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SpaceX set to launch 40 satellites on fourth dedicated rideshare mission
SpaceX says a Falcon 9 rocket is on track to launch its fourth dedicated rideshare mission no earlier than (NET) 12:24 pm EDT (16:24 UTC) on Friday, April 1st.
Known as Transporter-4, SpaceX will launch the batch of 40 customer satellites out of its Cape Canaveral Space Force Station (CCSFS) LC-40 pad. Poor weather means that the company currently has a roughly 30% chance of favorable conditions on April 1st, improving to 50% on April 2nd and 80% on April 4th. Following the first NASA Space Launch System (SLS) rocket’s trip to a nearby launch pad, SpaceX also has to work around the agency’s plans to attempt an important wet dress rehearsal (WDR) test as early as April 3rd, preventing any launches that day.
SLS has already partially contributed to delays to Axiom-1 – the first all-private astronaut launch to the International Space Station – and could potentially disrupt Transporter-4 if weather or Falcon 9 fail to cooperate on Friday or Saturday.
Transporter-4’s payload of 40 satellites is the smallest number SpaceX has ever manifested on one of its dedicated rideshare missions. It’s unclear why so few satellites will be aboard, but one customer in particular likely explains why the company can launch such a small payload. That customer is Germany’s national space agency (DLR), which has manifested EnMAP – a hyperspectral Earth observation satellite – on Transporter-4. EnMAP itself is quite a bizarre case: the wildly overambitious smallsat was initially scheduled to launch as early as 2012 but has suffered a full decade of delays as endless issues arose. Painfully, those delays mean that EnMAP – a spacecraft largely designed before 2010 – is merely the latest in a long line of similarly capable satellites. Italy, for example, began work on an almost identically capable spacecraft – PRISMA – in 2008 and launched it in 2019 for ~$140 million.
According to one estimate, EnMAP’s cost has likely ballooned from ~$100 million to more than $330 million. In other words, it’s fairly reasonable to assume that SpaceX was able to charge DLR quite a bit more than Transporter-4’s other rideshare customers. SpaceX could have positioned it as a heavily discounted dedicated launch that just so happens to carry some secondary payloads – perhaps charging ‘just’ $15-30 million. EnMAP (950 kg or 2100 lb) is slightly heavier than the maximum weight SpaceX’s one-size-fits-all pricing allows for, but a customer with a similar 830 kilogram (1830 lb) spacecraft could launch it for as little as $4.6 million on a Transporter mission.
Of Transporter-4’s 40 payloads, at least 16 are using intermediaries like Spaceflight, Exolaunch, and D-Orbit, who then deal with SpaceX for the satellite owners. Excluding EnMAP, at least six other customers likely booked directly through SpaceX. Combined, total Transporter-4 revenue before EnMAP could be as low as ~$13 million. According to a SpaceX executive speaking in 2020, the total cost of a Falcon 9 launch with a recoverable, flight-proven booster is $28 million. Given that some executives have compared Transporter missions to public transit, it’s possible that SpaceX is willing to launch some rideshare missions even knowing they will lose money, but it’s hard to imagine it would burn $10-15 million (or more) instead of just delaying a few months to add more payloads.
Even though EnMAP is thus likely picking up all of financial slack, Transporter-4 is still a good demonstration of SpaceX’s flexibility – flexibility that current or prospective providers with much smaller rockets simply can’t match. With Falcon 9, SpaceX can just throw a 1-ton, $300 million spacecraft on top of a several-dozen-satellite rideshare mission and still recover both the booster and fairing without issue – all while charging its smaller customers a more or less unbeatable $1.1 million per 200-kilogram slot and $5500 for each additional kilogram.
SpaceX will begin streaming its first Transporter-4 launch attempt around 12:10 pm EDT (16:10 UTC).
News
Tesla partners with Lemonade for new insurance program
Tesla recently was offered “almost free” coverage for Full Self-Driving by Lemonade’s Shai Wininger, President and Co-founder, who said it would be “happy to explore insuring Tesla FSD miles for (almost) free.”
Tesla owners in California, Oregon, and Arizona can now use Lemonade Insurance, the firm that recently said it could cover Full Self-Driving miles for “almost free.”
Lemonade, which offered the new service through its app, has three distinct advantages, it says:
- Direct Connection for no telematics device needed
- Better customer service
- Smarter pricing
The company is known for offering unique, fee-based insurance rates through AI, and instead of keeping unclaimed premiums, it offers coverage through a flat free upfront. The leftover funds are donated to charities by its policyholders.
On Thursday, it announced that cars in three states would be able to be connected directly to the car through its smartphone app, enabling easier access to insurance factors through telematics:
Lemonade customers who own @Tesla vehicles in California, Oregon, and Arizona can now connect their cars directly to the Lemonade app! ⚡🚘
Direct connection = no telematics device needed 📵
Better customer experience 💃
Smarter pricing with Lemonade 🧠This is a game-changer… pic.twitter.com/jbabxZWT4t
— Lemonade (@Lemonade_Inc) December 11, 2025
Tesla recently was offered “almost free” coverage for Full Self-Driving by Lemonade’s Shai Wininger, President and Co-founder, who said it would be “happy to explore insuring Tesla FSD miles for (almost) free.”
The strategy would be one of the most unique, as it would provide Tesla drivers with stable, accurate, and consistent insurance rates, while also incentivizing owners to utilize Full Self-Driving for their travel miles.
Tesla Full Self-Driving gets an offer to be insured for ‘almost free’
This would make FSD more cost-effective for owners and contribute to the company’s data collection efforts.
Data also backs Tesla Full Self-Driving’s advantages as a safety net for drivers. Recent figures indicate it was nine times less likely to be in an accident compared to the national average, registering an accident every 6.36 million miles. The NHTSA says a crash occurs approximately every 702,000 miles.
Tesla also offers its own in-house insurance program, which is currently offered in twelve states so far. The company is attempting to enter more areas of the U.S., with recent filings indicating the company wants to enter Florida and offer insurance to drivers in that state.
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.
News
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.
Tesla partners with Lemonade for new insurance program
Tesla Model Y gets hefty discounts and more in final sales push
