News
SpaceX nears big US govt. missions as ULA handwaves about risks of competition
Speaking at the 2018 Von Braun Symposium in Huntsville, Alabama, ULA COO John Elbon expressed worries that the US National Security Space (NSS) apparatus could be put at significant risk if it comes to rely too heavily on the commercial launch industry to assure access to space.
Given that the US military’s launch capabilities rest solely on SpaceX and ULA and will remain that way for at least three more years, Elbon’s comment was effectively an odd barb tossed in the direction of SpaceX and – to a lesser extent – Blue Origin, two disruptive and commercially-oriented launch providers.
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- The history of ULA and its Delta IV rocket is far wilder than most would expect. (Tom Cross)
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- The first stage of Parker Solar Probe’s Delta IV Heavy rocket prepares to be lifted vertical. (ULA)
Reading between the lines
For the most part, Elbon’s brief presentation centered around a reasonable discussion of ULA’s track record and future vehicle development, emphasizing the respectable reliability of its current Atlas V and Delta IV rockets and the ‘heritage’ they share with ULA’s next-generation Vulcan vehicle. However, the COO twice brought up an intriguing concern that the US military launch apparatus could suffer if it ends up relying too heavily on ‘commercially-sustained’ launch vehicles like Falcon 9/Heavy or New Glenn.
To provide historical context and evidence favorable to his position, Elbon brought up a now-obscure event in the history of the launch industry, where – 20 years ago – companies Lockheed Martin and Boeing reportedly “set out to develop … Atlas V and Delta IV” primarily to support the launch of several large satellite constellations. The reality and causes of the US launch industry’s instability in the late ’90s and early ’00s is almost indistinguishable from this narrative, however.
Despite the many veils of aerospace and military secrecy surrounding the events that occurred afterward, the facts show that – in 1999 – Boeing (per acquisition of McDonnell Douglas) and Lockheed Martin (LM) both received awards of $500M to develop the Delta IV and Atlas V rockets, and the military further committed to buying a full 28 launches for $2B between 2002 and 2006. Combined, the US military effectively placed $3B ($4.5B in 2018 dollars) on the table for its Evolved Expendable Launch Vehicle (EELV) program with the goal of ensuring uninterrupted access to space for national security purposes.
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- Crew Dragon arrives at ISS. (SpaceX)
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- Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft. (Boeing)
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- A mockup of Boeing’s Starliner capsule is explored by one of NASA’s Commercial Crew astronauts, clad in a Boeing spacesuit. (Boeing)
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- SpaceX’s Commercial Crew pressure suit seen on NASA astronauts during testing. (SpaceX)
Rocketing into corporate espionage
“The robust commercial market forecast led the Air Force to reconsider its acquisition strategy. The EELV acquisition strategy changed from a planned down-select to a single contractor and a standard Air Force development program [where the USAF funds vehicle development in its entirety] to a dual commercialized approach that leveraged commercial market share and contractor investment.” – USAF EELV Fact Sheet, March 2017
The above quote demonstrates that there is at least an inkling of truth in Elbon’s spin. However, perhaps the single biggest reason that the EELV program and its two awardees stumbled was gross, inexcusable conduct on the part of Boeing. In essence, the company’s space executives conspired to use corporate espionage to gain an upper-hand over Lockheed Martin, knowledge which ultimately allowed Boeing to severely low-ball the prices of its Delta IV rocket, securing 19 of 28 available USAF launch contracts.
Ultimately, Lockheed Martin caught wind of Boeing’s suspect behavior and filed a lawsuit that began several years of USAF investigations and highly unpleasant revelations, while Boeing also had at least 10 future launch contracts withdrawn to the tune of ~$1B (1999). USAF investigations discovered that Boeing had lied extensively to the Air Force for more than four years – the actual volume of information stolen would balloon wildly from Boeing’s initial reports of “seven pages of harmless data” to 10+ boxes containing more than 42,000 pages of extremely detailed technical and proprietary information about Lockheed Martin’s Atlas V rocket proposal.
“If you rewind the clock 20 years, there were folks on a panel like this having dialogue about commercial launch, and there were envisioned several constellations that were going to require significant commercial launch. Lockheed Martin and Boeing set out to develop launch vehicles that were focused on that very robust commercial market – in the case of McDonald Douglas at the time, which later became Boeing, the factory in Decatur was…sized to crank out 40 [rocket boosters] a year, a couple of ships were bought to transport those…significant infrastructure put in place to address that envisioned launch market.” – John Elbon, COO, United Launch Alliance (ULA)
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- ULA’s Decatur, Alabama factory now produces both Delta IV and Atlas 5. (ULA)
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- ULA’s Atlas 5 launched AEHF-4 for the USAF earlier this month. (ULA)
In reality, Boeing was so desperate to secure USAF launches – despite the fact that it knew full well that Delta IV was too expensive to be sustainably competitive – that dozens of employees were eventually roped into a systematic, years-long, highly-illegal program of corporate espionage specifically designed to beat out government launch competitor Lockheed Martin. Humorously, Delta IV was not even Boeing’s design – rather, Boeing acquired designer McDonnell Douglas in late 1996, five days before the USAF announced the decision to reject Boeing and another company’s EELV proposals, narrowing down to two finalists (McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed Martin).
Seven years after the original lawsuit snowballed, Boeing settled with Lockheed Martin for a payment of more than $600M in 2006, accepting responsibility for its employees’ actions but admitting no corporate wrongdoing. Five years after that settlement, John Elbon became Vice President of Boeing’s Space Exploration division. This is by no means to suggest that Elbon is in any way complicit, having spent much of his 30+ years at Boeing managing the company’s involvement in the International Space Station, but more serves as an example of how recent these events are and why their consequences almost certainly continue to reverberate loudly within the US space industry.
SpaceX forces change
Worsened significantly by the consequences of Boeing’s lies about the actual operational costs of its Delta IV rocket (it had planned to secretly write off a loss on each rocket in order to steal USAF market share from LockMart), the commercial market for the extremely expensive rocket was and still is functionally nonexistent. 35 out of the family’s 36 launches have been contracted by the US military (30), NOAA (3), or NASA (2); the rocket’s first launch, likely sold at a major discount to Eutelsat, remains its one and only commercial mission.
Atlas V, typically priced around 30% less than comparable Delta IV variants, has had a far more productive career, albeit with very few commercial launches since the Dec. 2006 formation of the United Launch Alliance. Since 2007, just 5 of Atlas V’s 70 launches have been for commercial customers. Frankly, although Atlas V was appreciably more affordable than Delta IV, neither rocket was ever able to sustainably compete with Europe’s Ariane 5 workhorse – Ariane 5 cost more per launch, but superior payload performance often let Arianespace manifest two large satellites on a single launch, approximately halving the cost for each customer. Russia’s affordable (but only moderately reliable) Proton rockets also played an important role in the commercial launch industry prior to SpaceX’s arrival.
After fighting tooth and nail for years to break ULA’s US governmental launch monopoly, SpaceX’s first dedicated National Security Space launch finally occurred less than a year and a half ago, in May 2017. SpaceX has since placed a USAF spaceplane and a classified NSS-related satellite into orbit and been awarded launch contracts for critical USAF payloads, most notably winning five of five competed GPS III satellite launches, to begin as early as mid-December. Falcon 9 will cost the USAF roughly 30% less than a comparable Atlas 5 contract, $97M to ULA’s ~$135M.
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- The aft connection mechanisms on Falcon Heavy Flight 1 and Flight 2 appear to be quite similar. It’s possible that SpaceX has chosen to reuse aspects of the hardware recovered on Flight 1’s two side boosters. (SpaceX)
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- Falcon 9 Block 5 booster B1046 seen during both of its post-launch landings. (SpaceX/SpaceX)
A bit more than two decades after Boeing bought McDonnell Douglas and began a calculated effort to steal trade secrets from Lockheed Martin, Elbon – now COO of the Boeing/Lockheed Martin-cooperative ULA – seems to fervently believe that the most critical mistake made in the late 1990s and early 2000s was the USAF’s decision to partially support the development of two separate rockets. Elbon concluded his remarks on the topic with one impressively unambiguous summary of ULA’s position:
“We have to make sure that we don’t get too much supply and not enough demand so that the [launch] providers can’t survive in a robust business environment, and then we lose the capability as a country to do the launches we need to do … [That’s] the perspective we have at ULA and it’s based on the experience that we’ve been through in the past.”
In his sole Delta IV vs. Atlas V case-study, what ULA now seems to think might have been “too much supply” under the USAF’s EELV program appears to literally be the fundamental minimum conditions needed for competition to exist at all – two companies offering two competing products. Short of directly stating as much, it’s difficult to imagine a more concise method of revealing the apparent belief that competition – at all – is intrinsically undesirable or risky.
News
Tesla begins factoring international designs in Full Self-Driving visualization
Tesla has begun incorporating region-specific vehicle designs into its Full Self-Driving (FSD) visualization system, marking a quiet but meaningful step toward global readiness. In software update 2026.14, released as part of the Spring Update, European Tesla owners are now seeing flat-fronted, cab-over European-style semi-trucks rendered accurately on their center displays.
Tesla has begun factoring international designs into its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) visualizations, marking a tremendous step in how the company plans to roll out its driver assistance tech in areas outside North America.
Tesla has begun incorporating region-specific vehicle designs into its Full Self-Driving (FSD) visualization system, marking a quiet but meaningful step toward global readiness. In software update 2026.14, released as part of the Spring Update, European Tesla owners are now seeing flat-fronted, cab-over European-style semi-trucks rendered accurately on their center displays.
The change, first spotted by Not a Tesla App, adds a second 3D model alongside the traditional North American long-nose semi-trucks that have been standard until now. Vehicles can detect and display both styles depending on what’s in front of them, and the feature requires no FSD subscription—every Tesla owner in Europe sees it immediately.
The European semi-truck visualization was actually added to the vehicle software back in October alongside roughly fifteen new visual assets.
Tesla held it in reserve, activating it only once fleet data confirmed the AI could recognize these trucks with high confidence. This mirrors recent rollouts for horses and golf carts, where Tesla similarly waited for reliable detection before enabling the graphics. The result is a more realistic on-screen representation tailored to local roads, where cab-over designs dominate heavy transport.
The significance of this update extends far beyond a simple graphics tweak, which is really what people need to be paying attention to. These small, incremental steps forward continue to show Tesla’s intent for global expansion.
For the first time, Tesla is explicitly factoring international vehicle designs into its visualization engine, signaling a deliberate push to make FSD feel native in international markets.
In Europe, where cab-over semis are commonplace, seeing an accurate rendering builds immediate driver trust—the critical bridge between the car’s AI perception and the human behind the wheel. Accurate visualizations reinforce that the system truly understands its surroundings, reducing range anxiety and skepticism that have slowed autonomous adoption abroad.
Regulators in the EU have repeatedly emphasized human-AI transparency; by customizing visuals to match local reality, Tesla strengthens its case for broader FSD approvals and smoother regulatory reviews.
This move also highlights Tesla’s data-driven engineering philosophy. Rather than rushing generic models worldwide, the company is leveraging its global fleet to learn regional nuances before flipping the switch.
It accelerates FSD’s international expansion while improving safety—misidentified vehicles could erode confidence or, in edge cases, affect decision-making. For a company aiming to deploy robotaxis and unsupervised FSD globally, tailoring visualizations to European, Asian, or other markets is no longer optional; it’s foundational.
Early European owners report the change feels more intuitive, making the car’s “mind” easier to read in daily traffic.
As Tesla continues enabling the remaining visual assets added last year, the pattern is clear: localization is now baked into the FSD roadmap. What began as a small graphics update in Europe could soon appear in other regions, turning the visualization display into a truly worldwide language of autonomy.
With this step, Tesla isn’t just showing trucks differently—it’s proving it’s serious about making FSD work everywhere, one culturally accurate pixel at a time.
Tesla has quietly rolled out one of its most practical software updates yet — and it could add real dollars to every used Model 3, Y, S, and X on the road.
Starting with the latest Tesla app version, owners now receive an official “Certification of Repaired HV Battery” whenever Tesla performs a major high-voltage battery repair or full replacement. The digital certificate appears directly in the vehicle’s Service History tab inside the Tesla app.
It’s permanent, verifiable, and downloadable as a PDF, so sellers can hand it over to buyers in seconds.
For years, the used EV market has suffered from one glaring problem: nobody could prove what happened to the battery.
Service invoices often vanish when a car changes hands. Third-party battery-health scans are expensive and inconsistent. Buyers, staring at a car with 80,000 miles and an 8-year warranty ticking down, would negotiate hard — or walk away entirely — because the battery is the single most expensive part of any Tesla.
That uncertainty routinely shaved thousands off resale values and slowed the entire secondhand market.
Now Tesla has eliminated the guesswork. The new certificate, which was spotted by Tesla App Updates, logs exactly what work was done, when, and by whom. It lives inside the car’s digital profile forever, exactly where any future owner will look. No more digging through old emails or hoping the previous owner kept paperwork.
— Tesla App Updates (iOS) (@Tesla_App_iOS) May 5, 2026
The outlet describes why the update is so important:
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Official Digital Certificates: The string “Certification of Repaired HV Battery” confirms that if your vehicle undergoes a major battery repair or replacement, Tesla will now issue an official, verifiable digital certificate documenting the work.
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Service History Integration: Strings such as viewRepairedBatteryCert and repairedBatteryCertId indicate that this document won’t be lost in an old email thread. It will be permanently anchored to your vehicle’s profile inside the app’s Service History tab.
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Easy Exporting: The service_history_repaired_battery_cert_download_fail error state indicates you will be able to download this certificate directly to your phone as a file (likely a PDF) to share with others.
Sellers who have already replaced packs under warranty are especially excited; they can now prove the vehicle received a fresh Tesla battery without any gray-area questions.
The timing couldn’t be better. As more Teslas roll off 8-year/100,000- or 120,000-mile battery warranties, the used market is exploding. Lenders, insurers, and even auction houses have quietly asked for better battery documentation for years. Tesla’s certificate hands it to them on a silver platter.
For current owners, the feature adds peace of mind and protects long-term value. For buyers, it removes the single biggest risk in any used EV purchase. And for Tesla itself, it quietly strengthens the entire ownership ecosystem — making vehicles more liquid, more desirable, and more valuable over time.
In an industry obsessed with range numbers and 0-60 times, Tesla just proved that sometimes the biggest innovation is a simple line in the Service History tab. One small certificate, one giant step for used-EV confidence.
In the global race toward electrification, Norway stands unchallenged as the world’s most mature EV market.
In the first quarter of this year, EVs captured a staggering 97.9 percent market share, with plugin EVs reaching 98.6 percent. Out of 27,175 new vehicles registered, non-BEV powertrains have been reduced to statistical noise—petrol and hybrids combined accounted for fewer than 80 units.
At the heart of this transformation is Tesla.
The Model Y dominated overall vehicle sales with 5,406 units, outselling the next five best-selling non-Tesla models combined. The refreshed Model 3 followed in second place with 2,010 units, giving Tesla a commanding one-two finish. Toyota’s bZ4X placed third with 1,400 units, while Volvo’s EX40 and others trailed further back.
The @Tesla Model Y was the #1 best-selling vehicle overall in Norway in Q1 2026 by a wide margin, with BEVs in general taking a 97.9% market share. Model 3 ranked #2.
Model Y (5,406 units) sold more units than the next five best-selling non-Tesla vehicles on the list. pic.twitter.com/LE2SD5UQjs
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) May 5, 2026
This dominance is no fluke. Norway has spent decades building the infrastructure and policy framework that makes EVs the rational choice. Generous tax incentives, exemption from VAT, reduced tolls, free ferries for EVs, and a dense charging network have turned the country into a living laboratory for mass adoption. High fuel prices—often exceeding $8 per gallon—further tilt the economics decisively toward electricity.
The result is a market where choosing anything but an EV feels increasingly anachronistic. Diesel and petrol cars have all but vanished from new registrations. Even plug-in hybrids, once a transitional favorite, have collapsed to 0.7 percent share.
Chinese brands like XPeng, BYD, and Zeekr are making inroads, while legacy European and Japanese automakers scramble to field competitive BEVs. Yet Tesla’s combination of range, performance, software, Supercharger network, and brand cachet continues to set the benchmark.
Norway’s Q1 figures come after a volatile start to 2026 caused by VAT changes that pulled forward sales into late 2025. The market rebounded strongly in March, underscoring underlying demand. Tesla’s Q1 performance in the country also jumped significantly year-over-year, reinforcing its position even as competition intensifies.
What happens in Norway rarely stays there. The country has long served as a bellwether for EV trends across Europe and beyond.
Its near-total transition demonstrates that when incentives align with infrastructure and consumer economics, adoption accelerates dramatically. For automakers, Norway signals a future where success hinges not on legacy powertrains but on delivering compelling electric vehicles at scale.
As other nations ramp up their own EV ambitions, Tesla’s continued reign in the world’s heaviest EV market sends a clear message: in a fully mature electric future, the company that started the revolution remains the one to beat. With the Model Y still the best-selling vehicle overall—quarter after quarter—Norway’s roads are a rolling testament to Tesla’s enduring leadership.
Tesla begins factoring international designs in Full Self-Driving visualization
Tesla adds new in-app feature to solve the used EV market’s biggest headache
