby) https://t.co/70eG2i7Axz— Mack Crawford (@brickmack) March 24, 2019
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SpaceX’s Starfall just went from secret to storefront
SpaceX now pitches Starfall missions with 1,000 kg payloads, weeks of microgravity, and Starlink connectivity.
SpaceX has put up a dedicated commercial page for Starfall, its disk shaped reentry capsule, laying out for the first time what customers actually get when they book a flight. The page, live at spacex.com/starfall, pitches “affordable, routine access to microgravity” and invites companies to get in touch about flying manufacturing, research or testing payloads.
The specs are short and specific. Each Starfall mission carries up to 1,000 kg of payload, supplies 1 kW of power and connects through an Ethernet interface. Mission length is tailored to the customer, and the payload stays online the entire time through Starlink, which means researchers can pull data from an experiment while it is still in orbit instead of waiting for splashdown.
SpaceX is launching a secret spacecraft that could change how things are made in space
SpaceX is aiming the service at three markets. Biomedical customers are told they can grow stem cell organoids, replacement tissue and layered biomaterials. Pharmaceutical companies are pitched on protein and small molecule drug crystals, which form smaller and more uniform shapes without gravity driven convection. Materials science rounds out the list, with semiconductors and other next generation materials grown in vacuum and microgravity.
The page also makes clear which rocket SpaceX is counting on. “By launching on Starship, Starfall brings a reliable and scalable cadence previously unavailable to the market,” the company wrote, contrasting weeks of continuous microgravity with the seconds offered by drop towers and parabolic flights. No price or first operational flight date is listed.
The commercial push is a sharp turn from how Starfall started. SpaceX said almost nothing about the capsule ahead of its first flight in June, and nearly everything known came from FAA and FCC filings describing a disk about 10.2 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall that can return 2,200 pounds of cargo. By its second flight on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare in October, Starfall was listed by name on the mission page, though SpaceX still did not say what it carried.
Customers appear to be lining up. SpaceX said in its third quarter results that it signed three commercial Starfall missions during the quarter. On the earnings call, President Gwynne Shotwell described the capsule as providing “routine relatively low cost access to microgravity environments for scientific research, including improving our understanding of diseases like cancer and diabetes,” and said the three new missions would fly on Starship.
The branding effort extends past the website. SpaceX added a Starfall T-shirt to its online store on Monday as part of a batch of new merchandise, giving the program a place next to Starship, Starlink and Starshield in the company’s lineup.
The move also puts SpaceX in more direct competition with companies it launches. Varda Space Industries, which has built much of the in-space manufacturing market so far, flew its W-Series 7 capsule on the same Bandwagon-5 mission as Starfall in October. Varda’s capsules are roughly three times smaller than Starfall, and SpaceX controls the ride to orbit for both.
Starfall’s near term cadence depends on Starship. SpaceX is preparing for Flight 15 after completing static fires of Ship 42 and its Super Heavy booster in late October, and is aiming to catch both stages with the launch tower on that flight.
Elon Musk said weeks ago during SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call that the company’s Grok Bot, its autonomous AI Agent platform, was showing “the fastest growth of a product” that he’d ever seen in his life.
Now, SpaceXSI is scaling back Grok Bot users’ weekly limits, much to the surprise of those who have relied on it to take away monotonous tasks in their lives.
Elon Musk’s terse November 1 reply on X captured a sharp tension in the early days of agentic AI. Responding to a user who asked for a Grok Bot usage reset after hitting 100 percent with four days still left on the weekly cycle, Musk wrote: “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue.”
@DogecoinNorway The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026
The post arrived amid a wave of similar complaints from paying subscribers whose meters had jumped unexpectedly toward or to the limit, sometimes overnight and with little corresponding activity. It also stood in clear contrast to statements Musk had made only days and weeks earlier.
On the SpaceX third-quarter earnings call in mid-to-late October, Musk had described Grok Bot in almost the opposite terms. He called it “the fastest growth of a product that I’ve ever seen in my life” and said he had “never seen anything grow this fast.”
Company figures put paid weekly users at roughly 800,000 earlier in the month, more than doubling over the prior period. Daily active users had climbed from under 100,000 in early September to over 600,000 by late October.
Musk emphasized that the product has no free tier and that users appear to be getting real value beyond what they pay. In other remarks, he noted that usage per user was rising rather than declining, the opposite of the usual decay pattern for new software.
Grok Bot, launched around August, functions as an always-available agent with its own persistent cloud computer; it can schedule, research, shop, browse, and execute multi-step workflows even after the user steps away. Access is bundled into X subscription tiers (roughly $30, $100, and $200 per month) and certain Cursor plans, drawing from shared weekly usage pools whose exact sizes have not been publicly detailed.
The economics of that model are what Musk’s November 1 post put in the spotlight. Agentic systems burn far more compute than ordinary chatbot exchanges. Each task can trigger repeated model calls, tool use, web actions, and sustained background work.
When growth is as rapid as Musk celebrated, the absolute compute bill scales quickly even if average revenue per user stays fixed under flat monthly subscriptions. Industry observers noted the opportunity cost as well: the same GPUs can be rented to other AI labs at higher rates.
A simple back-of-the-envelope comparison circulating after the post illustrated the gap: if every reported daily user paid the top tier, annualized subscription revenue would still be modest relative to the scale of compute infrastructure SpaceX is building and leasing to companies like Anthropic.
Some users also reported possible dashboard anomalies around the same period, though Musk’s framing treated the underlying cost-revenue imbalance as the core issue rather than a pure metering glitch.
The juxtaposition is the core of this exchange. Within roughly two weeks of publicly framing Grok Bot as an unprecedented success with strong unit economics and no free tier, Musk acknowledged that serving the same product had become unsustainable relative to the revenue it generates.
For the broader industry, the episode underscores a structural challenge of the agent era: demand is real and growing faster than many expected, yet the cost of fulfilling that demand through always-on, multi-step agents can outrun subscription pricing before companies can adjust limits, introduce metered billing, or raise prices.
Musk’s reply did not promise an immediate reset or higher allowances; it simply stated the constraint. In doing so, it supplied a rare, explicit public data point on the unit economics of a high-profile AI agent just as adoption numbers were still being celebrated as the fastest in Musk’s experience.
The tension between rapid, paid growth and the compute required to deliver it is now on the record.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk calls Earth’s data centers “peanuts” next to what SpaceX is planning in orbit
Elon Musk says SpaceX capex efficiency is underestimated as orbital data centers loom by 2028.
Elon Musk is pushing back on one of the biggest worries hanging over SpaceX stock. In a reply on X on Sunday, Musk said the company’s capital expenditure efficiency is severely underestimated. He was responding to a Milk Road Stocks post citing analyst Kyle Reidhead, who estimates SpaceX will need to spend roughly $470 billion over the next five quarters.
Reidhead built that figure around the target SpaceX set on its third quarter earnings call: 13 gigawatts or more of compute by the end of 2027. In his breakdown, Nvidia captures 83 to 89 percent of the spending. SpaceX ended the quarter with 1.7 GW of nameplate compute and guided to $35 billion to $40 billion in fourth quarter capex, as Teslarati reported.
Musk did not attach a number to his claim, but the earnings call shows the argument. CFO Bret Johnsen said new compute currently pays for itself in under a year at today’s pricing, and Musk said that window could shrink to six months next year. Using that pace, Reidhead argues about $230 billion of the $470 billion could come from operating cash flow and about $60 billion from SpaceX’s roughly $90 billion cash pile, leaving around $180 billion to borrow. Musk confirmed last week that SpaceX had already closed a new $40 billion debt raise to buy GPUs.
The ground buildout is not the end goal. It is what is meant to pay for the move to orbit. Replying on Friday to charts built from Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire’s SpaceX model, Musk wrote that “Terrestrial compute will be peanuts compared to orbital compute,” adding that orbital compute deployed per month “probably exceeds terrestrial around the end of 2028 and then far exceeds it in 2029.”
Maguire’s model shows how steep that path is. It has capex climbing from $88 billion this year to $290 billion in 2027 and $369 billion in 2028, with SpaceX burning $77.8 billion in cash this year and $122.6 billion next year before turning $114.9 billion cash positive in 2028. Musk’s response to the model was, “I think we can do better.”
The orbital half runs through Starmind. SpaceX plans to operate up to 1 million AI satellites flying in clusters of about 10, linked by roughly 10 terabits of bandwidth, with deployment of thousands of units starting as soon as late 2027 out of its Gigasat factory in Bastrop, Texas, according to SpaceX’s space safety page. Musk has said each Starmind spacecraft will carry more than 250 kW of solar power.
Getting there depends on launch volume. Maguire’s model assumes 250 Starship flights in 2028, up from two this year and 38 next year. The nearer test is financial: SpaceX guided to $33 billion to $37 billion in first quarter 2027 revenue, more than double the $14.58 billion it booked in Q3, and Musk reposted that guidance again on Sunday morning.
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