Varda Space Industries has closed a massive tranche of funding just weeks after its first drug manufacturing capsule returned from orbit. The company’s $90 million Series B round marks an inflection point for the company, which is now gearing up to scale from the initial demonstration mission to a regular set of missions carrying customer payloads, Varda founder Delian Asparouhov told TechCrunch. El Segundo-based Varda was founded in 2021 by Asparouhov, who is also a partner at Founders Fund, and Will Bruey, a spacecraft engineer who cut his teeth at SpaceX.
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.
Using Quantinuum's ion-trap hardware and Microsoft's new qubit-virtualization system, the team was able to run more than 14,000 experiments without a single error. This new system also allowed the team to check the logical qubits and correct any errors it encountered without destroying the logical qubits. This, the two companies say, has now moved the state-of-the-art of quantum computing out of what has typically been dubbed the era of noisy intermediate scale quantum (NISQ) computers.
NASA administrator Bill Nelson has pronounced the agency's $11 billion, 15-year mission to collect and return samples from Mars insufficient. "The bottom line is, an $11 billion budget is too expensive, and a 2040 return date is too far away," Nelson said at a press conference. In other words, clear the decks and start over — with commercial providers on board from the get-go.
All-around, highly generalizable generative AI models were the name of the game once, and they arguably still are. Case in point: Snowflake, the cloud computing company, today unveiled Arctic LLM, a generative AI model that's described as "enterprise-grade." Available under an Apache 2.0 license, Arctic LLM is optimized for "enterprise workloads," including generating database code, Snowflake says, and is free for research and commercial use.
Peter Higgs, the famous physicist who predicted the Higgs boson particle, has passed away at the age of 94. He won the Nobel Prize in 2013 for his research.