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SpaceX to fly reused rockets on half of all 2018 launches as competition lags far behind
Speaking at SATELLITE 2018, SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell reiterated the company’s commitment to and their customers’ acceptance of reusable rockets at the 2018, stating that SpaceX intends to fly reused boosters on at least half of their 2018 launch manifest.
Barring unforeseen circumstances, SpaceX is effectively on track to complete 30 separate missions this year with more than half flying flight-proven Falcon 9 (and Heavy) boosters. Thus far, the company has completed five launches – three flight-proven – in two months, perfectly extrapolating out to ~18 flight-proven missions and 30 total launches in 2018. While the middle weeks of March will not see any SpaceX launches, the company is on track to reach 11 flights total in late April/early March, six with reused boosters.
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- SpaceX intends to launch three Falcon 9s from all three of its pads in just seven days. Pictured here their VAFB pad in California. (Pauline Acalin)
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- LC-40, located in Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, is SpaceX’s second pad. (Tom Cross)
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- Falcon Heavy roars off of LC-39A, SpaceX’s third operational pad. A fourth launch facility is under development in Texas. (Tom Cross)
Ignoring the tidal wave of reusable rockets
Ultimately, SpaceX’s scheduled launch cadence lends a huge amount of credence to Shotwell’s historically pragmatic claim. Assuming a successful introduction of Falcon 9 Block 5 sometime in April (currently April 5), SpaceX may even be able to get closer to flying reused boosters on two thirds of their 2018 launches, a truly jaw-dropping achievement for a year-old technology in an industry that previously saw minimal technological progress in rocketry for the better part of two decades, if not three or even four.
In almost every conceivable manner, SpaceX has taken a complacent industry by surprise, to such an extent that other major rocket builders have barely begun to develop their competitive responses to successful reuse. SpaceX’s main domestic and global competitors – ULA, Arianespace, and ILS – are at best five years away from more than dabbling in operationally reusable rocketry. ULA is in the best shape here, and their strategy of recovering just the engine segment of their future Vulcan rocket is unlikely to fly – let alone conduct the first real reuse of engines – before 2023 or 2024 at the absolute earliest, and reuse is by no means a public priority for the company.
SpaceX’s main competitors are at best five years away from more than dabbling in operationally reusable rocketry
At this point in time, Arianespace has been halfhearted for years in their attempts to seriously consider reusable rocketry. As of 2018, the closest they have gotten is a noncommittal study that would see the French and German space agencies field a Falcon 1-sized (tiny) vehicle to study the SpaceX approach to landing rockets. In the case of Arianespace, ULA, and ILS, their Ariane 6, Vulcan, and Proton Medium rockets currently under development for inaugural launches no earlier than 2020 have indeed all been explicitly designed to compete with SpaceX’s highly-competitive Falcon 9. Sounds promising, right? The reality, however, is that each distinct company has more or less designed their modernized rockets to compete with Falcon 9’s pre-reusability pricing. Even before SpaceX begins to seriously lower the cost of reused Falcon 9s at the customer level, their competitors are already incapable of beating the price of Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy, at least without accepting net losses or leaning on government subsidies.
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- Arianespace’s next-generation Ariane 6. (Arianespace)
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- ULA’s upcoming Vulcan rocket. (ULA)
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- ILS is developing a marginally different version of its Proton rocket, called Proton Medium. (ILS)
Arianespace’s Ariane 5 and ULA’s Atlas 5 and Delta 4 rockets do have impeccable and undeniably superior records of reliability, but SpaceX is making rapid progress towards enhanced reliability and unprecedented launch cadences. Falcon 9 Block 5 – SpaceX’s hard-won solution to rapid and cheaply reusable rocket boosters – is weeks away from its first launch, with something like six or more additional Block 5 boosters in the late stages of construction and assembly at SpaceX’s Hawthorne factory. The first prototype of BFR, a rocket designed with a fully-reusable booster and upper stage, has already begun to be assembled, with spaceship test hops scheduled to begin in 2019 and full-up orbital tests hoped to begin as early as 2020. Even with a pessimistic outlook on SpaceX’s BFR development prospects, the likelihood of orbital tests/operational launches beginning before the mid-2020s is incredibly high, barring insurmountable technological hurdles.
Whether or not SpaceX actually manages to begin its first flights to Mars in 2022 (even 2024-2026), BFR and its highly reusable orbital upper stage will swallow the launch industry whole if it manages to be even a tenth as affordable as its engineers intend it to be, and it will likely be in the late stages of hardware development and test launches before ULA, Arianespace, or ILS have even begun to operationally fly their tepid responses to reusability.
SpaceX’s BFR is being designed to launch crew, cargo, and fuel for unprecedentedly low prices. (SpaceX)
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Elon Musk
Elon Musk and Tesla AI Director share insights after empty driver seat Robotaxi rides
The executives’ unoccupied tests hint at the rapid progress of Tesla’s unsupervised Robotaxi efforts.
Tesla CEO Elon Musk and AI Director Ashok Elluswamy celebrated Christmas Eve by sharing personal experiences with Robotaxi vehicles that had no safety monitor or occupant in the driver’s seat. Musk described the system’s “perfect driving” around Austin, while Elluswamy posted video from the back seat, calling it “an amazing experience.”
The executives’ unoccupied tests hint at the rapid progress of Tesla’s unsupervised Robotaxi efforts.
Elon and Ashok’s firsthand Robotaxi insights
Prior to Musk and the Tesla AI Director’s posts, sightings of unmanned Teslas navigating public roads were widely shared on social media. One such vehicle was spotted in Austin, Texas, which Elon Musk acknowleged by stating that “Testing is underway with no occupants in the car.”
Based on his Christmas Eve post, Musk seemed to have tested an unmanned Tesla himself. “A Tesla with no safety monitor in the car and me sitting in the passenger seat took me all around Austin on Sunday with perfect driving,” Musk wrote in his post.
Elluswamy responded with a 2-minute video showing himself in the rear of an unmanned Tesla. The video featured the vehicle’s empty front seats, as well as its smooth handling through real-world traffic. He captioned his video with the words, “It’s an amazing experience!”
Towards Unsupervised operations
During an xAI Hackathon earlier this month, Elon Musk mentioned that Tesla owed be removing Safety Monitors from its Robotaxis in Austin in just three weeks. “Unsupervised is pretty much solved at this point. So there will be Tesla Robotaxis operating in Austin with no one in them. Not even anyone in the passenger seat in about three weeks,” he said. Musk echoed similar estimates at the 2025 Annual Shareholder Meeting and the Q3 2025 earnings call.
Considering the insights that were posted Musk and Elluswamy, it does appear that Tesla is working hard towards operating its Robotaxis with no safety monitors. This is quite impressive considering that the service was launched just earlier this year.
Elon Musk
Starlink passes 9 million active customers just weeks after hitting 8 million
The milestone highlights the accelerating growth of Starlink, which has now been adding over 20,000 new users per day.
SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet service has continued its rapid global expansion, surpassing 9 million active customers just weeks after crossing the 8 million mark.
The milestone highlights the accelerating growth of Starlink, which has now been adding over 20,000 new users per day.
9 million customers
In a post on X, SpaceX stated that Starlink now serves over 9 million active users across 155 countries, territories, and markets. The company reached 8 million customers in early November, meaning it added roughly 1 million subscribers in under seven weeks, or about 21,275 new users on average per day.
“Starlink is connecting more than 9M active customers with high-speed internet across 155 countries, territories, and many other markets,” Starlink wrote in a post on its official X account. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell also celebrated the milestone on X. “A huge thank you to all of our customers and congrats to the Starlink team for such an incredible product,” she wrote.
That growth rate reflects both rising demand for broadband in underserved regions and Starlink’s expanding satellite constellation, which now includes more than 9,000 low-Earth-orbit satellites designed to deliver high-speed, low-latency internet worldwide.
Starlink’s momentum
Starlink’s momentum has been building up. SpaceX reported 4.6 million Starlink customers in December 2024, followed by 7 million by August 2025, and 8 million customers in November. Independent data also suggests Starlink usage is rising sharply, with Cloudflare reporting that global web traffic from Starlink users more than doubled in 2025, as noted in an Insider report.
Starlink’s momentum is increasingly tied to SpaceX’s broader financial outlook. Elon Musk has said the satellite network is “by far” the company’s largest revenue driver, and reports suggest SpaceX may be positioning itself for an initial public offering as soon as next year, with valuations estimated as high as $1.5 trillion. Musk has also suggested in the past that Starlink could have its own IPO in the future.
News
NVIDIA Director of Robotics: Tesla FSD v14 is the first AI to pass the “Physical Turing Test”
After testing FSD v14, Fan stated that his experience with FSD felt magical at first, but it soon started to feel like a routine.
NVIDIA Director of Robotics Jim Fan has praised Tesla’s Full Self-Driving (Supervised) v14 as the first AI to pass what he described as a “Physical Turing Test.”
After testing FSD v14, Fan stated that his experience with FSD felt magical at first, but it soon started to feel like a routine. And just like smartphones today, removing it now would “actively hurt.”
Jim Fan’s hands-on FSD v14 impressions
Fan, a leading researcher in embodied AI who is currently solving Physical AI at NVIDIA and spearheading the company’s Project GR00T initiative, noted that he actually was late to the Tesla game. He was, however, one of the first to try out FSD v14.
“I was very late to own a Tesla but among the earliest to try out FSD v14. It’s perhaps the first time I experience an AI that passes the Physical Turing Test: after a long day at work, you press a button, lay back, and couldn’t tell if a neural net or a human drove you home,” Fan wrote in a post on X.
Fan added: “Despite knowing exactly how robot learning works, I still find it magical watching the steering wheel turn by itself. First it feels surreal, next it becomes routine. Then, like the smartphone, taking it away actively hurts. This is how humanity gets rewired and glued to god-like technologies.”
The Physical Turing Test
The original Turing Test was conceived by Alan Turing in 1950, and it was aimed at determining if a machine could exhibit behavior that is equivalent to or indistinguishable from a human. By focusing on text-based conversations, the original Turing Test set a high bar for natural language processing and machine learning.
This test has been passed by today’s large language models. However, the capability to converse in a humanlike manner is a completely different challenge from performing real-world problem-solving or physical interactions. Thus, Fan introduced the Physical Turing Test, which challenges AI systems to demonstrate intelligence through physical actions.
Based on Fan’s comments, Tesla has demonstrated these intelligent physical actions with FSD v14. Elon Musk agreed with the NVIDIA executive, stating in a post on X that with FSD v14, “you can sense the sentience maturing.” Musk also praised Tesla AI, calling it the best “real-world AI” today.
Elon Musk and Tesla AI Director share insights after empty driver seat Robotaxi rides
Starlink passes 9 million active customers just weeks after hitting 8 million
