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SpaceX VP says Starship is already winning commercial launch contracts
A SpaceX executive says that the company’s next-generation, fully-reusable Starship rocket has already secured multiple commercial launch contracts.
Set to debut no earlier than (NET) the first quarter of 2022 with a semi-orbital launch that aims to send Starship about 85% of the way around the Earth, Starship has a ways to go before it’s ready to routinely launch payloads. Nonetheless, SpaceX is confident enough in Starship’s eventual success to have effectively made it the foundation of every one of the company’s future goals – both in the short and long term.
Today, SpaceX’s Falcon rockets have become a spectacularly successful revolution in cost-effective launch through reusability and vertical integration, among other things. Thanks to that unprecedented affordability, SpaceX has been able to kick off the deployment of its Starlink internet constellation, launching more than 1800 satellites and becoming the largest satellite operator in history in less than two and a half years. Where competition is possible, Falcon 9 dominates the global commercial launch market for both small and large satellites. And yet despite its staggering success, Falcon 9 remains at least one or two magnitudes too expensive and too performance-constrained to realize SpaceX’s grander ambitions.
Those overarching goals are simple enough and directly related. First, SpaceX – through Starlink – aims to blanket the Earth’s surface with high-quality, affordable satellite internet that is either indistinguishable from or better than ground-based alternatives, ultimately connecting tens or even hundreds of millions of people to the internet. Second, SpaceX’s founding goal has always been to make humanity a multiplanetary species by enabling the creation of one or several permanent, self-sustaining cities on Mars. For the latter goal, Starship or a fully reusable rocket like it has always been essential – without which it would be prohibitively expensive to launch the sheer mass and volume of supplies needed to build a city on another world.
Recently, if SpaceX’s often hyperbolic CEO is to be believed, Starlink’s success has also become dependent on Starship, with Musk stating in a company-wide memo that SpaceX as a whole could face bankruptcy if Starship isn’t ready to launch 200+ Starlink satellites per month by the end of 2022. While it’s simply untrue that SpaceX is at risk of bankruptcy, there might be some truth behind Musk’s statement. Fearmongering aside, the gist of Musk’s argument is that Starlink is “financially weak” under the current paradigm, where Falcon 9 delivers approximately 50 300-kilogram (~650 lb) satellites to orbit with each launch.
In the same vein as Starship, Musk believes that next-generation “Starlink V2” satellites – several times larger than V1 satellites – will drastically improve the cost-effectiveness of the constellation by allowing SpaceX to squeeze much more network capacity out of every unit of satellite mass. However, making Starlink V2 satellites several times larger would reduce the efficiency of launching them on Falcon 9 by an equal degree – hence the apparently dire need for Starship.
Contrary to Musk’s apocalyptic vision, even if it might be significantly slower and more expensive to deploy, it’s quite likely that a full Starlink V1 constellation launched by Falcon 9 could still be economically viable. What it probably wouldn’t be, though, is exceptionally profitable, which has long been SpaceX’s main plan for funding its multiplanetary dreams. With a Starship capable of achieving its design goals, that could change.
According to Musk and other SpaceX executives, the true cost – before payloads – of a flight-proven Falcon 9 launch is somewhere between $15M and $28M. At an estimated cost of $250-500k apiece, 50-60 Starlink V1 satellites raise the total cost of a Starlink launch to approximately $30-60M – the range between marginal and total cost. In a partially reusable configuration, Falcon 9 is capable of launching about ~16 tons (~35,000 lb) to low Earth orbit (LEO).
Starship, however, is designed to launch at least 100 tons (~220,000 lb) and possibly up to 150 tons (~330,000 lb) to LEO for a marginal cost of as little as $2M. Even if SpaceX is a magnitude off of that target and never gets beyond 100t to LEO, a $20M Starship launch fully loaded with Starlink satellites would still cost five times less than Falcon 9 per unit of satellite mass launched. At 150 tons to LEO for $10M, Starship would cost 15 times less. If SpaceX one day perfects full reusability and marginal costs do fall to $2M, a 150-ton Starship launch could be up to 70 times cheaper than Falcon 9.
For the exact same reasons it could radically improve the cost-efficiency of Starlink deployment and finally make humanity’s expansion beyond Earth affordable enough to be viable, Starship would also inherently revolutionize access to space for all other launch customers – not just SpaceX.
According to SpaceX Vice President of Commercial Sales Tom Ochinero, Starship has already begun to make inroads with SpaceX’s healthy list of existing Falcon customers. While relatively minor and inevitable, it’s still an important symbolic step for SpaceX and Starship as it attempts to deliver a launch vehicle so cheap and capable that it ushers the company’s own Falcon rockets into retirement.
Tesla Model Y configurations are getting hefty discounts and more benefits as the company is in the phase of its final sales push for the year.
Tesla is offering up to $1,500 off new Model Y Standard trims that are available in inventory in the United States. Additionally, Tesla is giving up to $2,000 off the Premium trims of the Model Y. There is also one free upgrade included, such as a paint color or interior color, at no additional charge.
NEWS: Tesla is now offering discounts of up to $1,500 off new Model Y Standard vehicles in U.S. inventory. Discounts of up to $2,000 are also being offered on Model Y Premiums.
These discounts are in addition to the one free upgrade you get (such as Diamond Black paint) on… pic.twitter.com/L0RMtjmtK0
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) December 10, 2025
Tesla is hoping to bolster a relatively strong performance through the first three quarters of the year, with over 1.2 million cars delivered through the first three quarters.
This is about four percent under what the company reported through the same time period last year, as it was about 75,000 vehicles ahead in 2024.
However, Q3 was the company’s best quarterly performance of all time, and it surged because of the loss of the $7,500 EV tax credit, which was eliminated in September. The imminent removal of the credit led to many buyers flocking to Tesla showrooms to take advantage of the discount, which led to a strong quarter for the company.
2024 was the first year in the 2020s when Tesla did not experience a year-over-year delivery growth, as it saw a 1 percent slide from 2023. The previous years saw huge growth, with the biggest coming from 2020 to 2021, when Tesla had an 87 percent delivery growth.
This year, it is expected to be a second consecutive slide, with a drop of potentially 8 percent, if it manages to deliver 1.65 million cars, which is where Grok projects the automaker to end up.
Tesla will likely return to its annual growth rate in the coming years, but the focus is becoming less about delivery figures and more about autonomy, a major contributor to the company’s valuation. As AI continues to become more refined, Tesla will apply these principles to its Full Self-Driving efforts, as well as the Optimus humanoid robot project.
Will Tesla thrive without the EV tax credit? Five reasons why they might
These discounts should help incentivize some buyers to pull the trigger on a vehicle before the year ends. It will also be interesting to see if the adjusted EV tax credit rules, which allowed deliveries to occur after the September 30 cutoff date, along with these discounts, will have a positive impact.
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Tesla FSD’s newest model is coming, and it sounds like ‘the last big piece of the puzzle’
“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026.”
Tesla Full Self-Driving’s newest model is coming very soon, and from what it sounds like, it could be “the last big piece of the puzzle,” as CEO Elon Musk said in late November.
During the xAI Hackathon on Tuesday, Musk was available for a Q&A session, where he revealed some details about Robotaxi and Tesla’s plans for removing Robotaxi Safety Monitors, and some information on a future FSD model.
While he said Full Self-Driving’s unsupervised capability is “pretty much solved,” and confirmed it will remove Safety Monitors in the next three weeks, questions about the company’s ability to give this FSD version to current owners came to mind.
Musk said a new FSD model is coming in about a month or two that will be an order-of-magnitude larger and will include more reasoning and reinforcement learning.
He said:
“There’s a model that’s an order of magnitude larger that will be deployed in January or February 2026. We’re gonna add a lot of reasoning and RL (reinforcement learning). To get to serious scale, Tesla will probably need to build a giant chip fab. To have a few hundred gigawatts of AI chips per year, I don’t see that capability coming online fast enough, so we will probably have to build a fab.”
NEWS: Elon Musk says FSD Unsupervised is “pretty much solved at this point” and that @Tesla will be launching Robotaxis with no safety monitors in about 3 weeks in Austin, Texas. He also teased a new FSD model is coming in about 1-2 months.
“We’re just going through validation… https://t.co/Msne72cgMB pic.twitter.com/i3wfKX3Z0r
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) December 10, 2025
It rings back to late November when Musk said that v14.3 “is where the last big piece of the puzzle finally lands.”
With the advancements made through Full Self-Driving v14 and v14.2, there seems to be a greater confidence in solving self-driving completely. Musk has also personally said that driver monitoring has been more relaxed, and looking at your phone won’t prompt as many alerts in the latest v14.2.1.
This is another indication that Tesla is getting closer to allowing people to take their eyes off the road completely.
Along with the Robotaxi program’s success, there is evidence that Tesla could be close to solving FSD. However, it is not perfect. We’ve had our own complaints with FSD, and although we feel it is the best ADAS on the market, it is not, in its current form, able to perform everything needed on roads.
But it is close.
That’s why there is some legitimate belief that Tesla could be releasing a version capable of no supervision in the coming months.
All we can say is, we’ll see.
Investor's Corner
SpaceX IPO is coming, CEO Elon Musk confirms
However, it appears Musk is ready for SpaceX to go public, as Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote an op-ed that indicated he thought SpaceX would go public soon. Musk replied, basically confirming it.
Elon Musk confirmed through a post on X that a SpaceX initial public offering (IPO) is on the way after hinting at it several times earlier this year.
It also comes one day after Bloomberg reported that SpaceX was aiming for a valuation of $1.5 trillion, adding that it wanted to raise $30 billion.
Musk has been transparent for most of the year that he wanted to try to figure out a way to get Tesla shareholders to invest in SpaceX, giving them access to the stock.
He has also recognized the issues of having a public stock, like litigation exposure, quarterly reporting pressures, and other inconveniences.
However, it appears Musk is ready for SpaceX to go public, as Ars Technica Senior Space Editor Eric Berger wrote an op-ed that indicated he thought SpaceX would go public soon.
Musk replied, basically confirming it:
As usual, Eric is accurate
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 10, 2025
Berger believes the IPO would help support the need for $30 billion or more in capital needed to fund AI integration projects, such as space-based data centers and lunar satellite factories. Musk confirmed recently that SpaceX “will be doing” data centers in orbit.
AI appears to be a “key part” of SpaceX getting to Musk, Berger also wrote. When writing about whether or not Optimus is a viable project and product for the company, he says that none of that matters. Musk thinks it is, and that’s all that matters.
It seems like Musk has certainly mulled something this big for a very long time, and the idea of taking SpaceX public is not just likely; it is necessary for the company to get to Mars.
The details of when SpaceX will finally hit that public status are not known. Many of the reports that came out over the past few days indicate it would happen in 2026, so sooner rather than later.
But there are a lot of things on Musk’s plate early next year, especially with Cybercab production, the potential launch of Unsupervised Full Self-Driving, and the Roadster unveiling, all planned for Q1.
Tesla Model Y gets hefty discounts and more in final sales push
Tesla FSD’s newest model is coming, and it sounds like ‘the last big piece of the puzzle’
