Technology

Space is becoming a major area of startup and commercial investment, and so I&ve decided to start providing a weekly round-up of the biggest news in aerospace, space science and space-related technologies. Let me know if you appreciate this or have suggestions, and I&ll make sure it evolves as needed to be useful resource.

This week, there was an abundance of spacesuit news, and signs from multiple operators that theregoing to be an orbital traffic boom in the immediate future. Also, we&re heading into the annual International Astronautical Congress (IAC) this coming week, so expect a lot more news starting tomorrow.

1. NASA unveils its Artemis-generation spacesuits

NASA showed off a brand new generation of spacesuit, including the one that the first American woman and next American man to set foot on the Moon will don for that historic moment. The new Artemis suits are designed to scale from essentially the smallest to the largest possible adult human frame, which NASA touts as a way to make the astronaut program more accessible to a wider range of Americans. The agency should be going out of its way to fix that, because of what happened that led to item #2 this week.

For the first time, NASA is looking to outsource the full production of these Artemis-generation spacesuits (including the Orion survival suit, which was also revealed today and will be worn only during flight aboard the Orion capsule). To that end, it has put out a request for input from industry about their design and development ahead of setting up a proper RFP.

2. NASA astronauts Christina H. Koch and Jessica Meir complete historic first all-woman spacewalk

NASA astronauts Christina H. Koch and Jessica Meir

As I alluded above, there was a very good reason that NASA really emphasized how inclusive its Artemis suit designs are: The agency had to cancel a first all-woman spacewalk earlier this year because it didn&t have the right amount of properly sized spacesuitson board the International Space Station. It sent one up in June, however, and that historic moment happened this past week, with Koch and Meir performing a roughly seven-hour spacewalk to repair a power controller.

3. SpaceX applies for permission to launch 30,000 more Starlink satellites

Thaton top of the 12,000 italready had cleared, which makes for a total potential constellation size of 42,000. Thatabout 8x the number of satellites currently in orbit, across all orbital zones. Ita move that is definitely raising the ire of both industry and space researchers, because it&ll make it a lot more complicated to ensure orbital spacecraft avoid collisions, and it could potentially obscure the view of the stars from Earth. SpaceX says it has taken steps to ensure it can avoid both problems, but not everyone is convinced.

4. Swarm gets the ‘OK& for its 150-satellite constellation

Meanwhile, startup Swarm has been granted FCC approval to deploy its own, much-smaller constellation of 150 satellites. Swarm isn&t competing directly with SpaceXStarlink & it wants to provide low-bandwidth IoT connectivity. And while it isn&t looking to put up a huge volume of spacecraft, there was some concern that its toaster-sized satellites might be too small to track and present a risk that way.

5. Rocket Labswap launch is a success

New Zealand-born and lately U.S.-headquartered Rocket Lab was successful in launching its fifth Electron rocket this year. The startupsuccess was more a proof point for its business model than its technology, however, since the payload that flew aboard this mission was actually one that wasn&t slated to go up until much later in the queue. Rocket Laboriginal client for this one had to drop out due to unfortunate circumstances, and Rocket Lab was able to get client Astro Digital an earlier ride. This kind of late-stage payload swap has not typically been a strength of the established commercial space launch industry.

6. Under Armour built some fancy tracksuits for space

Richard BransonVirgin Galactic will begin ferrying wealthy paying tourists to the very edge of space next year, if all goes to plan, and now we know what they&ll be wearing when they do: Under Armour. The sportswear company and Bransonspace enterprise unveiled the new suits at a flashy special event featuring the first tourists who have reserved $250,000 tickets aboard Virgin Galactic atmosphere-skimming spacecraft.

7. How Lockheed MartinVenture arm spends its $200 million in available funding

Lockheed Martin has been in the commercial space business since there has been a commercial space business to be in, and around a decade ago it established a corporate venture fund to make strategic bets on startups. I sat down with the fundGM and Executive Director J. Christopher Moran to talk about what the fund looks for in startups & and the industry giant is a lot more interested in early stage companies that you might have thought. Extra Crunch Subscription required.

Hey everyone. Thank you for welcoming me into you inbox yet again.

Last week, I talked about the eternal dumbness of the smart home and how Google had a big chance to lay out their vision this past week. Guess what? They did not, instead we got a new more expensive Google Wifi that falls under the Nest brand as well as a Google Mini that can be wall-mounted…

If you&re reading this on the TechCrunch site, you can get this in your inboxhere, and follow my tweetshere.

The big story

Zuckerberg had an interesting week, delivering a very rehearsed keynote that was neither in front of Congress or an audience of developers at F8. He spoke at Georgetown on the topic of free speech and Facebookbrand of capitalism.

It was an odd speech, but it was an opportunity for him to speak at length about what he saw as Facebookmission in terms of free speech

Facebook is in an interesting position here, where they&re tying a moral stance with an economic one. They seem to draw the line at paid ads and paid political speech whereas everything before it was so nuanced. I don&t like that very much.

Unrestricted speech on the internet has been an evolving topic. Therethe very real argument that giving people a megaphone to harass and bully minimizes other peopleability to have unrestricted speech themselves. Facebook and most of the other major platforms have agreed with this and have put policies in place.

Therealso the situation where someone is threatening or discussing violence or hate speech. Again, Facebook goes further than the law requires and has this firmly in their policies.

If you look at the companyexisting policies that have been put in place over the past few years, you would find plenty of guidelines at odds with sections of Zuckspeech and yet he seemed to be drawing a big red line here and now, with the only reason being the criticism of Facebookad policy that allowed Donald Trump to pay for and target ads that were ostensibly untrue.

I wrote about the situation in full here and it rings true again after Zuckerbergspeech. Timing is everything and ithard to take this moral stance seriously right now especially.

Send me feedback on Twitter@lucasmtnyor email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

On to the rest of the weeknews.

(Photo by Steve Sands/WireImage)

Trends of the week

Here are a few big news items from big companies, with green links to all the sweet, sweet added context:

• Sprint + T-Mobile = official best friends The FCC has reportedly decided to let another massive merger go through (after some decent concessions), allowing T-Mobile and Sprint to proceed in their massive telecom merger.
• Switch sales surgeNintendo has already made a major splash with the Switch, but the traction itgaining in North America has already eclipsed its last-gen systemworldwide unit sales. Check out their latest milestone.
• Justice Dept takes down a massive child exploitation site The government infiltrated and clamped down on a massive child exploitation dark web site this week and my colleague Zack has the full rundown.

GAFA Gaffes

How did the top tech companies screw up this week? This clearly needs its own section, in order of badness:

1. $35B lawsuit against FB can move forward:[$35 billion face lawsuit against Facebook can proceed]
2. AOC and Ted criticize Apple:[AppleChina stance makes for strange political alliances as AOC and Ted Cruz slam the company]

Sign up for more newsletters in your inbox (including this one)here.

Welcome to TechCrunchChina roundup, a digest of events that happened at major Chinese tech companies and what they mean to tech founders and executives around the world.

The talk about U.S.-China relationships over the past two weeks has centered heavily on the NBA controversy, which has put the interest of some of Chinalargest tech firms at stake. Last week, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey voiced support for Hong Kong protests in his since-deleted tweet, angering ChinaNBA fans and prompting a raft of local tech companies to sever ties with the league. But some businesses seem to be back on track.

Tencent, which is famous for a slew of internet products, including WeChat and its Netflix-like video service, has been NBAexclusive streaming partner since 2009 and recently renewed the deal through the 2024-25 season. As many as 490 million fans in China watched NBA programming through Tencent in just one season this year, the pair claims.

The basketball games are clearly a driver of ad revenue and subscribers for Tencent amid fierce competition in Chinavideo streaming market, but following Moreystatement, the company swiftly announced (in Chinese) it would suspend portions of its broadcast arrangements with the NBA. Popular smartphone brand Vivo and Starbuckslocal challenger Luckin also promised to pause collaboration with the NBA.

It was a tough call for businesses having to choose between economic interest and patriotism, and Tencent was tactful in its response, pledging only to &temporarily& halt the streaming of NBA &preseason games (China).& As public anger subsided over the week, Tencent resumed airing NBA preseason games on Monday. After all, the content partnership reportedly cost Tencent a heavy sum of $1.5 billion.

Entertainment giant turns to education

TikTok is probably the Chinese Internet service being most closely watched by the world at the moment. Its parent firm ByteDance, last reportedly valued at $75 billion, has ambitions beyond short videos.

This week, more details emerged on the upstarteducation endeavors through a WeChat post by Musical.ly founder Lulu Yang, whose short-video startup was acquired by ByteDance and subsequently merged with TikTok. Yang confirmed he was helping ByteDance to develop an education device in collaboration with phone maker Smartisanformer hardware team, which ByteDance has absorbed. The product, which leverages ByteDance artificial intelligence capabilities, will be a &robotic learning companion& for K-12 students to use at home.

The news arrived in the same week that ByteDanceflagship video app TikTok announced producing educational content for India, where itused by 200 million people every month. The move is designed to assuage local officials who have vehemently slammed TikTok for hosting illicit content, as my colleague Manish Singh pointed out.

Diving into education appears to be a sensible move for ByteDance to build relationships with local authorities, which can at times find its entertainment-focused content problematic. The multi-billion-dollar online education industry is also highly lucrative. ByteDance, with 1.5 billion daily users across TikTok, Douyin (TikTok for China), Toutiao news aggregator and other new media apps, is in a good position to monetize the enormous base by touting new services, whether they are educational content or mobile games.

Also worth your time

• A total of 53 major video streaming services in China have introduced a &safe mode& for teenagers as of this week, state media reported (in Chinese). During the controls mode, underage users won&t be able to search for content, send real-time comments or private messages, upload or share videos, or reward live streaming hosts with virtual gifts. Itpart of Chinanational effort to protect young people from consuming harmful digital content and internet addiction, which has also spawned age checks processes in Tencent games.
• Xiaohongshu, a fast-growing social commerce app in China, is back in Android app stores nearly three months after it was banned by the government for undisclosed reasons. Rumors had it that the service, which was reportedly valued at more than $2.5 billion last year, was used to spread pornography and fake reviews. Ithardly the first tech company hit by media regulation, and it can probably learn a thing or two from ByteDance, which has aggressively ramped up its content moderation force following a sequence of crackdowns by the government.
• Meituan will partner with 1,000 vocational schools in the country to train as many as 100 million workers from the service industry over the next ten years, the Hong Kong-listed company announced (in Chinese) this week. Food delivery makes up the bulk of the on-demand services giantbusiness but its footprint spans a wide range. The classes it provides to prepare workers for a digital era will also touch upon skincare, hair styling, manicure, plastic surgery, hospitality and parenting, a program highlighting the extensive reach of technology into Chinese peopleevery life.
• Chinese workers turn out to be big advocates for the application of AI. According to a survey by Oracle and research firm Future Workplace, workers in India (60 percent) and China (56 percent) are the most excited about AI. Japan, where the labor force is shrinking, ranks surprisingly low (25 percent), and the U.S. has an equally mild reaction (22 percent) toward the technology.