Weekly Dose of Optimism #146

Pricey Healthy Babies, Zuck + Palmer, Porcine Kidneys, Radiant, Hermeus, Starship 9

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 146th Weekly Dose of Optimism. This week we got a lot of Ashlee Vance, flying objects, and gene-edited things. That’s the type of week we’ve come to expect and appreciate here at the Weekly Dose.

Let’s get to it.

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(1) The Pricey, Controversial Science Creating Healthier Babies

From Core Memory

Orchid got the Ashlee Vance Core Memory Treatment. The startup uses full genome sequencing to help IVF parents select embryos with the lowest genetic disease risk. Today, that enables prospective parents to chose embryos with a clean genetic bill of health. In the future, it could allow parents to completely optimize and design embryos for a whole swath of genetic characteristics.

Orchid is complicated: it combines babies and disease prevention and genetic selection and futuristic biotech and what it means to be a loving parent and a whole swath of other complicated topics into one relatively early stage startup. When the company got major press from The New York Times last year, the public reception was mixed. Who wouldn’t cheer for healthier babies? But at the same time, how slippery can this slope get? How much do we want to design our babies? As I said, it’s a complicated and dynamic topic.

But our perspective is that we’d of course rather have the technological capability of doing these things and wrestle with the resulting ethical dilemmas of whether or not we should do these things, than to not have the capability at all.

Bonus: Palmer Luckey and Meta Make Peace to Make War Together

Not baby related, but Ashlee Vance with another big story this week. This time, he has the exclusive interview with Palmer Luckey, founder of Anduril, to cover the news that Anduril and Meta are teaming up to make create a product for the U.S. military dubbed “Eagle Eye.” Think of this as a sci-fi war helmet that combines Meta’s XR technology with Anduril’s weapons expertise.

This partnership is notable not only because the companies are planning on producing some pretty rad technology, but because it reunites Palmer Luckey and Mark Zuckerberg. Famously, Luckey sold Oculus to Zuck for $1B and then was ousted not too long after in response to some controversial stuff around the 2016 election. Palmer has been on a war path (literally) / public comeback path since, building Anduril into one of the most important companies of the 2020s. And Zuck has continued to invest billions into XR and become a lot more machismo. There doesn’t seem to be any bad blood between the two. Zuck + Palmer are not a duo I would bet against (or want to go to war against.)

(2) Xenotransplantation of a Porcine Kidney for End-Stage Kidney Disease

Kawai et al in the New England Journal of Medicine, h/t @cremieuxrecueil

A 62-year-old hemodialysis-dependent man with long-standing diabetes, advanced vasculopathy, and marked dialysis-access challenges received a gene-edited porcine kidney with 69 genomic edits, including deletion of three glycan antigens, inactivation of porcine endogenous retroviruses, and insertion of seven human transgenes. The xenograft functioned immediately. The patient’s creatinine levels decreased promptly and progressively, and dialysis was no longer needed.

Oink Oink! Put down that bacon my friend.

Doctors successfully transplanted a heavily gene-edited pig kidney into a 62 year old man with severe kidney disease. The pig kidney, modified with 69 (nice!) edits to make it compatible with the human immune system, worked immediately and eliminated the patient’s need for dialysis. This marked the most successful case of xenotransplantation yet, showing it’s now possible to use gene-edited pig organs in humans. Tragically, the patient died about 2 months later from an un-related cardiac event but the, importantly, the kidney was still functioning properly at the time of death.

The organ waitlist problem is pretty severe with over 100,000 people in the U.S. alone waiting for transplants, with 17 dying each day. Globally, the issue is much worse with demand for organs way outpacing supply. If we’re ultimately able to successfully use pig organs in transplants at scale, those issues all but go away.

Gene editing has been on a roll recently. We are learning to program our (and pigs’) bodies. If we covered nothing else in the Weekly Dose, that should make you optimistic. Our future is going to be longer.

(3) Nuclear Startup Radiant Raises $165 Million for Micro-Reactor

Will Wade for Bloomberg

Radiant Industries Inc., a US nuclear startup, lined up $165 million in funding to complete its small reactor design.

BOOM goes the micro-reactor!

Back in August of 2024, Packy wrote a Deep Dive on Radiant, a company with the goal of building a nuclear reactor from scratch on Earth so that one day we can use it to power a civilization on Mars. Pretty epic ambitions for a relatively early stage startup, but progress was real and the team was (is) a perfect fit. If you’re interested in the most detailed breakdown of Radiant, why we need nuclear energy for Mars colonization, and Radiant’s strategy you should drop what you’re doing and read the deep dive.

Otherwise, the important thing to note here is that Radiant raised $165M to execute on that strategy, and that’s up from from only about $55M in all-time funding ($100M of this round was announced in November 2024). The new funding will be used to continue to develop Radiant’s Kaleidos 1 MW micro-reactor, which is aimed at replacing diesel generators at military sites, remote villages or disaster relief efforts…oh yeah, an eventually the colonization of Mars.

On the back of Trump’s recent nuclear EOs, this money is rocket fuel for Radiant’s Race to the Dome, where it plans to test Kaleidos in 2026, en route to mass-producing nuclear reactors. The ELECTRONAISSANCE marches on.

(4) Hermeus Flies Quarterhorse MK 1 at Edwards Air Force Base

From Hermeus

EDWARDS AIR FORCE BASE, CA – Hermeus, a venture capital-backed aerospace and defense technology company specializing in high-speed aircraft, announced today the flight of its Quarterhorse Mk 1 aircraft. This milestone is a significant step in Hermeus’ development of high-Mach and hypersonic aircraft. With this flight, Hermeus demonstrated a rapid development pace, advancing Hermeus’ mission to operationalize hypersonic technologies.

The new breed of defense and aerospace company moves fast. That is, in some sense, their key differentiator against legacy primes and aerospace companies that spend decades and billions of dollars on bringing new products to market. But Hermeus, a startup that is focused on making fast airplanes, is redefining what it means for aerospace companies to move fast.

This past week, Hermeus successfully flew its Quarterhorse Mk 1, an uncrewed high-speed jet, just over a year after starting from scratch. This type of milestone would take a legacy company like Boeing at least 5-10 years. The flight validated critical systems and demonstrated the viability of their rapid, iterative hardware approach. Hermeus builds and flies full-scale prototypes yearly which lets them test, learn, and improve in real-world conditions far faster than traditional paper-heavy aerospace cycles.

If Hermeus is successful, it will give the Department of Defense faster-than-Mach-5 capabilities. And perhaps even more importantly, it will prove to the defense and aerospace industries that the U.S. is capable of building things quickly again.

As the company wrote, “Hermeus’ high-Mach and hypersonic aircraft aim to deliver capabilities at a pace not seen in the U.S. since the 1950s.” Golden Age.

(5) Starship's Ninth Flight Test

From SpaceX

Starship’s ninth flight test lifted off at 6:36 p.m. CT on Tuesday, May 27 from Starbase, Texas. The Super Heavy booster supporting the mission made the first ever reflight in the Starship program, having previously launched on Starship’s seventh flight test in January 2025. The booster performed a full-duration ascent burn with all 33 of its Raptor engines and separated from Starship’s upper stage in a hot-staging maneuver. During separation, Super Heavy performed the first deterministic flip followed by its boostback burn.

You’ll see headlines on the internet about SpaceX’s latest launch like “SpaceX Loses Control of Starship, Adding to Spacecraft’s Mixed Record” (NYT) and “Spaceflight SpaceX's Starship Flight 9 ends in failure after booster loss” (Fox). This is entirely par for the course: any time SpaceX does something absolutely miraculous, the media will spin it and catastrophizes it for clicks. So here’s what really happened earlier this week with SpaceX ninth launch in its Starship program.

SpaceX successfully launched its ninth Starship flight (which, by the way, holy shit…we can now launch skyscrapers into space) aiming to demonstrate key reusability and performance upgrades. The mission achieved full-duration burns for both Super Heavy and Starship, successful stage separation, and valuable test data on aerodynamic descent. While the Super Heavy booster performed its first reflight — it was flown before, refurbished, and sent back up — and tested a new descent angle, it was lost during the landing burn due to a rapid unscheduled disassembly. This “unscheduled disassembly” is, of course, what the media latched onto because…media. Despite this “unscheduled disassembly,” the mission met most objectives and marked progress toward rapid reusability and orbital refueling.

Instead of focusing on the supposed “failure” here, take this as a reminder that we can now launch super massive, almost reusable rockets into space and that our ability to do so will certainly blanket our planet with fast, reliable telecommunications and space drug factories and such, and most likely enable the eventual colonization of Mars and make civilization multi-planetary.

SpaceX just put out a video with an update on the Road to Making Life Multiplanetary for those interested in that kind of thing. And we gotta say, it’s nice to see Elon out of DC and back in the saddle at his rocket, AI, EV/robotics, tunneling, and brain-computer interface companies.

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Have a great weekend y’all.

Thanks to ElevenLabs for sponsoring. We’ll be back in your inbox next week.

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan