News

Via Satellite

Quantum Space Exec Details Plan to Open Access to GEO

Recently formed startup Quantum Space plans to open access to and understanding of Geostationary Orbit (GEO) and Cislunar orbit with its upcoming missions. Describing GEO as a “critical resource,” Bracken said the company is developing a fleet of in-orbit logistics and payload hosting vehicles called “Rangers,” and smaller multi-purpose vehicles called “Scouts” to provide communications and data collection. Both spacecraft systems are designed to work together to form QuantumNet, an edge computing network to support communications in GEO.

CNBC

ISS Commander Peggy Whitson Talks Axiom Mission, Making Space Accessible

Peggy Whitson is America’s most experienced astronaut, having spent 675 days in space. She’s just returned from her fourth flight to orbit. Axiom Space recently completed its second human spaceflight mission traveling to and from the ISS via a SpaceX Dragon Capsule. CNBC sat down with the retired NASA astronaut to discuss her return to space, the commercialization of human spaceflight and her outlook on the private space economy.

CNBC

Commonwealth Fusion Has Raised $2 Billion to Make Energy Like the Sun — Here’s a Look Inside

A fusion power plant has been, so far, firmly rooted in the realm of science fiction. Commonwealth is trying to change that, and has raised more than $2 billion in venture capital from the likes of Bill Gates, Gates’ climate investment firm Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Google, John Doerr, Khosla Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Marc Benioff’s TIME Ventures and more. That’s more private capital than any other fusion startup, according to the Fusion Industry Association, the industry’s trade group.

Fast Company

Boom Supersonic Reveals New Partners and Engine Details, Bringing Its Mach 1.7 Passenger Jet Closer to Reality

It can take a long, steady ground roll to get a big airplane up to speed, and for Boom Supersonic, the path off the runway is starting to look a little clearer. At the Paris Auto Show this week, the aerospace startup announced a slew of partners for the construction of major components of its aircraft, marking another significant step towards its goal of bringing supersonic air travel to the masses—or, at least, the wealthiest subset of the masses.

Quartz

A Pair of Space Upstarts Are Competing With SpaceX to Rescue the Hubble Space Telescope

NASA launched the Hubble Space Telescope in 1990, and in the decades since scientists have benefitted from its unprecedented views far beyond our galaxy. But Earth’s gravity and atmosphere will inevitably pull the bus-sized telescope back to the planet, perhaps as soon as 2028. NASA will need to safely bring it back down to crash into the Pacific Ocean, or better yet: lift it into a higher orbit so it can continue its mission, which has already cost the US about $16 billion since the idea for the telescope was conceived in 1977. Astroscale and Momentus want to use a robot to raise the telescope to a higher orbit.

CNBC

Neuralink Competitor Paradromics Gets One Step Closer to FDA Approval for Its Brain Implant

A growing team at the neurotech startup Paradromics is working on a brain implant that sounds like the work of science fiction and it has caught the attention of federal regulators. Paradromics is developing a device that could help patients with severe paralysis regain their ability to communicate by deciphering their neural signals. The company announced that it has received the Breakthrough Device designation from the Food and Drug Administration for its flagship system, called the Connexus Direct Data Interface.

Bloomberg

Startup Energy Vault Is Closer to Finishing Gravity Storage Project in China

California startup Energy Vault Holdings Inc. is nearing completion of its first major power-storage project, one of the only systems in the world to generate electricity using gravity. The project in Rudong, China, north of Shanghai, will be finished by September, Chief Executive Officer Robert Piconi said Wednesday in an interview at Bloomberg’s New York headquarters. It will be able to deliver as much as 25 megawatts of power for four hours.

Futurism

Ingenious Plan Could Save NASA’s Hubble Telescope

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope is slowly falling to its death — but now, a couple of startups have a solution that may just be crazy enough to work. This collab, Gizmodo notes, is a big deal given that Momentus already has a space tug craft in the works and, earlier this week, announced its water-propelled system, which a spokesperson confirmed to the online news site would be used for the proposed Hubble mission should NASA choose to select the joint project.

CNET

How Hundreds of 24-Ton Bricks Could Fix a Huge Renewable Energy Problem

Imagine a gigantic brick, packed full of tightly compressed dirt. As big as a pickup truck but about five times heavier. An elevator powered by solar panels or wind turbines hoists it over 300 feet up the side of a huge building. A trolley stows it inside and an automated system lifts and stores hundreds more bricks as the sun shines and the wind blows. Now imagine the building's control system lowering those hundreds of bricks one by one, spinning electrical power generators in the process. They drop down every evening just as demand for power peaks but solar panel output fades away.

Popular Mechanics

For Gravity Batteries, It’s Time to Put Up or Shut Up

Nuclear microreactors, lithium-metal batteries, and even the far-future promise of nuclear fusion are all examples of technologies that could solve this renewable energy shortcoming. Then, there’s gravity batteries, a novel idea that you could leverage Isaac Newton’s universal force to create kinetic energy when renewables are producing at their lowest. After many years of design and small-scale trials, one the biggest companies behind this approach, Energy Vault, is almost ready for its first real-world test.

SpaceNews

Quantum Space Moves up Development of Ranger Transfer Vehicle

Quantum Space is accelerating work on a transfer vehicle designed to take payloads to both geostationary orbit and cislunar space to support growing demand from commercial and government customers. The company established last year to develop spacecraft called Scouts to provide services such as space domain awareness and communications between the Earth and moon, planned to deliver those spacecraft using a tug called Ranger.

Futurism

Company Builds Facility That Lifts and Lowers 24-Ton Bricks to Store Energy

Switzerland-based startup Energy Vault has broken ground on two huge facilities in Texas and just north of Shanghai to test whether we can store energy by raising and lowering hundreds of 24 metric-ton bricks made of compressed dirt. By lifting the massive bricks to the facility's upper levels during periods of excess renewable energy production, the facility's cranes can store large amounts of power — and release it by subsequently lowering them back down when demand is high and the energy supply is low.

CNBC

Nuclear Fusion Will Not Be Regulated the Same Way as Nuclear Fission — A Big Win for the Fusion Industry

The top regulatory agency for nuclear materials safety in the US voted unanimously to regulate the burgeoning fusion industry differently than the nuclear fission industry, and fusion startups are celebrating that as a major win. As a result, some provisions specific to fission reactors, like requiring funding to cover claims from nuclear meltdowns, won’t apply to fusion plants. Fusion reactors cannot melt down.

TechCrunch

Robust.AI Raises $20M as It Scales Robot Deliveries for Pilot Customers

Founded in 2019, Robust.AI operates in the extremely popular — and wildly competitive — warehouse space. A number of companies formed in the wake of Amazon’s acquisition of Kiva already have large footprints in the category. The category has since grown into arguably the most competitive in all of robotics. Piggybacking on the concept that drove Rethink, human-robot interactions are at the heart of Robust’s offering.

Ars Technica

A Passenger Aircraft That Flies Around the World at Mach 9? Sure, Why Not

On a cloudy day in late March, Andrew Duggleby guided me a safe distance away from a rocket engine. We did not have to go far, maybe 50 meters, because the prototype engine designed and built by his small engineering team is not that large. We waited for a few minutes before steam began to hiss out of the engine. And then, for a few seconds, the engine emitted a distinctive whistling sound. "There it is!" Duggleby exclaimed. By it, he meant the sound of a rotating detonation engine firing after its ignition. The sound indicated that a reaction was successfully rotating at 20,000 times a second around the engine.

Axios

Air Taxis Are Coming to Chicago

Air mobility startup Archer Aviation and United Airlines are working to bring air taxi service to Chicago. The planned service will run between O'Hare International Airport (a vital United hub) and Vertiport Chicago, a helicopter facility about three miles west of the city's South Loop. The plan is for United passengers to be able to hop aboard an Archer eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) aircraft for a 10-minute cruise to O'Hare — a trip that can take 45 minutes or longer, depending on traffic.

CBS

How Does the World’s First Vaccine for Honeybees Work? “It’s Like Magic”

Bee colonies are collapsing all over the world, threatening large parts of our food supply. But there's good news in the fight to slow their decline: the US government has approved the use of the world's first vaccine for honeybees. "It's like magic," said Annette Kleiser, CEO of Dalan Animal Health, which partnered with the University of Georgia to develop the vaccine. "You vaccinate the queen and she passes it on to the millions of offspring that make the colony."

Fast Company

How Axiom Space Took a Giant Leap Toward Building a Commercial Space Station

With the International Space Station set to close by 2031, NASA has entered into commercial agreements with three companies—Blue Origin, Nanoracks, and Northrop Grumman Systems—to develop replacements, though it’s not clear they will be ready in time. Axiom Space has a head start on all of them, with the sole contract to build a commercial module that will be attached to the ISS—and eventually detach to become its own free-floating commercial station, offering a new place for humans to live and work in space long-term.

The Wall Street Journal

Wall Street Backs New Class of Psychedelic Drugs

Wall Street is betting tens of millions of dollars on psychedelic drugs that backers say could treat mental illness for a fraction of what it costs to do therapy with better-known treatments. Transcend Therapeutics raised $40 million from venture-capital investors in January to develop a post-traumatic stress disorder treatment that its 29-year-old CEO Blake Mandell says would require about half the amount of therapy as MDMA, or ecstasy, a popular hallucinogen. Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals has announced capital raises of about $100 million since November for similar products addressing depression.

Forbes

This Radar Tech Startup Just Raised $17 Million To Make Automated Driving Cheaper And Safer

Autonomous cars and trucks won’t be a big business for years, but the market for automating some driving functions is booming and most new vehicles now come equipped with cameras and radar. Spartan Radar, a Southern California startup created by ex-defense industry engineers, just raised $17 million to help commercialize sensor software that it says lets even cheap radar units track their surroundings in greater detail and will improve the performance of current hands-free driving systems.

Business Insider

A Y Combinator-Backed Startup Just Raised $39 Million to Develop New Psychedelic Treatments for Depression

Gilgamesh Pharmaceuticals is trying to develop a new type of psychedelic medicine — one that has all the mental health benefits of psychedelic treatment, but without the drawbacks. The Y Combinator alumnus is developing new treatments that work similarly to psychedelics like psilocybin, the psychoactive compound found in magic mushrooms, or DMT, the hallucinogen found naturally in many animals and plants, but that have been engineered to work faster, last shorter periods of time, or lack hallucinogenic effects all together.

The New York Times

Are Mushrooms the Future of Alternative Leather?

MycoWorks uses mycelium, the substance in the root structure of mushrooms, to make Reishi, which has the look and feel of leather and big-name companies are very interested. The company has obtained more than 75 patents and now has over 160 employees in the United States, France and Spain. It has also secured collaborations with high-end companies like Hermès and, most recently, the furniture maker Ligne Roset and GM Ventures, the investment arm of General Motors. If it continues to scale up, MycoWorks has enormous potential: The leather goods market is expected to surpass $720 billion by 2030.

Forbes

National Lab Unlocks Nuclear Fusion — True Breakthrough, Novelty Act, Or Both?

For a half-century fusion scientists have been limited by the power of their lasers and the strength of their magnetic fields — never before figuring out how to milk more energy out of their atom smashing than they put in. Until now. Today scientists at the National Ignition Facility at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) will reveal that for the first time, they have managed to achieve energy gain of greater than 1 — that is, more energy was emitted from the reactions inside their deuterium-tritium fuel capsule (2,000 megajoules) than was contained in the 192 lasers that they blasted it with.