DTN 127: White House Plans Space Deregulation

Plus: Seaweed biofuel, seaweed biomining, Starship test flight, human eggs in a dish, orbital weapons, origami spacecraft, grid hardening, pirate library crackdown, and more.

August 22, 2025

“An investor is a person with a checkbook. You need to make that person stand up in their investment committee and fight for you. That means cutting through the noise and translating between brilliant technical people and the rest of the world, because that's where you'll actually make an impact.”

“A new plan to authorize “novel space activities” is coming after an aborted effort under the Biden administration. Today, virtually every space activity that isn’t launch, satcom or EO lives in a bit of a regulatory gray area. New business models are coming online from in-space servicing and manufacturing, to resource extraction, to commercial LEO destinations—even NASA’s plan for commercial nuclear power plants on the Moon. Experts expect this plan to move fast, particularly because it is exempted from the complexities of human spaceflight, and wind up in the Office of Space Commerce (OSC).”

A brooding mother octopus shelters her eggs behind two different types of corals. The image was made by pilots using a robot to explore the north wall of the Mar Del Plata submarine canyon in Argentina, as part of a scientific expedition. Credit: ROV SuBastian / Schmidt Ocean Institute.

The first-ever high-tech dive to Mar del Plata Canyon - an offshore Argentinian canyon that’s twice as deep as the Grand Canyon - captured at least 40 suspected new species. The expedition was the first time scientists have been able to observe Mar del Plata Canyon in real-time with a remotely operated vehicle (ROV) equipped with sophisticated sampling tools and cameras. The team leading this expedition has studied the area for more than a decade using samples they retrieved with nets and trawls in 2012 and 2013, but this is the first time they have seen their seafloor live. (via Schmidt Ocean Institute) 

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