Daily Archives: April 9, 2022

The crew of the next SpaceX private astronaut flight, called Polaris Dawn, pose at SpaceXs Starbase facility in Boca Chica, Texas. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers informed SpaceX in a letter dated March 7 that its permit application for an expansion of the companys Starbase complex at Boca Chica has been withdrawn due to lack of information. (Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post)

BOCA CHICA, Texas (Tribune News Service) The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers informed SpaceX in a letter dated March 7 that its permit application for an expansion of the company's Starbase complex at Boca Chica has been withdrawn due to lack of information.

USACE said SpaceX had not provided requested follow-up information regarding proposed expansion that would affect more than 17 acres of land at Boca Chica designated by the Environmental Protection Agency as an Aquatic Resource of National Importance and by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as critical habitat for federally listed species.

USACE said it it sent SpaceX a letter on May 21, 2021, that included "substantive comments" about the company's proposed expansion, including comments from EPA, USFWS, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality and the Texas Parks and Wildlife Service. The letter also contained "substantive issues raised by the Corps."

USACE said that in order for it to complete its review of the proposed project, it needed SpaceX to provide an "alternatives analysis" under rules governing "disposal sites for dredged or fill material," a thorough public-interest review, and a Compensatory Mitigation Plan for Losses of Aquatic Resources.

In applying to USACE for the permit last year, SpaceX said the proposed expansion was to accommodate additional launch/landing pads, integration towers and "associated infrastructure, stormwater management features and vehicle parking," according to the public notice USACE issued last year soliciting comments.

SpaceX did submit some information to USACE, though the company's "siting criteria" requiring the use of existing infrastructure "eliminates, without additional considerations, all alternatives not located in Boca Chica," even though SpaceX has said it is considering additional launch/reentry locations beyond Boca Chica, USACE said.

USACE called SpaceX's definition of environmental siting criteria "too broad and undefined," and recommended that the company readdress the No Action Alternative in its analysis.

SpaceX is waiting for the results of a Final Programmatic Environmental Assessment by the Federal Aviation Administration about the company's plans for Boca Chica, including the first orbital launch of a combined Starship-Super Heavy booster. The FAA has pushed back the deadline to complete the PEA multiple times. The current deadline is April 29.

Depending on the results of the Final PEA, the FAA may or may not issue the necessary orbital launch license. One option is for the FAA to demand a much more comprehensive, time-consuming Environmental Impact Statement in addition to the PEA.

"Specifically, SpaceX needs to describe impacts to ongoing operations if the permit is denied," USACE said. "For instance, in a Feb. 10, 2022, announcement, SpaceX stated they will shift operations to Kennedy Space Center (in Florida) if the FAA requires an Environmental Impact Statement. This alternative was eliminated from analysis in your Oct. 2021 submission but seems to represent either the No Action alternative or a practicable off-site alternative requiring detailed analysis."

USACE wrote on March 7 that SpaceX can re-initiate the permit application process by "addressing all comments/concerns specified in our May 21, 2021 (letter)."

(c)2022 The Brownsville Herald (Brownsville, Texas)

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Army Corps withdraws SpaceX application for Starbase complex in Boca Chica, Texas - Stars and Stripes

Billionaire Elon Musks ambitious plans for space travel are taking shape on a sandy patch of Texas not far from the U.S.-Mexico border town of Brownsville and South Padre Island, the spring break haven.

Its an area that might not seem to have much in common with Chicago, with its warm, salty waters, occasional shark sightings and the up-righted rockets that protrude from the landscape.

But Chicagoans are central to the history of Musks Texas Starbase property where spaceships are assembled and SpaceX workers, including Musk, stay in an adjacent neighborhood of ranch-style homes or campers along streets lined with palm trees and, reflecting another of Musks business interests, electric-powered Tesla cars in some of the driveways.

Elon Musks Starbase complex includes what initially was called Kennedy Shores when it was created as a retirement village in the 1960s by a Chicago developer.

Robert Herguth / Sun-Times

Campers dot the landscape of Elon Musks rocket facility in south Texas adjacent to what was once a retirement community that drew Polish Americans from Chicago.

Robert Herguth / Sun-Times

Over the past decade, Musk has bought or obtained options to buy land there just down Texas State Highway 4 from a launch site where his spacecraft might one day take off for Mars or beyond.

The area previously was home to a retirement community that Chicago radio personality John A. Caputa helped create, pitching the site on Polish-language radio programs in the 1960s and 1970s as the next Fort Lauderdale.

Caputa who was from Austria but spoke Polish also promoted the development in a Polish language newspaper in Chicago.

Elon Musk speaks at SpaceXs Starbase facility near Boca Chica Village in South Texas.

Only a smattering of homes ended up being built for the retirement community. And no more than a few dozen people at any given time ever lived in the community initially named Kennedy Shores after President John F. Kennedy, then called Kopernik Shores in homage of Polish astronomer Nicolaus Copernicus and now known as Boca Chica Village, a nod in Spanish to the small mouth of the nearby Rio Grande River.

The entrance to Boca Chica Village, with the rocket launch site visible in the distance.

Robert Herguth / Sun-Times

What seemed like an honest venture at the start turned into a nightmare for some by the time Caputa died at 65 in 1977 after a heart attack while driving on what was then called the Northwest Tollway. At the time of his death, hed been staying, penniless or nearly so, at the Leaning Tower YMCA in Niles, noteworthy for its half-scale replica of the Pisa landmark.

In a story headlined, Hes Dead, Their Savings Gone, the Chicago Sun-Times reported: Caputa was building a retirement village for Polish immigrants in south Texas . . . and with the help of the Lord and the people of Chicagos Polish community, the dream would come true. He asked his listeners to lend him money and promised a 12% return after a year.

But, according to the story, Caputa had been falling behind on payments to his creditors, including his radio listeners, since the early 1970s.

According to the Texas Almanac, after Caputas death, it was discovered that many of the Kopernik Shore residents did not hold clear title to their land.

Caputa had gotten into real estate in the 1960s, joining a venture with several others who bought a huge parcel along the Texas Gulf Coast. Their plan? To build a Fort Lauderdale of the West, using Caputas salesmanship and ties with the Chicago ethnic community to market lots.

Caputa brought train and bus loads of people from Chicago to see the property, but a series of tropical storms battered the area, and sales slowed, the Sun-Times reported.

Caputa broke with his partners, and legal and financial problems followed.

Two months after Caputas death, the old Dallas Times Herald chronicled the politics of the place, whose mayor at the time was 82-year-old Stanley Piotrowicz, whod been a home builder in Evanston and run unsuccessfully for Illinois secretary of state in 1936 as a third-party candidate.

Piotrowicz got the community incorporated, but that was overturned by a judge as a political rival fumed over the inability to get fresh water piped to the area. The bitterness spilled into the April 2, 1977, election that a judge called the most irregular in the history of Texas, rife with accusations of election fraud.

Piotrowicz, who was born in Poland, believed so strongly in the idea of a Polish megalopolis of senior citizens in southern Texas that he was one of the first to invest, according to the Dallas newspaper.

I was president of the Polish American Senior Citizens Council of Chicago, and we had 2,600 members sign up for land with Caputa, he told the paper. Its the best climate in the U.S. for asthma and rheumatism. Here, you get cured without a doctor just God and the sun.

A grotto of the Virgin Mary, one of the few remaining signs that Boca Chica Village was once a retirement community of Polish Americans.

Robert Herguth / Sun-Times

One of the few unused structures in Boca Chica Village.

Robert Herguth / Sun-Times

Decades later, Musk is using that land in his effort to some day travel to the heavens.

And Caputa and Piotrowiczs dream for whats now Boca Chica Village, which still includes a few retirees who hadnt sold to Musk?

In the words of Cameron County Judge Eddie Trevino Jr., It is definitely not a sleepy retirement village any longer.

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Elon Musks Starbase in Texas sits on land once pitched to Chicago Polish retirees by Polish radios John C - Chicago Sun-Times

Good morning! Do you miss roaming a convention center with a tech conference badge? Or the summer camp vibe of reuniting with industry peers you havent seen in years? Well, the virtual events necessitated by the pandemic appear to be sticking around. So is the in-person tech event a thing of the past? I'm Allison Levitsky, and I once worked as a Frida Kahlo impersonator at SFMOMA.

The pandemics darkest days have passed and in-person gatherings are back, but the virtual events that emerged during the pandemic have staying power. Some of techs biggest conferences are hanging on to a hybrid element if not remaining entirely online.

Were fully into year three of the pandemic, and Big Techs conferences are still mostly virtual. The events once packed thousands of attendees into large convention centers in exotic locales like San Jose and Las Vegas, but this week, Apple announced that its annual developers conference would once again be an online event, and Facebook parent company Meta is also putting its annual developers event on pause.

Other companies are going all-in on hybrid conferences. This combines the benefits of in-person gatherings networking, more immersive experiences, a captive audience with the wider audience and deeper focus of online sessions.

In-person networking is a big part of the appeal of conferences. But apparently, thats not deterring tech companies from making their developer conferences virtual.

Well have to see whether Apple takes the wraps off its latest iPhone with a splashy IRL event this September. Either way, the more technical tech conferences are likely to stay at least partially, if not mostly, online or maybe in, IDK, the metaverse?

How is tech setting and measuring climate goals?

Net zero. Carbon offsets. Scope 3 emissions. These are just some of the terms youll find in Big Techs climate plans. Understanding what they actually mean is vital to ensuring the industry is meeting its goals. Join us at 10 a.m. PT April 19, where Protocol's Brian Kahn will talk with some of the people responsible for setting those goals and experts who are monitoring them to find out what tech companies are really doing. RSVP here.

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Tesla shareholder Ron Baron doesnt think Elon Musks Twitter buy is a big deal:

Microsofts Satya Nadella told workers to stop sending those late-night emails:

Janet Yellen said crypto regulation should be tech neutral:

Daversa Partners Frank Cumella said companies should create strong ties with their executive search firm:

Bolt Financial bought Wyre Payments, a blockchain-based payments provider, for about $1.5 billion, sources told The Wall Street Journal.

Coinbase is on a hiring spree in India. The company plans to triple its employee count in the country to 1,000, and half of the new hires will be engineers.

Discoverys new post-WarnerMedia merger leaders are in place. Jean-Briac Perrette will lead its streaming businesses; Bruce Campbell will serve as chief revenue and strategy officer; and Kathleen Finch is the new chair and chief content officer.

Skand Gupta is the new head of Engineering at Cadre. Gupta has worked in senior engineering roles at companies like Better.com and Dropbox.

Elon Musk finally visited the White House. He met with Biden officials alongside other auto industry leaders to discuss topics like charging networks and EVs.

Amazon will appeal its unionization defeat, which last week saw workers in New York vote to establish the companys first U.S. union. Hardly surprising.

Riot Games is the latest to drop its vaccine requirement and ask workers to come back to the office. Sources told Vice the change has upset employees, some of whom have left.

Twitter Employees aren't happy with Elon Musk being on the company's board, so much so that the company plans to host a town hall on the matter, according to The Washington Post.

Activision Blizzards quality assurance testers are now full-time workers after months of activism from some employees. The workers now have full-time contracts and a raise.

Twitter is testing a tool that would let users unmention themselves from conversations on the web.

Epic and Lego want to make the metaverse better for kids. Their plans to work together are vague, but theyre aiming to prioritize kids well-being and protect their privacy.

SpaceX cant expand in Boca Chica, Texas, for now because it never provided documentation on how its growth would affect surrounding ecology and wildlife.

Famous women including Gwyneth Paltrow and Reese Witherspoon are getting in on the crypto craze. Given that men have invested more in crypto than women, that leadership push from women celebrities should be seen as a good thing. But its not really?

Women celebrities interest in NFTs sounds a lot like the girlboss philosophy, which refers to a 2010s trend in which women leaders broke into male-dominated fields, but in a self-serving way. The charge looks like women are successfully breaking the glass ceiling, but at the expense of marginalized women. The ongoing hype around NFTs could play out in the same way, the Washington Post reports, but time will tell.

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Thoughts, questions, tips? Send them to sourcecode@protocol.com, or our tips line, tips@protocol.com. Enjoy your day, see you Sunday.

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Big tech conferences arent coming back - Protocol

Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal and former CEO Jack Dorsey like Elon Musk. Twitter employees? Not so much.

The news that Tesla's leader would join Twitter's board did not sit well with employees, who have expressed concern that Musk's values seem to contradict the company's. Twitter now plans to host Musk at a town hall to (hopefully?) clear the air, according to company messages obtained by The Washington Post. The meeting is being dubbed an AMA, and the Post said it's not very common for the company to host one.

We say that Twitter is whats happening and what people are talking about right now," Agrawal wrote in an email to employees on Thursday. "Often, we [at] Twitter are whats happening and what people are talking about. That has certainly been the case this week ... Following our board announcement, many of you have had different types of questions about Elon Musk, and I want to welcome you to ask those questions to him.

Musk is at once one of Twitter's biggest posters and one of its biggest critics. A few weeks before news that he bought a big stake in Twitter went public, Musk tweeted that he was considering building his own social media platform. He's a self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist" who has called for an open-source algorithm and criticized Twitter's content moderation policies. Republican lawmakers still upset about former President Donald Trump's ban on the platform have taken a liking to Musk's tweets attacking Twitter and appointment to Twitter's board.

Employees are worried that Musk's seat on the board could set the company back on its progress toward eradicating hate speech and misinformation on the platform. "Free speech" has often been used as cover for harassment and misinformation and has led to far-right Twitter clones like Gab and Trump's own Truth Social. The employees are not alone, either. A digital ad agency leader said Musk's role may scare off brands from doing business on Twitter, and Reddit's former CEO expressed concern about the move.

We know that he has caused harm to workers, the trans community, women, and others with less power in the world, one employee said, according to messages seen by the Post. How are we going to reconcile this decision with our values? Does innovation trump humanity?

Quick question: If an employee tweeted some of the things Elon tweets, theyd likely be the subject of an HR investigation, another employee wrote on Slack. Are board members held to the same standard?

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Angry Twitter employees are going to grill Elon Musk at a company town hall - Protocol

(TNS) Aaron Morrison wants to know if moon settlers in the near future can use rocks that litter the lunar surface to build a base camp, roads, and landing and launch pads.

The postdoctoral fellow in earth and planetary sciences at the University of Texas at San Antonio is studying gray, volcanic basalt, which is similar to rocks found on the moon. Among other things, he wants to know how much heat it would take to melt them.

His aim is to learn "how we could use those as construction materials," said Morrison, 29, who tests basaltic rocks at the university's NASA MIRO Center for Advanced Measurements in Extreme Environments.

The space agency is looking to return astronauts to the moon in 2025 for the first time since the Apollo 17 mission half a century ago through its Artemis program and to eventually establish a lunar settlement. And it's drawing on an army of outside experts.

UTSA is one of the higher-education institutions that NASA and other federal agencies are turning to for assistance. Since 2015, the university has won 10 research grants worth a total of $3.89 million to help advance NASA programs.

Still, UTSA had no NASA funding a decade ago.

CAMEE has received two of the awards for work tied to the Artemis program.

"This is undeniably cool, what we're doing," said Morrison, whose research is funded by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, an arm of the Defense Department, not NASA. "This is our generation's Apollo. I am intimately involved in that process that has implications for humanity and moving forward as a species."

NASA is relying on the private sector more than ever for space exploration. For the next moonshot, NASA selected Elon Musk's SpaceX to build the first commercial lander.

The close public-private collaboration has convinced UTSA to begin reaching out to SpaceX in hopes that the new neighbor it's developing the Starship vehicle in South Texas will support academic research and open doors for students seeking internships and jobs.

Morrison said the fact that NASA, SpaceX and a host of other government and industry partners are heading back to the moon "is definitely a motivator" for CAMEE researchers.

The center pulls together dozens of academics from several departments to research a broad range of issues, including polar ice and ocean warming, hurricanes, forest fires and droughts. They also investigate how NASA space vehicles traveling at hypersonic speeds would fare when re-entering Earth's atmosphere.

"The knowledge that we gain from these extreme events is what we could use later on in space problems," said CAMEE director Kiran Bhaganagar, a professor of mechanical engineering at UTSA. "Everything in space is an uncertain, but we'll have this knowledge. Eventually, our goal, our vision, our dream is to expand to answer questions in space."

In recent months, CAMEE requested $2 million in NASA grants to continue research for the Artemis program named after the goddess of the hunt and twin sister of Apollo in Greek mythology.

While awaiting NASA's funding decision, Bhaganagar has been trying to make connections with SpaceX, which is building the Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy rocket at its Starbase space port in Boca Chica, near Brownsville.

So far, she's had no luck making contact with Musk's privately held company. But she's hopeful SpaceX will see the benefits of partnering with her team.

"The time has come," she said. "I'm very confident our research can help them. We have a common vision."

For years, NASA has recruited UTSA students in its search for technical talent. At least 30 UTSA students or alumni are currently interning or holding jobs at the agency.

As part of the CAMEE funding, NASA offers summer internships to researchers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and the Langley Research Center in Virginia.

Academics hunger to see their research applied to solve problems on Earth and in space. That is why Bhaganagar said she's excited about SpaceX's ability to set aggressive, far-reaching goals namely, developing Starship, returning astronauts to the moon and eventually landing them on Mars and to move fast.

"The advantage of the fast-paced private industry is that they're putting the technology out there, so now the university is trying to figure out the science behind it," Bhaganagar said.

After the last Apollo moon landing, in 1972, NASA spent three decades building space shuttles and the International Space Station, while relying on robots to explore Mars and deep space.

But there's been a renewed push for human space exploration in recent years, thanks in part to Musk's efforts to spark interest in building a human settlement on Mars.

The Trump administration directed NASA to get to the moon by 2024, but Congress didn't come up with enough funding for the bullish goal.

President Joe Biden also wants to deliver astronauts to the moon and beyond.

Last week, he requested $26 billion for NASA's 2023 budget, including $7.5 billion for space exploration that would help the Artemis program reach the moon in 2025. NASA also wants to return astronauts to the lunar surface once a year throughout the following decade and send humans to Mars by 2040.

The White House budget request includes $1.5 billion for commercially owned and operated human landing systems that would lower astronauts onto the moon. After selecting SpaceX for the lunar mission in 2021, NASA announced last week that SpaceX and a yet-to-be-selected company would develop landers that could be used for subsequent missions.

"It's the largest request for science in NASA history," agency administrator Bill Nelson said during his recent State of NASA address. "But greater than any number or statistic or fact is what this budget request represents. It's a signal of support of our missions in a new era of exploration and discovery."

Of course, Congress will decide how much the space agency will receive for its big plans.

Back at CAMEE, San Antonio native Iyare Oseghae, 23, is researching hyperspectral imaging. Think about a drone flying over the moon's surface and sending images to computers showing how objects look in ultraviolet and infrared wavelengths.

"It's basically your eyes before you make a touchdown onto planetary bodies," he said.

Oseghae believes his research could help NASA and SpaceX on future missions to Mars.

He's interned for NASA twice. For one of his projects, at the Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley, he studied the roughness of lava flows on Mars.

"That project had implications for someday having a Mars habitat," he said. "You use remote sensing to study the landscape and determine which areas would be possibly good for a landing spot and which areas are made of this type of rock that could be used to make housing and structures."

Bhaganagar, the CAMEE director, said she's "very optimistic" that NASA will approve the requested renewal grant to carry on with Artemis-related research.

If UTSA wins the renewal, some of the NASA funding also could go toward building a lunar test facility in San Antonio a site that mimics the moon's environment. CAMEE has completed enough related research over the last three years, Bhaganagar said, to pursue donors and additional federal funding needed to build the site.

"We hope that NASA and SpaceX could use the facility," she said.

The lunar facility is in the preplanning stage. Bhaganagar said CAMEE is talking with Port San Antonio about possibly housing it on the 1,900-acre campus on the Southwest Side.

A Port San Antonio spokesperson confirmed ongoing discussions with UTSA "to explore ways in which we could host such an endeavor."

Bhaganagar said San Antonio "is an exhilarating city" where CAMEE has garnered a lot of support from the public and private sectors. She hopes the rush of interest in space exploration leads to more funding and more options for student internships and jobs for graduates.

In addition to NASA funding, CAMEE has received grants from the Air Force and the National Science Foundation.

"It's a good time for us to leverage," she said. "We have a good edge of moving from extreme events to space."

2022 the San Antonio Express-News. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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UTSA Invests in Space Research, Seeks SpaceX Partnership - Government Technology

Robinhood said its given a crypto wallet to every user who wants one, with millions on a waitlist. But its stock dropped Friday after Goldman Sachs said the online brokerage faces a rough road ahead.

Shares were down about 8% in late morning trades and have lost 39% of their value this year. The stock is 87% below its all-time high of $85 it reached in August shortly after its IPO, propelled by its growth in crypto trading revenue.

The company said Thursday it had rolled out the crypto wallet feature to every eligible Robinhood user on its waitlist. It also added support for Lightning payments, making the wallet more useful for low-cost retail transactions and transfers.

"Our goal is to make Robinhood the most trusted and easiest to use crypto platform, CEO and co-founder Vlad Tenev said in the statement.

But news of Robinhoods aggressive push for a stronger crypto market position was offset by a Goldman Sachs note downgrading its stock from neutral to sell.

We believe this lack of clarity around the path to profitability will prevent the stock from re-rating higher, Goldman analysts wrote.

The analysts said recent data pointed to user growth that remained depressed and pointed to worries of a crypto slump, which could have a negative impact on Robinhood given its growing reliance on that market.

While the company has negotiated much better economics on crypto trading, we see the decline in broader industry crypto volumes largely offsetting this tailwind, the analyst note said.

Robinhood kicked off the year with a disappointing earnings report highlighted by a revenue outlook that was well below what Wall Street was expecting.

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Robinhood gave its users a crypto wallet. Why did its stock drop? - Protocol