Lifeboat Foundation

The big picture: The US is committed to establishing semiconductor manufacturing within its borders, and perhaps no effort is more crucial to this goal than TSMC’s three-fab facility in Arizona. The government is pouring billions into the development, alongside TSMC’s $65 billion investment.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. has reached a significant milestone in its expansion into the US. Recent trial production at the company’s new Arizona facility has yielded results comparable to those of its established plants in Taiwan, according to Bloomberg, which cited a person familiar with the company who requested anonymity. This development is a positive sign for the chipmaker’s ambitious US project, which has faced delays and doubts about whether it could match the production efficiency of its Taiwanese operations.

The Arizona plant began engineering wafer production in April using advanced 4-nanometer process technology. With production yields now on par with its facilities in Tainan, Taiwan, TSMC should be able to maintain its targeted gross margin rates of 53 percent or higher.

TAMPA, Fla. — European small satellite maker Aerospacelab announced the opening of its first manufacturing facility in the United States Sept. 5 amid efforts to break into the lucrative U.S. government market.

The company sees the potential for contracts that would enable the 3,300 square-meter facility in Torrance, California, to reach a capacity to produce an average of two satellites a week in a single shift.

“With Space Force recently announcing its plans for not only a commercialization strategy, but [also the Space Development Agency] signaling their desire to diversify their supply base, we see potential not only for U.S. commercial customers,” said Tina Ghataore, group chief strategy and revenue officer at Aerospacelab and its CEO for North America.

This team is on a roll.

Launching aboard Firefly’s Alpha vehicle in 2024, this mission will demonstrate the responsive on-orbit capabilities of our Elytra vehicle. As the first of many missions utilizing multiple Firefly vehicles, the demonstration will lay the groundwork for Firefly’s end-to-end mission solutions, proving our capabilities to rapidly launch, maneuver, and deploy satellites at a time and place of our customers’ choosing.

In support of Xtenti’s follow-on study contract with the NRO, the mission will demonstrate a rapid payload reconfiguration utilizing Xtenti’s FANTM-RiDE payload dispenser prior to launching on Firefly’s Alpha vehicle. Upon launching on Alpha, Firefly’s Elytra vehicle will utilize the FANTM-RiDE dispenser to first deploy commercial rideshare payloads in Sun-Synchronous Orbit, and then perform an on-orbit maneuver and stand ready to deploy U.S. government payloads on-demand.

Continue reading “Elytra Mission 1” »

A real stinker.

The trial, conducted by Amazon Web Services, was commissioned by the government regulator as a proof of concept for generative AI’s capabilities, and in particular its potential to be used in business settings.

That potential, the trial found, is not looking promising.

Continue reading “Government Test Finds That AI Wildly Underperforms Compared to Human Employees” »

US government warns of rising attacks on infrastructure using advanced tactics.

“Space-based research has a long history of contributing to advancements on Earth,” said Dr. Lisa Carnell.

The International Space Station (ISS) has been a beacon of scientific and medical research ever since the station’s first module was launched in 1999, as astronauts continue to push the boundaries regarding microgravity research that has contributed to advancing science and medical knowledge back on Earth. To continue this, NASA and the ISS National Laboratory recently announced a partnership through the ISS National Lab Research Announcement (NLRA) 2024-09: Igniting Innovation: Science in Space to Cure Disease on Earth that will provide up to $4 million with the goal of helping to advance disease diagnosis and treatment back on Earth.

Through collaboration between government agencies, industry, and academia, the NLRA hopes to accomplish several objectives pertaining to developing medical technologies on Earth, including disease mechanism models, population and disease diversity, drug discovery & development, drug delivery, and drug resistance. This announcement comes after the ISS National Laboratory announced in July 2024 that five projects were selected for the Cancer Research in Space for Life on Earth with the goal of providing $7 million in grants to advance cancer research in microgravity onboard the ISS.

Continue reading “NASA and ISS National Lab Collaborate on $4M Grant for Space-Based Disease Research” »

The services are necessary to maintain a domestic trusted source for strategic radiation-hardened microelectronics to meet the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) certification to Congress, as stipulated by the fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act Section 1,670, DOD officials say.

Radiation-hardened microelectronics components are necessary for manned and unmanned spacecraft operating on long-duration orbital missions in high-radiation space environments like geosynchronous orbits.

A US agency pursuing moonshot health breakthroughs has hired a researcher advocating an extremely radical plan for defeating death.

His idea?

Scholz is still skeptical though. “A new brain is not going to be a popular item,” he says. “The surgical element of it is going to be very severe, no matter how you slice it.”

Continue reading “This researcher wants to replace your brain, little by little” »

Japanese officials on Monday announced the opening of a new government-run defense research institute this fall, as reported by the Kyodo News agency.

The agency, which will be tasked with developing innovative cyber war technologies, said the new project is directly modeled after DARPA, the US Defense Department’s research agency – responsible for some of the world’s most cutting-edge defense technologies.

Continue reading “Japan will launch DARPA-esque research institute for cyberwarfare” »