Applied Sciences
Joined June 2008
- Tweets 16,930
- Following 908
- Followers 1,257
- Likes 7,430
2,443 Photos and videos
Michael Ferrari retweeted
Jun 9
NASA names crew for Artemis 3 mission to test lunar landers spacenews.com/nasa-names-cre…
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Rounding up the Space Unicorns.
Good piece by @JasonRainbow spacenews.com/rounding-up-th… via @SpaceNews_Inc
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Awesome discussion w @lrocket & @MollySOShea.
Esp. the segment 'Nuclear Electric is the future'
Jun 4
BREAKING: Inside Impulse Space with Tom Mueller (@lrocket) (SpaceX's 1st Employee)
FULL TOUR
The famous engineer behind the Merlin engine, now Founder, CEO & CTO of Impulse Space (@GoToImpulse)
ICYMI: Merlin still powers Falcon 9 today, the most reliable rocket engine ever flown & the highest thrust-to-weight ever developed. It's the workhorse behind nearly every SpaceX mission: Starlink launches, Dragon crew & cargo flights to the ISS, & booster landings
Tom walks us through the factory floor, from the avionics clean room to a live rocket engine firing in the vacuum chamber
Impulse is building the in-space mobility layer: the vehicles & engines that move spacecraft after launch, from LEO to GEO, the Moon, infinity & beyond
We cover:
→ Mira: precision maneuvering spacecraft & its saiph thrusters (8 thrusters, ~50 lbs thrust, 5-yr orbit life)
→ Helios: long haul same-day delivery vehicle (12 tons of LOX/methane, LEO to GEO)
→ Deneb Engine: 15,000 lbs thrust engine that powers Helios, ox-rich staged combustion, carbon skirt running over 3,000°F
→ Why 3D printing is "almost a cheat code" for rocket engines
→ In-house composite tanks, Novaloy, & copper liners machined from 700 lbs down to 25
→ 3 spacecraft in orbit a 1,200-meter rendezvous
→ Starlink, iterating Merlin & Raptor, & working with @elonmusk
→ Nuclear propulsion, the Moon, & why compute needs to move to space
𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒
(00:00) Tom Mueller, Founder, CEO & CTO of Impulse Space
(00:49) Inside Impulse Space
(02:32) Avionics Bay floor
(02:59) Building rockets at home
(03:50) Mira and Helios
(08:00) Why Tom left SpaceX
(09:33) The Deneb Engine walkthrough
(11:42) Testing in Mojave
(12:23) Favorite part of the Engine
(13:30) How it's 3D Printed
(14:21) Why 3D Printing changes everything
(16:54) Finding Talent for COPVs
(17:28) No Modern hardware without software
(19:52) The Mill Turn explained
(22:42) Payload Deck Design
(25:28) Entering the Secret Area
(30:48) Thrust, Flow Rate, & 100 Sensors
(32:13) Collision avoidance in Orbit
(32:57) The Electric Propulsion Chamber
(34:28) Nuclear Electric is the future
(38:49) Data Centers in Space
(40:28) SpaceX & Starlink's Growth
(41:10) Working with Elon
(42:07) If not CEO, then what?
(42:32) Moon matters more than Mars
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As the global gas market grapples with the Strait of Hormuz being all-but closed for nearly three months, traders are fixated on two wildcards: China and the weather bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
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Great postdoc opportunity in the lab of @sherwang - AI for hyper-local Wx forecasting. @mitidss
academicjobsonline.org/ajo/j…
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#Space on the minds of investors today.
@SpaceX🚀🛰️📈
Just Look Up. #SpaceTech #DualUse michaelferrari.substack.com/…
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Information Ontogeny as Infrastructure.
Updated working paper, incorporating a section on acoustics. #SoundSignals #SpatialSignals open.substack.com/pub/michae…
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Space is having its internet moment. Investors should act accordingly. spacenews.com/space-is-havin… via @SpaceNews_Inc
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The Industrialization of Low-Earth Orbit michaelferrari.substack.com/… #SpaceTech #Geospatial #Networks
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Stanford merges AI and data science efforts under single institute news.stanford.edu/stories/20…
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Keep an eye on Dr. Najat Khan & @RecursionPharma - bringing the company back down to Earth, and with a sensible path to AI-driven product deployment. fiercebiotech.com/biotech/af…
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The Food Tech Salon at #SynBioBeta2026 was a great session today.
Practical and achievable goals were discussed - this is not always the case.
@SynBioBeta
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Michael Ferrari retweeted
May 6
Anthropic Says Life Sciences Is Its Biggest Bet After Code.
Eric Kauderer-Abrams started @AnthropicAI 's life sciences division ten months ago. He took on the stage at @SynBioBeta with Marc Tessier-Lavigne from @Xaira_Thera , and what caught my attention was how plainly Eric stated the following:
"The greatest opportunity to have a beneficial, scaled impact with everything that's happening in frontier AI is in the life sciences."
After coding, it's their biggest investment area. They've been training Claude on bioinformatics, chemistry, molecule design, structural biology, clinical regulatory. Their models went from mediocre in life sciences to roughly PhD level across most domains in under a year. That's a steep curve.
But what I found more telling than the benchmarks was the infrastructure they're building around it. Wet labs for basic research so their own scientists hit the walls firsthand. An acquisition of Coefficient Bio (acquired by Anthropic) to teach @claudeai how to think like a biotech program manager, not just a bench scientist. The gap between "Claude can answer a biology question" and "Claude can help you run a drug program" is enormous, and they're clearly aware of it.
Marc mentioned that 90% of drugs fail in the clinic. Two-thirds of those failures aren't bad science, but patient matching. You have a good target, a good drug, and you can't find who will respond. That's the problem both of them kept circling back to, and it's where causal AI models trained on real perturbation data might actually move the needle.
Marc said nobody's pushing a button for a development candidate anytime soon. But Anthropic went from $1B to $30B in revenue in sixteen months. That kind of resource behind this kind of focus is new. It's fun to think of what R&D can look like in the next few months!
#SynBioBeta2026 #SyntheticBiology #Biotech #AIxBio
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Important issue for the #SpaceTech & #Data communities.
Do AI tools undermine trust in geospatial imagery? spacenews.com/do-ai-tools-un… via @SpaceNews_Inc
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