Energy, space, and the long-horizon research that does not fit a quarterly report.
Every kilogram of landing gear a rocket carries is a kilogram of payload it doesn't. The Long March 10B moved the landing gear onto a boat — and the budget for a Moon landing is the reason why.
City Labs' BOHR reached orbit this week carrying a tritium battery decades old in principle. What's actually new is a piece of paper — and the paper may be worth more than the payload.
Kate Adamala's SpudCell completed a real, chemically defined cell cycle — feeding, growing, dividing across five generations. What it hasn't completed yet is peer review, or a life of its own.
The Iridium deal isn't about rockets. It's about a subscription business, a defense contract, and a block of spectrum that no booster can put into orbit.
A new US facility will try to build the first full-scale fusion breeding blanket — the part that has to survive the neutrons, capture the heat, and make its own fuel. That it is only now being designed tells you how far "net energy" still is from a power plant.
Its new disc-shaped capsule can return 1,000 kilograms from space, many times what today's vehicles manage. The wager isn't the rocket. It's that bringing cargo home is finally getting cheap enough to build factories in orbit.
A startup's robot is about to grab a satellite that was never built to be grabbed. If it works, the real product isn't a rescued telescope — it's a price for keeping things in orbit alive.
Artemis III now flies to Earth orbit to rehearse two rival landers without touching the Moon. The astronauts are the headline. The story is a roughly $10 billion bet on competition — and the contender that just lost its only launch pad.
IBM let a language model search a space no human could and it found error-correction codes that beat the textbook. The distance between a better blueprint and a working machine is still measured in years.
The AI1 satellite is a real engineering answer to a real grid problem. Whether it ever deploys comes down to the oldest number in energy: cost per kilowatt-hour, delivered.
Washington just finalized a national plan to put fusion on the grid within a decade. The science behind it is real and the document is unusually honest — which is exactly why its most truthful sentences are the disclaimers.
The largest IPO in history prices Thursday and trades Friday at a $1.75 trillion valuation. Strip away Mars, and what you are actually buying is a dish on a roof — and a booster that lost an engine last week.
The prospectus asks for $1.75 trillion and points at a rocket. Read the segments and the rocket is the loss leader — the company is an internet provider that happens to fly its own delivery trucks.
Starship V3 made a fiery splash in the Indian Ocean and Elon Musk called it epic. The number that matters is dollars per kilogram to the lunar south pole — and that number is still doing the heavy lifting NASA's renderings won't.
Thea Energy’s oversubscribed Series B is real money for a real machine. The interesting question is what the money is actually buying — and on what timescale.
Commonwealth Fusion has applied to plug a 400-megawatt fusion plant into the grid. The reactor it depends on has not yet produced a single watt of net energy — and that is the whole story.
