Weekly Roll-Up
23-27 January 2023
Here’s my weekly roll-up of news, readings, and other miscellany.
Defense continues to focus on preparing to face-off with China while aiding Ukraine. Galaxies were formed much sooner after the Big Bang than we previously thought. And NASA and DARPA are teaming up to build a nuclear propulsion system to explore deep space.
What I’m most excited about this week: Rocket Lab’s successful first launch from the United States
What I’m reading: Energy production by laser-induced annhilation in ultradense hydrogen H(0)
What I’m listening to: Shifting from the industrial age to the knowledge age.
What I’m thinking about: What will warfare look like in a digital-first or virtual-first age?
Weekly News Round Up
Military
The Department of Defense has clarified its policy and guidance on autonomous weapons (C4ISR.net)
Soldier performance drops when using the futuristic AR-capable IVAS system (T&P)
Germany and the US have both committed to sending main battle tanks to Ukraine (Der Spiegel | WSJ)
US industrial base is unprepared for a fight with China (Defense News)
Fighter pilot receives Navy Cross for single-handedly dogfighting 5 Soviet jets, 70 years ago (T&P)
US Senator questions if other Allie’s will support Taiwan (USNI)
Space
Rocket Lab launches electron rocket from Virginia (Breaking Defense)
Nat’l Science Foundation releases photo with more than 3 billion stars, galaxies, other objects (Harvard)
Exotic green comet returns to earth fadster 50,000 years (Guardian)
Earth’s core may be changing directions (Astronomy Magazine)
Asteroid mining company AstroForge to test refinery equipment in space in 2023 (TC)
Galaxies are older than we thought (Universe Today)
NASA mulls an oxygen pipe on the moon (Interesting Engineering)
Nuclear Power
US regulators approve first small, modular reactor (CBS)
NASA is returning to nuclear thermal propulsion, with the help of DARPA (SpaceNews)
IAEA chief says Iran has stockpiled enough material for several bombs (VOA)
Rocket Lab’s successful launch
Rocket Lab is a space launch company that was founded in 2006. Historically, it has conducted its launches from its Launch Complex - 1 (LC1) on the Mahia Peninsula on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island. In 2018, Rocket Lab begin construction of its US-based Launch Complex - 2 (LC2) at Wallops Island here in Virginia (about 75 miles from my office and 90 miles from home).
First scheduled for a launch in 2020, a series of hiccups prevented Rocket Lab from launching delaying until December 2022. Then, in December, weather further delayed the mission, now named “Virginia is for Rocket Lovers.”
Finally, on Tuesday of this week, Rocket Lab was able to launch its Electron Rocket, carrying 3x satellites for HawkEye 360.
I as at the gym and set a timer so I wouldn’t miss the launch. I excitedly ran outside with about 30 seconds to spare, grabbing other basketball coaches and anybody else that passed within arms length and excitedly telling them to come watch the launch. And, I texted my wife to remind her so that she could get the kids outside to watch too.
And, it was a beautiful launch.
Rocket Lab’s Electron Rocket on LC2 during the final countdown sequence to launch
Difficult to see, but the orange smudge just above and to the left of the light is the Electron rocket at a distance of 85 miles
Annihilation and energy production
The universe is a wild place. Somehow, in the moments following the Big Bang, we wound up with slightly more matter than antimatter in the universe. See, there should be a perfect balance between the two, based on various laws of conservation. When matter meets antimatter, they annihilate one another. So, that imbalance where we wound up with more matter than antimatter is a good thing. Otherwise, the odds of us being here would be just about zero.
Now, annihilation is a scary sounding thing, but it’s really only been observed at very tiny scales (sub atomic levels). But the cool thing about it is that it produces clean energy. But we’ll get there in just a second.
First, what is antimatter? The easiest way of conceptualizing antimatter is to start with matter—but then to reverse the charge. So, as an example while an electron is negatively charged, its antimatter partner is the positron, which carries a positive charge.
So back to the clean energy conversation: one of the biggest complaints about nuclear fission as an energy source is the creation of long-duration radioactive waste. But, if you can convert all of the matter into pure energy, then you eliminate that radioactive waste, and that’s the promise of annihilation as an energy source.
From Einstein’s famous equation
we can see that the energy produced is directly proportional to the mass of the material converted to energy multiplied by the square of the speed of light.
Let’s work with Hydrogen, as it’s the most abundant material in the universe, and also the most simple. Hydrogen consists of one proton and one electron. It has no neutrons. It’s also fairly easy to strip off the electron through ionization. That leaves us with a single proton, with a mass of
And since antimatter has the same mass as matter, just opposite charge, then the antiproton has the same mass. Now we’re going to multiple those masses by the square of the speed of light. Light travels very quickly. It’s speed is nearly 300 million meters per second. That’s more than 670 million miles per hour. To put it into context, if you walk 10,000 steps per day (that pesky default in many pedometers and smart watches), you’ll cover about five miles in a day. To cover the same distance that light travels in a second, you’d have to walk 10,000 steps every day for 102 years!
So, when you combine the masses of the proton / antiproton pair and the square of the speed of light, you wind up with 1.8 GeV (giga electron-volts, or 1,800 mega electron-volts) of energy. That’s both a tremendously large and incredibly small amount of energy.
When matter and antimatter meet, almost all of their masses are converted to energy
It’s massive because it’s nearly nine times the amount released when we split a plutonium atom. But, it’s also really small, as a 60W lightbulb would require 1,000,000,000 of these annihilations per second!
Well, what’s fascinating is a researcher in Sweden claims to be able to create these so-called “baryon” annihilations on demand by first putting the hydrogen into it’s most basic quantum and densest state. While the energy capture isn’t quite 100%, it’s still producing a significant amount of energy in a very small, basic laboratory (previously annihilation was only achieved at massive facilities like CERN). Assuming this is true and not some fluke, then the implications for cheap, reliable, safe power are massive
You can read one of Prof Leif Holmlid’s 258 peer-reviewed articles (many about this topic) here: Energy production by laser-induced annihilation in ultradense hydrogen H(0)
Shifting from the Industrial Age to the Knowledge Age
Albert Wenger, a managing partner at Union Square Venture (the top rated VC firm, as cited by entrepreneurs), joined Harry Stebbings on the 20VC podcast this week. Albert has been a guest before; although, I’ve not heard those previous appearances.
What struck me most in Albert’s conversation was the way he discussed how VC can have massive impact on fundamentally shifting society and civilization—but that making these massive shifts requires focus and concentrated efforts. As an example, he held up the way Germany constructed the Wilhelmshaven liquid natural gas terminal in less than a year, following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year and threats to cut off the flow of gas to Europe. This was no small feat, as the original construction timeline for the terminal was around five years.
I see Albert’s open discussion of building for a great good (compared to building a new social media app) as further evidence of a shift in how VCs are viewing the world and private capital’s role in building a defensibility around western civilization. We’re going to talk a lot more about this idea in the future.
You can listen to Albert’s appearance on the 20VC Podcast here or wherever you get your pods.
War in a virtual first society
Lambert Hogenhout, the Chief of Data, Analytics, and Emerging Technology at the United Nations, joined Daniel Faggella on the AI in Business Podcast to discuss the relationship between virtual worlds (the metaverse) and humanity. In their conversation, Daniel and Lambert came to a conversation about war, specifically what does wat look like in a virtual-first world.
I think they correctly recognized that war in a virtual-first world will be very asymmetric. By that, I mean that one party in the war will be virtual-first, while the other belligerent will likely be reality-first.
Daniel invoked Will Durant stating “a nation is born stoic and dies epicurean.”
Think about that for just a moment. While one country is enjoying an epicurean culture of hedonism and consumption, another is able to build—in the real world—instruments of national power to be wielded against its unsuspecting and unprepared adversary. This is a bit akin to the over-used quote from a G. Michael Hopf book that “hard times creat strong men. Strong men create good times. Good times create weak men. And weak men create hard times.” Of course that’s not true, but open many VetBro social media pages and you’ll find that plastered all over. And I think the concern that Hopf raises is valid that a culture of indulgences risks preparation to fend off the hungry up-and-comer.
Wall-E predicted some of the dangers of living in the metaverse
This led me to then think about how the west is already afflicted with a certain degree of virtual-first consumption, and how the primary goal of our adversaries could be to keep us consuming and stuck in our epicurean state, glued to our screens. Is it possible that we’re already in the opening battle or campaign of a war between a virtual-first culture (the west) and a reality-first country (China)? I hope a student at the School of Advanced Military Studies or Naval Postgraduate School will take on a monograph that studies warfare in a virtual-first society.
That’s a wrap for this week. I’m off for some much needed family time in a warm and sunny clime.
Keep building!
Andrew