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SpaceX settles on Thursday for first Falcon 9 launch of 2021
After a few days of delays, SpaceX appears to have settled on Thursday, January 7th for the first of several dozen Falcon 9 launches planned in 2021.
Originally scheduled to launch as early as January 4th, SpaceX’s Turksat 5A communications satellite launch was “placed TBD due to mission assurance” on January 1st – an unfortunate catch-all euphemism often used by launch providers in lieu of any real explanation for delays. Regardless, Next Spaceflight reports that Turksat 5A will be Falcon 9 B1060’s fourth launch, a milestone the first stage (booster) has reached just six months after its first flight.
Despite the minor delay, SpaceX’s current target of four launches this month is still well within reach even though the slip exemplifies the uphill battle the company will face as it aims to achieve CEO Elon Musk’s goal of 48 launches in 2021. Weather is currently 60% favorable for SpaceX’s first launch of the year and Turksat 5A is scheduled to lift off no earlier than 8:28 pm EST on January 7th (01:28 UTC, 8 Jan).
Good timing, too — the 45th said SpaceX’s next launch of Turksat was “placed TBD due to mission assurance.”— Emre Kelly (@EmreKelly) January 1, 2021
New forecast (60% favorable) and hazard area: pic.twitter.com/cEapdSd2DP— Emre Kelly (@EmreKelly) January 5, 2021
Unfortunately, SpaceX’s first launch of the new year has been steeped in unprecedented controversy for the company, including the first-ever instance of mass-protests at its Hawthorne, California factory and headquarters. The reason: Turksat 5A, while partially meant for civilian communications, will also support the Turkish military, which supported Azerbaijan after the country – unprovoked – reignited a long-simmering conflict in the Nagorno-Karabakh region in September 2020.
Stemming from events that transpired over the last several centuries, Armenian-Azeri conflict and Turkish involvement are extraordinarily complex and messy. In the 1910s and 1920s, Turkey (then the Ottoman Empire) infamously committed atrocities against Armenian, Assyrian, and Greek communities within its occupied territory in a process of “Turkification”, systematically killing 1-3 million people in what would ultimately be labeled genocide. In a separate but related conflict, Turkey eventually chose to support Azerbaijan’s claim to the ethnically (75-90%) and historically Armenian territory, backing the country against Armenia in the first Nagorno-Karabakh War in the 1990s.
Azerbaijan reignited the conflict in 2020, resulting in the deaths of at least 6000 combatants and civilians on both sides and ultimately securing a substantial portion of Nagorno-Karabakh territory as part of a November 2020 ceasefire agreement. To an extent, Nagorno-Karabakh’s borders are now more or less back to where they were before the first war in the 1990s. While an avoidable loss of life is inherently deplorable, it’s extremely difficult to say whether Azerbaijan was justified but it and Turkey’s history of systematic and discriminatory hostility towards Armenians leaves little benefit of the doubt worth giving.
Ultimately, that cloud of ambiguity makes it hard to directly fault SpaceX for choosing to launch Turksat 5A or for its contracts to launch Turksat 5B and future domestically-built satellites. Additionally, if SpaceX should be criticized for willingly launching the satellite, Airbus – contracted by Turkey to build Turksat 5A – is at least as worthy of critique but has yet to be included at all in protest discourse despite the fact that Turkey’s production contract was publicly announced in 2017.
In the history of spaceflight, a satellite that is completed but never launches is all but unheard of, as the inherent bureaucratic and financial inertia behind a launch campaign mere months away from its scheduled liftoff is obviously immense. Even if SpaceX were to accept major financial penalties and back out of its contract, Arianespace, Roscosmos, or ULA would assuredly accept any replacement contract.
For protestors still set on making an impact, the shrewd move would be to redirect attention on future Turkish satellite projects like Turksat 5B, 6A, and beyond with the intention of killing contracts in the cradle – a far more tenable goal.
Stay tuned for more launch details as SpaceX nears its first mission of 2021.
Tesla Full Self-Driving is now the centerpiece of the company’s newly revised Referral Program, which launched on October 29.
Instead of referring people to purchase vehicles and the referrer receiving $250 in Tesla Credit, the new program now incentivizes Full Self-Driving subscriptions.
If a Tesla owner is on an FSD trial and uses a referral code to subscribe to Full Self-Driving, the person whose Referral Link was used will receive one month of FSD (Supervised). Their code can be utilized 12 times per year, with January 1 marking the reset date.
Realistically, this means that if your Referral Code is used by 12 Tesla owners on an FSD trial, you will receive a full year of FSD for free.
🚨 Here is Tesla’s new Referral Program for Full Self-Driving (Supervised):
When someone subscribes to FSD using your link, you’ll get a month free. Up to a year of FSD is available to you for free!
If you’d like to use my link: https://t.co/g00IX9OCE3 https://t.co/GFBzEO2jjS
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 30, 2026
The previous program made it pretty difficult to get referrals; buying a vehicle is obviously a much larger financial strain than subscribing to Full Self-Driving for a month.
Of course, the previous Referral Program also offered a tangible benefit: $250 in credits you could use on Service, Supercharging, or anything in the Tesla Shop. It truly could pay for someone’s travel for a year. It recently bought me a new backpack and a T-shirt.
However, this new program is much more attainable for those who do not have a massive online presence of a slew of friends in the Tesla community who will use the code and max out subscriptions for vehicle purchases.
Woke up to maxed out Referrals! Thank you guys, that’s awesome!
Share your referral link below so others can use it! https://t.co/kesbwTcoTV
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) October 30, 2026
The Full Self-Driving suite will now be the keystone of the Referral Program, which makes it more inclusive and more fun for everyone with an awesome benefit.
It also gives the impression that Tesla is truly focused on FSD subscriptions, something that saw a tremendous increase in volume in Q3, as 75 percent of deliveries for the quarter came with an FSD subscription attached.
Full Self-Driving data is so instrumental to the suite’s improvement that this kind of program benefits Tesla as much as it does the consumer.
Elon Musk
Tesla made napping in a Robotaxi easier with its latest update
Tesla’s quiet mode reaches Model Y Robotaxis, blacking out the screen for riders wanting rest.
Tesla’s quiet mode, the setting that blacks out the screen for riders who want to rest, has moved beyond the Cybercab. A video posted Thursday by Spencer (@scotsrule08) shows the feature running in a Model Y Robotaxi on a night ride that appears to be in Dallas.
New quiet mode now on @Robotaxi https://t.co/2cM2eM9NeN — Spencer (@scotsrule08) October 29, 2026
The rider taps a small crescent moon icon in the bottom right corner of the map screen. The map, media player, app shortcuts and Grok prompt disappear, leaving a dark display with “Arriving soon,” the destination and a line reading “Tap display to exit quiet mode.” Controls a passenger may still need, including Pull Over, cabin temperature, volume and Support, stay visible. One tap anywhere brings the full map back.
Quiet mode first showed up in the Cybercab last week, which Teslarati reported alongside a new rear camera view. Tesla has been trimming cabin noise in other ways too. On October 25, Spencer reported that Robotaxi turn signals now chime for the first four blinks and then go silent. Tesla has not published release notes for either change.
Elon Musk has been pitching this use for more than a decade. In October 2014, he said that “maybe five or six years from now I think we’ll be able to achieve true autonomous driving where you could literally get in the car, go to sleep and wake up at your destination,”
By 2017 he was setting a higher bar. Speaking at TED, Musk said the hard part was not making self-driving work 99.9 percent of the time, “because, like, if a car crashes one in a thousand times, then you’re probably still not going to be comfortable falling asleep. You shouldn’t be, certainly.”
Owners asked for something similar in their own cars. In December 2019, a Tesla owner requested a Nap Mode that would keep the climate running and wake the occupant with an alarm, and Musk answered “Ok,” as Teslarati covered at the time.
The line returned when the Cybercab was unveiled at the We, Robot event in October 2024. “We’ll move from supervised Full Self-Driving to unsupervised Full Self-Driving, where you can fall asleep and wake up at your destination,” Musk said. On Tesla’s first quarter earnings call in April 2025, he called it the deciding measure: “The acid test is, can you go to sleep in your car and wake up in your destination and I’m confident that will be available in many cities in the US by the end of this year,”
Tesla has run driverless Model Y rides in Dallas and Houston since April, so a passenger dozing off on the way home is now a realistic use of the button. Tesla is also offering new riders a free first trip in both cities, according to an in-app screen shared by tracker Ethan McKanna, and said on its third quarter call that Cybercab rides would launch in Dallas next month.
News
FCC green lights SpaceX’s move to a showdown with Verizon and AT&T
The FCC advanced plans opening 482 MHz to satellite phone service, boosting SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile.
The Federal Communications Commission voted Thursday to move forward with a proposal that would open an additional 482 MHz of spectrum to satellite service beamed directly to ordinary phones, a step that could widen the road for SpaceX’s Starlink Mobile to compete with the country’s largest wireless carriers.
The commission adopted the notice of proposed rulemaking at its October open meeting in Washington, Reuters reported. The proposal would raise the number of bands eligible for Supplemental Coverage from Space from five to 13, according to the FCC fact sheet. Commissioners also advanced a companion item proposing an auction of 25 MHz in the 1675 to 1695 MHz and 2020 to 2025 MHz bands, which could be used for terrestrial service, direct to device service or both.
Thursday’s vote does not hand any spectrum to SpaceX. It opens a public comment period, and final rules will come later. Under the draft, comments would be due 60 days after the notice is published in the Federal Register. The FCC had not released the adopted text at the time of writing, so it is not yet clear whether any bands were changed before the vote.
That question is where the fight now moves. AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile, through industry group CTIA, asked the FCC to drop the 2.5 GHz and 3.45 GHz bands, which make up 290 MHz of the 482 MHz on the table, as Teslarati reported ahead of the vote. T-Mobile argued satellite interference could wipe out up to 96% of a cell site’s uplink coverage area. SpaceX asked the commission to go the other way and add the 902 to 928 MHz band.
The rule change that matters most to SpaceX may be a structural one. Today, a satellite operator must lease spectrum from every carrier holding co-channel licenses across an entire region such as the contiguous United States. The proposal would replace that with a certification that the operator has coexistence agreements covering only the areas it plans to serve, or that it holds the terrestrial licenses itself.
SpaceX has spent this year building that second path. It bought EchoStar’s AWS-4 and H-block licenses in a deal worth roughly $17 billion, and earlier this month agreed to acquire Grain Management’s nationwide 800 MHz portfolio, which the company said would pave the way for Starlink to become a major US mobile carrier. The FCC approved SpaceX’s purchase of three unused AWS-3 licenses from Tristar on October 21, and cleared its plan for 15,000 next generation direct to cell satellites on October 6.
The regulator has not always sided with SpaceX. In April, the FCC dismissed a SpaceX petition seeking access to Mobile Satellite Service spectrum held by incumbents, and it rejected 2.5 GHz for satellite coverage when it first adopted the framework in 2024.
The carriers are also building their own defenses. In May, the three companies agreed in principle to form a joint venture pooling spectrum for satellite service, and T-Mobile remains SpaceX’s US launch partner for Starlink Mobile even as it leads the push to keep satellites out of 2.5 GHz. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell has said service on SpaceX’s own airwaves is targeted for early 2028.
Tesla Full Self-Driving becomes main pillar of new Referral Program
Tesla made napping in a Robotaxi easier with its latest update
