May w1 2026

Very busy week! We continued connecting and chatting with more investors, got more components for our vacuum arm manifold, worked on the SBIR, and started writing an essay designed to be an updated version of “Dispelling the myth of robotic efficiency.” We should have all the critical components for the vacuum manifold in hand by the end of next week, and will start working on integration and the chamber itself shortly after. I’m incredibly excited about this SBIR, it looks like we are a great fit for one of the solicitations, we’ve been working on getting all our paperwork and registrations straightened out (the Fed really doesn’t like it when a co-working space is your office, for whatever reason) in between working on the proposal itself. Working hard to ensure we don’t end up close to the wire on the registration side. On the writing side, I realized that a lot of investors and other people interested in spaceflight are incredibly excited about spaceflight, but don’t see the inevitability of human spaceflight as clearly as I do, and still see it mostly as a prestige thing. To that end, I’ve worked off and on to write an essay on how post-starship economic development makes human work in space a necessity. For a long time, the only thing that has been profitable to do in space was take pictures and send down, or receive data and send it back down somewhere else, but that is changing. EO, comms, etc., aren’t going anywhere, and in fact will only expand, but there is a mountain of new opportunities that autonomous systems are not, and will not in any reasonable timeframe, be equipped to handle. Meanwhile, the cost of supporting humans in space gets cheaper and easier, and only gets cheaper and easier with better spacesuits.