SpaceX gets approval to build oxygen plant at Boca Chica

1:03 pm

SpaceX today received the okay from Cameron County to build a plant at Boca Chica to produce oxygen from the atmosphere for use in its Superheavy/Starship rocket.

The commissioners voted, 3-1, to give Elon Musk’s rocket company a beachfront construction certificate and dune protection permit, allowing the company to build a modern-day factory akin to an oil refinery to produce gases needed for space flight launches.

The plant will consist of 20 structures on 1.66 acres. The enclosed site will include a tower that will reach 159 feet, or about 15 stories high, much shorter than the nearby launch tower, which stretches 480 feet high. It is set to be built about 280 feet inland from the line of vegetation, which is where the dunes begin. The factory will separate air into nitrogen and oxygen. SpaceX utilizes liquid oxygen as a propellant and liquid nitrogen for testing and operations.

By having the facility on site, SpaceX hopes to make the delivery of those gases more efficient by eliminating the need to have dozens of trucks deliver them from Brownsville. The company says they need more than 200 trucks of liquid nitrogen and oxygen delivered for each launch, a SpaceX engineer told the county during a meeting last week.

As usual, the same cranks who always complain about this stuff are given space by this news outlet to whine, but the truth is that the commission’s vote well reflects the attitude of the local community. It supports what SpaceX is doing, because of the prosperity the company is bringing to this formerly depressed region.

Moreover, this facility will not only save SpaceX money and make it easier to launch more frequently, it is likely environmentally beneficial. I suspect the facility will be relatively clean compared to the truck convoys it will replace.

Hat tip Robert Pratt of Pratt on Texas.

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Why did Trump suddenly pick Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy to become temporary head of NASA?

9:32 am

The reason for Trump’s sudden decision yesterday to name Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as interim NASA administrator, replacing long-time NASA manager Janet Piro — who had held the job since Trump took office — remains unclear.

This article suggests the president wanted someone with more political clout who was also part of his inner circle.

Two articles (here and here) imply the decision was related to the recent clashes politically between Trump and Musk, adding that Duffy and Musk have been reported to be in conflict over air traffic controller issues. Picking Duffy thus directly reduces Musk’s influence at NASA.

The truth is that we really don’t know exactly what motives brought Trump to make this appointment. It could be that Trump wants someone in charge who will have the political clout to push through his proposed NASA cuts. It also could be Trump wants someone with that clout to review those cuts and change them.

The bottom line is that NASA remains a political football, a situation that in the end had done decades of harm to the American space industry. The sooner it can be made irrelevant and replaced by a commercial, competitive, and (most important) profitable space industry, the better.

We really don’t need a “space agency.” We didn’t have such a thing when we settled the American west.

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Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

SpaceX finally passes final regulatory hurdle to sell Starlink in India

9:11 am

You might get deja-vu from this story, since I have reported repeatedly in the past that SpaceX has finally gotten regulatory approval to sell Starlink in India.

However, India’s complex regulatory framework — leftover from the days of British rule and strengthened for decades after independence when the strongly socialist Congress Party ruled — ended up requiring SpaceX to leap multiple regulatory hurdles to get the Starlink approved. According to news reports today, that last licensing hurdle has now finally been leaped.

The final approval marks a crucial milestone that will pave the way for the Musk-led company to launch its commercial satellite operations in the country. The Elon Musk-led company has been waiting for regulatory approvals since 2022 to operate legally in India. With this approval, Starlink has become the third company to enter the satellite space in India after Reliance Jio and Eutelsat’s OneWeb, in which Bharti Airtel, led by Sunil Mittal, is a shareholder.

Does this mean SpaceX can now sell Starlink in India? Of course not:

The next step for Starlink is to secure spectrum from the government, which will likely be assigned in the coming months. It also needs to set up infrastructure on the ground. One of the most critical aspects of Starlink’s India foray will be its compliance with the country’s security rules.

Since Starlink doesn’t need a complex ground infrastructure, selling terminals directly to customers, the infrastructure mentioned in the quote likely involves partnering Starlink operations with the Indian telecommunications companies Airtell and Jio, so that they get a piece of the action.

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New census of inverted channels on Mars strongly suggests the planet once had more water

9:00 am

Martian ridges that imitate rivers
Click for original image.

A new review of inverted channels on Mars now strongly suggests that the red planet was once far wetter than presently seen, with the channels implying the existence of liquid rivers.

The discovery of more than 15,000 kilometres of ancient riverbeds on Mars suggests that the Red Planet may once have been much wetter than previously thought. Researchers looked at fluvial sinuous ridges, also known as inverted channels, across Noachis Terra – a region in Mars’ southern highlands. These are believed to have formed when sediment deposited by rivers hardened and was later exposed as the surrounding material eroded.

Similar ridges have been found across a range of terrains on Mars. Their presence suggests that flowing water was once widespread in this region of Mars, with precipitation being the most likely source of this water.

The image to the right is a good example of an inverted channel, a previous cool image posted in April 2025. It is located not in Noachis Terra but in the northern lowland plains.

The researchers argue that these channels suggest that about 3.7 billion years ago there were flowing liquid rivers on Mars, fed by precipitation. This conclusion however still does not explain how this could happen on a planet that is too cold with too thin an atmosphere for liquid water to exist. Every model so far proposed to make Mars warmer with a thicker atmosphere in the distant past remains questionable with many holes.

Could the inverted channels have been created by glacial activity, ice instead of liquid water? At present we don’t know enough about the Mars environment and the physics of such things in the planet’s one-third gravity to answer that question. It is however a question that scientists I think should be asking, based on the extensive evidence of glacial activity in the Martian mid-latitudes.

The big takeaway from this study however is that it adds weight to the overall trend seen in the data, that over time the total amount of water on the planet has declined. We can see this in glaciers, for example, with later glacial flows always falling short of previous flows. This research shows that even in the dry tropics there was once ample water, even if we don’t yet know what form it took.

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Conscious Choice cover

Now available in hardback and paperback as well as ebook!

From the press release: In this ground-breaking new history of early America, historian Robert Zimmerman not only exposes the lie behind The New York Times 1619 Project that falsely claims slavery is central to the history of the United States, he also provides profound lessons about the nature of human societies, lessons important for Americans today as well as for all future settlers on Mars and elsewhere in space.

 
Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space, is a riveting page-turning story that documents how slavery slowly became pervasive in the southern British colonies of North America, colonies founded by a people and culture that not only did not allow slavery but in every way were hostile to the practice.  
Conscious Choice does more however. In telling the tragic history of the Virginia colony and the rise of slavery there, Zimmerman lays out the proper path for creating healthy societies in places like the Moon and Mars.

 

“Zimmerman’s ground-breaking history provides every future generation the basic framework for establishing new societies on other worlds. We would be wise to heed what he says.” —Robert Zubrin, founder of the Mars Society.

 

All editions are available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and all book vendors, with the ebook priced at $5.99 before discount. All editions can also be purchased direct from the ebook publisher, ebookit, in which case you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Autographed printed copies are also available at discount directly from the author (hardback $29.95; paperback $14.95; Shipping cost for either: $6.00). Just send an email to zimmerman @ nasw dot org.

July 9, 2025 Quick space links

9:02 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay. This post is also an open thread. I welcome my readers to post any comments or additional links relating to any space issues, even if unrelated to the links below.

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Leaving Earth cover

Leaving Earth: Space Stations, Rival Superpowers, and the Quest for Interplanetary Travel, can be purchased as an ebook everywhere for only $3.99 (before discount) at amazon, Barnes & Noble, all ebook vendors, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.

If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big oppressive tech companies and I get a bigger cut much sooner.

 

Winner of the 2003 Eugene M. Emme Award of the American Astronautical Society.

 
"Leaving Earth is one of the best and certainly the most comprehensive summary of our drive into space that I have ever read. It will be invaluable to future scholars because it will tell them how the next chapter of human history opened." -- Arthur C. Clarke

Sightseeing near Starship’s candidate Martian landing sites

2:21 pm

An interesting mesa near Starship's Martian landing zone
Click for original image.

Today’s cool image takes us sightseeing in the region on Mars that SpaceX has chosen for its prime landing zone for its Starship spaceship. The picture to the right, cropped, reduced, and sharpened to post here, was taken on May 29, 2025 by the high resolution camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO), and shows a 465-foot-high unusually shaped mesa in this region.

The full resolution inset at the bottom of the picture focuses at the strange tilted layers on the southern slope of this mesa. Apparently the layers at this spot were pushed sideways so they lie significantly angled to the horizontal. Though it isn’t clear from this picture, it is possible that the mesa itself is made up of similar tilted layers, hidden below the surface. We can see the tilt only on the mesa’s southern flank because erosion has apparently exposed it.

Note also the black stain that surrounds the mesa. Though this might be caused by wind distributing dust, such stains have also been seen at a location where scientists suspect an inactive hot spring might exist, as well as another location where there may have been relatively recent volcanic activity.

Is this stain caused by any of these processes? In situ exploration would probably be necessary to find out. And we may soon actually have spaceships landing here in the relatively near future with the capability to do this.
» Read more

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The walls of Jericho blocking Trump’s effort to streamline government have now fallen

12:11 pm

Trump defiant after being shot
Trump defiant

Fight! Fight! Fight! The Supreme Court ruling yesterday that allowed Trump’s plan to reorganize and reduce the federal workforce to go forward was far more significant than most realize. It in fact tells us that opposition to Trump’s effort is dissolving, and that he will have the ability in the last three years of his present term in office to complete this effort in a manner that will reshape the federal bureaucracy in ways so radical we will not recognize it when he is done — assuming Trump maintains his present aggressive effort.

First the background. In February Trump issued an executive order requiring agency managements throughout the executive branch to institute plans for reducing staffing signficiantly.

Titled “Implementing The President’s ‘Department of Government Efficiency’ Workforce Optimization Initiative,” the executive order also severely limits federal departments’ ability to bring on more staffers and mandates that agency heads closely coordinate with their DOGE representatives on future hiring plans. Once the hiring freeze that Trump put in place is lifted, agencies will only be allowed to replace one of every four employees who leave and hiring will be restricted to the highest-need areas.

Plus, agencies will not be able to fill vacancies for career positions that DOGE team leaders think should remain open, unless the department head determines they should be filled. DOGE leaders at each agency will file a monthly hiring report to DOGE.

Not surprisingly numerous lawsuits were immediately filed to block this order, claiming that Trump was required to get Congressional approval for such actions.
» Read more

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Coalition of space companies begs Congress to fund office designed to track satellites

9:54 am

A coalition of 450 space companies has now submitted letters to both the House and Senate begging Congress to not kill the funding for an office in NOAA created during the first Trump administration and designed to help manage satellite traffic in orbit.

A coalition of space industry associations representing hundreds of companies is urging Congress to reject Trump Administration plans to kill the nascent Traffic Coordination System for Space (TraCSS). Developed through NOAA’s Office of Space Commerce, TraCSS began beta testing last fall to provide data to civil and commercial satellite operators to avoid collisions. Just as the system is finally taking shape, it is targeted for elimination in the FY2026 budget request. The Senate Appropriations Committee takes up that proposal on Thursday when it marks up the Commerce-Justice-Science (CJS) bill that includes NOAA.

This new office was first conceived as a replacement for the tracking that the U.S. military has been doing since Sputnik was launched in 1957, information that it provides free to the industry. It appears Trump in his second administration has now concluded this new NOAA office is essentially redundant and therefore unnecessary.

The letters to the House [pdf] and Senate [pdf] urge Congress to reinstate the $65 million in spending for this NOAA office, but offer no suggestions on what to cut to fund this extra cost. Instead, like all such lobbying efforts, it expects Congress to simply print money to pay for the expense.

Meanwhile, it remains a valid question why this additional office is needed if the military has been doing the job quite successfully for the last three-quarters of a century. The letters argue this is a job better suited to a civil agency, but why? The military has to do it anyway for security reasons. Why waste money on a duplicate effort?

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ESA tests parachutes and guidance system for its proposed Space Rider reusable mini-shuttle

9:38 am

The engineering
Click for original image.

The European Space Agency (ESA) revealed today that it has completed drop tests from a helicopter of an engineering vehicle of its proposed Space Rider reusable mini-shuttle — similar in concept to the U.S. military’s X-37B — testing the spacecraft’s parachutes and re-entry guidance system.

The drop-test campaign had two objectives: the qualification of the parachutes used to slow the spacecraft during descent, and to test the software that controls the parafoil, guiding the Space Rider’s reentry module to its precise landing site. Space Rider models were dropped from a CH-47 Chinook Italian Army helicopter from altitudes ranging from 1 to 2.5 km, at the Italian military’s training and experimentation area Salto di Quirra.

The press release provides no movie of any of the drop tests, and the images it provides are almost all taken from very far away, making it impossible to see in detail what the engineering vehicle looks like. Only one picture clearly shows it, and that is what I have posted to the right. This is not a model of a spacecraft, but a square box carrying the parachutes and sensors.

Note also that ESA was doing similar drop tests last summer of a similar model. Apparently they aren’t yet ready to test the real thing.

This X-37B copy was first tested by ESA in 2015 and by 2017 the agency was promising it would be flying commercially by 2025. A decade later and they have not yet begun testing a full scale spacecraft. In addition, ESA has established some very complex rules about who can use it commercially, rules so complex I predict few will be interested.

Europe might be trying to adopt capitalism and freedom as its model, but in many ways it behaves as if it hasn’t the foggiest idea what it is doing.

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ISRO successfully tests thrusters to be used on its manned Gaganyaan capsule

9:14 am

India’s space agency ISRO last week successfully completed two tests of the attitude control thrusters that will be used on its manned Gaganyaan capsule.

In a statement issued on Wednesday, ISRO said that the short-duration tests, lasting 30 seconds and 100 seconds respectively, were aimed at validating the test article configuration. The space agency stated that the overall performance of the propulsion system during the hot tests had been normal and aligned with pre-test predictions.

It was also noted that during the 100-second test, the simultaneous operation of all Reaction Control System (RCS) thrusters in various modes—both steady state and pulsed—along with all Liquid Apogee Motor (LAM) engines had been successfully demonstrated.

The first unmanned test flight of Gaganyaan is presently targeting a launch in the last quarter of 2025, with two more unmanned test flights in 2026. The manned mission of one to three days would follow in 2027.

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