Energy

Voyager invested in Max Space because a 350m3 habitat fits on one Falcon 9. The 2026 launch is a 20m3 demo. Thunderbird Station at 350m3 is a 2029 target. NASA studies peg minimum viable at ~317m3 per module.

Aethero says its next satellite will hit 16,000 TFLOPS — 100x its last mission. But the previous satellite, launched March 30, is still in health checks. Titan does not fly until October. The defense community is watching anyway.

The AI chip industry discovered its next bottleneck is not compute — it is the wiring between chips. Nvidia and Broadcom just answered that question the same way: light, through the same TSMC platform. What that means for every fab and photonics startup is the story.

Data centers are hitting a thermal wall: silicon becomes unreliable above 150°C, limiting how much power can reach AI chips. Intel Foundry just demonstrated something that could change that, on a production-scale 300mm wafer.

The EU just bet €211M that a seven-year-old Cambridge spinout can solve the AI data center power problem with graphene — before silicon photonics makers like Ayar Labs and Lightmatter make the question irrelevant.

SDA had 38 satellites on orbit by early 2024. Its plan called for 1,000. Before it got there, the Space Force moved to dissolve the agency and fold it into standard acquisition offices. The $6.4B question: can the culture of speed survive?

Blue Origin won the right to compete for $5.6 billion in national security launches. The Space Force just gave it a lease for a patch of California desert — where nothing has been built yet. The pad alone will take two years.

Orbital space was a battlefield in the Iran war. Iran used a Chinese spy satellite to target US bases while Guardians ran 24/7 GPS shifts from Colorado — the high ground is contested, and the Space Force needs to double its 15,000 Guardians to meet demand.

NASA wants industry to replace the satellite comms network it built for Hubble and the space station. The compatibility specs written into the bid may lock out everyone but the companies that already know the 1980s-era system.

JWST found a sulfur paradox in four gas giants 129 light-years away — a star depleted in sulfur hosts planets enriched in it, and nobody can explain why. The data is real, the gradient is tentative, and it matters for whether our solar system is typical.

The Space Force paid Turion $32.6M for three satellites before the startup had the capital to build them. Now it has raised $75M more to scale from 8 vehicles a year to 40 — and the government is counting on it.