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NASA wants to build a nuclear reactor on the surface of the moonand fast. Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who is also serving as NASAs interim administrator, has issued new directives at the agency to speed up the timeline for a fission reactor designed to power human activity on the moon, even as the space agency faces deep cuts to other parts of its budget. The plot beat is straight out of sci-fi, but its also key to unlocking humanitys future on the moon, where two weeklong long lunar night cycles make storing solar energy a challenge. To properly advance this critical technology to be able to support a future lunar economy, high power energy generation on Mars, and to strengthen our national security in space, it is imperative the agency move quickly, Duffy wrote in an agency directive sent out late last week. Under Duffys more aggressive plan, NASA has been directed to put out a broad call encouraging private companies to craft designs for a powerful 100 kilowatt reactor that could be ready to go by 2030. Politico first reported the expedited plan for a lunar reactor, which a senior NASA official characterized as a priority for winning the second space race. NASAs lunar fission dreams The U.S. space agency has been working on designs for an energy source that could power lunar development for a few years now. In 2022, NASA doled out three $5 million contracts for concept designs for small nuclear fission reactors that could be used on the moon and adapted for future Mars exploration. Those designs each weighed under six metric tons and were capable of producing 40 kilowatts of electricity, ensuring enough for demonstration purposes and additional power available for running lunar habitats, rovers, backup grids, or science experiments. A demonstration of a nuclear power source on the Moon is required to show that it is a safe, clean, reliable option, director of Technology Demonstrations for NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate Trudy Kortes said of the initiative, called the Fission Surface Power Project, last year. The lunar night is challenging from a technical perspective, so having a source of power such as this nuclear reactor, which operates independent of the Sun, is an enabling option for long-term exploration and science efforts on the Moon. Other nations plans The U.S. isnt alone in its ambitions for a sustainable source of power on the moonnor is its timing a coincidence. Russia and China are working together on a joint lunar program that could include building a nuclear reactor on the moons surface as soon as 2033. Russia’s former head of Roscosmos Yury Borisov said last year that Russia was seriously considering a projectsomewhere at the turn of 20332035to deliver and install a power unit on the lunar surface together with our Chinese colleagues. The project is viewed as a precursor to lunar colonization for both countries, enabling power production greater than what a solar array could generate. While that plan appears intact, Borisov was fired from his position earlier this year. Russia maintains ambitious plans for exploring the moon with an aggressive timeline, but the countrys space program faced a devastating setback when its first moon mission in almost 50 years smashed into the lunar surface. Beyond China, Russia is also partnering with North Korea, another U.S. adversary, when it comes to space. Former U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken warned in January that Russia planned to share advanced satellite and other space technology with Pyongyang, an extension of the new military alliance between the two countries.The Biden administration maneuvered to block Russian plans to place an anti-satellite nuclear weapon in orbit, though that weapons program may be derailed for now after suffering a technical failure in April.
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E-Commerce
When the coronavirus surged during President Donald Trumps first term, he called for a simple fix: Limit the amount of testing so the deadly outbreak looked less severe. When he lost the 2020 election, he had a ready-made reason: The vote count was fraudulent. And on Friday, when the July jobs report revisions showed a distressed economy, Trump had an answer: He fired the official in charge of the data and called the report of a sharp slowdown in hiring phony. Trump has a go-to playbook if the numbers reveal uncomfortable realities, and thats to discredit or conceal the figures and to attack the messenger all of which can hurt the president’s efforts to convince the world that America is getting stronger. Our democratic system and the strength of our private economy depend on the honest flow of information about our economy, our government and our society, said Douglas Elmendorf, a Harvard University professor who was formerly director of the Congressional Budget Office. The Trump administration is trying to suppress honest analysis. The Republican president’s strategy carries significant risks for his own administration and a broader economy that depends on politics-free data. His denouncements threaten to lower trust in government and erode public accountability, and any manipulation of federal data could result in policy choices made on faulty numbers, causing larger problems for both the president and the country. The White House disputes any claims that Trump wants to hide numbers that undermine his preferred narratives. It emphasized that Goldman Sachs found that the two-month revisions on the jobs report were the largest since 1968, outside of a recession, and that should be a source of concern regarding the integrity of the data. Trump’s aides say their fundamental focus is ensuring the data accurately describes reality. Not the first time Trump has sought to play with numbers Trump has a long history of dismissing data when it reflects poorly on him and extolling or even fabricating more favorable numbers, a pattern that includes his net worth, his family business, election results and government figures: Judge Arthur Engoron ruled in a lawsuit brought by the state of New York that Trump and his company deceived banks, insurers and others by massively overvaluing his assets and exaggerating his net worth on paperwork used in making deals and securing loans. Trump has claimed that the 2016 and 2020 presidential elections were rigged. Trump won the 2016 presidential election by clinching the Electoral College, but he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton, a sore spot that led him to falsely claim that millions of immigrants living in the country illegally had cast ballots. He lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden but falsely claimed he had won it, despite multiple lawsuits failing to prove his case. In 2019, as Hurricane Dorian neared the East Coast, Trump warned Alabama that the storm was coming its way. Forecasters pushed back, saying Alabama was not at risk. Trump later displayed a map in the Oval Office that had been altered with a black Sharpie his signature pen to include Alabama in the potential path of the storm. Trump’s administration has stopped posting reports on climate change, canceled studies on vaccine access and removed data on gender identity from government sites. As pandemic deaths mounted, Trump suggested that there should be less testing. When you do testing to that extent, youre going to find more people, Trump said at a June 2020 rally in Oklahoma. Youre going to find more cases. So I said to my people, Slow the testing down, please. While Trump’s actions have drawn outcry from economists, scientists and public interest groups, Elmendorf noted that Trump’s actions regarding economic data could be tempered by Congress, which could put limits on Trump by whom he chooses to lead federal agencies, for example. Outside observers can only do so much,” Elmendorf said. The power to push back against the president rests with the Congress. They have not exercised that power, but they could. White House says having its own people in place will make data ‘more reliable Kevin Hassett, director of the White House National Economic Council, took aim at the size of the downward revisions in the jobs report (a combined 258,000 reduction in May and June) to suggest that the report had credibility issues. He said Trump is focused on getting dependable numbers, despite the president linking the issue to politics by claiming the revisions were meant to make Republicans look bad. The president wants his own people there so that when we see the numbers, theyre more transparent and more reliable, Hassett said Sunday on NBC News. Jed Kolko, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics who oversaw the Census Bureau and Bureau of Economic Analysis during the Biden administration, stressed that revisions to the jobs data are standard. That’s because the numbers are published monthly, but not all surveys used are returned quickly enough to be in the initial publishing of the jobs report. Revisions solve the tension between timeliness and accuracy, Kolko said. We want timely data because policymakers and businesses and investors need to make decisions with the best data that’s available, but we also want accuracy. Kolko stressed the importance in ensuring that federal statistics are trustworthy not just for government policymakers but for the companies trying to gauge the overall direction of the economy when making hiring and investment choices. Not every part of the jobs report was deemed suspect by the Trump administration. Before Trump ordered the firing of the Bureau of Labor Statistics commissioner, Erika McEntarfer, Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer trumpeted the findings on native-born citizens, noting on Fox Business Network’s Varney & Co. that they are accounting “for all of the job growth, and thats key. During his first run for the presidency, Trump criticized the economic data as being fake, only to fully embrace the positive numbers shortly after he first entered the White House in 2017. The problem is that the firing of the labor statistics commissioner might make the data even less dependable. It is unfortunate that the BLS Commissioner is being made a scapegoat, particularly as firing her is only likely to reduce reliability as thousands of BLS employees now realize that their jobs could be at risk if they deliver bad news,” said Betsey Stevenson, a University of Michigan economist and a former chief economist at the Labor Department. White House says transparency is a value The challenge of reliable data goes beyond economic figures to basic information on climate change and scientific research. In July, taxpayer-funded reports on the problems climate change is creating for America and its population disappeared from government websites. The White House initially said NASA would post the reports in compliance with a 1990 law, but the agency later said it would not because any legal obligations were already met by having reports submitted to Congress. The White House maintains that it has operated with complete openness, posting a picture of Trump on Monday on social media with the caption, The Most Transparent President in History. In the picture, Trump had his back to the camera and was covered in shadows, visibly blocking out most of the light in front of him. Josh Boak, Associated Press Associated Press writer Michelle L. Price contributed to this report.
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E-Commerce
It seems theres fresh blood pumping back into the IPO market. After a blowout initial public offering from Figma last week, investors might have another chance to get their heart rates up again soon. Heartflow, a California-based medtech company that utilizes AI with imaging and diagnostics software to help evaluate cardiac and coronary diseases, is looking to list shares on the Nasdaq. In paperwork filed on Friday with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), Heartflow said it plans to offer 12.5 million shares, priced between $15 and $17. That could potentially raise more than $208 million. According to Reuters, Heartflow’s target valuation could be as high as $1.3 billion. The company plans to trade under the ticker HTFL. Personalized 3D-models of people’s hearts Heartflow uses AI and other technology to scan patients for coronary and cardiac problems, creating three-dimensional models of patients’ hearts. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) gave the software the green light in 2022, and its now being used in some markets to diagnose patients. Additionally, the company got a leg up last year when the U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) expanded Medicare coverage to include platforms that use imaging results to look for signs of coronary disease, and the American Medical Association (AMA) issued a new Category I CPT code for those platforms. That gives doctors and clinics the go-ahead to start using the technology on a broader scale starting next year. According to the companys SEC filing, Heartflow says that as of the end of March 2025, its been used to assess more than 400,000 patients. Revenues are growing but profits are elusive Heartflow generated $125.8 million in 2024, a 44% increase over the $87.2 million it made the year before, the company says. Revenue likewise grew 39% for the first quarter of 2025 to $37.2 million. However, the company saw a net loss of $96.4 million in 2024, wider than its net loss of $95.7 million in 2023. It warns in the filing that it expects to incur “substantial losses in the foreseeable future [and] may not be able to achieve or sustain profitability.” Bain Capital, Panorama Point Partners, and Capricorn Investment Group are among Heartflow’s backers, according to Crunchbase. Bain led its most recent fundraising round, a Series F round in 2023, which raised $215 million. This is not the first time that Heartflow has attempted to go public. The company had planned to merge with a special purpose acquisition company during the SPAC frenzy of the early pandemic years, but it halted the plan in 2022, citing “unfavorable market conditions,” as Fierce Biotech reported. Heartflows IPO comes on the heels of another growing medtech companys public debut. Carlsmed, which specializes in AI-driven spine surgery technology, recently went public as well, with shares trading on July 23. Since then, the stock is down around 4.5%. Heartflow has not said when it plans to list its stock. Fast Company reached out for more details on the timeline and will update this post if we hear back.
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