Cows Jump Over the Moon
What do cattle and space have in common? Quite a lot, it turns out.
America broke a 52-year hiatus from the moon this week with the landing of “Odie” on the lunar surface. Odie is the Odysseus lunar lander. Great. That’s nice. Cow tipping and lunar lander tipping seem to have a lot in common because Odie fell right over.
But, notice what was announced amidst all the excitement. The staff on the International Space Station broadcast that they are working on “organoids,” meaning they are figuring out how to grow tissue and organ production in space. Why? Partly because certain things can be accomplished in zero gravity that cannot be done in gravity. But, it’s also in anticipation of more and more humans going up into space to build out the space economy.
The moon is just a way station for this grand plan. But think of space and the lunar surface as the most important physics lab humankind has ever been able to access. Much of the testing there will define what is possible on Earth. This is especially true of autonomous robotics. Mining on the moon or on asteroids is also about new methods for radically transforming mining on Earth.
The low gravity on the moon makes it a very cheap and easy place to launch from. The buildout on the lunar surface and beyond will mainly be done by 3-D printers and autonomous AI-led robotics. This helps explain the continuing investor focus on AI-led, autonomous, remote robotics. No wonder we see this headline: Y Combinator Seeks Startups in Robotics, Space and Defense. They wrote, “Robotics hasn’t yet had its GPT moment, but we think it’s close,” YC wrote. “With the rapid improvements in foundation models, it’s finally possible to make robots that have human-level perception and judgment. That’s been the missing piece.” Now NASA says they are sending up robots that will build themselves. “NASA gave three robots plans for a moon shelter, and the robots figured out how to build it.” NASA is pursuing an ARMADAS approach: “Automated Reconfigurable Mission Adaptive Digital Assembly Systems,” meaning autonomous, AI-led construction of “off-world structures from basic building blocks made from local resources.” Imagine little boxes called voxels that assemble themselves using moon dust as their medium. Apparently, “During the demo, the three space robots built a shelter about the size of a shed in 100 hours using 256 voxels,” and that’s without machine vision. So, there’s no need to wait for Tesla to figure that out now.
It’s the creation and management of tissue and organs in space that is really interesting. It seems human health on Earth may be improved by the production of human tissue and organs that are grown in space. The Engineer writes, “The '3D Organoids in Space' project conducted by the Space Hub of the University of Zurich (UZH) and Airbus Defense and Space will use the zero-gravity conditions on the ISS to grow organoids - three-dimensional organ-like tissues grown from human stem cells - for use on Earth in research and medicine.” What makes it easier to grow these things in space? Zero gravity means there’s no need for a skeleton. Also, according to