Economics

The European space ecosystem funds top research, makes and opens extremely valuable data, trains top scientists and engineers … then buys the finished capability from abroad, often with European roots. What can break this pattern is to copy what works elsewhere: crowd in public customers to de-risk dependable home-market demand (not supply). Growth investment will follow, and so will the benefits. Ljubljana — Sinergise’s hometown — as seen by Copernicus Sentinel-2: the open data a small Slovenian team turned into a product the world used. Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data (2020), processed by ESA (CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO). ...

Update,5 hours after I posted this. NVIDIA announced Space-1 Vera Rubin Module at GTC, alongside Jetson Orin and Jetson Thor for orbital deployment. Planet will fly Jetson Thor on its next-gen satellites. Jensen Huang said: “In space, there’s no convection, there’s just radiation — and so we have to figure out how to cool these systems.” He confirms the thesis I write below. The chips actually shipping to orbit — Jetson Orin (42 TFLOPS, 60W) and Jetson Thor (~517 FP16 TFLOPS, 130W) — land exactly on the inference sweet spot identified below. Space-1 Vera Rubin promises 25× the H100 but has no published TDP and no ship date. The datacenter version runs at 1,800–2,300W. Sophia Space describes its platforms as “passively cooled.” The chips that fly are inference-class, not training-class. NVIDIA just formalized the split that T⁴ demanded. I’ve updated the image with the new chips. ...

You might have read how AI is the end of society. Perhaps Alap Shah’s “2028 global intelligence crisis” fearing a 38% S&P crash and a white-collar displacement spiral. Or Matt Shumer and the end of coding. Or Leopold Aschenbrenner “Situational Awareness” trillion-dollar compute clusters. TechCrunch: “the gradual unspooling of the economy itself.” But notice every single one of them is on the capital side of the table. They see what happens to the world (which they fund). But what about the rest of us? — the builders, the consumers, the nature lovers, the patients, … IMO news of society’s death is greatly exaggerated. ...