Inertia Enterprises burst onto the scene in February with a $450 million Series A, making it one of the best capitalized startups in the industry, aiming to bring laser-based fusion reactors to market.
We ended the year with a record $1.85 billion in backlog, representing 73% year-on-year growth, a figure we look forward to building upon in 2026. That backlog includes an $816 million SDA contract to build 18 satellites for the Tracking Layer Tranche 3 program, the largest single contract in company history, plus selection for the Missile Defense Agency SHIELD program, with potential contracts up to $151 billion.
The sprawling International Space Station is due to be decommissioned less than five years from now, and the US space agency has yet to formally publish rules and requirements for the follow-on stations being designed and developed by several different private companies. Although there are expected to be multiple bidders in "phase two" of NASA's commercial space station program, there are at present four main contenders: Voyager Technologies, Axiom Space, Blue Origin, and Vast Space.
"We didn't do any LLMs. There is significant interest in that. There are lots of people trying those ideas out, but I think they're still in the exploratory phase," Desai told El Reg. As it turned out, the researchers didn't need them. "We used a simpler model called a variational auto encoder (VAE). This model was established in 2013. It's one of the early generative models," Desai said.
Calling nanoscientists: your field needs you to try to replicate a landmark finding that quantum dots can act as biosensors inside living cells. As part of the first large-scale effort in the physical sciences to tackle the reproducibility crisis, researchers in France and the Netherlands are offering funds and resources in exchange for a few months of work. "We are trying to use