🤠 Howdy, Ryan Duffy here. First off, big happy birthday (yesterday) to my friend and Per Aspera co-founder Jeff Crusey 🎂🎈. That’s an AI version of him 👆, up there, celebrating another trip around the Sun.
Meanwhile, tonight we as a nation prepare for our own trip: around the Moon. Take in the current moment, with Artemis, SpaceX pressing toward Starship Flight 12, and Blue Origin preparing to refly a New Glenn booster. Take a second to pinch and remind yourself:
What. A. Time. To. Be. Alive.
Our national ambition is back ‘n bigger than ever, our trajectory clearer by the week. Clear eyes, full hearts, can’t lose.
But ambition and clear eyes are no excuse to accept inherited limits. This week, our resident former NASA honcho reminds us that chemical rockets have a ceiling we’ve been pressing against for decades. Is now finally the moment we break free of a 50-year cycle of nuclear propulsion cancel culture?
👇 Let's get into it.
IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:
🚀 Knives, butter, and chemical rockets
🔧 A quarterly review & Q2 preview/pulse check
📀 Camera roll: BYD trucks out in the wild
🏰 Good news: Rare earth wins
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At 6:24 PM Eastern four astronauts will lift off from Kennedy Space Center on the first crewed journey beyond low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in 1972. And the heavy-lift launch calendar doesn’t let up: Blue Origin is targeting April 10 to refly the Never Tell Me the Odds booster on New Glenn (a first for the program), while SpaceX presses toward Starship Flight 12 later this month, the next proving run for a rocket designed to ultimately haul 100+ tons to orbit with order-of-magnitude lower launch costs (<$100/kg) in the long run.
Tonight, Artemis II rides a chemical rocket to the Moon (as will Starship and New Glenn). That same fundamental technology — hydrogen and oxygen, combustion and thrust — puts every kilogram of payload into orbit today. It has for seventy years. And it will for a while yet.
As Dan puts it: We're sharpening a knife that only cuts butter.
Chemical propulsion has a ceiling, and we've been pressing against it for decades. Each new generation of chemical engine ekes out 3-5% efficiency gains at a tremendous cost and diminishing returns. By the time you’re at ~450 seconds of specific impulse, the bleeding edge for chemical engines, you're spending on the order of 80-90% of your vehicle's mass just to carry the remainder. For anything beyond cislunar space, the math gets ugly fast. (In the full piece, we break down the terms and math for all of the non-rocket scientists in our audience.)
This week, Per Aspera digs into the propulsion problem — tracing the NERVA program, which a young Dan worked on, that proved nuclear thermal engines at nearly double chemical performance in the 1960s, the cycle of cancellations that followed, and why we kept honing the same knife for fifty years.
The piece lays out why this time truly may be different, with modern microreactor designs, dual-use possibilities afforded across power and propulsion, and mission pull. We look at two engine concepts worth building, goals we should aspire to before the decade is out, the safety mandate, and how the right public-private partnership stars may be aligning to finally break the cycle of nuclear-propulsion cancel culture.
It was a busy quarter. We shipped a dozen newsletters and a stack of longer web stories in Q1. We want to look back on what we covered, partly for those of you just joining, mostly to keep ourselves and this community accountable. Because it’s far too easy in this business to fall prey to the press release bull market — and get caught up in capital raised, capacity planned, LOIs signed, or GWs “coming online.” These are leading indicators at best and paper commitments at worst. America’s technoindustrial renaissance has to be quantified, measured, felt, and seen in the real world — so we owe it to ourselves to mind the gap between what we say we’re going to do and what we get done!
We started the year in Vegas, where your editor showed up at CES and within the first hour of walking the floor, texted his wife: we are getting smoked by the Chinese robotic manufacturers. The gap between designing at the frontier and producing at volume was a persistent theme of Q1.
Midstream → megaproject: Dan asked: Why is $50B of copper investment concentrated in our most water-stressed states when smelters don’t need to be near mines? Jeff argued that the richest mine in America is a landfill. And Joy flagged purification chemistry as one of our more underdiscussed industrial-base bottlenecks.
Faster Better Cheaper: Per Aspera dropped our two-part series on FBC — a user's guide to the philosophy Dan built at NASA (cutting spacecraft costs by 67% and cycle times nearly in half), and a case for running it back at national scale.
Force Majeure reenters the lexicon: Supply chain theses — and the push for more domestic capacity — are abstractions untili they’re not…
A signature smorgasbord: There’s plenty more where that came from, from drone decoupling to Dominance to the Shahed’s story, to the growing datacenter backlash (and Big Tech’s bill-of-rights response), to the quiet transformation of EXIM from Boeing’s to builder’s bank, to the old economy colliding with the new. t
🏅 Leaderboard: Our three most popular stories in Q1 were the User’s Guide to Faster, Better, Cheaper along with two 2025 classics, Realities of Space-Based Compute (link) & How to Build Your 1st FDE Team (link).
Onwards and upwards, into Q2 we go!
Ryan here: A couple of weeks ago, I went to a high school best friend’s wedding in Mexico. This is your official foreign correspondence: 🚨 BYD trucks are everywhere 🚨. I saw dozens of these bad boys across Querétaro and San Miguel — and I have to admit, they look pretty great:
BYD, which has sold on the order of 80,000 vehicles since entering Mexico in March 2023, now accounts for roughly 70% of the country’s combined battery‑electric and plug‑in hybrid vehicle market.
There’s no free trade agreement between China and Mexico — no NAFTA-style framework, no bilateral governing structure of any kind — and yet Chinese FDI in Mexico surged from ~$267M in 2018 to ~$5.6B in 2023, a 20x expansion that arrived not as a trickle of opportunistic capital but as a coordinated industrial incursion: Chinese automakers moving in with substantial resources and supply chains so deeply integrated they stretch continuously from lithium extraction through battery manufacturing to final vehicle assembly, capturing, in the process, a commanding share of Mexico's emerging EV market (and it’s not just Mexico).
An idea: Here’s an intriguing proposition from Craig Fuller (@FreightAlley), the founder of FreightWaves:
“I think we should rip a page from the Chinese playbook and tell Chinese OEMs if they want to sell to American consumers, they must open up production in the US with an American OEM. As part of that arrangement, the Chinese OEM will be required to transfer IP over to that American OEM.”
Thoughts? Reply and tell us what you think.
The U.S. has made terbium oxide for the first time in decades. At the White Mesa Mill in Utah, a month ahead of schedule, Energy Fuels produced its first kilo of 99.9% pure Terbium (Tb) oxide from American-sourced monazite ore mined in Florida and Georgia.
A periodic refresher: Terbium (Tb) and its sister element dysprosium (Dy) are the heavy rare earths that keep permanent magnets from demagnetizing under extreme heat - the kind you'd find in EV motors, precision-guided munitions, wind turbine generators, drones, radars, and robotic joints.
The State of Play: You will be very surprised to read this next part, we know, but we have to say it for those in the back: China controls 90% of global heavy rare earth separation capacity. Until this year, the U.S. had ~zero domestic capability to go from ore to separated heavy rare earth oxide.
Once more for those in the back: You see, the challenge was never really about what's in the ground. American monazite deposits are substantial. The chokepoint is midstream in separation chemistry. You can mine all the ore you want but if you can't crack it into individual oxides at magnet-grade purity, you're still shipping your rocks across the ocean twice and depending on your chief adversary to kindly continue supplying its processing services, rain or shine, hell or high water.
Give em their flowers
Energy Fuels is on a heater. It produced its first kilo of 99.9% pure Dy oxide at White Mesa last August, which was subsequently qualified by a major South Korean magnet manufacturer. Terbium is the harder separation, but now that's done as well (albeit at bench scale). This is symbolically significant. Because, for the first time in a long while, the U.S. has demonstrated an end-to-end, mine-to-separate-oxide pathway for heavy rare earths, entirely within its borders, at purity grades that pass muster with real magnet makers. Now comes the harder part — scaling — and we've still got a long way to go. Commercial-scale separation is targeted for later this year, with annual output of ~35 tons of Dy and ~12 tons of Tb. Against a global market where China produces thousands a year, that is roughly 1% of world supply. No time to waste!
We hear a lot of space railroad analogies these days. SpaceX’s Transporter rideshare program is the only one that earns it today, as far as third-party freight is concerned. With Transporter, SpaceX has pulled off the rare trifecta: A) earned genuine goodwill with an industry it’s often competing with/consolidating, B) made itself structurally indispensable to the business models of dozens of space operators who it has uniquely enabled, and C) quietly cut smaller launchers off at the pass (a strategic play we rarely see discussed). It provides a quixotic case for the economists out there, in which customers cheer enthusiastically for what is, for now, a functional monopoly.
Transporter launch days are an electric time for team space. Timelines light up with SpaceX employees rooting for former colleagues who have since founded startups and are now flying their own hardware to orbit. It’s sort of like a homecoming game. If you’re in the starting lineup and it’s your first game, you’re likely not sleeping much the night before (at least, this was the case for Ryan when Array Labs launched its first two satellites on Transporter-11 in August 2024). Industry friends — and frenemies — cheer on and congratulate each other without hesitation, because when your payload is bolted to an ESPA ring hurtling toward orbit, everyone flying that day is briefly on the same team.
And cheer we did on Monday when Transporter-16 lifted off with 119 payloads on a Falcon 9 bound for a sun-synchronous orbit. A few callouts across the stack:
The caketopper: K2 Space, a bet on the post-Starship age, the notion that bigger is better, and who doesn’t want more power, flew its two-ton, 20 kW Gravitas demonstrator mission (Our friends at Albedo were the cake-topper on Transporter-13. A different kind of cake, for VLEO, but still most excellent all the same.)
The Russian nesting dolls: Every Transporter launch, you see a handful of space tugs (or “orbital transfer vehicles”) and hosted bus providers aggregating dozens of payloads or cubesats to be dispensed. T-16 had Exotrail’s SpaceVan-002 and Momentus’ Vigoride-7 carrying 20 spacecraft between the two of them, including laser optical links, atomic clocks, deployables, and space robotics. Missions within missions within a mission!
Space compute: Aethero launched Phobos, its second satellite, carrying a 2nd-gen space compute module powered by an Nvidia Jetson Orin NX in “Super Mode,” and debuted its compute-as-a-service model. (Starcloud, which raised $170M this week at a $1.1B valuation — one of the fastest YC companies to ever reach unicorn status — launched its first satellite, with a Nvidia H100, last November on Bandwagon-4.)
Make Space Boring Again: Varda flew its W-6 reentry vehicle, continuing on its increasingly successful campaign to normalize (and, frankly, make boring) space pharmaceuticals, on-orbit manufacturing, and return-to-Earth as a commercial service rather than a bespoke government favor.
Godspeed to all 119 payloads.🫡 May your solar arrays deploy cleanly, your Hall thrusters fire true, your downlinks be noise-free, and your missions be long and highly revenue-generating — or scientifically productive, for the university teams and space agencies who launched this week.
We close today as we started, by saying:
What a time to be alive!
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