In this week’s edition of The Prototype, we look at a new lunar mission for startup company Firefly, how to teach old robots new tricks, our new robotic ant overlords and more. You can sign up to get The Prototype in your inbox here. Firefly This week, NASA announced that it has awarded a new $179 million contract to Texas-based Firefly Aerospace as part of the Artemis lunar missions, the fourth it has awarded to the company to deliver projects to the Moon’s surface. The mission, which aims to launch in 2028, will utilize the space startup’s Blue Ghost cargo lander to deliver six scientific experiments to an area on the Moon called Gruithuisen Domes, which were formed by lava millions of years ago in order to better understand Lunar geology. Firefly’s first Moon mission for NASA is currently slated to launch in mid-January 2025 on top of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. That mission is scheduled to land at Mare Crisium in order to study a variety of surface conditions to help prepare for future crewed missions to the Moon. Stay tuned. P.S. This is the last edition of The Prototype for 2024. I’ll be back on January 3rd. Happy holidays! This Startup Is Teaching Old Robots New Tricks–No Coding Required T-Robotics Factories across the country rely on large, robotic arms to carry out a variety of tasks. These are large, versatile and already embedded within the facility’s infrastructure. They’re also difficult to program. Asad Tirmizi, CEO and cofounder of Bay Area startup T-Robotics, wants to change that–by making them smarter by letting them be trained for new tasks by people without programming knowledge. The company announced this week that it has raised a $5.4 million investment seed round, and that it will launch its first commercial product with robotics company ABB next year. “Our thesis is, we can make your language the new programming language of robots,” Tirmizi told me. To that end, his company has developed a software layer, called ActGPT, for these robots–regardless of the brand or model. Users can tell the robot what they want to have accomplished by having a conversation with it–telling it what to do while getting feedback the robot. T-Robotics’ software uses what’s called a Visual Language Haptic Action model, including not only a language component to interact with users, but also sensors and feedback to learn to correctly do a task. “There is a planning component that uses all this information to see if it has the correct information it needs,” Tirmizi explained. If the robot needs more information, it prompts the user. And this back-and-forth enables someone to program the robot without knowing a bit of code. “You can be a complete rookie in robot programming, but end up with a competent industrial-grade application,” Tirmizi said. DISCOVERY OF THE WEEK: A SWARM OF ANT-LIKE ROBOTS Researchers in South Korea have developed tiny magnetic robots that are capable of working together in swarms, much like ants, to perform tasks like throwing things, lifting much heavier objects, and pushing down obstacles. A group of a thousand of the cube-shaped robots were able to shape themselves into a raft and move along water. They are incredibly small (about 1/50th of an inch) and made from an epoxy containing particles of neodymium-iron-boron. The movements are powered by a magnetic field that enables them to self-assemble and are programmed by varying the angle by which they are magnetized. The research team’s findings were published in the journal Device this week. FINAL FRONTIER: NEXT CREWED NASA LAUNCH DELAYED NASA astronauts Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore were only supposed to be on the International Space Station on a weeklong trip. But much like the passengers and crew of the S.S. Minnow, their journey is taking more time than expected. The pair have been on board more than six months—and it looks like they’ll be there even longer now. Previously, NASA planned to return them to Earth, along with Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksandr Gorbunov, in February. But that date’s been pushed back to “no earlier than late March” as the space agency and SpaceX complete work on the new Dragon spacecraft that will be used for the mission. That capsule will carry NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nichole Ayers, JAXA astronaut Takuya Onishi and cosmonaut Kirill Peskov to the station. FORBES CALLED IT: NEXT GENERATION IVF Two years ago, we recognized Dina Radenkovic for our annual 30 Under 30 list in Healthcare. That was based on the potential of the next generation IVF technology her startup, Gameto, had developed. It enables extracted eggs to mature in synthetic ovaries, shortening the length of time the IVF procedure requires while lowering the overall cost. This week, that potential proved out as the company announced the first birth of a baby facilitated by its technology was born to a couple in Brazil. WHAT ELSE I WROTE THIS WEEK The Federal Reserve warned this week that it is forecasting fewer rate cuts in 2025 as inflation persists. I wrote about why that could be bad news for biotech startups. In my other newsletter, InnovationRx, I wrote about the persistence of avian flu, which has prompted a state of emergency in California, due to the number of dairy farms affected by the disease, on the same day the CDC announced the first severe case in a patient in Louisiana. SCIENCE AND TECH TIDBITS Iran has a thriving black market for Starlink terminals, with an underground worldwide network of smuggling and advocacy aiming to bring an uncensored internet into the country. Anthropologists argued in the journal Nature Astronomy this week that space agencies should include the tracking and preservation of human spacecraft, landers, etc. in their planetary protection plans for future Mars missions. (Though hopefully they'd forgive Mark Watney for disturbing Pathfinder.) Commonwealth Fusion Systems says it plans to build its first grid-scale fusion power plant in Virginia, with an aim of being operational in the early 2030s. An Alabama woman is in good health after becoming the third living person to receive a pig kidney transplant, NYU Langone Health announced earlier this week. Chinese astronauts Cai Xuzhe and Wang Haoze completed a 9 hour, 6 minute spacewalk while installing devices to protect China’s Tiangong space station from space debris, reported SpaceNews. This breaks the previous record for a spacewalk, which was 8 hours and 56 minutes. A research team created a new type of sunscreen that both protects skin from harmful UV rays and also cools the skin at the same time. PRO SCIENCE TIP: AVOID INJURIES WITH FLATTER RUNNING SHOES Scientists at the University of Florida discovered that runners who wear shoes with thick heels are more likely to suffer an injury than those who wear thinner, flatter shoes. The culprit appears to be sensation–thicker heels make it harder to feel how your foot lands, making an injury more likely. But that doesn’t mean you should ditch your shoes right away–the researchers add that a transition should be gradual so you can work on strengthening your feet and learn to land in a more controlled way. The research findings were published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living. WHAT’S ENTERTAINING ME THIS WEEK This week I watched the series finale of What We Do In The Shadows, a mockumentary TV series about a group of vampires living together on Staten Island. Over the course of six seasons, this was consistently one of the funniest shows on TV–particularly thanks to Matt Berry’s incredible line readings. Series finales are hard to pull off well, but the show stuck the landing. All episodes are currently streaming on Hulu. MORE FROM FORBES