Topics worth your time: the institutional design behind our generation’s moonshot factory, a public-data approximation of SpaceX’s Raptor 2 engine, Hugging Face’s $399 robot duck, and musings on why not about cables are created equal.
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Interesting Links
Building a moonshot is partly a technical problem, and partly an institutional one. X, the Moonshot Factory (formerly Google[x]), just so happens to be our era’s entry in a lineage of ambitious corporate labs that include the famous Bell Labs and Xerox PARC. What few know is that the Factory is a moonshot itself as a 16-year experiment designed to study the environments, organizational structures, funding models, and exit criteria that let improbable ideas cross the chasm into real businesses. The standouts include Waymo and Wing, but also failures affectionately termed “moonshot compost”, like Loon and Google Glass—projects that didn’t become viable businesses but produced technology worth carrying forward. The lab is unusually candid about what it learns along the way, in such a way that its project graveyard is a treasure trove of high-quality engineering case studies. Each project receives a post-mortem documenting what killed it, broke the financials, or otherwise stymied progress so others can build on their work. Some great retrospectives that mix hardware and economics are H2E (water from air) and Blixt (fusion). The most exhaustive is the 437-page Loon Library that preserves a decade of technical and operational lessons after the company shut down. The premise might seem obvious in retrospect, but cheap space launch (and therefore Starlink) were far from solved when Loon explored the problem.
A quick author’s note: The retrospectives are how I (Cooper) found my way to the Factory. I started with documentation of Project H2E and eventually worked on hardware for Project Tidal during my master’s. If you enjoyed the case studies above, check out The Gimbal, a booklet that explains how the Factory is organized. I still miss it (both the people and the projects) - especially the Design Kitchen.
A cable tester like Total Phase’s $15,000 Advanced Cable Tester hinges on a surprisingly simple value proposition: not all cables are created equal, and the bad ones can appear to work while failing in less obvious ways. The simpler idea to understand is that USB‑C mandates a connector shape, not a guarantee of what every cable can safely do. A particularly famous example came in 2016, when Google engineer Benson Leung tested a badly miswired USB‑A to USB‑C cable and found that it had permanently damaged his Chromebook’s embedded controller, along with the two USB power-delivery analyzers; manufacturing defects included a 10 kΩ resistor instead of a 56 kΩ one, a resistor hooked up as pull-down instead of pull-up, and no wiring for USB 3.1 speeds, despite being sold as a USB 3.1 cable. Cable testers are instruments that can check a cable’s continuity (shorts, opens, and routing), DC resistance (voltage drop under load), signal integrity (loss and distortion at high data rates), and e-marker data (reported power and speed capabilities). Like most things in engineering, test and verify, including the cables!
Benson has great deep dives on the complexity of USB-C cables if you’d like to go deeper.
An engineering student reverse-engineered — or more precisely, built a public data approximation — of the full-flow staged-combustion cycle inside SpaceX’s Raptor 2 engine, the engine system that powered SpaceX’s early Starship vehicles. To prove out the utility of his self-built fluid solver (FullFlow), he collected the limited public information available and modeled the engine from basic components like pumps, turbines, ducts, and valves. It’s a steady-state snapshot and not a simulation of transient conditions. More generally though, it is a great example of why rocket engines are the frontier application for thermodynamics and fluid mechanics.
A good primer on progressive sheet metal stamping. Progressive stamping, transfer stamping, and stage tooling might sound like separate, distinct processes, but they’re really just different ways of moving sheet metal through sequences of cutting and forming operations. Stage tooling fits simpler and lower-volume jobs ($), transfer stamping handles large or deep-drawn parts that can’t remain attached to a carrier strip (),andprogressivestampingissuitedforsmalltomedium,complexpartsathighspeed($). Tooling for progressive stamping ranges from $30k to $250k and can take 12-20 weeks to build, depending on complexity. Also see here for a great webinar on stage tooling.
The premise of the morphing wheel is to design a wheel architecture that can handle multiple terrain regimes: soften to deform around rough terrain, then stiffen to resist deformation on flat ground. This 2024 research paper maps out one proposed architecture that uses an outer ring of interlocking chain blocks connected to wire spokes. Tightening the spokes pulls the blocks inward, creating a rigid wheel; releasing them allows the rim to conform around rocks and steps. The researchers were also able to demonstrate real-time transitions on a four-wheeled vehicle and a 120 kg wheelchair. The only widely-deployed version of this idea still uses air; military trucks and agricultural equipment have adjusted compliance by raising and lowering the tire pressure for different surfaces. What still remains unproven is whether an airless mechanical wheel can truly deliver the same range of behavior without adding more complexity than it removes.
And a couple fun links to round out the week:
Alan Kay’s recipe for recreating the conditions behind Xerox PARC. Keep groups small, hire people who don’t need managing, understand that invention != innovation, and give the department a sufficiently boring name such that executives leave it alone. Think artist colony, not R&D lab.
Your local community college probably has a more interesting course catalog than you’d expect. De Anza College, for example, offers classes in manual machining, CNC programming, metrology, and more. NBC framed it as a feeder program for Tesla’s engineering technician openings.
Cantos, an early-stage venture fund, is hosting the Hyperdrive Summit in LA on 9/16.
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Startup News
Hugging Face unveiled the $399 Microduck, an open-source robot platform that developers can train through reinforcement learning. The duck-like robot uses a camera, lidar, and two IMUs to navigate, and can waddle, right itself after falling, and roller skate. Behaviors can be trained in simulation and deployed directly to the device, while its SDK and full reinforcement-learning stack are available on GitHub. Some more company context: Microduck originates from Pollen Robotic, which Hugging Face acquired in April 2025.
Skild AI unveiled S1, a robotic foundation model that learns new tasks from a single video prompt without task specific fine-tuning. S1 can translate a human demonstration into robot actions and complete unseen, long-horizon tasks including plant potting, pour-over coffee, and kit assembly. In internal tests, S1 reached a 66% success rate on unseen tasks after 100,000 hours of pretraining, compared with 9% for a language-prompted VLA.
SpaceX‘s Falcon 9 has been carrying the satellite launch market for the past five years (flying 165 times in 2025!) and its planned retirement is creating a bottleneck for satellite operators. SpaceX could end commercial Falcon 9 launches after 2028 to shift production to Starship, which is still in testing, while rival vehicles have yet to reach a meaningful launch cadence.
Gatik raised a $200M Series D to expand its commercial driverless box-truck operations across new and existing markets. The company focuses on middle-mile delivery, moving goods between distribution centers and stores on routes reaching 400 miles. Its largest public deployment is with PepsiCo, with 41 driverless trucks across Dallas, Phoenix, and Northwest Arkansas. The company has secured $600M in contracted revenue and also counts major retailers like Walmart and Kroger as customers. The round was led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies.
REGENT raised a $240M Series B to scale manufacturing of its Seaglider vessels for commercial and defense customers. The round is split evenly between equity and debt and comes ahead of the first human flight of its Viceroy prototype. The round was co-led by Mare Liberum and AE Ventures, with debt capital from Erebor Bank.
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Technical elegance means nothing if the administrative overhead overwhelms the operator. Designing hardware or workflows without factoring in cognitive load is just shifting systemic waste further down the line.