Weekly Dose of Optimism #97

Cryonics, Starship, Starliner, Vogtle, Fuse

Hi friends 👋,

Happy Friday and welcome back to our 97th Weekly Dose of Optimism.

Big week for rockets and fusion, with a little lead off cryonics to whet your appetite. If things keep up, we’re going to be living in straight up sci-fi in 20 years. Can’t wait.

Let’s get to it.

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Sponsor Not Boring

Packy here. We’ve let our sponsor game slip a little bit. Dan’s been selling the world’s most delicious creatine gummies and I’ve been deep down the deep dive hole and we kinda just forgot to sell ads. Which means that we have a practically clean slate.

I’m working with Nancy Xu, who produced Age of Miracles, to build out the business side of Not Boring. We’re looking for a handful of sponsors we can work closely with over the next couple of quarters, and hopefully much longer.

If you want to talk to the smartest, most curious group of people on the internet, the kind of people who are down to read 15,000 words on mining one week and fusion the next, let us know by clicking the button:

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(1) Startup Brings New Hope to the Pursuit of Reviving Frozen Bodies

Ashlee Vance for Bloomberg Businessweek

On Monday, Deming plans to unveil Cradle Healthcare Co., which she’s been running in secret for the past three years. The company’s focus is on trying to develop technology around reversible cryonics, placing people with illnesses into a frozen state and then reviving them at some stage in the future when cures for their ailments have arrived.

I said brr, it’s cold in here, there must be some ambitious founder in the atmosphere.

Earlier this week, Laura Deming unveiled the cryonics company that she’s been working on in stealth for the last three years. Cryonics, which where popularized by the 1997 comedy blockbuster Austin Powers¹, is the practice of preserving legally dead individuals at extremely low temperatures in hopes that future medical advancements will allow for their revival and treatment. Deming’s company, Cradle Healthcare, is pioneering reversible cryonics by developing innovative cooling and rewarming technology that preserves and revives biological function, focusing on minimizing ice crystal formation and optimizing cryoprotectant use.

The mission is super ambitious; the company’s website reads: “Pressing pause on biological time.” Luckily, Deming is a force. In Ashlee Vance’s words:

She was a child prodigy in biotech who secured a laboratory research job at the University of California, San Francisco, when she was 12 years old. At 14, she was accepted into the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and then dropped out after two years to take one of the first entrepreneurial fellowships offered by the billionaire Peter Thiel. At 19, she created the Longevity Fund, which invested in more than a dozen companies. Today, in addition to running Cradle, Deming is co-founder and partner at Age1, a new longevity-focused investment firm.

And now she has $48 million to pause biological time. Big win for the rest of us.

Cradle has shown early promise, successfully experimenting with cooling and rewarming rodent brain slices that retain neuronal activity, but is still in the early stages of research and commercialization is at least a few years out.

The company perfectly fits within my idea that our primary job as humans for the next ~5-10 years is to simply not die. I think if you can make it to 2030 in reasonably good health, you’ll start adding years and years of incremental lifespan. Medicine is getting so good, so fast. And if you contract some horribly complicated disease then maybe, through Cradle’s technology, you can just freeze yourself for a few years until the AI quantum computers spit out the new cure to your disease.

(2) STARSHIP LAUNCH

Between Cradle and SpaceX, we might be able to live out the plot of every space sci-fi ever written: get frozen, travel a very, very long distance, and wake up on the other side of the galaxy as if no time had passed.

SpaceX successfully launched Starship for the fourth time on Thursday. Watching Starship, the largest and most powerful rocket ever created, launch is a real thing of beauty…so if you haven’t watched yet, stop reading and go watch the video.

The goal of this launch was to prove out some reusability characteristics of the craft, and by all accounts, SpaceX achieved the goal. Starship executed a landing burn and had a soft splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico, as planned.

Even The New York Time’s had to admit, SpaceX’s Starship Rocket Successfully Completes 1st Return From Space.

What was maybe most remarkable about this launch is how under control it all felt. Until that heroic flap started melting off, everything kind of just worked as planned. By the time our kids are our age, Starship launches might feel just as routine as commercial airline flights do today. Until then, though, I’m going to enjoy the plasma out of each and every one of these launches.

(3) LIFTOFF! NASA Astronauts Pilot First Starliner Crewed Test to Station

From NASA

“Two bold NASA astronauts are well on their way on this historic first test flight of a brand-new spacecraft,” said NASA Administrator Bill Nelson. “Boeing’s Starliner marks a new chapter of American exploration. Human spaceflight is a daring task – but that’s why it’s worth doing. It’s an exciting time for NASA, our commercial partners, and the future of exploration. Go Starliner, Go Butch and Suni!”

SpaceX, for once, wasn’t the only company that successfully launched a reusable rocket this week.

Boeing needed a win and earlier this week, they got one.

On Wednesday, after delays and $1.4 billion in cost overruns, Boeing successfully launched and sent NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams on the Starliner’s first crewed flight test to the International Space Station (ISS), an important step for NASA as it gets back in the crewed-flight business. The goal of the mission was to validate the Starliner system, ensuring it’s ready for regular astronaut transport to and fro the ISS. Mission accomplished.

Yesterday, Starliner successfully docked at the ISS, where Wilmore and Williams joined the international crew.

The launch was particularly important for Boeing, which proved it could deliver a fully operational reusable spacecraft. The company, whose reputation has been damaged from it’s troubles in commercial aviation and the short shelf life of its whistleblowers, finally did a good.

Honestly, we were pretty worried for the astronauts. Great to see them smiling from space. And the more companies building and selling reusable rockets that don’t blow up, the better, IMO.

(4) $35 Billion Georgia nuclear reactors are celebrated, but Biden Administration wants 98 more

From the Associated Press

U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm stated, "We have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country to reach our goal of getting to net zero by 2050" while celebrating the nearly $35 billion investment in new reactors at Georgia's Plant Vogtle​.

What is this a nuclear network for ants? This needs to be at least…three times bigger.

While U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm celebrated the recent opening of tower three at Georgia’s Plant Vogle, she also made it very clear that the U.S. has a ton of work ahead. There are currently 93 commercially operating nuclear reactors in the U.S. spread out across 54 sites and 28 states, and nuclear currently accounts for just under 20% of electricity generation. According to Granholm, nuclear capacity needs to expand by 3x in order for the country to hit its emissions goals.

Even those who don’t care about climate change want more nuclear. Per the article, “Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp floated the idea of a fifth Vogtle reactor. Although the Republican Kemp rarely discusses climate change, he has made electric vehicles a priority and has said new industries demand carbon-free electricity.”

And if there’s a bipartisan will, there’s certainly a way. Despite projects being long delayed and way over budget, there seems to be the political desire to support and prioritize nuclear buildout.

On Wednesday, the Biden Administration said that it would create a working group to make it easier to build nuclear, and proposed some ideas that we can get behind (and discussed on Age of Miracles):

• Military reactor purchases to help bring nuclear down the cost curve.

• Replacing closing coal plants with small reactors.

• Further streamline licensing (we’d prefer to see the NRC shut down, but hey)

Those measures, combined with growing nuclear popularity and a rising class of nuclear startups, may be enough to overcome the boundaries that have prevented previous nuclear buildouts in this country.

More energy is good. Let’s go build it.

(5) Harnessing the energy of the stars … in a bottle | Fuse

Jason Carman for S³

Packy here. Last week, I wrote about one of my favorite companies: Fuse Energy.

Founder JC Btaiche and co. are building pulsed power generators that can be used for radiation effects testing en route to commercial fusion power. It’s simultaneously wildly ambitious and surprisingly practical.

On Monday, my friend Jason Carman dropped an excellent S³ video on Fuse (and an interview with JC), featuring interviews of the team and a look at TITAN firing. It’s a banger, and I particularly enjoyed hearing Dr. Vahid Damideh joyfully explain fusion, what they’re building at Fuse, and why:

What fusion scientists believe, they think if we achieve energy from fusion, since energy will be limitless, all energy wars all over the world will stop. This is the dream for all fusion scientists all over the world.

Until that day, Fuse is also working to help prevent nuclear war, a goal that keeps getting more important for the US government. Semafor reported that the Biden administration “will announce its intention to embrace a more assertive nuclear weapons strategy” later today after China and Russia have spurned arms control conversations over the past year. Fuse may play a critically important role in modernizing the nuclear arsenal, to bring peace through strength.

I, for one, hope they pull it off. There are too many amazing things I want to live to see for us to bump into the Great Filter.

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We’ll be back in your inbox on Tuesday.

Thanks for reading,

Packy + Dan

1. We’re kidding baby! Oh behave!