Rivals take on Musk's SpaceX, and other stories
Welcome to Ramin’s Space, the newsletter from science writer and editor Ramin Skibba. You can read more about the newsletter here. If you like it, please consider subscribing and sharing this post.
Before discussing Elon Musk’s SpaceX, I want to turn to a more pressing issue, the attacks on free speech by Musk’s allies in the White House, especially President Trump and Secretary of State Marco Rubio (who was sadly confirmed unanimously by the Senate in January).
Some 300 university students and scholars in the US have been targeted simply for using their First Amendment rights to free speech. They’ve had their student visas and green cards revoked, and they’ve been detained with no notice by armed, masked, plainclothes immigration agents. A few of those incidents have been caught on film, and they look like kidnappings. And then the victims have been whisked away to distant immigration jails (especially one in Louisiana, formerly run by the private company Geo Group) and threatened with deportation. It reminds me of the thousands of people who were “disappeared” during Argentina’s Dirty War in the 1970s and 1980s.
The people affected by the Trump administration’s aggressive and harmful policies include Mahmoud Khalil, Rumeysa Ozturk, Momodou Taal, Badar Khan Suri, Yunseo Chung, Ranjani Srinivasan, and Alireza Doroudi. We should know their names. Some of them appear to have been targeted for writing or speaking for Palestinian rights, and most have not been charged with any crime.
The crackdown is part of an AI-powered program called “Catch and Revoke” (apparently evoking “catch and release”), where the government scans people’s social media activity to identify “violations.” With a couple exceptions, most universities involved have not defended their students and scholars, while in some cases, ICE is revoking students’ immigration statuses without university officials’ knowledge.
I fear more attacks will follow, if we take Rubio and Trump at their word, and US citizens will be next. This is an attempt to instill a climate of fear and to divide the working class in the US. In addition to antiwar activists, this administration has already set its sights on union activists, anti-Tesla activists, racial justice advocates, and climate and public health advocates. This is just the beginning.
There’s lots of good news coverage out there, and in particular I recommend checking out Zeteo, Drop Site News, Democracy Now, and Ken Klippenstein’s Substack.
Trump’s administration has reportedly sought to purge numerous terms in government documents. These forbidden words include inequality and injustice. But repression is allowed.
Rivals are Rising to Challenge the Dominance of SpaceX
SpaceX has had a near monopoly in the commercial space industry for years, especially with its Falcon rockets nabbing lucrative NASA and Pentagon contracts as well as private customers. But as I write in my new piece for MIT Technology Review magazine, that dominance may soon come to an end, as a bunch of credible competitors are emerging this year.
At the same time, SpaceX has become Elon Musk’s most valuable resource, thanks to Tesla’s plummeting stock. (On that note, I recommend this podcast episode of System Crash, with tech journalists Brian Merchant and Paris Marx.) Musk seems to be moving to aid SpaceX through his prominent position in Trump’s DOGE agency, and he may now have allies installed at regulatory agencies like the FAA and FCC. A friend of his, Jared Isaacman, may soon helm NASA as well, if he’s confirmed.
In other writing…
The Cult of the American Lawn, by Oliver Milman in Noema magazine. While people in the Western US are beginning to shift away from heavily-watered yards, many Americans are still obsessed with having manicured lawns.
Meet The Women Survivors of the World’s Worst Industrial Disaster, by Alessandra Bergamin in Atmos magazine. We cannot forget the Bhopal chemical disaster, when a leak at a pesticide plant of Union Carbide (now owned by Dow) killed some 20,000 people and exposed half a million more.
Critical takes on the “Abundance” agenda: Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s new book has been getting a lot of press, but I’m skeptical of the agenda’s focus on technocratic neoliberalism, when what we really need now is more organizing, for workers, for immigrants, and for political power. I recommend these reviews and analysis by Malcom Harris in The Baffler and by Dylan Gyauch-Lewis in The American Prospect.
The Coyote Next Door, about coexisting with urban wildlife, by Betsy Mason in bioGraphic magazine
New World Symphonies, an interesting article by Matthew Sherrill in Harper’s magazine, who nerds out about musical instrument engineering
How a Chinese battery factory sparked a political meltdown in a small Michigan town, by Viola Zhou in Rest of World magazine. I also recommend this interview with the reporter, by Camille Bromley, in Columbia Journalism Review.
Meta is pirating books and scientific papers with LibGen to train its AI, and The Atlantic has published a search tool. (I found that LibGen has already feasted on some of my writing and a couple physics papers I published a long time ago.) Other AI companies are doing the same thing, possibly illegally, and there’s a class action lawsuit going through the courts now. Writer friends, the Authors Guild has a webpage full of resources and actions you can take.
What I’m reading: The Terranauts, a novel by T. C. Boyle
Looking back: Three years ago, I reviewed for WIRED a documentary about SpaceX, called Return to Space. The uncritical movie almost comes across as fawning and promotional. I think it’s fair to say, it has not aged well. I should also add, however, that despite Musk, some of SpaceX’s leaders are good at their jobs, including Gwynne Shotwell. Whether SpaceX and Tesla survive Musk’s activism is another story.
More about me: I’m a science writer, editor, and journalist based in the Bay Area. I was WIRED magazine’s space writer until December 2023, and before that I worked as a freelance writer and an astrophysicist. You can find me at my website, raminskibba.net, and on Twitter and Bluesky. I’m also former president of the San Diego Science Writers Association (SANDSWA) and on the board of the National Association of Science Writers (NASW), though the opinions I express are mine alone. If someone has forwarded this email to you, you’re welcome to subscribe too.
thumbs down for LibGen harvesting your writing, Ramin