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Commercial Space Economy: Space Stations, Space Data Centers, and NASA

Matthew Weinzierl and Brendan Rosseau, authors of Space to Grow, explain the commercial space economy and the role of NASA, Artemis, commercial space stations, space-based data centers, Starlink, GPS, China’s space program, national security, and space governance.

The conversation covers how governments, private companies, and investors build, fund, regulate, and compete in space, from microgravity research and launch markets to lunar exploration, space resources, and the economics of commercial space.

We also try and re-write the Space Treaty and look at the politics of the space race.

Please enjoy the show.

Thinking on Paper is a technology podcast about AI, Space, quantum computing, science, and the systems shaping the future.

🏠 Buy us a beer on Substack: https://thinkingonpaperpodcast.substa… Take us with you on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/00volKq… 🎧 Remember steve jobs on APPLE: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast… 📺 Get the clips and outtakes on Instagram / thinkingonpaperpodcast — Links & Resources Matthew: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/pro… Brendan: linkedin.com/in/brendan-rosseau Buy Space To Grow: https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/ite… — Chapters 00:00 Setting The Scene 03:35 Microgravity 07:43 Economic Incentives 12:14 Political Cycles 17:09 International Collaboration 18:45 National Security in Space 21:36 Space Exploration 24:27 A Day Without Space 28:49 Space Investment 30:37 Space-Based Data Centers 33:40 Space Resources 38:26 Governance in Space 40:55 A New Space Treaty.

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The Commoditization of Intelligence: Why AI Aggregators Will Beat Foundation Models

Everyone is currently watching the major tech giants throw billions of dollars at the AI arms race, cheering for whichever foundation model happens to top the leaderboards this week.

It is an incredible spectacle to watch unfold, but focusing too closely on the tech itself might mean we are missing the actual business revolution happening right under our noses.

We have seen this exact economic shift before. The biggest winners of the internet era weren’t the ones who built the physical infrastructure or supplied the goods; they were the platforms that organized the supply and owned the user relationship. The same economic laws are now coming for artificial intelligence, actively turning “intelligence” into a basic, interchangeable utility.

The real value moving forward is no longer in the models themselves, but in the seamless interfaces that aggregate them. If you want to protect your business from vendor lock-in and position your team for ultimate flexibility, it is time to rethink your approach.

Read my full blog post to dive into why the future of AI belongs to the aggregators, and how your business can strategically capitalize on this shift.

We spend an enormous amount of time obsessing over the titans of the AI arms race. Every single week seems to bring a breathless new headline about OpenAI, Google, Anthropic, or Meta releasing a foundation model that edges out the competition on some obscure benchmark test. We find ourselves endlessly arguing over parameter counts, context windows, and raw reasoning capabilities, captivated by a multi-billion-dollar war unfolding in real-time.

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Microsoft Exchange, Windows 11 hacked on second day of Pwn2Own

During the second day of Pwn2Own Berlin 2026, competitors collected $385,750 in cash awards after exploiting 15 unique zero-day vulnerabilities in multiple products, including Windows 11, Microsoft Exchange, and Red Hat Enterprise Linux for Workstations.

The Pwn2Own Berlin 2026 hacking competition takes place at the OffensiveCon conference from May 14 to May 16 and focuses on enterprise technologies and artificial intelligence.

Security researchers can earn over $1,000,000 in cash and prizes by hacking fully patched products in the web browser, enterprise applications, cloud-native/container environments, virtualization, local privilege escalation, servers, local inference, and LLM categories.

Silk made into strong plastic-like materials with 6G potential

Silk threads can be fused into transparent, plastic-like materials that twist terahertz frequencies of light, according to research led by Imperial College London, University of Michigan Engineering and Tufts University. The findings could enable components of 6G networks to be made from upcycled silk.

The new materials are also lightweight, yet stronger than many metal alloys and conventional plastics produced from fossil fuels. Their mechanical properties could make them useful in sports gear, shipping containers and certain kinds of packaging. In ballistics tests, the new materials were about as puncture-resistant as carbon-fiber-reinforced polymers, which are used in the bodies of airplanes and the chassis of automobiles. And, because the materials slowly degraded when implanted into mice, they could prove useful in temporary medical implants.

The researchers are particularly interested in the material’s ability to twist, or polarize, terahertz frequencies of light. The 6G band, which could transmit data up to hundreds of times faster than 5G networks and is particularly appealing for rural high-speed internet, extends into terahertz frequencies.

New quantum protocol breaks distance and speed barriers in fiber networks

Scientists at the University of Science and Technology of China have successfully deployed a multi-mode quantum relay network, achieving matter–matter entanglement over 14.5 kilometers, according to media reports.

The system, known as Xinghan-2, was detailed in the journal Nature Photonics on May 7. It addresses a key bottleneck in quantum communication by achieving both high transmission rates and high fidelity at the same time.

Quantum relays are seen as essential for the future quantum internet, as they help prevent signal loss over long distances by dividing communication channels into shorter segments. Previous approaches often involved a trade-off between the high speeds of single-photon interference and the high precision of two-photon interference.

You can put a data center at your house—but who really pays?

“The idea, put forward by a California smart utility box company called Span, is to put the GPUs where the power has already been allocated—at the home. Span says the average household uses only about 42% of the electricity allotted to it, and rarely reaches peak usage. Span’s smart utility boxes detect that, and steer the extra available power over to the GPUs, which live inside a ”node” that sits beside the house and looks something like an HVAC unit. The boxes contain 16 Nvidia GPUs, 4 AMD CPUs, 4 terabytes of memory, and a cooling system. When a large number of homes have these, the servers could be connected together in a network and work together on distributed computing jobs (workloads), Span says.

In exchange for hosting a node, Span pays a big chunk of the homeowner’s electricity and broadband internet bills.

And there may even be advantages for putting the compute power closer to the end users that are using the chatbots or AI services, Span says.

It’s a cool idea on paper, but it’s almost completely unproven in real-world use. Span has been prototyping the units but has yet to install any of them beside real homes. I asked Span VP Chris Lander if his company has done technical studies showing that its brand of distributed computing will be fast and robust enough to handle real AI workloads. ‘We’ve done a bunch of technical studies internally [and] a bunch of modeling for different kinds of workloads, both from the business point of view [and] the product point of view and from the technical architecture point of view,’ he replies.

The idea of asking homeowners to host boxes full of GPUs is a symptom of the woeful dearth of data center space needed for AI computing.

‘Elegant triangle’ experiment suggests quantum internet may be closer than we think

For more than 60 years, Bell’s theorem has been the gold standard for demonstrating that quantum mechanics defies the rules of classical physics. Now, an international team of researchers, including Constructor University Professor Dr. Nicolas Gisin, has extended this principle to new limits, using an “elegant triangle” to reveal new forms of quantum nonlocality that specifically emerge in multi-node quantum networks.

The study, published in Physical Review Letters, opens a new frontier in our understanding of how quantum correlations behave in realistic network settings, one that could help usher in the age of a quantum internet.

“This is not simply a more elaborate version of Bell’s theorem applied to networks, it’s something genuinely new that only emerges when multiple independent quantum sources interact through entangled measurements,” explained Dr. Gisin, who collaborated on the experiment with researchers from China, France and Austria.

Chip-scale photonic approach achieves ultralow-noise microwave and millimeter-wave signal generation

Researchers led by Dr. Changmin Ahn and Prof. Jungwon Kim at KAIST, in collaboration with Prof. Hansuek Lee, have demonstrated a chip-scale photonic approach for generating ultralow-noise and highly stable microwave and millimeter-wave signals based on optical frequency combs (microcombs), offering a potential pathway toward compact, high-performance frequency sources for next-generation technologies.

High-frequency signals in the tens to hundreds of gigahertz range are essential for emerging applications such as 6G communications, radar, and precision sensing. However, achieving both low noise and high stability at these frequencies remains a fundamental challenge for conventional electronic signal sources.

In the first study, published in Laser & Photonics Reviews, the researchers addressed the long-standing challenge of transferring the stability of an optical reference to a microcomb. Direct stabilization is difficult due to the lack of carrier-envelope offset detection in high-repetition-rate microcombs. To overcome this, they used a mode-locked laser as a transfer oscillator and synchronized it to the microcomb using electro-optic sampling.

How Many Satellites are There in Space?

A satellite is any object that orbits another body in space. Earth’s only natural satellite is the Moon. Every other satellite around Earth, more than 14,000 of them as of early 2026, is artificial. The first one was launched in October 1957 by the Soviet Union; recent ones are reaching orbit at a rate of roughly 60 per week, almost all of them part of SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. The orbital environment around Earth has changed more in the last six years than in the previous sixty, and the trajectory of that change is what makes the satellite question worth revisiting in 2026.

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