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DTN 174: Satellite Factories on the Moon

Plus: Terafab finds a home in Texas, America's interceptor shortage, DeepMind's talent exodus, the dawn of AI worms and viruses, IBM's quantum supremacy claim, SpaceX rocket crashes into the moon, and more.

07 Aug 2026 — 6 min read

“We went through the industry's roadmap for the next 15 years and looked for the pain points nobody can solve. In most cases the materials are known. Making them is the problem. That's what we're building. I said Moore's law is dead. We're going to bring it back to life.”

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Elon Musk reveals SpaceX plans to build satellite factories on the moon

“Elon Musk laid out a sweeping plan for SpaceX to reach profitability during an investor call on Tuesday—including robotic satellite factories on the moon.

Musk, who is known for making ambitious timeline predictions that don’t always hold up to reality, told investors this will come to fruition “faster than you think.”

Building factories largely staffed by robotic workers “sounds like super sci-fi right now,” he acknowledged, “but it’s going to happen.”

Those facilities, when combined with solar and radiation-based energy production on the lunar surface, would allow humanity to “scale to 1,000 times the economy of Earth in terms of intelligence launched to space but probably, maybe even a million times,” he said. (via Scientific American)

As facial recognition technology is rolled out across Britain’s public spaces, a new generation of designers say privacy could be the next big fashion trend. Image: The Guardian / Flip the Coin Collective

“Companies have started incorporating “adversarial patterns” in their garments – carefully designed arrangements of shapes, colors and repeated motifs said to exploit weaknesses in some computer vision systems.

The designers say advances in computing have made it easier to incorporate such patterns into commercially viable garments. Experts caution that the effectiveness of the patterns depends on the surveillance system and the conditions in which it is used, but Nick Tidball, the co-founder of the clothing brand Vollebak, thinks “adversarial clothing” could be on the cusp of going mainstream.

“Anti-surveillance feelings are so widespread that all it would take is for a single celebrity to wear one of these garments, currently popular in the countercultural fashion world, to a high-profile event for it to take off,” he said. (via The Guardian)