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SpaceX on a roll with latest small satellite launch contract wins
Rideshare organize Exolaunch has announced a multi-spacecraft launch contract with SpaceX, continuing a streak of success enjoyed by the launch company’s Smallsat Program over the last several months.
While Exolaunch declined to confirm the mass of the payload or the number of satellites it manifested on a SpaceX Smallsat Program launch, the German company has likely arranged for 5-10 customer satellites to travel to orbit on Falcon 9. Known as a launch services provider, Exolaunch is effectively a middleman company tasked with connecting small satellites – typically cubesats in the 1-50 kg (1-125 lb) range – to rideshare launch opportunities on much larger rockets.
At face value, SpaceX’s Smallsat Program offers an extremely poor deal for individual cubesat owners on the market for launch services. However, through a growing number of flight-proven organizers like Exolaunch, Nanoracks, and others, markets and actual hardware are being developed to give the many hundreds or thousands of potential customers a cheap and reliable way to space. Uncertainties undoubtedly remain but SpaceX appears to be well on its way to securing a range of relatively valuable keystone customers, potentially becoming the go-to option for smallsat launches.
While it sounds deceptively simple, it’s looking more and more like SpaceX’s Smallsat Program has been an extremely strategic and forward-looking play, setting the company up to be a bit like the spaceflight equivalent of an ocean freight provider. Effectively the invisible backbone of the global economy, modern shipping is incredibly efficient and effective in large part because of the adoption of standardized shipping containers.
Just like oceanic shipping, the cost of transporting an entire shipping container is uneconomical for the vast majority of customers in search of logistics services. Instead, 3rd parties typically acquire space and then sell portions of each container’s volume inside to smaller customers. Companies like Exolaunch, Nanoracks, and more are essentially trying to become those third parties, albeit in a world where the standard shipping container has yet to be developed.
Exolaunch’s ‘Exopod’ is one of several such orbital-shipping-crates-in-waiting and will fly on SpaceX’s first dedicated rideshare mission, scheduled to launch no earlier than (NET) December 2020. Critically, providers like Exolaunch – tasked with deploying multiple customer satellites in orbit – can require an overall payload heavy enough for SpaceX’s pricing to be spectacularly competitive. Assuming an Exopod is ~50 kg and can store four 3U cubesats weighing ~10 kg each, Exolaunch would have to pay SpaceX just ~$1M to launch a full pod.
Add a 25% overhead for Exolaunch’s own costs and those four satellites could reach orbit for something like ~$300,000 apiece. In reality, it’s likely possibly for costs to be even lower, but it serves to show how 3rd-party service providers can offer prices lower than the launch company’s own catalog.
Aside from Exolaunch, SpaceX has won several smallsat launch contracts from Nanoracks (partially a services provider like Exolaunch), Momentus (a space tug company with more than a dozen of its own satellite customers), Kepler (an Internet of Things satellite constellation company), as well as several smaller orders. SpaceX’s growing relationship with Momentus is particularly interesting as the latter company’s goal is to develop cheap orbital tugs, deploying satellites at the exact orbits they want even if launched as part of a rideshare. Momentus has already bought slots for its Vigoride space tugs on five SpaceX rideshare launches, beginning as early as December 2020.
Ultimately, while the economics of rideshare launches on vehicles as large as Falcon 9 remain extremely unforgiving, SpaceX appears to be in it for the long haul and has certainly won an impressive number of launch contracts in just the last few months. SpaceX’s first Smallsat Program rideshare could happen as early as June 2020, hitching a ride on one of the two-dozen internal Starlink missions planned this year. The first dedicated rideshare is working towards its own December 2020 launch debut.
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SpaceX just locked up a NASA record no other U.S. spacecraft can touch
SpaceX’s Crew-13 Dragon reached the ISS in under eight hours, and NASA confirmed a record.
SpaceX now owns every spot on the list of the five fastest trips a U.S. spacecraft has ever made to the International Space Station, and its newest entry beat the old mark by more than four hours.
Crew Dragon Grace docked to the forward port of the station’s Harmony module at 7:05 p.m. ET on October 1, just 7 hours and 55 minutes after lifting off from Space Launch Complex 40 at Cape Canaveral. NASA confirmed the milestone in a space station blog update, writing that the flight “marked the fastest launch‑to‑docking of a U.S. spacecraft in the history of the International Space Station.”
The previous U.S. record also belonged to Dragon. SpaceX’s uncrewed CRS-31 cargo mission reached the station in a little over 12 hours in November 2024. The fastest crewed trip before last week was Crew-11, which took 14 hours and 43 minutes in August 2025, according to Space.com.
A post that Elon Musk reposted on Monday filled out the rest of the ranking. Behind Crew-13, CRS-31 and Crew-11 sit Axiom’s Ax-2 mission at 15 hours and 35 minutes and NASA’s Crew-4 at 15 hours and 44 minutes. All five flew on Dragon.
SpaceX turned a heralding moment for Starship into its greatest
Crew-13 carried NASA astronauts Jessica Watkins and Luke Delaney, Canadian Space Agency astronaut Joshua Kutryk, and Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Teteryatnikov. NASA had projected a docking around 8 p.m. ET, as Teslarati reported the day before launch, and Dragon arrived nearly an hour early. Our launch day coverage noted that the flight was lined up to be the quickest Crew Dragon transit yet.
The speed came from timing more than hardware. SpaceX’s Julianna Scheiman said the station “was in an opportune spot in space,” which let Dragon start closing the gap almost immediately after reaching orbit. “This is close to the fastest it could be,” she added. Most Crew Dragon flights still take close to a day, using a series of Draco thruster burns to raise and phase their orbit before arrival.
Dragon’s next job at the station is a departure. NASA said Monday it is targeting 8:05 a.m. ET on Wednesday, October 7, for Crew-12 to undock, setting up a splashdown off the coast of California around 11:34 a.m. on Thursday. Clearing that port makes room for CRS-35, a cargo Dragon carrying the final set of iROSA solar arrays.
Dragon remains NASA’s only operational ride to the station while Boeing’s Starliner stays grounded, and the agency recently added Crew-15, Crew-16 and Crew-17 to SpaceX’s contract in a $946 million modification.
Elon Musk has acknowledged that early discussions with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) could bring the company into his ambitious Terafab semiconductor project, signaling a possible partnership with the world’s leading contract chipmaker.
Musk confirmed that early talks are underway, but as of right now, they are “just discussions.” There is no confirmation of a deal nor dismissal of the possibility of one, leaving open the prospect of one of the largest advanced-chip collaborations under discussion in the U.S.
@wholemars Just discussions, but something may come of it
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2026
The report that speculated on potential discussions between Terafab and TSMC comes from Tim Culpan, who outlined a few ways the collaboration could operate. One is TSMC using the project as an “anchor customer” for future facilities in Texas, potentially contributing process expertise, operational know-how, or capacity while Terafab provides capital, long-term purchase commitments, or both.
Tesla and SpaceX jointly developed the Terafab project, with Intel already participating on the tech side. Elon Musk announced the project in March, and it intends to produce more than one terawatt of AI compute capacity annually once fully built.
Company statements place the first phase at approximately $16.8 billion in cost, with later filings pointing to a total that could reach well into the tens of billions across multiple stages.
Intel joined the effort in April 2026 and is expected to supply its 14A manufacturing process for the full-scale plant.
Musk has said existing suppliers, including Samsung and TSMC, remain important for near-term needs; Tesla already has production arrangements with Samsung for AI5 and AI6 chips, but that future demand from Optimus robots, Cybercab vehicles, and planned space-based data centers will eventually exceed what the global industry can currently deliver.
Terafab is positioned as the long-term answer to that projected shortfall, and Tesla did something similar during COVID to avoid a chip shortage. This is just a much larger-scale solution.
If the partnership were to materialize, it would add TSMC’s industry-leading strategies to a project that already combines Tesla’s and SpaceX’s capital and offtake with Intel’s process technology. For now, the only public confirmation is Musk’s brief acknowledgement that conversations are occurring.
Tesla’s early strategy for charging units operating within its Robotaxi fleet reveals that the company surely has not lost any of that scrappy DNA that took it from an unlikely success story to the most valuable carmaker in the world.
An observer at a Tesla Supercharger in Austin spotted ten total Robotaxi vehicles arrive: one Cybercab and nine Model Y units. A Tesla employee was waiting at the lot and allowed each unit to park itself; every car that arrived had nobody in it.
Tesla wins FCC approval for wireless Cybercab charging system
The Tesla employee would walk around and plug each car in, adjusting the parking if needed:
So look at what I found. This is how Tesla charges unsupervised robotaxis at a public supercharger. Here is a driverless Cybercab showing up with no one in it. There are 9 other Model Ys that showed up too. A Tesla employee is walking around and plugging each of them in. She also moves the cars if they are not positioned well enough to charge. I love this process. One person charges multiple robotaxis at once
— Abhimanyu Yadav (@WorldlyReviewer) October 3, 2026
It’s a very interesting strategy, but extremely understandable at this early point in the Robotaxi program. It’s only been out for about 15 months, and Cybercab just entered the fleet in early September.
On top of that, Tesla is still working tirelessly on its wireless charging apparatus, and a new patent was just published regarding that product last week.
However, this is just another example of how Tesla still has plenty of that scrappy DNA leftover from the “production hell” days, when CEO Elon Musk slept on the floor of the factory, employees were working crazy hours, Tesla was building Sprung Structures to build cars in, and the company was tiptoeing on the brink of bankruptcy.
@Teslarati Sheer magnitude of the entire production system is hard to appreciate. Almost every element of production is >75% automated. Only wire harnesses & general assembly, which are <10% of production costs, are primarily manual.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 12, 2020
For now, Tesla is utilizing a simple system for recharging its ride-hailing vehicles, and that is a Tesla employee doing it manually until another solution presents itself. Sure, it’s not the most high-tech thing, and it certainly is not what people might have expected at this point in time, but it works, and it’s keeping the entire suite running.
SpaceX just locked up a NASA record no other U.S. spacecraft can touch
Elon Musk teases TSMC as potential Terafab partner
