NASA has given three space companies the chance to design the next generation moon buggy — but only one design will go to space.
Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost, and Venturi Astrolab are developing rugged vehicles intended for astronauts to drive around on the lunar surface, from which NASA may choose as early as next year.
The three teams will now enter into a 12-month “feasibility phase” that will culminate in a preliminary design review.
NASA declined to specify the dollar value of the awards, though Intuitive Machines said in a statement that it was awarded a $30 million contract.
“With NASA’s Artemis campaign, we are building up the capabilities needed to establish a longer-term exploration and presence of the moon,” he said.
What’s been billed as a Windows event is, predictably, focused on AI efforts, with Copilot taking the wheel.
The new Surface Pro 10 for Business and Surface Laptop 6 for Business both sport a devoted Copilot key wedged between the Alt key and arrows.
At the end of the day, a Copilot key is simply a physical shortcut that surfaces one particular service.
That the key has been added to a pair of business-focused devices highlights how much the company is considering Copilot an important enterprise play.
The Surface Pro 10 for Business sports a 13-inch touchscreen, powered by either the Intel Core Ultra 5 or 7 and the Intel AI Boost NPU.
Despite all that growth, Eric Gylman, the co-founder and CEO of Ramp thinks that the industry, and companies like his, are just scratching the surface.
Glyman and his current co-founder Karim Atiyeh launched their first fintech startup, Paribus, back in 2014.
The company raised a mere $2 million before getting snapped up by Capital One.
When the team was building Paribus, the generative AI technology to craft the emails was still relatively rudimentary and the rest of the company’s AI technology was built on very simple language models.
The startup has raised more than $1.7 billion from venture capitalists and was last valued at $5.8 billion in August 2023.
Ocean intelligence company Saildrone has just put the first of a new generation of Surveyor autonomous vessels in the water: an aluminum version that the Navy is keen to take advantage of.
Founder and CEO Richard Jenkins told TechCrunch that the demand for vessels like SailDrone’s is only growing.
So far, no one has suggested weaponizing the Saildrone vessels, though.
The Austal line is expected to be able to put out one Surveyor every six weeks to start with.
SD-3000 and a few of its in-progress aluminum kin will be detailed to Navy testing of its capability of producing “surface and undersea intelligence for a range of high-priority applications, including anti-submarine warfare.”
As crucial as the ocean is to countless industries, we lack the kind of systematic knowledge of it that we have of the surface.
This is partly due to the simple fact that the ocean is gigantic and there’s simply no way (or need) to monitor all of it.
Cheap solutions like buoys are great but limited to surface measurements, and are subject to the whims of weather and currents.
“There is such a clear need for safe, reliable and continuously updated data about water quality,” said Ester Strommen, CEO and co-founder of Syrenna.
Free-floating, free-divingI saw a prototype of the WaterDrone, as they call it, while visiting startups last spring in Oslo, where Syrenna is based.
Intuitive Machines’ first moon mission will come to a premature end due to the spacecraft landing on its side, which altered how the solar panels are positioned in relation to the sun, the company said in an update Tuesday morning.
Intuitive Machines made history when it landed its spacecraft, called Odysseus, near the lunar south pole last week.
The lander is the first American hardware to touch the lunar surface since NASA’s final crewed Apollo mission in 1972.
It’s also the first privately built and operated spacecraft to land on the moon — ever – and the closest a lander has ever come to the lunar south pole.
Intuitive Machines and NASA leadership will host a second televised news conference tomorrow to discuss updates to the mission.
My stomach is still in knots from the Intuitive Machines landing livestream.
I think it’s fair to say that the words of Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines’ CTO, will go down in history: “We’re not dead yet.”Very metal.
Intuitive Machines’ first lander, called Odysseus, softly touched down on the south pole region of the moon around 5:23 p.m. Central Time on Thursday, bringing to a close an eight-day journey and years of hard work.
There was a brief period after landing when mission controllers waited to reestablish communications with the spacecraft.
The mission is also a huge success for NASA, which paid Intuitive Machines around $118 million to deliver six scientific and research payloads, under a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services.
My stomach is still in knots from the Intuitive Machines landing livestream.
I think it’s fair to say that the words of Tim Crain, Intuitive Machines’ CTO, will go down in history: “We’re not dead yet.”Very metal.
Intuitive Machines’ first lander, called Odysseus, softly touched down on the south pole region of the moon around 5:23 p.m. Central Time on Thursday, bringing to a close an eight-day journey and years of hard work.
There was a brief period after landing when mission controllers waited to reestablish communications with the spacecraft.
The mission is also a huge success for NASA, which paid Intuitive Machines around $118 million to deliver six scientific and research payloads, under a program called Commercial Lunar Payload Services.
Hot on the heels of the successful completion of its grid-connected geothermal power plant in Nevada, Fervo Energy is raising $221 million per SEC documents, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.
Previous geothermal plants have only scratched the surface by accessing hot springs or shallower rock formations.
Fervo uses directional drilling techniques pioneered by the oil and gas industry to extend its wells far beyond their surface footprints.
Once those wells are drilled, Fervo then strings them with fiber optic cables connected to a range of sensors.
Previous investors include BHP Ventures, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Congruent Ventures, DCVC, and Prelude Ventures.
Something I’ve always admired about Lenovo is the way the Chinese tech giant really lets its freak flag fly.
In fact, visiting the company’s booth nestled in the way, way back of Hall 3 has long been a highlight of MWC for me.
This year’s big scrum gatherer was Lenovo’s long-rumored transparent laptop.
Broadly speaking, it looks like a laptop, with a transparent pane where the screen should be.
Lenovo loves making weird tech for weird tech’s sake, and that’s totally fine.
