News
SpaceX wins US Air Force contract for Falcon Heavy launch
In an unexpected bode of confidence in the nascent vehicle, SpaceX has competed for and won a $130 million US Air Force launch contract for the massive Falcon Heavy rocket. While not planned to occur until September 2020 at the earliest, the most critical aspect of this development is the fact that the USAF has apparently already certified Falcon Heavy for high-value military launches.
The almost knee-jerk certification of Falcon Heavy for USAF launches makes for an extraordinary contrast when compared with the certification of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 workhorse rocket, a tedious political minefield that took more than two years, led SpaceX to (successfully) sue the federal government, and forced the Air Force to critically reexamine its internal processes after they delayed SpaceX’s certification by six or more months. For that particular endeavor, the USAF required SpaceX to complete three successful Falcon 9 launches, while also preventing SpaceX from engaging in launch contract competitions until their launch vehicle was certified in May 2015.
#SpaceX has won a competitively-awarded #AirForce launch contract for the AFSPC-52 flight. The mission will utilize a #FalconHeavy rocket. Mission will launch by Sept. 2020 from LC-39A at Kennedy Space Center. Statement from Gwynne Shotwell below… pic.twitter.com/a5ka2ov20L
— Chris G (@ChrisG_SpX) June 21, 2018
Jump ahead to 2018 and SpaceX appears to have been allowed to compete for this particular mission – known cryptically as AFSPC-52 – before Falcon Heavy had so much as completed an integrated static fire test. The awe-inspiring rocket did, however, complete a nearly-flawless debut launch in February 2018, a mission that required the company’s Falcon upper stage to survive a lengthy (6+ hour) coast in orbit before igniting its Merlin vacuum engine for one final burn. Regardless of the specifics, many of which have likely been kept under wraps, the Air Force must have been quite impressed with the rocket’s debut performance, and Falcon Heavy has now – according to President and COO Gwynne Shotwell – been certified for USAF missions just four months later.
- Falcon 9 Block 5 completed its first launch on May 11, carrying the Bangabandhu-1 communications satellite to geostationary transfer orbit. (Tom Cross)
- Falcon Heavy clears the top of the strongback in a spectacular fashion. Two of the rocket’s three manifested missions are now for the USAF. (Tom Cross)
It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to accurately compare the different payloads and launches of the Air Force Space Command (AFSPC), but SpaceX’s only competitor ULA was awarded a contract for the launch of two relatively different AFSPC payloads at an average (fixed) cost of $175 million per mission. Those satellites were likely much smaller than AFSPC-52 but they require direct insertion into geostationary orbit (GEO), whereas AFSPC-52 may instead be sent to a geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) before circularizing the orbit under its own power.
Still, SpaceX’s triple-booster Falcon Heavy launch contract will cost the USAF a slim $130m. It’s worth noting that the 2018 AFSPC-8 and -12 contracts awarded to ULA were for the company’s single-booster Atlas 5 rocket, with most of the draw coming from its admittedly advanced, efficient, and extraordinarily reliable Centaur upper stage, tasked with reigniting repeatedly to circularize the orbit of its valuable satellite payloads once in space.
While it requires far less rigor than the Air Force’s more secretive, national security-sensitive satellite launches, SpaceX’s second Falcon Heavy launch – this time with three highly-reusable Block 5 boosters – will also be conducted with the military branch as the primary customer. Known as Space Test Mission-2 (STP-2), Falcon Heavy will be tasked with carrying a stack of dozens of different smallsats to a variety of orbits. Of note, the vast majority of that mission’s payload comes in the form of a 5000-kilogram ballast mass, included because the mission was manifested on Falcon Heavy (instead of the operational Falcon 9) for the sole purpose of facilitating the rocket’s rapid certification for critical Air Force missions.
- Falcon Heavy may look for more condensed than Delta Heavy, but its performance dramatically outclasses the ULA rocket in all but the highest-energy mission profiles. (SpaceX)
- The fully-integrated Falcon Heavy rolls out to Pad 39A. For vertical integration, think of this… but vertical. (SpaceX)
STP-2 is currently scheduled for no earlier than (NET) November 2018, while the third launch of Falcon Heavy – the commercial Arabsat 6A communications satellite – is tentatively targeted for December, although it’s almost guaranteed to slip into Q1 2019.
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Lifestyle
Tesla wins over Netflix’s Selling Sunset star, who’s now ditching his Bentley
Selling Sunset’s Jason Oppenheim swapped his Bentley for a Tesla and promised ten for employees.
Jason Oppenheim, the luxury real estate broker best known as the star of Netflix’s Selling Sunset, has parked his Bentley for good and moved into a Tesla Model Y, and he says Full Self-Driving (Supervised) is the reason.
Oppenheim, who founded The Oppenheim Group, the Los Angeles brokerage at the center of the show, posted a video to X on Saturday evening that he called “the most important video I’ve ever posted.” In it, he rides from Newport Beach to his firm’s Los Angeles office, a trip he put at roughly an hour and 15 minutes, while FSD handles the drive and parks the car without him touching the wheel or the accelerator. He said he handed the Bentley to his father because he no longer has any use for it.
Tesla shared the clip from its main account on X about two hours later, pulling out the quote that has since spread well beyond the Tesla community:
“[FSD Supervised] is life-changing. I was on the phone with my brother last night, and I made him buy one. He literally bought one while we were talking. I’m buying 10 of my employees a Tesla with FSD. It’s 8x safer than the average driver. There’s nothing more important than the safety of you and your loved ones.”
Oppenheim was candid about why the safety pitch landed with him. He admitted in the video that he is a distracted driver who answers emails and texts behind the wheel, and framed the employee purchases as a way to keep his team off their phones while driving. Elon Musk posted “Tesla FSD feels like magic” less than half an hour after the video went live.
The endorsement lands at a convenient moment for Tesla. The company delivered 486,532 vehicles in Q3, beating Wall Street’s estimates and marking its best quarter ever without the $7,500 federal EV tax credit.
A public service announcement. https://t.co/NYa1IpKwBX
— Jason Oppenheim (@OppenheimJason) October 4, 2026
Tesla FSD has been subscription only in the U.S. since February at $99 per month, and Tesla said in its Q2 update that active subscriptions hit 1.48 million, up 56 percent year over year, with more than 55 percent of new North American deliveries leaving with FSD attached. That attach rate is the figure Ron Baron cited last month when he told CNBC “the time to buy the stock is now.” At current pricing, Oppenheim’s 10 employee cars alone would add $990 a month, or about $11,880 a year, in FSD revenue.
Tesla AI head Ashok Elluswamy said in July that FSD had logged more than 12 billion miles while going roughly twice as far between collisions as manual driving. FSD also remains a supervised system, so Oppenheim and his employees are still required to watch the road, even as Tesla rolls out v14.3.10 with Automatic Collision Evasion, which can steer or brake on its own to avoid a frontal crash.
Elon Musk
Elon Musk follows Trump’s lead, says a SpaceX name change is coming
Elon Musk says SpaceXAI will become SpaceXSI, marking its second rebrand in under three months.
Elon Musk wants to rename his artificial intelligence company again, less than three months after its last rebrand.
In a string of posts on X early Sunday morning, Musk wrote “No more AI,” followed by “SI” and “It’s better.” He then added, “SpaceX is a super intelligence company.” When a user asked whether SpaceXAI could become SpaceXSI, Musk replied, “Yes, we will make that change.”
The posts extend a terminology push that began at the White House last week. On September 29, President Donald Trump signed an executive order directing federal agencies to replace “artificial intelligence” and “AI” with “Super Intelligence” and “SI” on government websites, policy documents and press releases. The same day, Musk sat beside Trump as the heads of the largest AI companies signed a voluntary safety accord, as Teslarati reported. Speaking to reporters afterward, Musk caught himself mid sentence: “I think it is worth highlighting the positive benefits of A.I. … S.I., pardon me.”
Elon Musk and Trump are closer than ever, and Tesla could be the big winner
SpaceXSI would be the third name for the business since February. SpaceX acquired xAI on February 2 in a deal that valued the combined company at $1.25 trillion. In May, Musk said xAI would be dissolved as a separate company, and on July 6 the division adopted the SpaceXAI name and a new logo that placed the xAI letters inside the SpaceX identity.
Musk gave no timeline. He did not say whether SpaceXSI would be a legal name change or a branding update, whether the @SpaceXAI handle on X would change, or how the shift would apply to products like Grok. The company had not issued a formal announcement as of Sunday morning.
The change would reach well beyond a chatbot. SpaceXAI now houses Grok, the X platform, the Colossus training clusters in Memphis and the coding tool Cursor, which SpaceX acquired in August. It also runs the orbital compute effort SpaceX is building around Nvidia hardware, which Musk said during the company’s first earnings call would be exclusive to Nvidia.
It’s unclear if rivals like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and Nvidia have plans to also rename their companies or products. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has continued to say “AI” in public, while Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has gone partway, describing data centers as “super intelligence factories.”
The rename would also line up SpaceX’s AI branding with the federal government’s language as Musk takes on a new advisory role at the Pentagon, where he is helping lead the Project Meridian study on the future of warfare.
News
Starlink launches Communities Program for passive income through internet sharing
Starlink is launching a new beta path for ordinary property owners and local operators to turn a single Starlink kit into a small shared-access business for passive income.
Under the Starlink for Communities program, a host installs one dish and router setup in a location with nearby demand: an apartment complex, campground, rural crossroads, or event site. Neighbors or local users can buy short-term passes rather than full individual subscriptions, giving the Starlink provider a potential path to passive income.
Hour, day, and week passes cover one device. A month pass covers up to four. Starlink handles account creation, payments, access controls, and the satellite link itself. The host’s role is mainly placement, power, and basic upkeep, with earnings tied to each paid connection.
Big news! SpaceX is introducing a new @Starlink for Communities program that lets you earn money by providing Starlink internet to your neighbors or people nearby, who can pay for access by the hour, day, week, or month.
Neighbors pay for the access they need, while the person… pic.twitter.com/DtOUs0Ekvt
— Sawyer Merritt (@SawyerMerritt) October 1, 2026
The model echoes the passive-income vision long attached to Tesla’s Robotaxi plans, and it seems like it’s something Musk has hinted toward in the past as he believes AI will make the need to work relatively optional. In both cases, the platform owns the hard parts of matching, billing, and network management, while an individual supplies a physical asset that sits idle much of the time.
A Starlink host’s dish can serve multiple nearby users without each household buying and installing its own terminal. A Tesla owner, under the stated Robotaxi concept, would leave a vehicle enrolled in the fleet during unused hours so the car generates rides while the owner is at work or asleep.
Both arrangements convert under-utilized hardware into a revenue stream. They also let the company scale coverage or capacity without owning every endpoint.
Differences are practical. A Starlink kit is a fixed, relatively low-cost terminal whose main constraint is local congestion and line-of-sight. A Tesla Robotaxi is a mobile, high-value vehicle whose earnings depend on demand density, utilization rates, insurance, cleaning, and charging.
Starlink’s program is already accepting host applications in multiple countries and describes the revenue split as ongoing. Tesla’s owner-network version remains more aspirational.
The company currently operates a limited company-controlled robotaxi service in select areas and has solicited interest from fleet buyers for Cybercab vehicles, while private Full Self-Driving owners have not yet been able to dispatch their own cars for paid rides at scale.
Tesla primes Cybercabs for 4K streaming and high bandwidth gaming with Starlink integration
Starlink is a satellite broadband service operated by SpaceX that uses a constellation of low-Earth-orbit satellites to deliver internet to locations where terrestrial broadband is slow, expensive, or absent. It has grown to millions of subscribers worldwide by selling direct residential, mobile, and enterprise terminals, and have become widely available at a wide array at retail locations like Target and Best Buy.
The Communities program extends that reach by letting hosts resell short bursts of capacity to people nearby, while also providing high-speed internet access to those who are simply around a Starlink user.



