“President-elect Donald Trump has tapped Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur, aviator and private astronaut, to lead NASA. The selection comes as the $25-billion-per-year space agency faces intense pressures to return U.S. astronauts to the moon as part of its over budget and behind-schedule Artemis program—while also balancing the denouement of the International Space Station and a vast, ambitious portfolio of space science and aeronautical initiatives.” (Scientific American)
A weekly dispatch featuring exclusive interviews with deep tech founders & a roundup of the most important deep tech news.
- SpaceX satellite launch from Kennedy Space Center tops off three launches in 30 hours
- The US just made it way harder for China to build its own AI chips
- Over the weekend, China debuted a new rocket on the nation’s path to the Moon
- The quest to better recycle wind turbines and solar panels
- The US is making and deploying more solar panels than ever before
- Researchers launch “moonshot” to cure blindness through eye transplants
- China retaliates, bans exports of rare-earth metals after US chip ban
- Europe’s newest startup trend: Making AI-powered weapons
- Vivek Ramaswamy wants to shift defense spending to new technology
- NASA’s mission to return humans to the Moon has been delayed again until 2026
- Palantir teams up with Shield AI on AI-powered autonomous aircraft
- USC student rocket group shatters international amateur space record
- UK is paying £1B to waste a record amount of wind power
- Utilities are trying enormous ‘glow’ batteries big enough to oust coal power plants
- AI startup Helsing is now making attack drones for Europe
- Quantum tech startups get military backing to replace GPS
- Saudi Arabia bets on tech to make deserts bloom
- U.S. imposes export restrictions on advanced memory chips to China
- Google Deepmind’s new weather forecaster blows away the competition
- Radioactive ‘diamond battery’ could power spacecraft for thousands of years
- German researchers learn how to store solar energy chemically
- Experiment realizes quantum advantage in data storage with a photonic quantum processor
- Photonic processor could enable ultrafast AI computations with extreme energy efficiency
- Analysis of ground motions reveals the seismic signature of Hamas forces en route to their attack
- New laser technique achieves atomic-scale precision on diamond surfaces
- Artificial photosynthesis learned from nature: New solar hydrogen production technology developed
- A new reconfigurable structure could be used to make space habitats
- Researchers develop hyper-sampling imaging to deliver ultra-high-resolution images
- Heartcore Capital closes $180M fund to pivot towards infrastructure, synthetic biology, climate
- Manufacturing AI startup Tractian locks up $120M Series C
- Eos Energy lands $304M DOE loan for battery plant expansion
- Spanish startup PLD Space edges closer to Europe’s first private orbital rocket launch with €11M loan
- French startup Elyse Energy raises €120M for maritime and sustainable aviation fuel projects
- Fly Ventures sets its eyes on technical founders with a fresh €80M fund
- Rubi, a carbon-to-cellulose platform provider secures $1M Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation
- Yurts raises $40M to be the DoD’s AI Chatbot
- Orikine Bio secures €800K in innovation research funding for precision-engineered bi-specific cytokine therapies
- Biopharmaceutical company Maze Therapeutics raises $115M in Series D financing
- SpinLaunch raises $11M but hoped to raise much more, source says
- FireDome raises $4.5M in funding to improve autonomous wildfire defense
- WeatherFlow-Tempest, a weather technology and environmental monitoring solutions company, raises $3M in Growth capital
- TRIO Pharmaceuticals, a biotechnology company pioneering bispecific antibodies for the treatment of cancer, completes $3.1M financing round
- ConnectDER raises $35M in Series D funding for resilient home energy technology
- SpaceX mulls tender offer at $350B valuation
- Biotechnology company Serina Therapeutics raises $10M in financing
- Heirloom Carbon raises $150M to remove CO2 from the air using rocks
- Cleerly raises $106M from Insight Partners for AI heart health early detection
- Newcells raises further £1.2M in funding to develop laboratory models that help speed up drug development and reduce reliance on animal testing
- Amp Robotics raises $91M to build more robot-filled waste sorting facilities
- Planet A Foods nabs $30M to make tons more cocoa-free chocolate
- Fuelled by €24M, UK startup gears up to put more thermal satellites in orbit
- Tenstorrent closes $693M+ Series D funding to build computers for AI
- Medical device company Ossio raises $27.6M in equity funding
- Orakl Oncology raises €11 to combine data and biology to bring new drugs to cancer patients
- European AI infrastructure firm Nebius raised a $700M funding round
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