How to build a satellite company.

Space resilience and the importance of multiple orbits.

Africa’s birth rates are falling (Economist). Wagner Group activity in Africa (Washington Post).

Analog Computer Steering System, 1966, Research Engineer Mrs. T. Vasquez. (Convair/General Dynamics Astronautics Atlas Negative Collection)

The UK government has allocated $A187 million for a taskforce to accelerate the UK’s AI capability, on top of a $A1.7 billion investment in computation.

The return of analog—a better analog (Wired).

The changing shape of US government supercompute needs, specifically for US nuclear stockpile security needs, with pressures coming from industry moves to cloud and attention shifting to hot areas such as AI.

China’s COVID censorship (NYT).

Concerns over Huawei in German telecommunications networks: ‘the potential of sabotage through critical components that could collapse telecoms networks’.

Electric car battery geography (Washington Post). Australia has large known reserves of lithium, bauxite, manganese and nickel. But ‘[w]hen it comes to processing, there is one major player: China, which handles more than half of the mineralscritical to EV batteries…as the demand for EV components soars, so could dependency on China’s refining infrastructure.’

‘The Cost-Benefit Fallacy: Why Cost-Benefit Analysis Is Broken and How to Fix It‘ by Bent Flyvbjerg and Dirk W Bester. The root cause of cost overruns is not complexity, supply chains, etc, but optimism bias and overconfidence. How to rectify failing cost-benefit analysis? Correct for optimism bias, introduce skin in the game for cost-benefit forecasters, undertake independent audits of cost-benefit analysis, and adapt the process to account for the messiness of democratic decision-making.