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    Voters Approve Incorporation of SpaceX Hub as Starbase, Texas

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    A South Texas community, mostly made up of SpaceX employees, voted 212 to 6 in favor of establishing a new city called Starbase.Members of a South Texas community that has served as the hub of Elon Musk’s rocket launch company, SpaceX, voted on Saturday to formally establish a new city called Starbase, fulfilling one of Mr. Musk’s long-held dreams.All but six of the 218 people who voted supported incorporating the city of Starbase, according to Cameron County, which administered the vote.There were 283 eligible voters, said Remi Garza, the elections administrator for the county.The community, known to locals as Boca Chica, covers about 1.5 square miles on a spit of land that brushes up against the Mexican border.SpaceX broke ground in the area in 2014, and it has since become the company’s central hub and launch site, as well as home to hundreds of its employees.On his social media platform, X, Mr. Musk has referred to the area as Starbase more than a dozen times in the past four years.“My primary home is literally a ~$50k house in Boca Chica / Starbase that I rent from SpaceX,” Mr. Musk wrote in June 2021. “It’s kinda awesome though.”In December, people living around the company offices and launch site filed a petition to officially establish the city of Starbase, Texas. More

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      How Lauren Sanchez Helped Design Blue Origin’s Flight Suits

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      What do you wear for your first trip to space?If you are like most people, probably whatever spacesuit or astronaut outfit the company (or government agency) you are flying with provides. However, if you are Lauren Sánchez — journalist, pilot, children’s book author, philanthropist and fiancée of Jeff Bezos — the second-richest man on the planet, you have another idea. You think, “Let’s reimagine the flight suit.”“Usually, you know, these suits are made for a man,” Ms. Sánchez said recently on a video call from the West Coast. “Then they get tailored to fit a woman.” Or not tailored: an all-female spacewalk, planned in 2019, had to be canceled because NASA did not have two spacesuits that fit two women. (Instead they sent out one woman and one man.)But Ms. Sánchez is part of the first all-female flight since Russia sent Valentina Tereshkova on a solo flight in 1963. She will be going up on a Blue Origin flight with a pop star (Katy Perry), a journalist (Gayle King), two scientist/activists (Amanda Nguyen, Aisha Bowe) and a film producer (Kerianne Flynn). Feeling like yourself is what makes you feel powerful, she said, and you shouldn’t have to sacrifice that because space has been — well, a mostly male space. Even if you are a space tourist, rather than a full-fledged astronaut.So five months ago, Ms. Sánchez got in touch with Fernando Garcia and Laura Kim, the co-founders of the brand Monse, who are also creative directors of Oscar de la Renta (Mr. Garcia and Ms. Kim made Ms Sánchez’s 2024 Met Gala outfit). She wanted to know if they would work with Blue Origin, Mr. Bezos’ space company.“I was like: right away!” Mr. Garcia said over Zoom.The result of their collaboration will be unveiled on Monday, when Ms. Sánchez and crew climb into the Blue Origin rocket in West Texas, and take off for their approximately 11-minute trip past the Kármán line and into zero gravity.Details of the new Blue Origin/Monse flight suits, including the passengers’s name, mission patch, dual zippers, Blue Origin insignia, and customizable flared leg.Photographs by Justin Hamel for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Blue Ghost’s Long Day on the Moon

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      <!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> –> <!–> –><!–> –><!–> –>Landing<!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> [–><!–> –><!–> –> <!–> –><!–> –><!–> [–><!–>Several companies and countries have aimed to land on the moon in recent years. The map below shows the crewed Apollo moon landing sites, as well as more recent robotic landings from China, […] More

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      How to Watch Firefly’s Blue Ghost Mission 1 Moon Landing

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      The lunar lander is the first of three robotic spacecraft aiming to set down on the moon this year.Blue Ghost during an orbit of the moon about 62 miles above the surface on Feb. 24. The footage is sped up 10 times.By Firefly AerospaceThe moon will be a busy place this year. There are three robotic spacecraft in space right now that are aiming to set down on the moon’s surface.The first of those to arrive — the Blue Ghost lunar lander, built by Firefly Aerospace of Austin, Texas — will attempt to land early Sunday.When is the landing and how can I watch it?The landing is scheduled for 3:45 a.m. Eastern time on March 2. Firefly will begin live coverage of the landing at 2:20 a.m. from its YouTube channel.What is Blue Ghost’s destination?This mission is headed to Mare Crisium, a flat plain formed from lava that filled and hardened inside a 345-mile-wide crater carved out by an ancient asteroid impact. Mare Crisium is in the northeast quadrant of the near side of the moon.What is Blue Ghost taking to the moon?The lander is carrying a variety of scientific and experimental payloads to the lunar surface, including 10 for NASA. Those include a drill to measure the flow of heat from the moon’s interior to the surface, an electrodynamic dust shield to clean off glass and radiator surfaces, and an X-ray camera.That cargo is part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Service, or CLPS, which aims to put NASA equipment on the moon at a cheaper price than if NASA built its own lunar lander. The agency will pay Firefly $101.5 million if all 10 payloads reach the lunar surface, and a bit less if the mission does not fully succeed.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      NASA’S Lunar Trailblazer Hitches Ride to the Moon to Map Water for Astronauts

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      Lunar Trailblazer, an orbiter that shared a launch on Wednesday with the commercial Athena lander, will help scientists understand where the moon’s water is, and what form it takes.The moon is not bone dry, scientists now know. But how many drops of water will thirsty astronauts find? No one knows for sure.A robotic NASA spacecraft called Lunar Trailblazer, which launched Wednesday night from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, is aiming to provide a detailed map from orbit of the abundance, distribution and form of water across the moon.Lunar Trailblazer tagged along for the ride to space on the same SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as Athena, a commercial lunar lander built by Intuitive Machines of Houston, which will deploy a NASA instrument to drill in the moon and sniff for water vapors.Athena will study one spot on the moon. Lunar Trailblazer will provide a global picture of water on the moon.“That’s another exciting thing for us as we get more science into space with one launch,” Nicola Fox, the associate administrator for NASA’s science mission directorate, said during a news conference before the launch.Less than an hour after liftoff, Lunar Trailblazer and Athena went their separate ways. Athena is taking a direct path to the moon, with landing scheduled for March 6, while Lunar Trailblazer set off on a meandering but fuel-efficient journey that will take four months to reach its destination. After it enters orbit, the spacecraft will make observations for at least two years.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk Is Focused on DOGE. What About Tesla?

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      Mr. Musk, one of President Trump’s main advisers, has not outlined a plan to reverse falling sales at the electric car company of which he is chief executive.Elon Musk’s role as President Trump’s cost-cutting czar and his immersion in right-wing politics appears to be diverting his attention from Tesla at a perilous moment for the electric car company.Tesla’s car sales fell 1 percent last year even as the global market for electric vehicles grew 25 percent. Mr. Musk has not addressed that underperformance, and he has offered no concrete plan to revive sales. He has also provided no details about a more affordable model Tesla says it will start producing this year. In the past, Mr. Musk spent months or years promoting vehicles before they appeared in showrooms.And he has spent much of his time since the election in Washington and at Mr. Trump’s home in Florida — far from Austin, Texas, where Tesla has its corporate headquarters and a factory, or the San Francisco Bay Area, where it has a factory and engineering offices.In the past decade or so, Tesla went from a struggling start-up to upending the global auto industry. The company sold millions of electric cars and generated huge profits, forcing established automakers to invest billions of dollars to catch up. Tesla’s success has been reflected in its soaring stock price, which helped make Mr. Musk the world’s richest person.But now, he seems to have lost interest in the grinding business of developing, producing and selling cars, investors and analysts say. That could have serious ramifications for his company and the auto industry, which employs millions of people worldwide.Even before he joined the Trump administration as the head of the Department of Government Efficiency, Mr. Musk’s running multiple companies had led investors and corporate governance experts to wonder whether he was spread too thin. Besides Tesla, Mr. Musk controls and runs SpaceX, whose rockets carry astronauts and satellites for NASA and others; X, the social media site; and xAI, which is developing artificial intelligence. And he wants to colonize Mars.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos Exchange Posts About Trump on X

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      The world’s two richest men are longtime business rivals, but now one of them has the ear of the next president of the United States.A few months ago, a three-post exchange between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk on Mr. Musk’s X would have passed for petty sniping between billionaire rivals.But times have changed.“Just learned tonight at Mar-a-Lago that Jeff Bezos was telling everyone that @realDonaldTrump would lose for sure, so they should sell all their Tesla and SpaceX stock,” Mr. Musk wrote Wednesday night, referring to two of his companies. He added an emoji for a snickering face, with a hand covering the mouth.“Nope. 100% not true,” Mr. Bezos responded on Thursday morning.“Well, then, I stand corrected,” Mr. Musk wrote back, with a laughing-crying emoji.With President-elect Donald J. Trump’s history of animosity toward Mr. Bezos, the posts carried an unspoken message about Mr. Musk’s growing power within the incoming administration.The exchange — brief, brassy and fairly typical of Mr. Musk’s overwhelming presence on X — could foreshadow a bumpy next few years for Mr. Bezos and the companies he started, Amazon and the rocket maker Blue Origin. It was also a reminder that the power dynamics in the longtime rivalry between the world’s two richest men changed on Nov. 5.Plenty of tech executives have drawn Mr. Trump’s wrath over the last few years. Perhaps none more than Mr. Bezos, largely because he owns The Washington Post, which has frequently written critically about Mr. Trump. (The Post did not endorse a presidential candidate this year, a decision that angered many of its readers and that Mr. Bezos publicly defended.)We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      California Rejects Bid for More Frequent SpaceX Launches

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      A commission denied a request to increase the number of rocket launches on the state’s central coast, citing environmental concerns.A California state commission this week rejected the U.S. Space Force’s bid to increase the number of SpaceX rocket launches on the state’s central coast, citing concerns about the environmental impacts of the launches.The Space Force had sought to increase the number of launches of SpaceX’s flagship Falcon 9 rocket from 36 to 50 per year out of California. But on Thursday, the California Coastal Commission denied the bid in a 6-4 vote, pointing to its previous requests for the military and SpaceX to mitigate the disruptive sonic booms caused by the rockets and to keep a closer eye on the operations’ effects on the state’s wildlife.The commission also rejected the military and SpaceX’s argument that the launches should be considered a federal activity, saying they mostly benefit SpaceX and its private business operations, as opposed to the government.The move came just a couple of months after the commission had approved increasing the number of SpaceX launches to 36, contingent on the military’s commitment to adopting such measures. The board, which is tasked with protecting the state’s coastal resources, previously expressed its reservation for approving more launches without understanding the effects of the sonic booms and launch debris on wildlife.SpaceX, which is owned by Elon Musk, has grown to dominate the space launch business, serving as the primary provider to both NASA and the Pentagon. It has blasted its own commercial satellites into space out of bases across the country at a rapid clip, and it is set to test its new Starship rocket on Sunday in Texas. In California, SpaceX carries out many of its missions at the Vandenberg Space Force Base in Santa Barbara County.But the sonic booms have been startling residents in Southern California, whose homes have been shaken by powerful, confusing jolts, The Los Angeles Times reported. And several environmental groups submitted letters urging the commission to take more time to study the impact on wildlife ahead of this week’s meeting.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      F.A.A. Clears the Way for SpaceX to Hold Starship Launch on Sunday

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      The agency said the company had agreed to study the environmental impact of its launches in South Texas and ways to mitigate harm to wildlife.The Federal Aviation Administration issued a new license on Saturday allowing Elon Musk’s SpaceX company to launch its Starship rocket again from South Texas, and it included new requirements to limit the harm to birds’ nests and other wildlife in an adjacent state park and National Wildlife Refuge.The action by the F.A.A., which came after weeks of pressure by Mr. Musk on the agency to speed up its latest review, allows Mr. Musk to go ahead with his next test of Starship, with a launch now set to take place as early as 8 a.m. Eastern time on Sunday.So far, SpaceX has been required to obtain a license for each launch. With the latest license, the F.A.A. is allowing the company to launch more than once, unless it modifies its procedures.Starship, the largest rocket ever built, has not yet carried any humans into space, as its reliability is still being assessed. But this is the spaceship that Mr. Musk is under contract to use to land NASA astronauts on the moon — and that he hopes to someday use to take humans to Mars.But as prototypes and full-scale versions of the rocket have been tested at the company’s launch site at the edge of the Gulf of Mexico near the Mexican border in South Texas, there has been widespread evidence of environmental consequences to the region, as detailed in a New York Times investigation in July.The report in The Times examined, in part, damage that a Starship launch in June caused to the fragile migratory bird habitat surrounding the launch site, including destroying eggs in nearby nests.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More