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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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Tesla revealed a major new Cybercab detail in a guide it released for First Responders, showing new territory in its beliefs and intentions for the ride-hailing-focused vehicle that entered production in April.
The First Responders Guide is released to give fire departments, paramedics, and other emergency personnel the proper guidance on what to do in the event of an accident, entrapment, or other situation that would require immediate attention.
On one of the pages of the First Responders Guide, Tesla revealed a stark detail about the Cybercab, which could help personnel enter the vehicle more easily in case of an emergency.
Tesla Cybercab has one important piece that AI4 cars might need for FSD
It shows Tesla has no intention of releasing any Cybercab units that were initially proposed for ride-hailing services for the general public with any manual controls, meaning a steering wheel or pedals:
“A Cybercab equipped with steering wheel, brake pedal, and an acceleration pedal is typically an engineering or test vehicle, and operates at SAE Level 2 autonomy. Cybercab is not typically equipped with a steering wheel or acceleration and brake pedals.”
New official Cybercab documentation from Tesla:
“A Cybercab equipped with steering wheel, brake pedal, and an acceleration pedal is typically an engineering or test vehicle, and operates at SAE Level 2 autonomy. Cybercab is not typically equipped with a steering wheel or… https://t.co/P6ut1mZyzr pic.twitter.com/yq6skl9s2J
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) June 27, 2026
This is a major development for those who continue to believe Tesla planned to release the Cybercab with any sort of manual controls so that passengers could take over if needed. However, when Tesla started manufacturing production versions of the Cybercab in Giga Texas earlier this year, they were spotted without a steering wheel or pedals.
It essentially confirms the company has no intentions of bringing manual controls to the car’s production versions. Some have argued that the likelihood of Tesla having something
There still are some Cybercab units out there with a steering wheel and pedals, and as Tesla said, these cars are engineering or test vehicles, which have Safety Monitors on board to help the car out of a precarious situation or emergency.
Tesla released the Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ suite to owners of Hardware 3 or AI3 vehicles today, adding several new features to the vehicles that were once believed to be capable of unsupervised self-driving.
Now, Tesla has released this modified suite to older Tesla vehicles, adding plenty of new features and capabilities.
Here are the full release notes for the suite:
- Distilled the intelligence from HW4 V14 into HW3. This allows HW3 to directly learn how to handle scenarios using HW4 V14 as a guide. This process unlocks the improvements that have been made to HW4 including Reinforcement Learning (RL) and offline models for HW3.
- Improved both proactive and reactive responsiveness across a wide variety of categories including navigation handling, merges and forks, pedestrian interactions, traffic lights, and vehicle cut-in scenarios.
- Improved general comfort in nominal scenarios through fewer false slowdowns, smoother steering and more consistent lane centering.
- Introduced parking, unparking, and reversing capabilities.
- Added Arrival Options for you to select where FSD should park: in a Parking Lot, on the Street, in a Driveway, or at the Curbside.
- Speed Profiles are now available at all times, to further customize driving style preference.
These improvements, according to Tesla’s Head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, help distill the driving behavior from AI4’s v14 series into both the camera and compute configurations of AI3.
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ for older cars finally gets released
He added:
“It includes destination options and speed profiles on city roads, but more importantly significantly improved safety. We hope you’ll enjoy it, once the build ships wide.”
FSD v14 Lite is now rolling out to AI3 early-access customers. Based on the feedback, will rollout to more customers over the next few weeks.
This build distills the driving behavior from AI4’s v14 series into both the camera and compute config of AI3. It includes destination…
— Ashok Elluswamy (@aelluswamy) June 29, 2026
Tesla will continue to roll out the v14 Lite suite more widely in the coming weeks, the company said.
Tesla has finally released its Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ suite for older cars that equip the Hardware 3 or AI 3 chip, which have not been able to handle the newest versions of the company’s driver assistance software.
Tesla officially started releasing the v14 Lite suite to owners in the Early Access Program last night. The company’s Head of AI, Ashok Elluswamy, said that the rollout will continue over the next few weeks. The build distills the driving behavior from AI4’s v14 series into both the camera and compute configurations of an AI3 car.
🚨 Tesla is releasing v14 Lite for AI3 owners who are in early-access
This will give AI3 cars the ability to experience new FSD features like parking preferences. https://t.co/pp6Q5FOKoz pic.twitter.com/tqexMB8SVy
— TESLARATI (@Teslarati) June 29, 2026
It also includes a variety of new features that were available to AI4 cars running v14, including:
- Start Self-Driving from Park
- Arrival and Parking Options
- Speed Profiles
The release is highly anticipated because those owners with AI3 vehicles were early adopters into the FSD platform and were promised that their cars would be capable of achieving Full Self-Driving.
However, Tesla CEO Elon Musk admitted during the company’s recent Q1 Earnings Call that these vehicles would not be capable of achieving unsupervised Full Self-Driving, which is what Tesla had originally said.
Owners were not pleased with this answer, or the idea that their commitment to buying the suite outright for thousands of dollars would not yield the ability to drive without operating the car. Tesla gave some solutions for this, including a discount on a new car, or an upgrade to an AI4 or AI5 self-driving computer and new, upgraded cameras.
Tesla owners do not seem pleased with these options, as they require giving the company more money.
Nevertheless, it is important to note that Tesla came through for owners here by releasing v14 Lite before the end of Q2, something it had promised owners during the previous Earnings Call. Tesla has had trouble keeping up with timelines, but this is a big achievement for the team.
Tesla reveals huge Cybercab detail in new guide for First Responders
Tesla Full Self-Driving v14 ‘Lite’ Release Notes: new capabilities and features
