Years before Starship ever flew, SpaceX picked a rocket fuel that only makes sense if you take Mars completely seriously. Falcon 9 burns rocket grade kerosene. Mars has no oil, so kerosene can never be made there. Hydrogen is very hard to keep cold and takes a lot of energy to produce. Methane is different. The Martian air is about 95% carbon dioxide, there is water ice in the ground, and with power from big solar fields you can turn CO2 and water into methane and oxygen. Chemists have known that recipe, the Sabatier reaction, for over a hundred years. So every Raptor engine was designed around a fuel station that doesn't exist yet, on a planet hundreds of millions of kilometers away. The ship is meant to land, refill from the air and the ice, and fly home. Elon Musk laid this out in 2016 in Guadalajara. Without making propellant on Mars, he said, a trip would cost about 500% more, and you would end up with a graveyard of ships that never come back. That's a city on Mars being planned, down to the chemistry, a decade ago.

Yesterday two things happened in America on the same day that the world will understand better in a few years. In Texas, Starship reached orbit for the second time and released 26 Starlink V3 satellites. SpaceX says that one batch adds about a terabit of capacity, as much as ten Falcon 9 Starlink launches. Tonight the ship is set to come home and fly into the arms of the tower, something no orbital spacecraft has ever done. A few hours later Tesla started inviting customers to buy a Cybercab for personal use. $29,990, two seats, no steering wheel and no pedals, with first deliveries planned for December in Austin. A car you can own that has no place for a driver at all. Both come from the same way of thinking from Elon Musk. Make the expensive thing reusable, make the hard thing automatic, and keep going until it is cheap enough for everyone. Now look at Europe on the same day. Europe still has no orbital booster that lands and flies again. No company in Europe sells a car without a steering wheel. The big headlines from Brussels are about regulation and fines, like the €120 million fine on X last December. Europe has brilliant engineers and some of the best universities in the world. What it keeps losing is the freedom to try, fail in public and try again. Starship exploded more than once on the way to this orbit, and every one of those flights became data for the next one. Tonight, if the ship lands, the future gets closer for everyone, including those of us watching from Europe.

Yesterday in Los Angeles, the only complete Space Shuttle stack on public display opened to visitors. Endeavour standing on its real boosters and external tank, 200 feet tall. The same day, Starship reached orbit from Texas and put 26 Starlink V3 satellites in space. The Shuttle was called reusable. The external tank was thrown away on every flight, and the boosters were fished out of the ocean and rebuilt. Between missions the orbiter needed months of work. 135 flights, about $209 billion, roughly $1.5 billion per launch. Starship is designed so both stages fly back to the tower and go again within hours. Reuse like an airplane is the only way flights get cheap enough to build a city on Mars, and Elon Musk has been aiming at exactly that since 2002.

Yes Bank asked India’s top court to review a ruling that revived 84.2 billion rupees ($893 million) of bonds written off during its 2020 rescue, a decision the lender has said could cut a key capital ratio by about 2.5 percentage points