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Category: space travel

NASA outlines nearly $1 billion investment into initial Moon Base missions

NASA’s vision for a future, long-term sustained presence on the Moon gained more clarity on Tuesday as the agency announced a series of contract awards for future robotic missions.

The agency announced that two companies developing lunar terrain vehicles (LTVs), Astrolab and Lunar Outpost, would each be receiving contracts valued at about $220 million each to finish their designs and get them to the Moon’s surface.

Astrolab’s Crewed Lunar Vehicle (CLV-1) takes after its original design, called FLEX, and Lunar Outpost’s Pegasus vehicle takes heritage from its earlier Eagle design. NASA previously put out a call for LTVs that would be capable of surviving on the Moon for up to 10 years, but revised its requirements to have more readily available options to augment earlier astronaut missions.

Elon Musk Chilling Warning Makes Host GO QUIET In Interview

Elon Musk just laid out one of the clearest timelines yet for artificial general intelligence. According to Musk, AGI could arrive as early as next year, with digital superintelligence potentially surpassing the collective intelligence of humanity by 2029 or 2030. → Try Visionary Society for $1 — https://bit.ly/VSONE

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In this full breakdown, we analyze Musk’s probability estimates on existential risk, why he believes abundance is the most likely outcome, and how exponential AI compute growth is accelerating faster than any technology in history.

From Neuralink’s first human telepathy implant to the possibility of brain-state backup, from Nvidia’s AI chip dominance to Starship’s full reusability unlocking a multiplanetary civilization, Musk connects AI, brain-computer interfaces, and space into one long-term strategy. This video explains the compute explosion, the power bottlenecks, the singularity timeline, and what it really means when digital intelligence begins to outscale biological intelligence.

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Los Alamos National Laboratory Sends Mass Spectrometer To International Space Station

The AIMSS payload was launched as a part of the Department of Defense’s Space Test Program Houston-11 mission onboard SpaceX’s 34th Dragon Commercial Resupply Services mission. Photo Courtesy LANL

Members of the AIMSS team after successful thermal vacuum testing at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Photo Courtesy LANL

LANL NEWS RELEASE

A Colorado startup just raised $30 million to send a second rover to the Moon — and the real bet isn’t on exploration, it’s on becoming the construction crew that arrives before the astronauts do

Lunar Outpost has secured $30 million in Series B funding as the Colorado company tries to move from building individual lunar rovers to supplying the machines that could prepare the Moon for longer-term human use.

The money is meant to accelerate production of its robotics and mobility platforms. It also arrives as Lunar Outpost is promoting Pegasus, a smaller rover concept that Space.com reported the company hopes to deliver by the end of 2027 and launch to the Moon in 2028, on a timeline that broadly lines up with NASA’s current Artemis 4 schedule.

The real bet is not just exploration. It is that the Moon is becoming a worksite, and that whoever supplies the mobile robotic workforce may become more important than whoever sells the most dramatic single vehicle.

Mars Fungi Could Make Red Planet Regolith Fertile for Crops

You’re on the fourth human mission to Mars, and you’ve been tasked with establishing the first self-sustaining food crop on a Martian settlement. You’re nervous because you’re using a new type of fungi called beneficial fungi, which you’re told will help enhance Martian regolith, enabling it to be used for growing crops. You were privately told that doing this will not only get a high school named after you, but you will successfully feed future settlers without the need to bring food from Earth. But you really only care about having your name on a high school.

Starship launch: How to watch make-or-break SpaceX mission this week

“The flight test’s primary goal will be to demonstrate each of these new pieces in the flight environment for the first time,” a post to SpaceX’s website explained.

“As this is the first flight test of a significantly redesigned vehicle, the booster will not attempt a return to the launch site for catch.”

A live stream of the launch will be available on SpaceX’s website, as well as the company’s official X page and YouTube channel.

Commercial Space Economy: Space Stations, Space Data Centers, and NASA

Matthew Weinzierl and Brendan Rosseau, authors of Space to Grow, explain the commercial space economy and the role of NASA, Artemis, commercial space stations, space-based data centers, Starlink, GPS, China’s space program, national security, and space governance.

The conversation covers how governments, private companies, and investors build, fund, regulate, and compete in space, from microgravity research and launch markets to lunar exploration, space resources, and the economics of commercial space.

We also try and re-write the Space Treaty and look at the politics of the space race.

Please enjoy the show.

Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping the future.

🏠 Buy us a beer on Substack: https://thinkingonpaperpodcast.substa… Take us with you on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/00volKq… 🎧 Remember steve jobs on APPLE: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast… 📺 Get the clips and outtakes on Instagram / thinkingonpaperpodcast — Links & Resources Matthew: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/pro… Brendan: linkedin.com/in/brendan-rosseau Buy Space To Grow: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/ite… — Chapters 00:00 Setting The Scene 03:35 Microgravity 07:43 Economic Incentives 12:14 Political Cycles 17:09 International Collaboration 18:45 National Security in Space 21:36 Space Exploration 24:27 A Day Without Space 28:49 Space Investment 30:37 Space-Based Data Centers 33:40 Space Resources 38:26 Governance in Space 40:55 A New Space Treaty.

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Surrounded by stardust: Antarctic ice cores confirm Earth is accumulating iron-60 from local interstellar cloud

Our solar system is currently passing through the Local Interstellar Cloud, a region of highly diluted gas and dust between the stars. On its path, Earth continuously accumulates iron-60, a rare radioactive isotope of iron produced in stellar explosions. This has now been confirmed by an international research team led by the Helmholtz-Zentrum Dresden-Rossendorf (HZDR) through the analysis of Antarctic ice tens of thousands of years old. From the steady but time-varying influx, the researchers conclude that the radioactive isotope has been stored within the cloud since a long-past stellar explosion. The results have been published in the journal Physical Review Letters.

Iron-60 is formed in the interiors of massive stars and is ejected into space when they explode. Geological archives show that our solar system was hit twice by iron-60 from supernovae millions of years ago. In more recent times, however, there have been no nearby stellar explosions—and thus no direct supply of iron-60. When scientists discovered iron-60 in Antarctic surface snow less than twenty years old a few years ago, the question of its origin arose.

“Our idea was that the Local Interstellar Cloud contains iron-60 and can store it over long time periods. As the solar system moves through the cloud, Earth could collect this material. However, we couldn’t prove this at the time,” explains Dr. Dominik Koll from the Institute of Ion Beam Physics and Materials Research at HZDR.

SpaceX is skipping the booster catch on Starship V3’s debut flight — and the reason quietly reveals which milestone Musk actually cares about hitting before Artemis

SpaceX will not attempt to catch the Super Heavy booster on Starship V3’s debut flight. The booster will steer itself to a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico instead of returning to the launch tower’s mechanical arms — the maneuver that became the defining image of the program on multiple V2 flights. For a company that has made spectacle a core part of its engineering culture, skipping the catch is a tell. It signals what Elon Musk and his engineers actually care about getting right on this flight, and it isn’t the part that makes for a good replay.

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