SpaceX
SpaceX calls ULA NASA launch contract “vastly” overpriced in official protest
SpaceX has filed an official protest with the US Government Accountability Office (GAO) after NASA awarded competitor United Launch Alliance a launch contract for Lucy, an interplanetary probe meant to explore a belt of unique asteroids clustered around Jupiter’s orbital swath.
Announced on January 31st, SpaceX believes that NASA made a decision counter to the best interests of the agency and US taxpayers by rewarding ULA the Lucy launch contract at a cost of $148M, a price that the company deemed “vastly more [expensive]” than the bid it submitted for the competition.
Updated our story on SpaceX’s GAO protest of a NASA launch contract with comments from both NASA and ULA. https://t.co/qqCsnNatu0
— Jeff Foust (@jeff_foust) February 14, 2019
With performance roughly equivalent to SpaceX’s Falcon 9 Block 5 rocket in a reusable configuration when launching from low Earth orbit (LEO) up to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO), ULA’s Atlas V 401 variant is the simplest version of the rocket family with the lowest relative performance, featuring no solid rocket boosters. According to the company’s “RocketBuilder” tool, Atlas V 401 was listed with a base price of $109M in 2017. SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is listed with a base price of $62M for a mission with booster recovery, while the rocket’s highest-value expendable launch (for a USAF GPS III satellite worth ~$530 million) was awarded at a cost of $83M, with three subsequent GPS III launch contracts later awarded for ~$97M apiece.
Relative to almost any conceivable near-term launch contract on the horizon, SpaceX’s GPS III launch contracts act as a sort of worst-case price tag for Falcon 9, where the customer requires extraordinary mission assurance and the entire rocket has to be expended during the launch. Put in another way, NASA would likely be able to get the reliability, performance, and mission assurance it wants/needs from Falcon 9 for perhaps $50M less than the cost of ULA’s proposed launch, equivalent to cutting more than a third off the price tag. Part of NASA’s Discovery Program, the Lucy spacecraft will be capped at $450M excluding launch costs, meaning that choosing SpaceX over ULA could singlehandedly cut the mission’s total cost by a minimum of 8-10%.
- A mockup of NASA’s proposed Lucy spacecraft. (NASA)
- NASA’s InSight lifts off atop Atlas V 401, March 2018. (Pauline Acalin)
- A panorama of Atlas V 401, March 2018. (Pauline Acalin)
- SpaceX and NASA’s most recent science spacecraft launch, TESS. (SpaceX)
- After launching in April 2018, B1045 landed on OCISLY and is being refurbished for a second launch in just 5 days, on June 29. (Tom Cross)
“Since SpaceX has started launching missions for NASA, this is the first time the company has challenged one of the agency’s award decisions. SpaceX offered a solution with extraordinarily high confidence of mission success at a price dramatically lower than the award amount, so we believe the decision to pay vastly more to Boeing and Lockheed for the same mission was therefore not in the best interest of the agency or the American taxpayers.” – SpaceX, February 13th, 2019
The fact remains that the Lucy mission does face a uniquely challenging launch trajectory, offering just a single launch window of roughly three weeks, after which the mission as designed effectively becomes impossible. Missing that window could thus end up costing NASA hundreds of millions of dollars in rework and delays, if not triggering the mission’s outright cancellation. NASA and ULA thus couched the launch contract award and ~50% premium in terms of what ULA argues is Atlas V’s “world-leading schedule certainty”. Excluding ULA’s other rocket, Delta IV, Atlas V does have a respectable track record of staying true to its contracted launch targets. However, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 “schedule certainty” continues to improve as the launch vehicle matures.
Admittedly, while Falcon 9 has gotten far better at reliably launching within 5-10 days of its on-pad static fire test, SpaceX has continued to struggle to launch payloads within a week or two of customer targets. Regardless, October 2021 is more than two and a half years away, giving SpaceX an inordinate amount of time and dozens upon dozens of manifested Falcon 9 launches to reach a level of operational maturity and design stability comparable to Atlas V, a rocket that has changed minimally over the course of 16+ years and 79 launches.
- An Atlas V 401 rocket lifts off in 2017. (ULA)
- Falcon 9 B1046 prepares for its third launch and recovery, December 2018. (SpaceX)
- Falcon 9 B1046 is pictured here landing after its third successful launch in December 2018 – the first SpaceX rocket to cross that reusability milestone. (SpaceX)
In October 2010, NASA awarded ULA a contract valued at $187M to launch its MAVEN Mars orbiter on Atlas V 401. In December 2013, ULA won a $163M contract to launch NASA’s InSight Mars lander on Atlas V 401. In January 2019, ULA was awarded a contract for NASA’s Lucy spacecraft, priced at $148.3M for a 2021 Atlas V 401 launch. Put simply, barring ULA using a dartboard and blindfold to determine launch contract pricing or aggressive reverse-inflation, SpaceX’s very existence already stokes the flames of competition, particularly when launch contracts are directly competed by their parent agencies or companies.
Whether or not SpaceX’s protest is entirely warranted or ends up amounting to anything, it can be guaranteed that the fact that SpaceX was there to compete with ULA at all forced the company to slash anywhere from $20-40M from the price it would have otherwise gladly charged NASA. Another ~$50M saved would certainly not be the worst thing to happen to the US taxpayer, but it’s also not the end of the world.
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk’s Grok Bot is picking up the phone now, and the first calls are wild
Elon Musk wants Grok Bot users making phone calls, and one Comcast call saved $500.
Elon Musk is pushing Grok Bot users toward a feature that, until this week, few of them could actually use. “Try asking Grok @Bot to make calls!” Musk wrote on X Tuesday afternoon, quoting a demo from Sawyer Merritt that included audio from a live call.
Musk first announced calling on October 25, writing that the agent could “call someone or a business for you, make a request on your behalf, take notes on the response and send you a note summarizing the conversation.” There were no release notes at the time, and the feature only appeared in preview builds. That changed on Tuesday, when creator Peter Yang said all Grok Bot users should now be able to call US businesses. Musk reposted his demo.
Try asking Grok @Bot to make calls! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 3, 2026
Yang’s call shows how far the feature goes. In his video, his bot dialed Comcast, worked through the phone menu, deflected small talk about the weather by saying it does not “have eyes on the sky,” turned down three upsells and used a cheaper fiber offer from competitor Sonic as leverage. His bill dropped from $84 to $45 per month on a faster plan, a savings of nearly $500 a year. The call ran about 25 minutes, and the bot paused to get Yang’s approval before accepting the final terms.
Merritt described what the user sees: a live transcript runs during the call, and when the business asks for something the bot does not know, an answer box pops up in the chat. The user types a reply and Grok relays it to the person on the line. Other users posted results Tuesday, including a $100 gift card recovered from Verizon Fios after a 51 minute call and a same day pediatric appointment, which Musk also shared. Not every call worked. One user said a rep refused to cancel a subscription once it was clear an AI was on the phone.
Grok @Bot can now call someone or a business for you, make a request on your behalf, take notes on the response and send you a note summarizing the conversation! — Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 25, 2026
The Grok Bot terms require every call to identify itself as a virtual assistant calling on the user’s behalf and warn that calls may be recorded. Marketing, mass calling and impersonation are prohibited, and calling currently works only with US numbers.
The timing stands out. Days ago, users began hitting their weekly limits early, and Musk said the cost of serving Grok Bot was “unsustainably high relative to revenue,” as Teslarati reported. A call that spends most of its 25 or 50 minutes on hold is the kind of long running task that eats into usage, and SpaceXSI has not said how calls count against the weekly pool. Grok Bot is included from the $30 Premium tier of The X Subscription upward.
For Tesla owners, the agent has been in their cars since September 22 and is enabled across every Cybercab and Model Y Robotaxi. Musk has already pitched it for phone chores like scrubbing your number from spam call lists. Neither Tesla nor SpaceXSI has confirmed whether a bot can place one of these calls on request from inside the vehicle.
News
SpaceX’s Starfall just went from secret to storefront
SpaceX now pitches Starfall missions with 1,000 kg payloads, weeks of microgravity, and Starlink connectivity.
SpaceX has put up a dedicated commercial page for Starfall, its disk shaped reentry capsule, laying out for the first time what customers actually get when they book a flight. The page, live at spacex.com/starfall, pitches “affordable, routine access to microgravity” and invites companies to get in touch about flying manufacturing, research or testing payloads.
The specs are short and specific. Each Starfall mission carries up to 1,000 kg of payload, supplies 1 kW of power and connects through an Ethernet interface. Mission length is tailored to the customer, and the payload stays online the entire time through Starlink, which means researchers can pull data from an experiment while it is still in orbit instead of waiting for splashdown.
SpaceX is launching a secret spacecraft that could change how things are made in space
SpaceX is aiming the service at three markets. Biomedical customers are told they can grow stem cell organoids, replacement tissue and layered biomaterials. Pharmaceutical companies are pitched on protein and small molecule drug crystals, which form smaller and more uniform shapes without gravity driven convection. Materials science rounds out the list, with semiconductors and other next generation materials grown in vacuum and microgravity.
The page also makes clear which rocket SpaceX is counting on. “By launching on Starship, Starfall brings a reliable and scalable cadence previously unavailable to the market,” the company wrote, contrasting weeks of continuous microgravity with the seconds offered by drop towers and parabolic flights. No price or first operational flight date is listed.
The commercial push is a sharp turn from how Starfall started. SpaceX said almost nothing about the capsule ahead of its first flight in June, and nearly everything known came from FAA and FCC filings describing a disk about 10.2 feet wide and 2.5 feet tall that can return 2,200 pounds of cargo. By its second flight on the Bandwagon-5 rideshare in October, Starfall was listed by name on the mission page, though SpaceX still did not say what it carried.
Customers appear to be lining up. SpaceX said in its third quarter results that it signed three commercial Starfall missions during the quarter. On the earnings call, President Gwynne Shotwell described the capsule as providing “routine relatively low cost access to microgravity environments for scientific research, including improving our understanding of diseases like cancer and diabetes,” and said the three new missions would fly on Starship.
The branding effort extends past the website. SpaceX added a Starfall T-shirt to its online store on Monday as part of a batch of new merchandise, giving the program a place next to Starship, Starlink and Starshield in the company’s lineup.
The move also puts SpaceX in more direct competition with companies it launches. Varda Space Industries, which has built much of the in-space manufacturing market so far, flew its W-Series 7 capsule on the same Bandwagon-5 mission as Starfall in October. Varda’s capsules are roughly three times smaller than Starfall, and SpaceX controls the ride to orbit for both.
Starfall’s near term cadence depends on Starship. SpaceX is preparing for Flight 15 after completing static fires of Ship 42 and its Super Heavy booster in late October, and is aiming to catch both stages with the launch tower on that flight.
Elon Musk
Grok Bot users hit with weekly limits early, Elon Musk explains what happened
Elon Musk said weeks ago during SpaceX’s third-quarter earnings call that the company’s Grok Bot, its autonomous AI Agent platform, was showing “the fastest growth of a product” that he’d ever seen in his life.
Now, SpaceXSI is scaling back Grok Bot users’ weekly limits, much to the surprise of those who have relied on it to take away monotonous tasks in their lives.
Elon Musk’s terse November 1 reply on X captured a sharp tension in the early days of agentic AI. Responding to a user who asked for a Grok Bot usage reset after hitting 100 percent with four days still left on the weekly cycle, Musk wrote: “The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue.”
@DogecoinNorway The cost of serving Grok Bot was unsustainably high relative to revenue
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 1, 2026
The post arrived amid a wave of similar complaints from paying subscribers whose meters had jumped unexpectedly toward or to the limit, sometimes overnight and with little corresponding activity. It also stood in clear contrast to statements Musk had made only days and weeks earlier.
On the SpaceX third-quarter earnings call in mid-to-late October, Musk had described Grok Bot in almost the opposite terms. He called it “the fastest growth of a product that I’ve ever seen in my life” and said he had “never seen anything grow this fast.”
Company figures put paid weekly users at roughly 800,000 earlier in the month, more than doubling over the prior period. Daily active users had climbed from under 100,000 in early September to over 600,000 by late October.
Musk emphasized that the product has no free tier and that users appear to be getting real value beyond what they pay. In other remarks, he noted that usage per user was rising rather than declining, the opposite of the usual decay pattern for new software.
Grok Bot, launched around August, functions as an always-available agent with its own persistent cloud computer; it can schedule, research, shop, browse, and execute multi-step workflows even after the user steps away. Access is bundled into X subscription tiers (roughly $30, $100, and $200 per month) and certain Cursor plans, drawing from shared weekly usage pools whose exact sizes have not been publicly detailed.
The economics of that model are what Musk’s November 1 post put in the spotlight. Agentic systems burn far more compute than ordinary chatbot exchanges. Each task can trigger repeated model calls, tool use, web actions, and sustained background work.
When growth is as rapid as Musk celebrated, the absolute compute bill scales quickly even if average revenue per user stays fixed under flat monthly subscriptions. Industry observers noted the opportunity cost as well: the same GPUs can be rented to other AI labs at higher rates.
A simple back-of-the-envelope comparison circulating after the post illustrated the gap: if every reported daily user paid the top tier, annualized subscription revenue would still be modest relative to the scale of compute infrastructure SpaceX is building and leasing to companies like Anthropic.
Some users also reported possible dashboard anomalies around the same period, though Musk’s framing treated the underlying cost-revenue imbalance as the core issue rather than a pure metering glitch.
The juxtaposition is the core of this exchange. Within roughly two weeks of publicly framing Grok Bot as an unprecedented success with strong unit economics and no free tier, Musk acknowledged that serving the same product had become unsustainable relative to the revenue it generates.
For the broader industry, the episode underscores a structural challenge of the agent era: demand is real and growing faster than many expected, yet the cost of fulfilling that demand through always-on, multi-step agents can outrun subscription pricing before companies can adjust limits, introduce metered billing, or raise prices.
Musk’s reply did not promise an immediate reset or higher allowances; it simply stated the constraint. In doing so, it supplied a rare, explicit public data point on the unit economics of a high-profile AI agent just as adoption numbers were still being celebrated as the fastest in Musk’s experience.
The tension between rapid, paid growth and the compute required to deliver it is now on the record.








