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SpaceX sues US government to protest mystery launch or rocket R&D contracts
SpaceX has filed a lawsuit – technically a “Bid Protest Complaint” – against the United States government and successfully petitioned for the file to remain sealed, restricting access to additional case details for the time being.
This development follows a quiet series of bid protests SpaceX filed with the Government Accountability Office (GAO) in February 2019, shortly after NASA announced that it had awarded ULA a ~$150M launch contract for Lucy (a robotic Trojan asteroid explorer). SpaceX believed that it could perform the mission at a “dramatically lower” price, potentially saving the federal government tens of millions of dollars. SpaceX withdrew both of its GAO bid protests without comment on April 4th. Whether those prior protests are related to SpaceX’s May 2019 lawsuit is unclear.
Adding even more complexity and uncertainty to the series of events, NASA awarded SpaceX the launch contract for its Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) spacecraft on April 20th, about two weeks after SpaceX retracted its Lucy protests. The cause-and-effect relationship between both events is wholly ambiguous. Perhaps SpaceX withdrew before the company was made aware of their DART win. Perhaps they withdrew their protest because they learned of NASA’s award.
Regardless of what did or did not trigger the contract award, the fact remains that SpaceX’s DART launch will cost NASA ~$70M, less than half the price of ULA’s ~$150M Lucy launch contract. As such, it seems likely that launching Lucy on Falcon 9 could have saved the US government as much as $50M, assuming an expendable profile (~$100M per SpaceX’s latest GPS III launch contracts).
Returning to the topic at hand, the simplest explanation is that SpaceX’s GAO bid protests and May 2019 lawsuit are in some way related. Although SpaceX was clearly correct when it insinuated that it could launch Lucy far more affordably than ULA, the company was criticized for its GAO protests because they effectively froze – or at least complicated – work on the NASA spacecraft. In the event that the withdrawals and lawsuit are related, SpaceX would have backed down after entering into the slow GAO protest process, essentially conceding the contract to ULA and allowing spacecraft work to continue without disruption.
Replaced with a lawsuit against the US government, SpaceX could instead be attempting to change the processes that lead NASA to award ULA the Lucy launch contract in spite of potential savings on the order of ~$50M. SpaceX has done something similar once before when it sued the US Air Force for its uncompetitive launch procurement processes, a largely successful endeavor that has helped force some competition back into USAF/DoD launch contracts.
However, there are several additional possibilities for the actual subject of SpaceX’s latest sealed suit. Most recently, NASA distributed ~$46M among 11 companies for studies and prototypes of lunar landers, transfer vehicles, and in-space refueling technology. SpaceX tied with Aerojet Rocketdyne for the least substantial awards out of those 11 companies, each receiving funds for a single study, while most other awardees were contracted for multiple studies and/or prototypes. This is a stretch, however.
The most likely alternative to a continuation of SpaceX’s Lucy protest is a lawsuit focused on the USAF’s latest EELV/NSSL development contracts and its proposed continuation of block-buy launch procurement. Of the four companies involved, Blue Origin and SpaceX have both criticized the USAF for a variety of reasons. Both did agree, however, in their dislike of the USAF’s inexplicable desire to award all launch contracts to two victors, despite there being as many as four different launch vehicles that could feasibly compete for those several-dozen contracts.
For now, details of SpaceX’s latest lawsuit will remain sealed, leaving the company’s motivations veiled in mystery. SpaceX’s next USAF mission could occur as early as June 22nd. Known as STP-2, it will mark Falcon Heavy’s third flight, the rocket’s first defense-related launch, and the USAF’s first use of flight-proven SpaceX boosters. If successful, SpaceX will effectively be able to compete with ULA for all conceivable future launch contracts.
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Tesla Cybercab is set to launch in Austin, Texas, on September 3, as the company has officially started sending out invitations to a dedicated event it will hold in the city where its headquarters is located.
The Cybercab is Tesla’s dedicated ride-sharing vehicle: it features just two seats and has no steering wheel or pedals. It is aimed at fully autonomous passenger transport, and will operate in the Robotaxi fleet alongside the Tesla Model Y, which has been performing driverless rides for real-world passengers for more than a year.
Thank you so much @Tesla for inviting us to the Cybercab launch in Austin! 🤠 pic.twitter.com/F1rAR8zd5O
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) August 22, 2026
The launch of the Cybercab marks the next chapter in Tesla’s autonomy story. The company has been developing autonomous transport for years with its Full Self-Driving (Supervised) platform, which is available in any vehicle the company has built with the proper hardware and software capabilities.
Its capabilities vary by hardware and software version, but Tesla says its latest hardware version, known as AI4, can deliver full autonomy. However, future vehicles will operate with even more robust hardware packages, as Tesla will develop AI4.5 and AI5 for even more capability in its vehicles.
Following a report from The Information that surfaced earlier this week, the writing was on the wall that Tesla was set to launch Cybercab in the near term. The report stated Tesla could launch Cybercab as soon as the end of August. Tesla came close and has booked it for September 3.
The big thing with this event being scheduled is not necessarily that Tesla is launching a new vehicle, but instead that it is launching a vehicle that has no steering wheel or pedals and will operate exclusively on a self-driving program that is evidently nearing full autonomy. If the event allows vehicles to take passengers on public roads and drop them off wherever they please within the City of Austin, it will be a drastic advancement in the company’s self-driving story.
People have ridden in Cybercab previously: Tesla had the “We, Robot” event in October 2024, which allowed people to experience fully autonomous rides in a closed circuit at Warner Bros. Studios in Burbank.
🚨 Ride in a Tesla Cybercab with us
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) May 11, 2025
Additionally, Tesla launched employee rides in Cybercab in July.
It’s a drastic step forward for Tesla, whose CEO, Elon Musk, has promised for years that the company would release a fully autonomous vehicle and platform capable of allowing drivers to relinquish any responsibility behind the wheel.
Elon Musk put a number on where he thinks SpaceX’s Starship program is headed by 2030, replying on X a day after President Trump signed a memo pushing the country toward 1,000 space launches and reentries a year.
The exchange started when Aaron Burnett, co-founder of propulsion startup Mach 33, posted that “1,000 launches/reentries is the goal,” quoting White House science adviser Michael Kratsios on the newly signed National Space Transportation Policy. Burnett noted that the FAA’s own bull-case forecast reached only 385 annual launches by 2030, while his firm’s conservative model already put SpaceX alone near 940. Musk responded, “We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized. Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!”
We’re aiming to reach 30+ Starship launches/day in 2030, which is ~10k annualized.
Still tiny numbers compared to airplane flights!
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 21, 2026
That figure is specific to Starship, the rocket SpaceX is still developing for orbital and lunar missions, not the Falcon 9 fleet that carries most of the company’s current launch volume. Starship has flown twice this year, a slower pace than the four and five flights SpaceX managed in 2024 and 2025. Getting from two flights a year to 30 a day is the scale of jump the new federal policy is meant to clear regulatory room for.
Trump’s memo, signed Thursday, directs agencies to identify new launch and reentry sites on federal land, including a new reentry site within 90 days, and to speed up the permitting and environmental reviews that have long slowed cadence growth. It also sets a goal of returning American astronauts to the moon by 2028 and placing initial lunar base elements by 2030, tying the launch buildout directly to NASA’s Artemis program.
SpaceX has already been pushing the FAA toward higher numbers on its own. The agency approved up to 44 annual Starship launches from Kennedy Space Center in February, on top of a 2024 review that raised the cap at Starbase in Texas to 25 a year. Those approvals cover a fraction of the 10,000 annual flights Musk is now describing, which shows how far current permitting still sits from the administration’s stated target.
The near-term test of all this is more modest. SpaceX cleared a full-duration, six-engine static fire on its next Starship vehicle this week, the last major hardware checkpoint before Flight 14, which is targeting no earlier than August 28 and is expected to attempt the vehicle’s first full orbital mission. Musk said last week that a tower catch of the upper stage is still probably months away, a reminder that the immediate roadmap remains far more incremental than the daily launch numbers he just posted.
Tesla will resolve its massive recall of nearly three million vehicles in China with stickers and a software update.
On Friday, Chinese regulators filed recall plans against Tesla, Xiaomi, Leapmotor, Xpeng, Chery, Geely, Dongfeng, Arcfox, and FAW to resolve what is essentially a carbon-copy issue throughout each of the companies’ vehicle models: emergency door release latches are simply not visible enough.
Tesla door handle saga gets its latest chapter and a big change is coming
The companies will be required to add things that will make these latches, which will open the door in the event of an emergency, more visible. Of the 7 million vehicles impacted, Tesla accounts for 2,975,910 units. More than 1.9 million of those are Model Y vehicles, with the rest, just over 970,000, being Model 3s.
To resolve the issue, Tesla is going to add warning labels to the emergency latches free of charge, and then utilize an Over-the-Air update to add a post-crash window-lowering strategy, according to CNEVpost.
This massive effort to fix the all-electric Model Y and Model 3’s emergency latch system comes just months after several probes across various markets identified the trouble some had identifying this latch. Those who had gotten involved in car accidents that stripped the vehicle of its power were not aware that every Tesla has emergency door latches.
China’s State Administration for Market Regulation (SAMR) said that severe crashes that disable a vehicle’s low-voltage system could not only hinder occupants from getting out, but also make it more difficult for emergency response workers to gain entry.
SAMR is starting to tighten the regulations it has on door handles on vehicles. A new mandatory national standard will take effect for all models starting January 1, 2027, and will require all doors to be equipped with mechanical release mechanisms. This will effectively end purely electronic door handles. Models already on sale with type approval have been granted a two-year transition period, which will enable things to change until January 2029.
Tesla will launch Cybercab on September 3
SpaceX and a new Trump order that could rewrite the next decade of launches
