DTN 008: World's First 3D Printed Orbital Rocket Prepares for Space Shot

Plus: Lab-grown meat is vegan, the birth of an AI porn industry, supercomputer warns of a second dust bowl, stem cell transplant cures 5th person of HIV, and more.

February 25, 2023

Welcome to The Deep Tech Newsletter, a weekly exploration of the business, science, and engineering behind the world’s most important frontier technologies.

Nova Spivack is a serial entrepreneur, founder of the venture studio Magical, and co-founder of the Arch Mission Foundation.

What Hollywood can teach Silicon Valley: “I was looking at how Hollywood does movies and thinking we could probably apply some of that thinking to how we build ventures. Hollywood has producers who work across multiple projects. They aren’t the director and they aren’t the CEO, but they’re running the project. They have to have a production model that scales across multiple releases. So that’s the model we started looking at: Finding people who are experienced founders to be a company’s “producer” and then bring a CEO in at the right time when the venture is a little more mature. I think Silicon Valley and Hollywood can both teach each other useful things about how they work.”

Why Venture Studios are key to commercializing university R&D: “The universities need to find a way to be more involved with creating startups from university IP much more quickly. They need to have a really simple template and probably some kind of venture partner–either an outside venture studio or one they build themselves. They need venture producers because typically the people who work in the IP offices of universities aren’t really venture producers. They’re not qualified to do it. They’re A players from an IT standpoint, but they don’t really know how to build companies, so if you have the university IP office trying to build companies it usually fails. So really I think universities need to either participate in venture studios or build their own to develop their best IP, and they haven’t really done that yet.” 

The Big Picture

“Relativity Space said Wednesday that it had received its launch license from U.S. regulators, clearing the way for its first-ever orbital flight attempt on March 8. Relativity will be attempting to send its lightweight rocket Terran 1 to orbit for the first time, in a demonstration mission that will not carry any customer payloads. The company is quick to point out that, at 110-feet tall and 85% 3D-printed by mass, Terran 1 is the largest 3D-printed object to attempt orbital flight and the largest 3D-printed object to exist, period.” (TechCrunch)

“Just a year ago a global crunch in one metal looked likely to single-handedly derail the energy transition. Not only was cobalt, a crucial battery material, being dug up far too slowly to meet soaring demand, but the lion’s share of known reserves sat in Congo, a country rife with instability, corruption and child labour. Fast forward to today and the price of the blue metal, which had more than doubled between summer 2021 and spring 2022, to $82,000 a tonne, has collapsed to $35,000, not far from historic lows.” (Economist)

“For many, the permissibility of lab-grown meat hinges on whether you think the harvesting of stem cells from an animal qualifies as exploitation. The question could be posed like this: Should we assert the rights of a single cow not to have its stem cells harvested above the rights of all the animals who could be emancipated—that is, not slaughtered—by the burgers grown from that cell?” (Wired)

“In the past year, researchers have teleported energy across microscopic distances in two separate quantum devices, vindicating Hotta’s theory. The research leaves little room for doubt that energy teleportation is a genuine quantum phenomenon. “This really does test it,” said Seth Lloyd, a quantum physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who was not involved in the research. “You are actually teleporting. You are extracting energy.” (Quanta)

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