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SpaceX receives first major Starship Moon lander funding from NASA
SpaceX has received its first major funding from NASA for the development of a crewed Starship Moon lander meant to return humans to the surface of Earth’s nearest neighbor as early as 2024.
Ordinarily, funding disbursement is just a routine, mundane part of government contracting. However, soon after NASA revealed that it had selected SpaceX – both the most technically sound proposal and cheapest option by half – alone to return humanity to the Moon, former competitors Dynetics and Blue Origin both filed protests complaining about the space agency’s conclusions. As a direct result, NASA was forced to freeze work on SpaceX’s brand new Human Landing System (HLS) contract and collaboration between both partners was strictly limited until both protests could be evaluated.
Technically, the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) tasked with those reviews had 100 days from the date the protests were filed (April 26th) to complete the process. On July 30th, 95 days later, GAO announced that it had firmly denied both Dynetics’ and Blue Origin’s protests. As it turns out, likely just hours after GAO released its decision, NASA sent SpaceX its first major HLS Starship milestone payment.
As part of the $2.9 billion contract SpaceX won to develop a crewed Starship lander and perform at least two major test flights of the vehicle, one uncrewed and one crewed, NASA wasted no time at all sending SpaceX its first milestone payment of $300 million. In one fell swoop, NASA has thus doubled the amount of money it’s invested to date in SpaceX’s next-generation, fully-reusable Starship launch vehicle.
Per GAO’s July 30th decision document, NASA reportedly only had ~$350 million left to fund its FY2021 HLS Option A awardee(s) – almost all of which has now been sent to SpaceX. Despite the fact that the Dynetics and Blue Origin protests all but completely prevented NASA from making progress on HLS, they didn’t prevent SpaceX from continuing work at a breakneck pace. Notably, even with that $300M payment and a ~$140M HLS requirements contract Starship received in 2020, NASA has still disbursed less HLS funding to SpaceX than Blue Origin’s National Team, which received almost $480M to develop its own lander before SpaceX was crowned.
In fact, SpaceX simply continued as if those protests and their associated obstructions didn’t exist. In early May, for the first time ever, SpaceX successfully launched a full-scale Starship prototype to 10 km (~6.2 mi) and gently landed the massive rocket in one piece. The Starship tankers SpaceX’s HLS lander missions will require will ultimately rely on the exact same exotic recovery approach – an approach that SpaceX has now unequivocally proven works.
Around the same time, SpaceX began assembling a skyscraper-sized ‘launch tower’ that will be tasked with fueling Starship and eventually catching Super Heavy boosters. A few days before GAO denied the HLS Option A protests and allowed NASA to get back to work, SpaceX stacked that launch tower to its final ~145m (~475 ft) height, completing the basic structure. Plenty of outfitting remains, including the installation of the giant arms that will hopefully one day catch and fuel Starship stages, but that work is also progressing quickly.
In the three months NASA’s HLS program has been frozen in place, SpaceX also built, proof tested, and static fired a ~69m tall (~227 ft) Super Heavy booster (B3) for the first time, more or less completed the first orbital-class Starship prototype (S20), nearly finished another full-scale Super Heavy (B4), collectively installed 35 Raptors on both vehicles in about two days, and briefly stacked Ship 20 atop Booster 4 – creating the largest, tallest rocket ever assembled.
In short, even with no guarantee that it would ever receive any of the $2.9 billion NASA awarded it, SpaceX continued Starship development at a breakneck pace and – according to Elon Musk – could technically be ready for the rocket’s first orbital launch attempt “in a few weeks.” In the background, SpaceX also almost certainly completed a great deal of paperwork and deliverables that NASA was finally able to accept and review once unshackled. Ever the optimist, despite the hurdles, CEO Elon Musk still believes that SpaceX will not only deliver its Starship Moon lander – and thus NASA astronauts to the lunar surface – on time, but “probably sooner” than the 2024 target.
Elon Musk
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla confirmed HW3 vehicles cannot run unsupervised FSD, replacing its free upgrade promise with a discounted trade-in.
Tesla has officially confirmed that early vehicles with its Autopilot Hardware 3 (HW3) will not be capable of unsupervised Full Self-Driving, while extending a path forward for legacy owners through a discounted trade-in program. The announcement came by way of Elon Musk in today’s Tesla Q1 2026 earnings call.
🚨 Our LIVE updates on the Tesla Earnings Call will take place here in a thread 🧵
Follow along below: pic.twitter.com/hzJeBitzJU
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) April 22, 2026
The history here matters. HW3 launched in April 2019, and Tesla sold Full Self-Driving packages to owners on the understanding that the hardware was sufficient for full autonomy. Some owners paid between $8,000 and $15,000 for FSD during that period. For years, as FSD’s AI models grew more demanding, HW3 vehicles fell progressively further behind, eventually landing on FSD v12.6 in January 2025 while AI4 vehicles moved to v13 and then v14. When Musk acknowledged in January 2025 that HW3 simply could not reach unsupervised operation, and alluded to a difficult hardware retrofit.
The near-term offering is more concrete. Tesla’s head of Autopilot Ashok Elluswamy confirmed on today’s call that a V14-lite will be coming to HW3 vehicles in late June, bringing all the V14 features currently running on AI4 hardware. That is a meaningful software update for owners who have been frozen at v12.6 for over a year, and it represents genuine effort to keep older hardware relevant. Unsupervised FSD for vehicles is now targeted for Q4 2026 at the earliest, with Musk describing it as a gradual, geography-limited rollout.
For HW3 owners, the over-the-air V14-lite update is welcomed, and the discounted trade-in path at least acknowledges an old obligation. What happens next with the trade-in pricing will define how this chapter ultimately gets written. If Tesla prices the hardware path fairly, acknowledges what early adopters are owed, and delivers V14-lite on the June timeline it committed to today, it has a real opportunity to convert one of the longest-running sore subjects among early adopters into a loyalty story.
Elon Musk
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
Tesla’s Optimus factory in Texas targets 10 million robots yearly, with 5.2 million square feet under construction.
Tesla’s Q1 2026 Update Letter, released today, confirms that first generation Optimus production lines are now well underway at its Fremont, California factory, with a pilot line targeting one million robots per year to start. Of bigger note is a shared aerial image of a large piece of land adjacent to Gigafactory Texas, that Tesla has prominently labeled “Optimus factory site preparation.”
Permit documents show Tesla is seeking to add over 5.2 million square feet of new building space to the Giga Texas North Campus by the end of 2026, at an estimated construction investment of $5 billion to $10 billion. The longer term production target for that facility is 10 million Optimus units per year. Giga Texas already sits on 2,500 acres with over 10 million square feet of existing factory floor, and the North Campus expansion is being built to support multiple projects, including the dedicated Optimus factory, the Terafab chip fabrication facility (a joint Tesla/SpaceX/xAI venture), a Cybercab test track, road infrastructure, and supporting facilities.
Credit: TESLA
Texas makes strategic sense beyond the existing infrastructure. The state’s tax structure, lower labor costs relative to California, and the proximity to Tesla’s AI training cluster Cortex 1 and 2, both located at Giga Texas and now totaling over 230,000 H100 equivalent GPUs, means the Optimus software stack and the factory producing the hardware will share the same campus. Tesla’s Q1 report also confirmed completion of the AI5 chip tape out in April, the inference processor designed specifically to power Optimus units in the field.
As Teslarati reported, the Texas facility is intended to house Optimus V4 production at full scale. Musk told the World Economic Forum in January that Tesla plans to sell Optimus to the public by end of 2027 at a price between $20,000 and $30,000, stating, “I think everyone on earth is going to have one and want one.” He has previously pegged long term demand for general purpose humanoid robots at over 20 billion units globally, citing both consumer and industrial use cases.
Tesla (NASDAQ: TSLA) reported its earnings for the first quarter of 2026 on Wednesday afternoon. Here’s what the company reported compared to what Wall Street analysts expected.
The earnings results come after Tesla reported a miss on vehicle deliveries for the first quarter, delivering 358,023 vehicles and building 408,386 cars during the three-month span.
As Tesla transitions more toward AI and sees itself as less of a car company, expectations for deliveries will begin to become less of a central point in the consensus of how the quarter is perceived.
Nevertheless, Tesla is leaning on its strong foundation as a car company to carry forward its AI ambitions. The first quarter is a good ground layer for the rest of the year.
Tesla Q1 2026 Earnings Results
Tesla’s Earnings Results are as follows:
- Non-GAAP EPS –Â $0.41 Reported vs. $0.36 Expected
- Revenues –Â $22.387 billion vs. $22.35 billion Expected
- Free Cash Flow –Â $1.444 billion
- Profit –Â $4.72 billion
Tesla beat analyst expectations, so it will be interesting to see how the stock responds. IN the past, we’ve seen Tesla beat analyst expectations considerably, followed by a sharp drop in stock price.
On the same token, we’ve seen Tesla miss and the stock price go up the following trading session.
Tesla will hold its Q1 2026 Earnings Call in about 90 minutes at 5:30 p.m. on the East Coast. Remarks will be made by CEO Elon Musk and other executives, who will shed some light on the investor questions that we covered earlier this week.
You can stream it below. Additionally, we will be doing our Live Blog on X and Facebook.
Q1 2026 Earnings Call at 4:30pm CT https://t.co/pkYIaGJ32y
— Tesla (@Tesla) April 22, 2026
Tesla confirmed HW3 can’t do Unsupervised FSD but there’s more to the story
Tesla isn’t joking about building Optimus at an industrial scale: Here we go
