On the way to the Capitol for his presidential inauguration, 43-year-old President-elect John F. Kennedy asked outgoing President Dwight D. Eisenhower a question: How did we actually win D-Day?

“Because we had better meteorologists than the Germans,” Eisenhower, the former Supreme Allied Commander who led the D-Day invasion, told him, according to the New Hampshire Union Leader.

That footnote in history powers Pressure, the David Haig play now adapted into a film starring Andrew Scott and Brendan Fraser. It is my favorite World War II movie since Saving Private Ryan.

Pressure is not about weather. It is about something harder: trusting compatriots you dislike and disagree with.

In 1944, those people were meteorologists arguing over storm systems. Today they could be civilian teams building the artificial intelligence systems that will shape military and government decisions. Eisenhower understood that trusting someone does not require liking or agreeing with them. Sometimes trust simply means allowing a hard argument into the room and forcing your own assumptions to survive it.

The Room Where the Call Was Made

The action unfolds during the final 72 hours before D-Day. Nearly 160,000 Allied troops were preparing to cross the English Channel and land in Normandy. Eisenhower was ready to launch on June 5, 1944.

The weather refused to cooperate.

Group Captain James Martin Stagg, the Scottish meteorologist charged with coordinating forecasts from British and American teams, had to turn their competing analyses into one recommendation for Eisenhower.

The film compresses that system into two clear options. American meteorologist Irving P. Krick trusted historical patterns and forecast manageable conditions. Stagg saw a storm that he believed would make a June 5 invasion dangerously difficult.

Neither adviser was a villain. Neither had certainty. Eisenhower needed both of them. Stagg had to tell the Supreme Allied Commander that the forecast he wanted was probably wrong. Eisenhower listened — even to the adviser he did not particularly like— and postponed the invasion.

In the hours that followed, the competing teams kept working. Stagg found an imperfect break on June 6. Conditions would still be rough, but they might be good enough. Eisenhower took the advice and gave the order. The rest is history.

Stagg’s courage was telling Eisenhower what he did not want to hear. Krick’s value was forcing Stagg’s assumptions to survive a real challenge. Eisenhower’s greatness was making room for both men, including the one who turned out to be wrong.

That is leadership.

Humans on-stage and in-the-loop

Pressure was commissioned by the Royal Lyceum Theatre in Edinburgh, which asked Haig to write about an overlooked Scottish hero. For a playwright, it is a dream assignment: take a footnote in history and turn it into human drama. The play premiered there in 2014 and reached London’s West End four years later.

Today the same argument would center on artificial intelligence. The real question is not simply which AI system is smarter. It is who chose the system. Selecting an AI contractor is not merely buying software. It is deciding whose assumptions and version of reality will be allowed into the decision-maker’s room. A government and a corporation can procure an algorithm. It cannot procure judgment.

Like Ike, Matt Damon’s Odysseus, the warrior at the center of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, faces the same problem. He receives warnings from gods, counsel from allies and resistance from his crew. He must decide which voices to trust and when the plan must change. Eisenhower faced Churchill, Stagg, Krick and a command structure full of strong personalities and competing forecasts. Stagg faced experts who sincerely believed he was both an a-hole and wrong.

Whether the technology is a Trojan horse, a weather balloon or artificial intelligence, the technology changes. The pressure does not.

Years later while riding to his inauguration, Kennedy turned to Eisenhower for the same reason. They came from opposing parties, different generations and different visions of America. Kennedy had just defeated Eisenhower vice president Richard Nixon. Still, Kennedy sought Eisenhower’s advice.

America has always been a country of competing forecasts. The system endures when leaders are willing to listen across rivalry and ego. Kennedy asked Eisenhower how America won D-Day. Eisenhower said we had better meteorologists.

What Eisenhower might also have told the young president-elect was this: We trusted the ones with whom we disliked and disagreed.

I just got back from my first space launch at Vandenberg out in California. No, I wasn’t on the rocket. But, hey — one small step…

This wasn’t just any launch. It was history. Little did I know that I witnessed the first ever — of all time… in global history — commercial space nuclear satellite launch into orbit. How’s that for the rocket’s red glare on America’s 250th?

Potomac Database CEO Jake Matthews invited me to tag along with space regulatory expert Alex Gilbert to watch City Labs to watch the SpaceX rideshare launch of City Labs’ nuclear satellite. I wrote it up for mtf.news, which you can read here. And lookout for my upcoming HELLO FUTURE episode with the City Labs CEO Peter Cabauy.

City Labs didn’t launch a reactor, but a small, quiet, persistent tritium battery the size of a piece of bubblegum. The kind of power source that actually matters when the next space race is won by whoever can keep operating once the lights go out — and space has a lot of dark, especially when there’s no sun.

As I always say: The Earth may revolve around the Sun but the space economy revolves around the Moon.

As I also always say: To work in space, you don’t have to be an astrophysicist or an astronaut — you just can’t be an a-hole. Space-collar jobs is the U.S. economy’s biggest bright spot. And City Labs’ team is a microcosm of it. This is the workforce that will actually build the lunar economy (and beyond).

HOW A SMALL BATTERY ACTUALLY GOT TO ORBIT: This wasn’t a rocket that showed up with one payload ready to fly. It was years of unglamorous work across states and teams. City Labs is based in Miami. Their team ran a literal cross-country driving relay from New York to deliver the hardware safely instead of risking it on a plane. Here are my five takeaways:

1. THE REAL JOURNEY TO ORBIT HAPPENS ON THE GROUND: Infrastructure isn’t just the rocket. It’s the handoffs, the safety cases, the integration work, and the brokers who turn dozens of separate payloads into one reliable flight. That’s the real launch system. On July 7, 2026, SpaceX’s Transporter-17 rideshare carried 81 total satellites — including City Labs’ softball-sized 1U CubeSat called BOHR — stacked together on a single Space X Falcon 9 from Vandenberg. Exolaunch handled the complex integration and logistics that made the whole stack possible. Repeatable ground infrastructure is what actually scales commercial space. Source: Space Daily

2. REGULATORY APPROVAL IS THE ACTUAL LAUNCH INFRASTRUCTURE: City Labs didn’t just build hardware. They cleared the first commercial nuclear payload through the FAA and set a precedent future missions will ride on. In space, the permit often matters more than the press release. This was the first mission approved under the FAA’s new nuclear licensing process tied to National Security Presidential Memorandum-20. The FAA gave affirmative payload authorization on September 30, 2025, after safety analysis led by City Labs and validated by Sandia National Laboratories. That green light creates a repeatable template for other companies. Source: mtf.news

3. RIDESHARES ARE HOW COMMERCIAL SPACE ACTUALLY SCALES: SpaceX provides the rocket. Companies like Exolaunch make the economics work for the long tail of customers who could never fill a dedicated launcher. This is the business model now — repeatable stacks of logistics, regulators, and small teams that can do it cheaper and faster every time. SpaceX has launched over 1,800 payloads through its Transporter series since 2021, routinely flying 70–100 satellites per mission. City Labs’ BOHR satellite flew as one of 81 on Transporter-17, proving the rideshare model turns one rocket into dozens of commercial missions. Source: Space Daily

4. PERSISTENT POWER IS THE MISSING LAYER FOR REAL OPERATIONS: Solar works until the Sun disappears. The Moon has long nights (up to 14 Earth days) and permanently shadowed craters where solar is useless and batteries freeze. A small nuclear battery the size of a piece of bubble gum that keeps working in the dark for 20 years isn’t flashy — it’s the brick that makes lunar infrastructure, autonomous systems, and long-duration missions possible. City Labs’ NanoTritium battery works for 20+ years with no moving parts, no sunlight, and no maintenance. City Labs just proved the commercial path exists for sensors, memory retention, telemetry, and beacons that need to survive the dark. Source: Florida Today

5. SPACE COLLAR JOBS ARE THE FUTURE FOR ALL OF US: City Labs’ team is a microcosm of the future of America’s workforce, which I call Space Collar Jobs: The CEO who knows how to build a work force for the future. The Gen Z engineer two months into her first job. The former teacher who pivoted because why not. The nuclear safety veteran who still calls it trailblazing. They didn’t perform for the cameras. They delivered. My old world rewarded the green-room act. For as future-focused as the space industry is, it’s being built by old-school American values of hard work and team effort and grit with grace.

Sometimes the thing that changes everything isn’t the biggest object on the rocket.
Sometimes it’s the small one built to keep working when everything else goes dark.

Subscribe to HELLO FUTURE: iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of conflict — not necessarily in a hot war capacity, but in the sense of slowly boiling the frog. It’s a theme that’s developed across my reporting in recent months, most notably in my conversation with Gen. Gagnon of the U.S. Space Force and with recently retired Pentagon CIO Leslie Beavers, who told me that we are facing a sustained cyber-invasion.

With this on my mind, I sat down with former Congressman Mike Conaway, who was a member of the House Intelligence Committee and chaired the House Agriculture Committee. I also wanted him joined by Christine Bordine, who's 37 year career spanned across several administrations from Regan to Trump and most recently served as the Dep. Director for the Defense Intelligence Agency.

I wanted to better understand how the Strait of Hormuz was impacting Americans at the grocery store — and whether the pain millions are still feeling can be connected to the geopolitics of that narrow waterway.

The answer: Yes, it can.

But it also teaches us something powerful: our adversaries know that food security is national security. And national security includes food security. What’s happening at the Strait of Hormuz directly impacts both.

If you’re looking for partisan analysis, this is not the piece for you. This is a piece about America’s exposure to the world’s critical straits and how those vulnerabilities reach our kitchen tables.

Food security is national security. The Strait of Hormuz illustrates how geopolitics hits Americans at the grocery store.

The disruption in the Strait of Hormuz is already driving up costs for the food Americans buy every week. Conaway laid out how farmers face higher costs they cannot fully pass along because they are price takers on both ends of the market. Transportation expenses, which already make up a significant share of final food prices, climb when energy and shipping markets are disrupted.

—> KEY QUOTE, Bordine: “The really interesting thing that happened with the Strait of Hormuz closure is that it wasn’t necessarily the mines or the blockades that really impacted it — it was the decision of the insurance companies not to insure the ships transiting the Strait, because there’s no way to guarantee a ship won’t be hit by a mine.”

While the United States produces much of its own food, we operate in a global system where disruptions anywhere create price pressure everywhere. This is not just about empty shelves in other countries — it is about higher costs showing up at checkout for American families right now.

Last month, the government stopped extra taxes on fertilizer from Morocco for eight months. Critics of this approach say that this might make fertilizer a little cheaper for now, but it hurts American companies that make fertilizer here at home. Relying on other countries for important farm supplies is not a smart plan and can put our food and national security at risk later.

Conaway said phosphate fertilizers depend on sulfur — with roughly half the world’s supply moving through the Strait — while nitrogen fertilizers rely on natural gas and LNG that also transit the region. When those routes are threatened, he explained, input costs for farmers rise sharply.

—> KEY QUOTE, Conaway: “What China has done — to self-protect — they have historically been a large exporter of fertilizer, and they’ve never restricted it significantly to protect their own growing season. But now that supply is no longer in the market. So fertilizer prices have gone up high.”

—> BOTTOM LINE: China’s decision to restrict its own fertilizer exports to protect domestic supply has tightened global availability even more. The result is steady upward pressure on grocery bills at a time when many households are already feeling squeezed. “A nation that can feed itself is certainly more secure than a nation dependent on getting food from other parts of the world,” Conaway told me. “…If we depend on bringing in food, and the disruption happens, it’s not just higher costs in grocery stores — people get empty shelves. Something no American has experienced since the Dust Bowl in the 1930s.”

The Strait of Hormuz is one of several chokepoints U.S. detractors are looking to exploit.

The crisis shows how adversaries can use relatively cheap tools to disrupt global trade at key maritime chokepoints. Bordine explained that mines combined with anti-access capabilities — and especially the private sector’s reaction through insurance companies withdrawing coverage — can effectively shut down vital waterways without triggering full-scale war. This low-cost, high-impact approach is now being studied closely by other actors.

—> KEY QUOTE, Conaway: “Each of these choke points — the rest of the ways the world can resist a closed strait — each is different. There are potential workarounds, and the capital system will find a way to fix those issues.”

The lessons extend well beyond one strait. Similar tactics could be applied at other vulnerable passages around the world, forcing the United States and its allies to rethink how we defend and harden critical trade routes. Conaway noted that while workarounds exist and markets are nimble, the underlying vulnerability remains. This is not traditional naval warfare — it is asymmetric pressure that exploits our dependence on open sea lanes. Detractors are watching and learning how to turn geography into leverage without firing a shot.

—> KEY QUOTE, Bordine: “This is very instructive for Taiwan. There are scenarios for trying to get a repatriation — China ‘retaking’ Taiwan — and being able to watch a second-tier country essentially block off a major waterway with mines and anti-access/area-denial capabilities, controlling a waterway without ever really having to fire a shot, is instructive for what they could do relative to Taiwan.”

The Chinese Communist Party is Watching for what the Strait of Hormuz reveals about a potential future conflict with Taiwan.

Beijing is not sitting on the sidelines. Bordine pointed out that China has received preferential treatment from Iran, including discounted shipping and the ability to pay in yuan rather than dollars. This arrangement gives China both short-term energy security and a longer-term tool to chip away at dollar dominance in global trade. At the same time, China is accelerating alternative routes — such as the Siberia pipeline and Arctic shipping lanes — to reduce its own future exposure to similar disruptions.

—> KEY QUOTE, Bordine: “The reason China didn’t necessarily prevent it, I think, is because of the special treatment that China receives from Iran. Iran, Russia, and China have all been sort of helping one another. ... it allowed China to continue to work with Russia to build out the Siberia pipeline, a land-based fuel line that will get fuel from that region into China in an effective manner, sidestepping any blockade concerns.”

Bottom line: These three takeaways make one thing clear: the Strait of Hormuz is not a distant problem. It is a live demonstration of how geopolitics, supply chains, and everyday affordability are now tightly linked. The prices families pay at the grocery store are increasingly shaped by decisions made far from home. Paying attention is no longer optional.

Subscribe to HELLO FUTURE: iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

CABEUS — hello future. it’s me, kev. This month, America turns 300 years young. I am writing from the U.S. Territory of Cabeus, near the Moon’s south pole, where Earth hangs above us like a blue porch light.

Light and its absence built this place. Every day here is a negotiation between what burns and what endures. As editor of Cabeus Explorer, my job is to explain this territory to the 1,938 Americans and 323 residents from Artemis partner nations who live inside our dome — and to remind Americans on Earth that we are one with them.

At 86, I am just entering the second half of my life. Quantum-designed medicine pushed average life expectancy to 156. I remember when the country turned 250. We felt older then. We feel younger now.

Back in 2026, America was tired, angry, alone, and scared. We stood at the start of the Fifth Industrial Revolution, yet it seemed the only people achieving escape velocity were the wealthy and well-connected. Ordinary Americans could see the future coming. Too many were told to wait outside.

Then came the discoveries that changed everything. Life existed all around us in the Solar System — not little green men with weapons on Mars, but small, microbial lives hiding in darkness, enduring what should have killed them, swimming in the depths of oceans on the moons orbiting Jupiter, Saturn, and Neptune.

The discoveries reminded us that life is stubborn, defiant, resilient. The knowledge from those harsh worlds helped extend human life on Earth. We cured diseases our children will never know. If life could survive through the coldest, darkest times, maybe we can, too.

The Place We Call Home

They asked me to say a few words about Cabeus during our Fourth of July celebration. I know most of you have heard this story before — but that is the point. Fifty years ago, almost no one knew how to pronounce this place. Cabeus (kuh-bay-us) is named after a crater on the Moon’s South Pole.

Unlike Earth, the Moon doesn’t rotate. Parts of the Moon’s South Pole sit in constant sunlight — perfect real estate due to solar energy. But constant sunlight means temperatures too hot for ice to exist.

Then, a few billion years ago, a giant rock whacked the Moon’s South Pole, creating ridges and basins and a result? Shadows. Shadows so dark that temperatures there are several hundred degrees below freezing… far colder than any place known on Earth.

The shadows keep the ice frozen. The ice provides the hydrogen needed for fuel and cooling mechanics to protect our data centers and nuclear reactors.

That’s the miracle of Cabeus: Here, extremes do not live far apart. They exist side by side, balancing each other. At Cabeus, survival depends on learning how to live between polar opposites.

Where the extremes coexist together is where the future waits to be found.

For centuries, Cabeus was just a name on a map — first appearing in Giovanni Battista Riccioli’s 1651 lunar atlas, and named in honor of Niccolò Cabeo, the Italian Jesuit astronomer. Then NASA found water ice here in 2009. After that came landers, labs, roads, a base, and finally a town.

That is how the future works. One generation calls something impossible. The next generation calls it home.

What We Actually Celebrate

Growing up on Earth, the Fourth of July meant fireworks and hamburgers and corn on the cob and baked beans and hot dogs and watermelon. I am a grandson of the Greatest Generation, raised outside Philadelphia, the birthplace of the American experiment. I became a journalist who only ever wanted to be an astronaut. Because of the American dream, I get to be both.

As a boy, I remember dreaming up all sorts of space games with the kids on my street. Fifty years ago? My career would seem like science fiction. Today? It’s ordinary.

My parents died before this became normal. My father was an engineer at an oil refinery. My mother was a schoolteacher. They were Americans who worked hard and gave their kid a telescope because he would not shut up about aliens. They never saw Cabeus become a territory.

When I look up at Earth from my window on the Moon, I don’t see division. I see Mom and Dad. I see Christmas morning in Pennsylvania, unwrapping a red plastic telescope from Santa. I see Mom tacking glow-in-the-dark stars above my childhood bed. I see Dad on the Fourth of July, tired from work, adjusting that telescope after the fireworks ended, the air still heavy with charcoal, sparklers, and smoke, lightning bugs hovering like UAPs over the Philly suburbs. I see family. I see freedom. I see faith in a nation still trying to become a more perfect union.

This Fourth of July, we will not have fireworks. Up here, fireworks would be a very bad idea.

Instead, we turn off the colony lights and look up at Earth, the Milky Way itself becoming our star-spangled banner as we sing the National Anthem.

On my desk tonight is a postcard stamped Written on the Moon. Tourists write to the people they love. Some cards go home right away. Some are sealed in lunar vaults, so someone back on Earth can know a letter from the person they lost is still waiting to arrive from the future.

In an age when almost everything arrives instantly, a handwritten note from the Moon reminds us that some things are worth waiting for. Some things are worth believing in.

So is America.

The Light We Carry Forward

Cabeus is American territory. We are American citizens. We are Americans in every way except the one that still matters most on paper. Our ask is simple: we want to vote. Really vote. We are not asking to leave America. We are asking to be counted fully inside it.

That, too, is America — a nation that builds the future while sometimes asking its own citizens to keep waiting for promises already made. We are Americans not because we were born on Earth, but because we inherited the same promise: that people can govern themselves, that freedom belongs to all of us, and that the future is not something we predict. It is something we create.

Here is what I am writing on my postcard tonight that I’ve asked to be delivered back to Earth on America’s 500th birthday:

Happy 500th birthday, America. From the brightest and darkest place we ever learned to call home, we still see you shining. We are still building. Still arguing. Still laughing. Still reaching for the next frontier.

And still writing home.

With gratitude,

Kev

— Kevin Cirilli is the editor of Cabeus Explorer, the largest media platform headquartered on the Moon.

Subscribe to HELLO FUTURE: iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

hello, future. it’s me, kev.

hello, future. it’s me, kev.

Fifty years ago this summer, America held its breath on Mars.

On July 20, 1976, NASA’s Viking 1 became the first American spacecraft to land on Mars and keep working. It sat there in the red dust, alone on another world, with a small biology lab tucked inside its metal body.

Viking was an enormous mission — two spacecraft with orbiters, landers, cameras, weather instruments, and multiple experiments — but today I want share one small, human piece of it: the biology team’s argument over whether a single test had found signs of life on Mars.

A robotic arm reached down, scooped up Martian soil and fed it a nutrient solution tagged with radioactive carbon. If tiny living things were hiding in the dirt, they might eat, release gas and give themselves away.

Put simply, NASA gave Mars a snack and waited to see if microbe aliens would burp back.

It took less than 20 minutes for the data to travel at the speed of light from Mars to Pasadena. At NASA, a team of about 20 scientists watched the numbers arrive one line at a time. Some saw alien burps — proof of life. Some saw bubbles — proof of nothing. And some were unsure, which may be the most honest place a scientist can stand.

Trust me: compared with the stakes in that room, presidential politics looked like a petty catfight on a pale blue dot.

At the center stood Harold Klein, Viking’s biology team leader at NASA Ames Research Center. He is now widely regarded as the father of astrobiology.

He was not merely a spokesman. He was the scientist responsible for helping interpret results that could alter humanity’s understanding of itself. Behind him were years of American engineering and scientific discipline. In front of him was a press corps hungry for revelation.

At a hastily called press conference in early August 1976, Klein stepped before the microphones.

“We have at least preliminary evidence of a very active surface material,” he said. “It looks at first indication very much like biological activity.”

That was enough. The wires lit up. The New York Times ran the story with the headline: “Scientists Say Data Could Be First Hint of Life on the Planet.” Nobody at NASA had announced Martians. Nobody had declared microbes. But for one brief national instant, the possibility was allowed to breathe.

Meet the Jury

The experiment that lit the fuse was called Labeled Release. NASA basically recruited a guy who spent years studying actual shit in sewage treatment plants and asked him to go look for alien farts on Mars. His name was Gilbert Levin.

His idea was simple: drop a special nutrient snack laced with radioactive carbon into Martian soil. If anything living was down there and eating the food, it would give off radioactive gas. The signal came back strong.

But Mars refused to give a straight answer. The other Viking experiments pointed to chemistry, not life. The red dirt was strange and highly reactive — it could fake the signs of life without any living thing actually being there. What looked like biology might have been nothing more than weird Martian chemistry — bubbles.

So the Viking team turned into something like a jury deciding the biggest case in human history. And Harold “Chuck” Klein was the guy in charge. Meet the team:

• Harold “Chuck” Klein was the leader and the steady hand. The son of Hungarian immigrants who arrived through Ellis Island, Klein was a Berkeley-trained microbiologist who served in the Army during World War II. On Viking, he had the toughest job: keep the excitement alive without letting it run wild. He protected the wonder, but he refused to let hope get ahead of the evidence. The father of astrobiology.

• Gilbert Levin was the man making the case for life. The Baltimore engineer who went from cleaning up human waste in sewage plants to hunting for signs of life on another planet. He trusted his machine. He trusted the data. And he spent the rest of his life arguing that the test had done exactly what it was built to do.

• Patricia Straat was the swing vote. A Rochester-born biochemist who knew the constellations by age twelve. She helped turn Levin’s idea into hardware that could survive the trip to Mars. She didn’t rush to Levin’s conclusion at first, but as new evidence about water on Mars came in over the years, she moved closer to his side.

News from The New York Times paints a picture of how the Viking Mars-life story played out — from early excitement, to expanding ambition, to scientific caution and uncertainty.

• Aug. 1, 1976 — Early tests raise eyebrows: “Viking Finds Mars Oxygen Is Unexpectedly Abundant.” The first soil results suggested Mars was chemically stranger than expected, with unexpectedly abundant oxygen complicating the search for life.

• Aug. 8, 1976 — The hint of life gets stronger: “Tests by Viking Strengthen Hint of Life on Mars.” Viking’s biology experiments appeared to produce a life-like signal, but scientists urged caution before declaring anything alive.

• Aug. 11, 1976 — The imagination expands beyond Viking: “Going Beyond Viking 1: Touring Mars on Wheels”. As Viking captured public attention, the conversation quickly moved from one lander’s test results to bigger visions of mobile exploration on Mars.

• Aug. 14, 1976 — The life theory takes a hit: “Mars Life Theory Receives Setback”. Follow-up findings undercut the biological interpretation, pointing instead toward nonliving chemical reactions in the Martian soil.

• Nov. 10, 1976 — The verdict stays unresolved: “Scientists Are Still of Two Minds About Life on Mars”. Months later, the debate remained unsettled: Viking had not proved life, but it also had not fully ended the argument.

Signs of Life

This is why the story still has a pulse. It is not only a science story. It is a character test. Can a country be bold enough to ask the biggest question and mature enough not to force the answer?

One of my favorite movies is Signs. It is not really about aliens. It is about small things lining up — a glass of water, a child’s asthma, a brother’s baseball swing — and a family learning how to believe again. Real discovery works the same way. A sterile scoop. A calibrated instrument. A delayed signal. A careful sentence. A scientist willing to be unpopular. Another willing to keep arguing after the cameras leave.

Viking reminds us what real discovery looks like — and maybe what a divided country forgets: A team staring at the same data and seeing different things, yet still staying in the room together. That may be the lesson.

In polarizing times, the hard work is not pretending uncertainty is weakness. It is admitting what we know, naming what we do not, and refusing to let our need for an answer become more important than the truth.

Viking’s greatness was not that it settled the question of life on Mars. It was that it showed a country how to ask the biggest question without breaking under the weight of not knowing.

And somewhere out there, maybe a little alien microbe is still burping back at us.

With gratitude,
Kev

LinkedIn. Sign-up to receive the future in your inbox here.

Subscribe now

ABOUT mtf.tv’s meet the future: mtf.tv’s meet the future is a cutting-edge platform focused on addressing key challenges at the intersection of national security, technology, and business. With a mission to embrace freedom to meet the future’s challenges and opportunities, mtf.tv offers forward-thinking media offerings and forums. mtf.tv produces the daily HELLO FUTURE show on iHeart Media’s Premiere Network, which reaches 9 in 10 Americans. iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

I got rid of my television a few months ago. Not because I stopped caring about the news. The opposite. I cared enough to admit the return on the time I spent with the machine no longer seemed worth it.

Television has become so reductive that the tabloid section in the checkout line at the grocery store reads like Thornton Wilder and Arthur Miller. For me, Willy Loman’s briefcase in 2026 might as well be a flat screen TV.

I report a lot on space exploration and futurism, but that does not mean I want technology to make us less human. Quite the opposite, really.

Recently, I was back in Washington, D.C., and walked right past the birthplace of television — not metaphorically, literally. Dupont Circle, the 1500 block of Connecticut Avenue NW, in one of those unassuming old Washington buildings that looks too sturdy to advertise itself. It is easy to miss if you are checking your phone, hurrying to brunch or doing what Washington does best: pretending proximity to power is the same thing as purpose.

The Man Who Made Pictures Move

Inside that building, 103 years ago this month, Charles Francis Jenkins helped prove that moving images could travel through the air. He was not the sole inventor of modern television; no serious history of television belongs to one American. But Jenkins was one of the medium’s essential pioneers: a farm kid turned American inventor, a former stenographer with a workshop mind, more than 400 patents and the temperament of someone who saw a limitation and took it personally.

The story that survives is uniquely American: A deaf child wrote to Jenkins asking whether he could create a device that would allow deaf people to see sign language from a distance. Think about what had to go right for that letter to matter. A child had to believe the future might answer back. An inventor had to open the mail. A country had to produce institutions, laboratories, radio engineers and military research serious enough to turn imagination into hardware.

And then? The future happened fast:

• In June 1923, from his Washington laboratory, Jenkins demonstrated wireless moving pictures in front of senior military leaders, investors, and policymakers.

• On June 13, 1925, he publicly demonstrated what he called radiovision, transmitting the silhouette of a rotating model windmill from a Navy facility in Anacostia to a receiver at his Connecticut Avenue lab.

• And by 1928, his Jenkins Television Corporation opened W3XK, widely regarded as the first television broadcasting station in the United States.

The military saw the implications of Jenkins’s work, and rightly so. If images could be transmitted without wires, information could move differently. Armies could coordinate. Ships could communicate. Government could see farther. A serious country invests in communications technology because communications technology shapes power. But the child saw language.

Jenkins saw both.

All because a deaf kid wrote him a letter and he found the courage to answer back.

The Executives Managed Decline

Flash-forward to today: The evidence against television’s current leadership is not subtle. Americans’ confidence in mass media — newspapers, television and radio — has fallen to 28%, the first time Gallup has measured it below 30%.

• In May 2025, Nielsen reported that streaming accounted for 44.8% of total television usage, surpassing broadcast and cable combined for the first time.

• Traditional pay-TV penetration, once above 80% of U.S. households in 2011, had fallen to 34.4% by the end of 2024.

• Pew found that 21% of Americans said in 2025 that they follow local news very closely, down from 37% in 2016.

Executives can blame technology, a politician, fragmentation, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, the phone, the algorithm or the American attention span. Some of that is real. But it is also a dodge. The internet did not make television news shallow. It exposed how shallow the incentives had become.

We rightly ask what social media executives have done to children’s attention, mental health and sense of reality. But why don’t we ask cable news executives a version of the same questions? What did they do to the American nervous system? What did they know about fear, anger and compulsive viewing? What did they reward because the ratings worked?

I believe in free speech with all my heart. Asking hard questions about media incentives should never become an excuse for censorship. But the First Amendment is not a shield against scrutiny. Too often, media executives seem to invoke free speech not to defend open debate, but to avoid one.

Americans Can Smell a Hustle

I am from Delco, so I will put this plainly: People can smell bullshit. They know when television is informing them, and they know when television is trying to keep them angry enough not to change the channel.

Americans know when television is garbage.

Television news does not need another graphics package, another ideological cage match, another panel of professional certainties or another host confusing airtime with authority.

It needs to recover its first obligation: help people see. That was the beginning. A child asked for help. Jenkins built toward that request. A century later, the people running television should walk past 1517-1519 Connecticut Avenue, look up from their phones and ask a simple question:

Would that kid recognize what we did with the machine?

With gratitude,
Kev

ABOUT mtf.tv’s meet the future: mtf.tv’s meet the future is a cutting-edge platform focused on addressing key challenges at the intersection of national security, technology, and business. With a mission to embrace freedom to meet the future’s challenges and opportunities, mtf.tv offers forward-thinking media offerings and forums. mtf.tv produces the daily HELLO FUTURE show on iHeart Media’s Premiere Network, which reaches 9 in 10 Americans. iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

SPACE JAM: REDWIRE IS GROWING STRAWBERRIES IN ORBIT AND INVESTORS ARE LOVING IT. Redwire just landed a contract to run the world’s first commercial space greenhouse on the ISS — and the market responded with an 11%+ stock pop. They’re not just sending up another experiment. They’re trying to grow actual food in space.

—> WHY STRAWBERRIES? They’re basically the perfect space crop. High in nutrients, relatively fast-growing, and tough enough to handle microgravity. Plus, who doesn’t want fresh strawberries on a long mission? Redwire will use its PONDS tech and a special biostimulant made from space-adapted microbes to see if they can produce better, more nutrient-dense berries in orbit.

—> THE BIGGER PLAY: This isn’t just about strawberries. It’s about figuring out how to sustainably feed astronauts on long-duration missions to the Moon and Mars. If you can grow fresh produce in space, you reduce the need for constant (and expensive) resupply missions from Earth. It’s a step toward real self-sufficiency beyond our planet.

—> MEET THE FUTURE: When a space company’s stock jumps because they’re growing berries in orbit, it shows investors are starting to see serious commercial potential in space agriculture.

Source: mtf.tv

hello, future. it’s me, kev.

…and this is a dispatch from the digital frontier. It’s time to meet the future NOW — with the latest on markets, tech, and freedom. The day is 155. The year is 2026. The planet is Earth.

The planet has completed roughly 42.4 percent of its orbit around the Sun. My name is Kevin Cirilli —> LinkedIn. iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora. Sign-up to receive the future in your inbox here.

Subscribe now

Back to the future...

Share mtf.tv | meet the future

SPACE

BOEING 737 IS BECOMING NASA’S NEW “VOMIT COMET” FOR MOON TRAINING NASA is bringing back the legendary Vomit Comet — and this time, it’s a modified Boeing 737. The plane will fly parabolic arcs to simulate lunar gravity so astronauts and equipment can train for Artemis Moon missions in actual 1/6th gravity conditions.

--> HOW IT WORKS: The aircraft will perform special flight paths that create about 23 seconds of lunar gravity at a time. It’s the same concept as the old Vomit Comet that trained shuttle astronauts, just updated for the Moon. Expect plenty of floating, testing gear, and yes — some motion sickness.

--> WHY THIS MATTERS: Long-duration Moon missions need real practice in low gravity. Walking, working, and handling equipment on the lunar surface feels very different from Earth. This 737 will let NASA test procedures, suits, and tools in the actual gravity environment astronauts will face — without leaving Earth’s atmosphere.

--> THE BOEING ANGLE: Yes, it’s a Boeing 737 being turned into a vomit-inducing training plane while the company is still dealing with Starliner issues. But NASA clearly still sees value in using Boeing hardware for critical Artemis support work. The future of human spaceflight sometimes looks exactly this weird.

Source: mtf.tv

FUTURE OF WORK

HIGH PERFORMERS USE AI AS CHEAT CODE TO HACK MULTIPLE REVENUE STREAMS. Welcome to 2026, where top talent is no longer betting everything on one employer. The old social contract is dead, and high performers are quietly building backup plans — including second full-time W-2 jobs — as their own form of private unemployment insurance. I dive into the study on the latest episode of HELLO FUTURE with Kevin Cirilli In an interview with fiscal policy expert Mattie Duppler, founder of Forward Strategies.

—> THE NEW REALITY: Nearly 80% of professionals now see a second full-time job as essential for financial security. More than half are still mostly working in-office at their primary role. It’s a strategic hedge against instability, layoffs, and one-directional loyalty.

—> AI CHANGED THE MATH: High-output employees are using AI tools to finish what used to be a full week’s work in around 30 hours while still exceeding expectations. Reality check: The people companies say they want to keep are the ones most able to build options elsewhere.

—> THEY’RE AIR-GAPPING THEIR INCOME: High performers are treating their careers like a portfolio instead of a single bet. They’re diversifying revenue streams so no one employer controls their livelihood. It’s not hustle culture — it’s rational risk management in an economy where volatility is the new normal.

Source: mtf.tv

ROBOTS

UKRAINE IS USING ROBOTS AND AI TO ACTUALLY WIN — NOT JUST SURVIVE Ukraine has shifted from a defensive war of attrition to actively talking about victory, and robots are a big reason why. By leaning heavily into drones, ground robots, and AI systems, Ukrainian forces are neutralizing Russia’s numerical advantage on the battlefield.

—> WHAT’S ACTUALLY WORKING: Ukraine is running robot-forward attacks and using networked AI defenses that link sensors, interceptors, and remote operators (sometimes working from Kyiv or even other countries). These systems have reportedly intercepted up to 90% of incoming Russian drones and missiles. Ground robots are also being used to hold or retake territory without putting as many soldiers in harm’s way.

THE BIGGER SHIFT: Russia’s traditional advantage — throwing more troops and equipment at the problem — is becoming less effective against cheap, fast, and increasingly autonomous systems. Ukraine has rapidly built a domestic drone and robotics industry that’s producing, modifying, and deploying systems at scale. This has damaged Russian oil infrastructure and forced Russia to change how it operates.

—> WHAT IT SIGNALS: This war is becoming a real-world test of how robotics and AI change modern conflict. Ukraine is proving that a smaller force with superior technology, tactics, and adaptability can punch well above its weight. The lessons being learned here — on both sides — will shape how militaries around the world think about future wars.

Source: Defense One

With gratitude,

Kev

ABOUT mtf.tv’s meet the future: mtf.tv’s meet the future is a cutting-edge platform focused on addressing key challenges at the intersection of national security, technology, and business. With a mission to embrace freedom to meet the future’s challenges and opportunities, mtf.tv offers forward-thinking media offerings and forums. mtf.tv produces the daily HELLO FUTURE show on iHeart Media’s Premiere Network, which reaches 9 in 10 Americans. iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

hello, future. it’s me, kev.

I think it’s time the Pope got on Substack. The Church has always been filled with early tech adapters — even Moses had a tablet.

—> FLASHBACK TO BOSTON BACK IN 1906 — CHRISTMAS EVE. Reginald Fessenden — some big-wig tech guy back in the day — had an idea that the radio should be used for more than just military tech. So he took out his violin and started playing O Holy Night on-air — making it the first song ever broadcast on radio.

That’s right… the very first song on radio was a Christian anti-slavery protest song that dates back to the Civil War (and also happens to be a Catholic Christmas Banger). Legend has it the sailors off the coast of Boston thought they were hearing angels (or they were drunk, God Bless).

—> FAST FORWARD: VATICAN CITY. CHRISTMAS DAY. 1995. One American nun — it’s always an American and it’s always a nun — was on a mission for months to get the Pope online. Her name was Sister Judith Zoebelein. And she was determined to get God online. As she told the New York Times back in the 1990s: “Technology has to have a spiritual dimension.’‘ Pope John Paul II listened to the nun and on Christmas Day, the official Vatican website launched.

On Substack, church bulletins could get an upgrade.

—> MONEY FOR PARISHES: Local parishes could start their own Substacks and have parishioners subscribe (aka: pay money ) to their parish’s content. Think of it like a weekly church bulletin with a collection basket. And a place for priests to put their daily homilies.

—> VATICAN, MEET THE FUTURE: I could go on about the Church and tech — from running space observatories (a dream interview of mine, by the way); to Pope Francis saying he’d baptize a Martian. The speed has varied, but the direction has been steady:

• When the printing press arrived in the mid-1400s, the Gutenberg Bible was one of the first major books printed. It helped spread literacy. Nowadays, maybe the Church can help spread kindness online.

• In the 1500s, St. Philip Neri loosened things up. He leaned into storytelling, music, humor, and informal gatherings to reach regular people. By today’s standards, some of his methods would land somewhere between a podcast and a well-timed meme.

• The Vatican got in early on the telephone in the early 20th century, around the same era the White House installed its first phone.

• One of the first cars in Rome belonged to the Pope around 1909–1910 — basically the original Popemobile, decades before it became a thing.

• Vatican Radio launched in 1931 under Pope Pius XI, making the Church an early player in global broadcasting at a time when radio was still relatively new.

• Popes started appearing on television in the 1950s, and the Vatican eventually built out its own TV capabilities.

• The Vatican launched its website in 1995 — just one year after the Clinton White House went online.

• It joined YouTube in 2009 and Twitter (now X) in 2012.

—> WHY THIS AMERICAN POPE AND THIS MOMENT ACTUALLY MATTER: Pope Leo XIV took his name from Leo XIII, whose encyclical Rerum Novarum directly addressed the social disruptions of the Industrial Revolution. That wasn’t just a historical callback. It showed a Pope willing to engage with major technological and economic change instead of treating it as something happening somewhere else. Most institutions — and candidly, American politicians — are still figuring out how to talk about these technologies without sounding either panicked or completely detached.

Plus, the Pope had an epic drone show at the first ever Vatican concert back in September in St. Peter’s Square…

—> WHY SUBSTACK ACTUALLY WORKS FOR THE POPE: Substack has grown into one of the more durable platforms for long-form writing in a fragmented media landscape. It was founded in 2017 by Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi with a simple idea: give writers the ability to own their audience and earn directly from readers, rather than relying on traditional media companies or ad-driven platforms.

—> Unlike social media, it isn’t optimized for outrage or constant reaction. And unlike traditional legacy media, it allows writers and institutions to communicate directly without layers of editorial filtering or algorithmic interference.

In many ways, Substack represents a return to a more direct form of media — one where the relationship between the writer (or institution) and the reader is clearer and less mediated. That aligns with how the Church has often done its best work: speaking plainly and consistently over time.

God bless.

With gratitude,
Kev

LinkedIn. Sign-up to receive the future in your inbox here.

Subscribe now

ABOUT mtf.tv’s meet the future: mtf.tv’s meet the future is a cutting-edge platform focused on addressing key challenges at the intersection of national security, technology, and business. With a mission to embrace freedom to meet the future’s challenges and opportunities, mtf.tv offers forward-thinking media offerings and forums. mtf.tv produces the daily HELLO FUTURE show on iHeart Media’s Premiere Network, which reaches 9 in 10 Americans. iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

America’s politicians are excellent at short-term fights and terrible at long-term vision. Right now, most of our national energy goes into managing the present while the real generational work sits on the sidelines.

I think we need something bigger and more honest than another five-year strategy or another headline rocket launch. We need a thousand-year deadline to Make Mars Habitable Again.

Why should Americans care about planning for one thousand years from now? Because the advances we make along the way, we can tackle climate change here on planet Earth today.

I explore the enviromentalist case for space exploration on a recent episode of my iHeart Media show HELLO FUTURE with Kevin Cirilli. Listen to that episode here.

Subscribe to HELLO FUTURE: iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

Subscribe now

I’m not talking about a few people living in sealed boxes. I’m talking about the real thing: air you can breathe outside, liquid water that stays on the surface, soil that can grow things, and eventually the conditions for more complex life. That’s what “habitable” means here — not warm corners, but a world that actually works like Earth.

—> MARS WAS ONCE A LOT MORE LIKE EARTH: Scientists have strong evidence that billions of years ago, Mars was not the frozen desert we see today. It had a thicker atmosphere, warmer temperatures, and liquid water flowing on the surface. You can still see the old river valleys and lake beds from orbit, and rovers have found minerals that only form in the presence of water.

Something changed. The atmosphere thinned, the planet cooled, and the water either froze underground or was lost to space. So when we talk about making Mars habitable again, we’re not inventing something that never existed. We’re talking about restoring conditions that were already there a long time ago.

—> TERRAFORM TIME: Terraforming is the deliberate, large-scale engineering of a planet’s atmosphere and surface to make it suitable for Earth-like life. On Mars, that means warming the planet, thickening the atmosphere, and getting liquid water to stay on the surface instead of immediately freezing or boiling away.

This idea has been in serious scientific discussion since at least the 1960s and 1970s. Researchers like Carl Sagan were already exploring whether we could warm Mars on purpose. By the 1990s, scientists such as Christopher P. McKay were publishing detailed papers on how it might be done.

—> REAL RESEARCHERS ARE ALREADY WORKING ON THIS: This isn’t internet speculation. Legitimate scientists and institutions have been studying this seriously for decades:

• Christopher P. McKay at NASA Ames has been one of the leading voices since the 1980s and co-authored the influential 1991 paper “Making Mars habitable” in the journal Nature.

• Edwin Kite and his team at the University of Chicago published a major 2026 scientific roadmap that treats warming Mars as a real engineering problem with clear stages and constraints. You can read the paper here on arXiv.

• In 2024, researchers held a dedicated Mars Terraforming Workshop (hosted by the Astera Institute and Pioneer Labs), which led to a perspective paper in Nature Astronomy making the case for sustained scientific work on making the planet habitable.

• Martyn J. Fogg’s 1995 book Terraforming: Engineering Planetary Environments remains one of the foundational technical texts in the field.

These are serious people doing serious work at real institutions.

WHY A THOUSAND-YEAR PLAN ACTUALLY MAKES SENSE: Full terraforming — real breathable air, stable oceans, and functioning ecosystems — is not a project that finishes in one or two generations. The physics and the scale suggest it could take centuries, possibly approaching a thousand years to do properly.

We could have research outposts and even small colonies much sooner. But living your entire life inside pressurized habitats with no real sky and no ability to step outside unprotected is not a future most people would choose. A thousand-year plan is honest about the difference between having a presence on Mars and actually making it a livable world.

THE WORK WE DO ALONG THE WAY HELPS US ON EARTH RIGHT NOW: This is where the long timeline becomes practical. Every major technical challenge we solve to make Mars habitable creates tools we can use on Earth immediately — better materials for extreme environments, highly efficient systems for recycling air and water, new approaches to building with local resources, and much deeper understanding of how planetary climates actually work. Those capabilities don’t wait until Mars is finished. They start paying off as soon as we get serious about solving the problems.

—> AMERICA IS THE ONLY COUNTRY THAT CAN LEAD THIS: This isn’t just a science project. It’s a civilizational one. America has always done its best work when it has a place to test whether our innovation and our freedom could scale. Mars is the clearest frontier left. Right now, no other country combines the capital, the engineering culture, the willingness to take big risks, and the belief in expanding human freedom the way the United States still can.

We can keep managing the same narrow fights on Earth. Or we can give ourselves — and the generations after us — something worthy of a great nation: the chance to extend human life and human possibility to another world while learning how to better protect the one we already have.

The third rock from the sun doesn’t take care of itself. We do that by thinking bigger and longer than we’re used to.

With gratitude,
Kev

Sources: Phys.org – Could we actually terraform Mars? A new scientific roadmap lays out the blueprint; Starlust – Can we really terraform Mars? New study outlines a plan and the challenges; Universe Magazine – Can we really terraform Mars?

Team — today’s newsletter features TWO news articles that I wrote on mtf.tv (soon to be expanded into mtf.news)….

Back to the future…

NASA JUST UNVEILED ITS MOON BASE PLAN... AND IT’S STARTING THIS YEAR! NASA is moving fast to build America’s first real outpost on the Moon. The plan focuses on the lunar South Pole and kicks off with a series of robotic missions in 2026 to test landing, moving around, and surviving on the Moon before humans arrive.

--> THE FIRST MISSIONS ARE ALREADY LINED UP: Three robotic missions are scheduled for this year. Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander will deliver gear to study landing sites. Astrobotic’s Griffin lander will bring a rover to test mobility. Intuitive Machines will fly another lander to study lunar “swirls.” These are just the beginning — NASA says over a dozen more robotic flights are coming.

--> BIG CONTRACTS AND NEW TECH: Companies like Astrolab and Lunar Outpost just won big contracts worth over $400 million combined to build lunar terrain vehicles that astronauts can drive on the Moon by 2028. Blue Origin also landed a major deal to deliver cargo to the South Pole. A cool new “Moonfall” drone mission is planned for 2028 to hop around and scout landing spots.

--> WHY THIS MATTERS FOR THE FUTURE: This isn’t just about planting a flag. NASA wants to learn how to live and work on another world so we can eventually go to Mars. The Moon base will help test new tech, use local resources, and build a real economy in space. With the global space economy already at $626 billion and growing fast, America is racing to lead the way before other countries do.

Source: mtf.tv from my reporting yesterday.

MONEY

SPACEX IPO COULD CREATE A NEW WAVE OF MILLIONAIRES... HERE’S HOW SpaceX is reportedly planning a massive IPO as soon as June 2026 that could value the company at nearly $2 trillion — the largest IPO in history. While buying SpaceX stock directly would be the obvious play, experts say the real money might be made in companies that help power SpaceX’s growth.

--> THE BIG PICTURE: SpaceX’s Starlink satellite internet business is already printing money, bringing in $11.4 billion in revenue last year. The company’s next big leap depends on Starship, its massive reusable rocket that could dramatically lower the cost of getting things to space. If the IPO happens, it would be one of the most watched stock launches in years.

--> NOT JUST SPACEX STOCK: You don’t have to own SpaceX shares to benefit. Companies that supply critical parts for Starlink and Starship could see big gains too. Think chipmakers like Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor, plus networking and connectivity companies that help Starlink work. As SpaceX grows, these suppliers stand to win as well.

--> WHY THIS MATTERS: A successful SpaceX IPO wouldn’t just make Elon Musk and early investors richer — it could spark a whole new wave of wealth creation across the space and tech sectors. It would also signal that the space economy is maturing fast, moving from government contracts to mainstream public investing. The ripple effects could be huge.

Source: Yahoo Finance; Motley Fool

hello, future. it’s me, kev.

…and this is a dispatch from the digital frontier. It’s time to meet the future NOW — with the latest on markets, tech, and freedom. The day is 147. The year is 2025. The planet is Earth.

The planet has complete 40.27 percent of its orbit around the Sun. My name is Kevin Cirilli —> LinkedIn. iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora. Sign-up to receive the future in your inbox here.

Subscribe now

Back to the future...

Share mtf.tv | meet the future

SPACE

URBAN PLANNING: MOON EDITION Experts are now talking about building on the Moon the same way we build cities and business parks on Earth. At a recent town hall, space leaders said the U.S. should stop treating the Moon like a science project and start treating it like real estate — with clear rules, shared infrastructure, and a plan to attract private companies.

--> THE BIG IDEA: Create a “Lunar Innovation Park” — basically a Moon version of a business park or industrial zone. It would have landing pads, solar power, excavation sites, and reusable infrastructure that multiple companies can use. The goal is to make it easier (and less risky) for businesses to set up shop on the Moon for mining, manufacturing, and long-term operations.

--> WHY THIS APPROACH? Right now, lunar plans feel uncertain and risky to investors. The group argued that we need stable rules and shared infrastructure — like how cities build roads, ports, and utilities to attract businesses. They compared it to how Britain and the U.S. once used strong commercial presence at sea to build power and influence. Without this kind of setup, they worry China could move faster and lock in the best spots.

--> WHAT IT MEANS FOR THE FUTURE: This is a shift from “plant a flag and do science” to actually building a real economy on the Moon. If the U.S. gets serious about governance and shared infrastructure now, it could turn the Moon into a place where companies actually want to invest and operate — not just visit. Moon-adelphia might sound funny, but the thinking behind it is dead serious.

Source: Aerospace America

ROBOTS

CHINA IS RUNNING ROBOT SCHOOLS… AND THE FUTURE JUST GOT WEIRD. In China, humanoid robots aren’t just being built anymore — they’re being sent to school. Special training centers are teaching them how to fold clothes, wipe tables, carry trays, and move through real human environments like they actually live there.

--> THE ROBOT CLASSROOM: Facilities in provinces like Shandong and Hubei are running what can only be described as robot boot camps. Using motion-capture suits and virtual reality, the machines practice everyday tasks over and over. One company’s 10,000-square-meter “robot school” even has simulated homes and factories where robots learn to function in human spaces. They’ve already mastered over 20 different skills with success rates above 95%.

--> WHY THIS FEELS LIKE SCIENCE FICTION: This isn’t factory work. These robots are being trained to exist alongside us — doing chores, navigating homes, and operating in the messy, unpredictable world humans actually live in. Every session generates millions of new data points, feeding smarter and more capable machines. It’s less “robots in the workplace” and more “robots learning how to be part of daily life.”

--> WHAT IT MEANS: While much of the world is still debating what humanoid robots will eventually do, China is already running the training programs. The gap between “robots as tools” and “robots as companions or household helpers” is shrinking fast — and someone is actively teaching them how to cross it.

Source: BGR

QUANTUM // ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

QUANTUM COMPUTING JUST WENT PUBLIC... AND THE RACE IS HEATING UP One of the biggest names in quantum computing, Quantinuum, is going public in a major IPO that could value the company at up to $12.7 billion. The move signals that quantum tech is no longer just a lab experiment — it’s becoming a real business that investors are betting big on.

--> WHAT QUANTINUUM IS BRINGING: The company recently launched Helios, which it called the world’s most accurate quantum computer at the time. They’re also working on an even more advanced system called Apollo, expected by the end of the decade. These machines are getting closer to solving real problems in medicine, materials science, and encryption that regular computers can’t handle.

--> THE BIGGER PICTURE: The U.S. is pouring serious money into quantum through the CHIPS and Science Act, with billions going to companies like Quantinuum, IBM, Rigetti, and D-Wave. At the same time, China is aggressively investing in quantum tech for both economic and national security reasons. Multiple quantum companies have already gone public, showing the industry is maturing fast.

--> WHY THIS MATTERS: Quantum computing is moving from “someday” to “starting now.” As companies like Quantinuum go public and raise massive amounts of capital, the technology is getting the funding it needs to scale. The winners in this race could reshape everything from drug discovery to cybersecurity — and the U.S. is clearly trying to stay ahead.

Source: mtf.tv

With gratitude,

Kev

ABOUT mtf.tv’s meet the future: mtf.tv’s meet the future is a cutting-edge platform focused on addressing key challenges at the intersection of national security, technology, and business. With a mission to embrace freedom to meet the future’s challenges and opportunities, mtf.tv offers forward-thinking media offerings and forums. mtf.tv produces the daily HELLO FUTURE show on iHeart Media’s Premiere Network, which reaches 9 in 10 Americans. iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

hello, future. it’s me, kev.

…and this is a dispatch from the ASCEND earlier this week in Washington D.C., where the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics convened the most interesting group of thinkers in the nation.

Subscribe now

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman didn’t just give a speech at ASCEND this week — he laid out the clearest roadmap yet for what NASA looks like under his leadership. The billionaire-turned-NASA-administrator stood in front of one of the biggest space gatherings in the world and basically said: we’re not waiting around.

I reported on it over at mtf.tv, which I’m soon expanding to be mtf.news — but more on that later this summer. Read my coverage here and here.

Here are my three biggest takeaways that actually matter:

COMMERCIAL SPACE IS NO LONGER OPTIONAL — IT’S THE ONLY PATH THAT WORKS

Isaacman was blunt: the old government-only model is too slow and too expensive. He doubled down on handing more LEO work to companies like Vast, while keeping NASA focused on the deep-space stuff it does best. The message to industry was loud and clear — if you can build it cheaper, faster, and safer, NASA wants to be your biggest customer, not your competitor.

Share mtf.tv | meet the future

THE MOON IS THE PROVING GROUND — MARS IS THE GOAL

No more vague timelines. Isaacman tied Artemis directly to Mars prep, calling the Moon “the test track” for everything we’ll need on the Red Planet. He emphasized that every lunar landing, every new habitat tech, and every in-situ resource test is buying down risk for the long game. This isn’t aspirational talk — it’s a sequenced plan with commercial partners baked in from day one.

SPACE HEALTH ISN’T A SIDESHOW — IT’S A NATIONAL PRIORITY

This one hit hard. Isaacman highlighted how microgravity research is already delivering real therapies for heart failure, POTS, and other conditions back on Earth. He made it clear that NASA’s biomedical work — especially the partnerships with Cleveland Clinic and Cedars-Sinai — isn’t just nice-to-have science. It’s core to why Americans should care about space in the first place.

The bottom line from Isaacman’s speech: NASA isn’t shrinking. It’s refocusing. The agency is getting out of the way where the private sector can move faster, while doubling down on the hard stuff only it can do.

With gratitude,
Kev

Subscribe now

ABOUT mtf.tv’s meet the future: mtf.tv’s meet the future is a cutting-edge platform focused on addressing key challenges at the intersection of national security, technology, and business. With a mission to embrace freedom to meet the future’s challenges and opportunities, mtf.tv offers forward-thinking media offerings and forums. mtf.tv produces the daily HELLO FUTURE show on iHeart Media’s Premiere Network, which reaches 9 in 10 Americans. iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

His name is Kirby Runyon. He works with NASA, the Planetary Society, and the Planetary Science Institute. Kirby trains civilian astronauts. He’s also a planetary geologist, a published scientist in some the biggest science journals in the world, and has single handedly convinced me that the Moon is a planet.

So, yeah, not a bad guy to help coach me on my mission. Listen to my conversation with him on my iHeart Media show HELLO FUTURE with Kevin Cirilli. Subscribe to HELLO FUTURE: iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

And for those new here, allow me to out myself: Since I was a little kid growing up in Delco: I’ve wanted to go to space since I was a kid, and now I realize I didn’t have to figure it out alone.

What Does a Space Coach Actually Do?

Kirby is helping me understand what it really takes to prepare for space — both physically and mentally. He’s teaching me about training, fitness, and the mental toughness required for long missions. He even keeps mentioning something called the Vomit Comet (I’ll explain that one later). More than anything, he’s helping me understand that space is a team sport. Nobody gets there alone.

Lifelong dream

Growing up outside Philadelphia, my friends and I invented a game called Party on Mars. Every day at recess, we’d turn the blacktop into the Red Planet. We didn’t know anything about rockets or gravity. We just knew there was something bigger out there than the streets we grew up on.

Even back then, I was drawn to stories that made the impossible feel possible. Ursula K. Le Guin’s quiet universes. Madeleine L’Engle’s A Wrinkle in Time. Interstellar. The Martian. Apollo 13. Star Wars. October Sky. The Book of Strange New Things. These stories didn’t just entertain me — they gave me permission to dream bigger than my neighborhood.

At Bloomberg TV and Bloomberg Radio where I had a stint as the chief Washington correspondent, I once interviewed an astronaut and said out loud on air that I wanted to go to space someday.

A client later told me I should probably stop saying that because it sounded weird. She said it at the place Neil Armstrong studied to be an astronaut. I didn’t fight her. I just quietly decided that wasn’t the kind of person I wanted to keep working with. And I didn’t shut up. I launched meet the future (mtf.tv, but soon to be expanded into mtf.news).

For me, space has always been about the art of what’s possible — not just for me, but for all of us. And the truth is, almost nothing big in space happens alone.

I’ve spent more than a decade covering Washington policy. I’ve sat in rooms with powerful people. Some of it was interesting. (A lot of it was not.) But candidly, most of it played out like a re-run. Nothing has ever lit me up the way space does. There’s something about the idea of leaving Earth that feels like the ultimate act of hope. That’s why I finally made a decision.

Everybody Needs a Space Coach

I reached out to Kirby because I knew I couldn’t do this by myself. He’s helping me understand what it really takes — and more than anything, he’s helping me understand that space is a team sport.

Every major mission in space is built by thousands of people. Take Artemis II, the first crewed flight around the Moon since Apollo 17. On April 1, 2026, four astronauts traveled farther from Earth than any humans ever have. But behind them were more than 2,700 companies and thousands of workers across America and Europe. Lockheed Martin. Boeing. Northrop Grumman. Airbus. Hundreds of smaller companies. International partners from Canada, Europe, and Japan. California alone contributed more than 500 companies and 16,000 workers.

That’s what it takes to reach for the stars.

Space exploration is at its best when it includes all kinds of people — not just professional astronauts, not just celebrities, not just billionaires.

Space Will Be a Pharmacy

And more than anything — literally, with all my heart — I want to go to space to help with medical research.

Here’s the simple reason why: When people live in space, their bodies change in ways we still don’t fully understand. By taking blood samples up there, scientists can see exactly what’s happening inside the human body. This helps them create better medicine — not just for astronauts, but for people right here on Earth too.

It’s like trying to fix a car but only being able to look at it from far away. Going to space lets scientists look under the hood while it’s running.

The truth is, space is going to become a pharmacy. In the future, some of our most important medicines may be made, improved, or even discovered in orbit. If we invest in this research now, we could unlock treatments that are impossible to create on Earth.

Don’t believe me? Here’s what that research looks like right now, grouped by what they’re trying to help:

—> HIV and AIDS: Varda Space Industries has already grown better crystals of an HIV medication in orbit, creating a more stable and effective version of the drug.

—> Cancer: Merck used space to improve Keytruda, one of the most important cancer medicines in the world. BioOrbit is working on cancer treatments that could one day be given as simple shots at home. AstraZeneca and Bristol Myers Squibb are also using space to make cancer drugs and vaccines work better.

—> Brain diseases like Alzheimer’s, Dementia, and Parkinson’s: Cedars-Sinai researchers are growing mini brains and heart tissues in space to test new medicines faster. SpacePharma is running experiments on aging and brain-related conditions.

—> Muscle and bone problems: Amgen did early work in space that helped create Prolia, a medicine for osteoporosis and weak bones. Redwire and others are studying how to protect muscles and bones during long space missions.

—> Eyes and vision: LambdaVision has flown multiple missions to grow special proteins in space to build artificial retinas that could one day help blind people see again. Space Tango is helping with advanced eye and organ research.

I want to be part of this work. I want to help collect the data that could save lives. I’m not trying to go to space to check a box or chase a headline. I’m going because I believe the medical insights we gather up there could have real, lasting benefits here on Earth too.

The other day I asked Kirby if there was any chance I could bring my dog Theo with me. He told me about Laika, the brave little Russian dog who was the first to go to space — but didn’t make it back. “Probably best to leave Theo here on Earth,” he said.

Fair enough. Some journeys you take knowing the ones you love most are cheering you on from home. But you take advice from Coach with you where you go in the Universe.

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately: Do you know someone who has battled cancer? Heart disease? HIV/AIDS?

What if I told you that some of the most promising breakthroughs for treatments aren’t coming from traditional labs on Earth — but from 250 miles above it? Cancer. Heart disease. Bone density. Stem cell research. Muscle atrophy. You name it — the future of medicine is in space.

That was the powerful message delivered this week at the ASCEND conference in Washington, D.C., one of the largest and most influential space summits in the world powered by the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA).

Two of the nation’s leading hospitals — Cleveland Clinic and Cedars-Sinai — descended onto ASCEND to share a truth that still surprises most people: discoveries made in microgravity are already saving and improving lives right here on Earth. Patients just don’t know it yet.

Why is space good for medicine? Put very simply: In microgravity, cells and tissues can grow and organize in three dimensions the way they naturally do inside the human body — something that’s difficult or impossible under the constant pull of Earth’s gravity.

SPACE RESEARCH ALREADY TREATING EARTH PATIENTS

Kenneth Mayuga, director of the Cleveland Clinic Space Health Center, put it plainly after spending two straight weeks caring for very sick heart failure patients.

“Space-based research actually does have a very real effect on people’s health here on Earth,” he said.

Mayuga explained that one of the most effective therapies for Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome (POTS) — a debilitating condition that causes dizziness and near-fainting — was originally developed for astronauts. His team has since used that same exercise protocol to help more than a thousand patients on Earth.

He also noted that the left ventricular assist device (LVAD), a lifeline for advanced heart failure patients, traces its roots to NASA technology. The rate of POTS is rising, he added, partly because more people are surviving cancer but living with long-term side effects. “Without the experience that we had from NASA and astronauts,” Mayuga said, “we would’ve been a step behind.”

LEADING HOSPITALS ADVANCE SPACE MEDICINE

This isn’t fringe science anymore. Cleveland Clinic and Cedars-Sinai have both launched dedicated space health programs. Cedars-Sinai has partnered with Vast Space to conduct cutting-edge biomedical research aboard the company’s Haven-1 commercial space station, set to launch in 2027. The collaboration focuses on stem cell research, organoid development, and crew health in microgravity.

Arun Sharma, director of Cedars-Sinai’s Center for Space Medicine Research, said the field is exploding.

“It’s multiple teams of stem cell research across multiple disciplines,” Sharma said. “That tells us that this field has rapidly grown and folks are really taking it seriously.”

TRANSLATING SPACE SCIENCE TO EARTH — AND BEYOND

Kate Rubins, a NASA astronaut who became the first person to sequence DNA in space during her 2016 mission to the International Space Station, emphasized the urgent need to bring these discoveries down to Earth — especially for rural and underserved communities.

She pointed to the growing importance of point-of-care molecular diagnostics, technology that could one day prove critical not just for astronauts on the Moon or Mars, but for patients here at home who lack access to advanced hospitals.

Michael Roberts, chief scientist at the ISS National Lab, said the lab has always existed to turn orbital research into real-world impact — both in space and on Earth.

INSPIRING THE NEXT GENERATION

The panel closed with a clear call to action: we need more young people in this field. Arun Sharma described a one-week space medicine education program designed to show students — especially those who never saw space as part of their future — the real health challenges of spaceflight.

“We’ve already seen shifting into space-related careers,” he said.

THE FUTURE IS ALREADY HERE

This is the part that gets me excited. We’re not waiting for some distant sci-fi future where space medicine magically appears. It’s already happening. Right now. In hospitals across America. In the form of better heart treatments, smarter diagnostics, and therapies born from the unique conditions of microgravity.

The next time you hear someone say space exploration is a waste of money, remember this: some of the cures we’ve been praying for may already be floating above our heads — we just haven’t fully connected the dots yet.

The future of medicine isn’t just on Earth anymore. It’s in orbit. And it’s already saving lives.

With gratitude,
Kev

CAN MARTHA STEWART BRING AI INTO AMERICANS’ HOMES? The lifestyle icon has co-founded Hint, an always-on AI home management platform that predicts and prevents home problems before they happen. She raised $10 million in seed funding led by Slow Ventures (with Montauk Capital, Tusk Venture Partners, and Brian Kelly also backing) and is launching this summer on desktop, iOS, and web.

—> HOW HINT WORKS AND MARTHA’S VISION: Users enter their address and Hint pulls public data like flood risk and property history. They upload warranties, insurance policies, inspection reports, and bills, and the AI builds a living record of the home’s needs. It sends smart reminders for maintenance like roof replacements or policy renewals and recommends trusted contractors.

—> WHY AI INVESTORS ARE PARTNERING WITH HER: Investors see Martha Stewart as the perfect bridge between cutting-edge AI and everyday consumers. Her massive brand trust, combined with real hands-on expertise, makes AI feel approachable and useful instead of cold or abstract. They’re betting that the $500 billion home repair market is ready for proactive, predictive AI — and that Martha is the one person who can make it feel both premium and practical.

—> WHAT THIS TELLS US ABOUT WHERE AI IS GOING: AI is now moving into deeply personal, lifestyle-driven spaces through trusted cultural figures. Martha Stewart partnering with AI investors shows that the future belongs to AI that feels human, helpful, and embedded in real life — not just in apps, but in actual homes.

Sources: Entrepreneur | Morning Brew | Fast Company

hello, future. it’s me, kev.

…and this is a dispatch from the digital frontier. It’s time to meet the future NOW — with the latest on markets, tech, and freedom. The day is 138. The year is 2025. The planet is Earth.

The planet has complete 37.81 percent of its orbit around the Sun. My name is Kevin Cirilli —> LinkedIn. iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora. Sign-up to receive the future in your inbox here.

Subscribe now

Back to the future...

Share mtf.tv | meet the future

SPACE

SMALL ASTEROID HITS EARTH... BUT IT BURNED UP SAFELY OVER THE OCEAN! A tiny asteroid named 2026 JN4 entered Earth’s atmosphere on May 15 and broke apart over the Arafura Sea, between Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. It was only about 2 to 4 feet wide — roughly the size of a large beach ball — and caused no damage.

--> WHAT HAPPENED: The asteroid entered at 1:44 p.m. UTC and completely disintegrated high in the atmosphere before it could reach the ground. Scientists had predicted the impact days in advance using data from ESA and NASA systems. This was only the 12th time astronomers successfully predicted an asteroid impact before it happened.

--> WHY THIS IS COOL (AND NOT SCARY): Even though it sounds dramatic, asteroids this small are very common and almost never reach the ground. They usually burn up like shooting stars. This one was detected early, tracked carefully, and posed zero threat to people. It’s actually a good sign that our early warning systems are getting better at spotting these space rocks before they get close.

Source: Watchers News

QUANTUM // ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE

POPE LEO STARTS AI TEAM... THE CHURCH IS GETTING READY FOR ROBOTS! Pope Leo the Fourteenth just launched a new team to study artificial intelligence. The Catholic Church wants to understand how AI and smart robots will affect people’s lives, jobs, and values — and they’re not waiting around.

--> THE BIG ANNOUNCEMENT: On May 17, the Pope officially created the AI Commission. This comes right before his first major letter (called an encyclical), which will be released soon. That letter will lay out the Church’s official stance on AI and how it should be used responsibly.

--> WHAT THE AI TEAM WILL DO: The new commission will guide the Church’s response to AI. It will focus on protecting human dignity, fairness, and jobs as AI gets smarter and more powerful. The Pope believes the Church has an important role to play in making sure AI helps people instead of hurting them.

Source: Politico | The Atlantic

TITAN // SPACE // SATURN // ENERGY

NUCLEAR SPACECRAFT COULD GET HUMANS TO TITAN IN JUST 220 DAYS! Scientists are working on a powerful new engine that uses nuclear heat to send people all the way to Saturn’s moon Titan much faster than ever before. A one-way trip could take only 220 days — that’s a huge improvement over current technology.

--> HOW THE NEW ENGINE WORKS: The system is called nuclear thermal propulsion. It uses a small nuclear reactor to super-heat liquid hydrogen, creating a powerful push that can move spacecraft much quicker through deep space. This technology could cut travel time to Titan (which is 17 times farther than Mars) down to less than 8 months one way.

--> WHY TITAN IS WORTH THE TRIP: Titan is one of the most interesting places in our solar system. It has a thick atmosphere, lakes of liquid methane, and weather systems that make it feel almost like a strange version of Earth. Scientists believe we could even use Titan’s own resources to make fuel for the return trip.

--> WHAT THIS MEANS FOR THE FUTURE: If this nuclear engine works as planned, it could open the door to crewed missions to the outer planets much sooner than we thought. A robotic mission called Dragonfly is already set to launch in 2034, and this new technology could one day bring humans there too. We’re getting closer to making deep space travel faster, safer, and more realistic.

Source: Daily Galaxy

ROBOTS

SOUTHWEST AIRLINES BANS HUMANOID ROBOTS FROM FLIGHTS... SAFETY FIRST! Southwest just updated its rules to ban humanoid and animal-like robots from all flights — both in the cabin and as checked bags. The airline made the change after a viral video showed a 3.5-foot robot named Stewie flying on one of their planes.

--> WHY THE BAN? The main reason is safety. Many of these robots run on lithium-ion batteries, the same kind that have caused fires on airplanes in the past. Southwest decided it was better to be safe than sorry and banned any robot that looks or moves like a human or animal.

--> WHAT’S STILL ALLOWED? Regular robot toys are still okay, as long as they fit inside a normal carry-on bag and follow the usual battery rules. The ban only targets robots that look and act like people or pets.

Source: USA Today

With gratitude,

Kev

ABOUT mtf.tv’s meet the future: mtf.tv’s meet the future is a cutting-edge platform focused on addressing key challenges at the intersection of national security, technology, and business. With a mission to embrace freedom to meet the future’s challenges and opportunities, mtf.tv offers forward-thinking media offerings and forums. mtf.tv produces the daily HELLO FUTURE show on iHeart Media’s Premiere Network, which reaches 9 in 10 Americans. iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

My name is Kevin Cirilli —> LinkedIn. Listen to my iHeart Media show HELLO FUTURE via iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora. Sign-up to receive the future in your inbox here. The day is 135. The planet is Earth. The planet has complete 36.99 percent of it orbit annual around the sun.

Back to the future…

This week I was at The Kennedy Forum, a group co-founded by Patrick and Amy Kennedy to tackle mental health parity. Patrick and Amy Kennedy have done serious, unglamorous work on mental health parity. During one session Amy said something that stuck with me: “Why do parents have to pay to make their phones safer for their kids?”

It’s a brutal question. We built devices engineered for addiction — infinite scroll, variable rewards, social validation loops — then acted surprised when we all got hooked. Now the consumer demand is surging for new products — not with more features… but with less.

This is the dumbphone moment. And this edition of my newsletter is focusing on something that I think is grossly underreported: the rise of dumbphone demand.

Yes, I am a futurist enthusiast. But that doesn’t mean that I want tech ruining our lives in the future and re-wiring our brains! I want tech and a future that lets us be more human… more American… not less!

DUMBPHONES ARE AN UNTAPPED $5 BILLION MARKET. A growing part of our culture is opting out of smartphone addictive doom scrolling. The analog economy — vinyl, film cameras, dumbphones, physical books — is already a multi-billion-dollar category, and dumbphones are one of the fastest-rising segments. Nostalgia is part of it. Mental health is the bigger driver. This isn’t fringe nostalgia — it’s becoming a measurable economic trend estimated at at least $5 billion, with clear momentum behind it.

—> GEN Z IS VOTING WITH ITS ATTENTION — AND THE DATA IS STRIKING. Pew Research shows 48% of U.S. 13-to-17-year-olds now view social media’s effects as mostly negative, up sharply from 32% just two years earlier. Meanwhile, 44% in this age group have actively cut back on smartphone use. Searches for Y2K aesthetics have exploded 891% since late 2024, reflecting a deeper longing for less optimized, more grounded ways of living.

—> THIS IS CREATING REAL COMMERCIAL OPPORTUNITY BEYOND SIMPLE NOSTALGIA. The analog economy spans vinyl, film cameras, physical books, crafting, “analog bags,” escape rooms, live events, and digital-detox experiences. One UK operator of tech-free cabins scaled from a handful of locations in 2020 to over 50 by 2026. Even the tools that help people go analog are booming — the global social-media-blocker app market is projected to grow from $1.47 billion in 2025 to $5 billion by 2035. Source: Kavout and Fortune

DIY: MAKE YOUR PHONE A DUMBPHONE (WITHOUT BUYING A NEW ONE). You don’t have to go full Light Phone to reclaim your attention. Here’s how people are actually doing it:

• Switch to black and white. Learn how here. Grayscale mode kills the dopamine hit from colorful app icons and notifications. It’s the single highest-ROI change most people make.

• Add app restrictions and parental controls. Use Screen Time (iOS) or Digital Wellbeing (Android) aggressively. Set hard limits on social apps. Turn on Downtime. Treat your own phone like it belongs to a responsible 12-year-old.

• Go full dumb. Devices like the Light Phone and BRICK are designed for this. Minimalist by default. No app store. No infinite scroll. Some people use them as a secondary phone; others go all-in. Early reviews suggest they actually work for reducing compulsive checking.

The goal isn’t purity. It’s friction. Make the addictive stuff slightly harder and the real world slightly easier to access.

SOURCE: CNET | Wired | Consumer Reports | The Telegraph

FLASHBACK: TECH IN THE WHITE HOUSE: FROM ONE PHONE LINE TO A BLACKBERRY IN 132 YEARS. The speed at which technology reached the most powerful office in the world tells a clear story about how fast connectivity transformed American life.

--> 1877: THE FIRST PHONE IN THE WHITE HOUSE: President Rutherford B. Hayes had the very first telephone installed in the Executive Mansion. His number was simply “1,” and it only connected to the Treasury Department. For decades, the president still relied mostly on messengers, letters, and telegrams.

--> 1929: HOOVER PUTS A PHONE ON THE OVAL OFFICE DESK: Herbert Hoover became the first president to have a telephone installed directly on his desk in the Oval Office. Before that, there was no phone in the president’s personal workspace — staff had to answer calls in the hallway. It took over 50 years after the White House first got a phone for it to reach the Resolute Desk.

--> 2009: BARACK OBAMA BECOMES THE FIRST PRESIDENT WITH A SMARTPHONE: Barack Obama was the first sitting president to use a BlackBerry. He fought the Secret Service to keep it, insisting on staying digitally connected in ways no previous president ever had. In just 80 years after Hoover got a desk phone, the commander-in-chief was carrying a pocket computer.

Now, Washington culture frequently bans cell phones in secure briefing rooms… Blackberries are a thing of the past… think Smartphones can’t become like the Blackberry???

SMARTPHONES ARE THE NEW CIGARETTES? We’re now in the early “Surgeon General’s warning” stage with smartphones. Not outright prohibition, but growing cultural permission to say: maybe I don’t actually need one of these in my pocket every waking hour.

—> THE PARALLELS RUN DEEPER THAN MOST PEOPLE WANT TO ADMIT. Both products were sold with the promise of connection and convenience while quietly extracting attention, time, and well-being at scale. Just as society eventually had to confront the real costs of widespread smoking, we’re now seeing the first widespread reckoning with what constant algorithmic engagement has done to focus, mental health, and childhood.

—> THIS IS CREATING SPACE FOR A DIFFERENT KIND OF TECHNOLOGY RELATIONSHIP. For the first time, opting for a simpler phone is starting to feel like a reasonable, even responsible, decision rather than an eccentric one. Source: The New York Times

REVENGE OF THE ANALOG — YOUNG AMERICANS ARE DITCHING SMARTPHONES TO RECLAIM THEIR BRAINS. Across the country, a growing number of young people are quietly stepping away from their iPhones — or radically scaling them back.

—> SOME ARE GOING FULL FLIP PHONE… OTHERS ARE USING MINIMALIST DEVICES TO CREATE FRICTION. Another person described ditching their smartphone for a Light Phone after watching The Social Dilemma. The device handles calls, texts, music, and maps, but removes the endless scroll and addictive features. Many in this group aren’t going completely offline — they’re intentionally adding friction so they’re not mindlessly consuming content for hours.

—> THE GOAL IS RECLAIMING PRESENCE, NOT REJECTING PROGRESS.
Whether they go full flip phone or heavily restrict their devices, the motivation is the same: they want their attention and their real-world relationships back. Psychologists are calling this shift “the revenge of the analog” — a direct response to digital overload and the mental toll of always-on social media.

GET SMART FAST: This isn’t anti-technology. It’s anti-addiction.

Source: News4SanAntonio | Inlander

PARENTS TAKE CHARGE AND JOIN THE DUMBPHONE REVOLUTION. Schools and parent groups are moving faster than policymakers. Thousands of parents are signing pledges for smartphone-free schools. Not because they hate technology — because they’ve watched what happens when 11-year-olds get unrestricted access to the most powerful attention-extraction machines ever invented.

The movement isn’t anti-phone. It’s pro-childhood. And it’s gaining real momentum because the status quo — hand every kid a supercomputer with a casino in their pocket and hope for the best — is obviously failing.

SOURCE: Kent Online

MEET THE FUTURE: We spent 15 years telling people that more connectivity was always better. The data on attention, anxiety, and adolescent mental health got hard to ignore. Now the market and culture are course-correcting — not with regulation (yet), but with consumer choice and social permission.

Dumbphones won’t replace smartphones. They’ll exist alongside them as a deliberate counterweight. The people adopting them aren’t rejecting the future. They’re rejecting the idea that we have to accept every default setting the attention economy hands us.

The most radical thing some people are doing right now is making their phone less powerful on purpose. That’s not regression. That’s agency.

And, quite honestly, another sign that America’s technocrats would be wise to listen to their consumer base.

With gratitude,
Kev

So let me clear my throat: America is not in decline. America, at 250 years young, is in ascent. And this has nothing to do with Republicans or Democrats. American innovators are leading humanity into the Fifth Industrial Revolution… where American technological advances will eradicate diseases and explore deeper into our Solar System.

Don’t believe me? Look up at the Moon. Americans went there last week.

Yet everywhere you thumb through online (like on Xi’s TikTok), the American chattering class continues to predict America’s decline:

• Li Yuan in The New York Times claims China sees Trump’s America as an “accelerator of American political decay,” sliding toward “polarization, institutional dysfunction and even ‘Latin American-style instability.’”

• Ryan Hass reports the same thing in The Atlantic.

• The Economist frames it as China viewing the United States in “imperial twilight.”

• Christopher Caldwell declares in the New York Times that America is “officially an empire in decline.”

What is this lack of fact-checking Xi Jinping? These pieces recycle his favorite slogan — the rise of the East and decline of the West — without ever pausing to examine whether China’s own economy can actually deliver on it.

Fact check: Xi can’t.

The media is doing Americans a grave disservice by covering the contest between Communist China and America like just another domestic partisan brawl — Democrats versus Republicans — or worse, like the Eagles versus the Cowboys.

As the founder of meet the future (mtf.tv) and host of iHeart Media’s HELLO FUTURE, I’ve spent years reporting on the actual innovators building the next century — not the pundits writing think pieces about it. I was also one of the first journalists assigned to cover Trump back in 2015 and later served as chief Washington correspondent for Bloomberg.

I’m not naive. America’s adversaries have found ways to weaponize our freedoms against us in our own institutions. Global income inequality threatens to strangle the American dream. Hyper-partisanship — bankrolled by billionaires playing poker with outdated campaign finance laws — fuels extremism. And when political extremism turns into violence, we must all call it a cancer.

But Americans openly admitting our problems is not a symptom of decline. I think it’s a sign of a redemption.

Have These Journalists Forgotten 1776?

America has always been a raucous and deeply contentious republic. From the moment we cast British tea into the waters of Boston Harbor in an act of defiant resistance, the world has repeatedly predicted our collapse.

• European monarchies dismissed the American colonists as little more than unruly rebels doomed to fail.

• During the Civil War, many sophisticated foreign observers confidently forecast the permanent dissolution of the United States.

• In the 1960s, amid riots, assassinations, and wrenching social upheaval, respected voices declared the American experiment had finally run its course.

And yet, time and again across our 250 years, we have emerged from these periods of turbulence not weaker, but renewed — often carrying the cause of equality and human dignity further than before.

What some call dysfunction is not decline. Vigorous political debate and open protest are not signs of decay. I would argue they are quite the opposite: they are the very mechanisms through which our country has always corrected, renewed, and in its imperfect way, perfected itself in a never-ending quest to form a more perfect Union…

The Real Story: America Is Leading the Fifth Industrial Revolution

While these outlets chase political optics, the United States is dominating the convergence of quantum computing, commercial space, and biotech.

Just Last Week: Artemis II Made History: NASA just released more than 12,000 new photos from the successful Artemis II mission — the first crewed flight around the Moon in over 50 years. The Orion spacecraft completed its 10-day voyage in April, testing deep-space systems and paving the way for sustained lunar presence.

On the commercial side, American firms captured roughly 82 percent of the global launch market last year. Reusable rockets, satellite constellations, lunar landers, and Mars architecture are not aspirations. They are flying hardware. Civilizations literally expanding beyond Earth are not in decline.

Quantum Computing: America’s Clear Lead: I’m obsessed with quantum for a reason — it is the next foundation of computing, materials science, medicine, finance, and national security. American companies and investors are driving the breakthroughs.

• In 2025, U.S.-headquartered quantum companies raised more than $2.7 billion in venture capital — more than double the previous year and the overwhelming majority of global private funding (QED-C State of the Global Quantum Industry 2026 Report).

• China’s entire quantum computing market generated just $118.5 million in revenue in 2024 and is projected to reach only $410 million by 2030 (Grand View Research).

The U.S. private-sector ecosystem — IBM, Google Quantum AI, IonQ, Rigetti, PsiQuantum, and others — leads in hardware milestones, error correction, and commercial applications. Open research, capital markets willing to fund uncertainty, and cross-border talent flows create frontier breakthroughs that centralized systems simply cannot replicate at the same pace.

What China Actually Faces (The Part They Don’t Fact-Check)

China excels at scale and replication (which is a nice way of saying stealing American intellectual property). But Xi Jinping’s economy is confronting demographic collapse, youth unemployment stuck near 17 percent, a property-market hangover, and capital flight pressures. These are not vibes. They are structural headwinds that no amount of state messaging can wish away.

America’s Freedom of Speech Is the Real Advantage

This is the part I really want to hammer home. While I think it’s lazy reporting for these pieces to do the bidding of Xi Jinping’s narrative, I totally agree with their right to be lazy.

In Xi’s Communist Party, freedom of speech does not exist. Dissent is censored. Unusual ideas are dangerous. Breakthrough creativity eventually slows.

America — whether you love or loathe Trump — has never been more politically engaged. Our loud, messy argument is not weakness. It is the engine. It is permission to challenge consensus, speak up for equality, and self-correct in public. That’s never been easy. But it’s been democracy. Centralized systems can copy what already works. Only open systems invent what doesn’t.

The next time you read another “America in decline” story: Are they looking at the data — or just repeating a story that flatters their worldview?

Then, respectfully, look up. The Moon is infrastructure. And right now, the country building the strongest bridge back to it — through Artemis, quantum leadership, and American innovation — is still the United States.

And I’d still take all of the dysfunction in a democracy over Xi Jinping’s worldview any day.

hello, future. it’s me, kev.

One of the best parts of hosting HELLO FUTURE (distributed on iHeart Media through Premiere Networks, right alongside The Breakfast Club and Ryan Seacrest) is getting to sit down with the people who are actually building the future instead of just talking about it. I’ve had the chance to interview some of the sharpest futurists and operators out there — the ones turning big ideas into hardware, timelines, and real capital deployment.

Max Haot, CEO of Vast, is firmly in that category. He’s one of those rare founders who has already scaled and sold multiple companies (Livestream, Mevo, Launcher) and is now all-in on the hardest problem in commercial space: replacing the International Space Station with something better, faster, and actually sustainable.

We just recorded a new episode, and it’s one you should hear if you care about where American leadership in space actually goes from here.

The Clock Is Ticking — Loudly

The ISS is scheduled to come down at the end of 2030. That’s not a rumor. It’s the plan. When it goes, the United States needs continuous human presence in low Earth orbit — or we hand a massive strategic and symbolic win to China, which already operates its own station.

Max’s message is blunt: the commercial path is the only one fast enough to avoid a gap. Vast has Haven-1 in integration and on track for a 2027 launch as the world’s first commercial space station. They’re targeting continuous crewed capability with Haven-2 by 2030. They’ve raised serious capital and are taking a hardware-rich, vertically integrated approach that prioritizes speed and cost discipline.

Why This Actually Matters

Look, I’ve been talking to people building the future across AI, energy, biotech, and space for a while now on HELLO FUTURE. The through-line is always the same: the winners are the ones who treat hard problems like engineering challenges instead of political footballs.

Space stations aren’t just about cool photos or national pride (though both matter). They’re about maintaining a foothold in orbit while we figure out how to go further. They’re about creating the demand signal that lets companies invest in the next generation of vehicles, life support, manufacturing in microgravity, and eventually artificial gravity. And yes — they’re about not ceding the high ground to a strategic competitor while we argue with ourselves.

Max Haot isn’t waiting around for perfect conditions. He’s building. Vast is building. The question is whether NASA and the broader system will move with the urgency the 2030 deadline demands.

If you want the full, unfiltered conversation, go listen to the latest episode of HELLO FUTURE on the iHeart app or wherever you get your podcasts. Max doesn’t sugarcoat anything — and that’s exactly why I keep having him back on the show.

The future isn’t going to build itself. But some people are already out there laying the groundwork.

With gratitude,
Kev

I’ve covered Washington policy for more than a decade — including a stint as chief Washington correspondent for Bloomberg TV and Bloomberg Radio. My journalism has appeared on Yahoo Finance, POLITICO, and more.

But when I started digging into this topic on iHeart Media’s HELLO FUTURE, I could feel the DC media club rolling their eyes and laughing me off like I’d gone insane. I get the instinct. For decades this subject lived in the margins, ridiculed or sensationalized. The space economy is taking off — fast — and pretending the solar system is just empty rock and radiation is bad strategy.

I founded meet the future (mtf.tv / mtf.news) to cover all things future — that includes exploring our solar system.

In an exclusive conversation with Dr. Peter Skafish of the Sol Foundation, we cut through the noise. What the files actually show. Why trusted voices are still so rare. And why getting this right matters for business, science, and how we understand our place in a much bigger neighborhood.

Why trusted voices have been missing

Skafish put it directly: “We don’t have enough trusted voices. We don’t have what I like to call a responsible narrator.”

For too long the topic was marginalized. That vacuum got filled by the loudest, kookiest, or most click-driven voices (sounds a lot like political punditry on cable news) — not because serious people weren’t curious, but because engaging risked exactly the laughter I heard when I left straight policy coverage. Mainstream institutions largely stayed away. The result? Every new disclosure triggers the same cycle of hype and dismissal.

This isn’t sustainable. Skafish believes this could become one of the defining issues of the 21st century — bigger than climate or AI in its long-term implications. We need institutions and journalists who can stay curious without going conspiratorial.

The Sol Foundation is trying to build that lane: cross-disciplinary work with anthropologists, astronomers, engineers and policy experts. Evidence first. Policy recommendations second.

Why this matters for the space economy

Here’s the practical part most coverage misses: The solar system isn’t a handful of planets. It has millions of objects. Earth is a grain of sand on a vast ocean. As companies and governments push into lunar infrastructure, Mars missions, cislunar operations and beyond, we’re entering an environment we don’t fully understand.

That means preparing for:

• Space weather and its effects on systems

• Unknown space-native minerals and materials

• Biological realities — including the possibility of interplanetary bacteria-like organisms that could interact with habitats, life support or equipment

This isn’t about fighting little green men. It’s basic risk management and engineering for an expanding operational domain. Businesses that treat the solar system as empty vacuum are going to get surprised.

There’s upside too. Studying how life adapts in extreme solar system conditions could drive real medical advances back on Earth — new therapies, resilience insights, biotech edges from extremophiles and novel biological mechanisms.

And yes, the intelligent life question sits on top of all of it. Skafish urged staying open but rigorous. Analogies help — Earth’s own deep ocean “aliens” like octopuses and microalgae we still barely understand, or historical first-contact moments between human societies. But at some point the analogies run out. We’re left with a real enigma about what (or who) might be operating advanced technologies in our neighborhood.

The immediate move, he said, is listening to people who have actually encountered these phenomena — and building the serious research capacity to make sense of it.

Meet the future

I didn’t pivot to this beat for clicks or conspiracies. I did it because the trajectory is clear: the space economy is infrastructure, not just inspiration. Understanding what’s actually out there — scientifically, biologically, and potentially intelligently — is going to shape how we build, operate and thrive beyond Earth.

Now the real work — serious voices, rigorous study, practical preparation — has to catch up.

I love space with everything I’ve got. The next economy won’t be messaged in green rooms. It will be built in orbit, on the Moon, and on Mars. Getting the UAP conversation right is part of building it responsibly.

Clear skies + gratitude,

Kev

TAYLOR SWIFT IS TRADEMARKING HER VOICE AND LIKENESS TO FIGHT AI DEEPFAKES AND CLONES. Taylor Swift has filed trademark applications to protect both her voice and her image from unauthorized AI use. The filings include sound marks for phrases like “Hey, it’s Taylor Swift” and a specific visual of her holding a pink guitar in a multicolored bodysuit. The move is widely seen as a direct response to the growing threat of AI-generated deepfakes, voice cloning, and fake content using her likeness without permission.

--> CELEBRITIES ARE INCREASINGLY TURNING TO TRADEMARK LAW AS AI MAKES IT EASIER TO MIMIC THEM. While copyright and right of publicity laws have limits when it comes to AI-created content that doesn’t directly copy existing work, trademarks offer broader protection against confusing or unauthorized commercial use — giving stars like Swift a new legal tool in an era where their voices and faces can be replicated with just a few prompts.

--> LEAVE IT TO LAWYERS TO CAPITALIZE ON AI — BY TURNING FAMOUS VOICES INTO REGISTERED TRADEMARKS. Swift’s filings are part of a growing wave of preemptive legal moves by high-profile figures looking to control how their identity is used in an AI-saturated world, even if it remains to be seen how well these trademark claims will hold up once they’re actually tested in court.

Source: Washington Post Source: Gerben Law

THE FIRST WAVE OF AI-NATIVE COLLEGE GRADS IS HITTING THE WORKFORCE — AND THEY’RE BRINGING A POWERFUL NEW SET OF SKILLS. A new generation of graduates who grew up using AI tools throughout college is now entering the professional world. Instead of treating AI as a shortcut, many are developing advanced fluency in prompting, synthesizing information, iterating quickly, and collaborating with intelligent systems. At the same time, this shift is forcing universities and employers to rethink what “critical thinking” and “prepared for work” actually mean in an AI-augmented reality — creating an exciting moment of reinvention rather than decline.

--> THESE GRADS ARE ARRIVING WITH A NEW KIND OF INTELLIGENCE. They know how to work alongside AI as a thought partner, rapidly test ideas, and scale their output in ways previous generations couldn’t. Early reports from hiring managers show that while some traditional skills need strengthening, these AI-fluent graduates are also bringing speed, creativity in tool use, and comfort with ambiguity that are becoming genuine advantages in fast-moving industries.

--> THIS IS PUSHING BOTH EDUCATION AND WORK TO EVOLVE IN REAL TIME. Colleges are experimenting with new models that blend human judgment with AI capabilities, while forward-thinking companies are redesigning roles around human + AI teams. Rather than making college obsolete, the arrival of these graduates is accelerating a more dynamic, skills-focused future where lifelong learning and intelligent collaboration become the new baseline — and the people who master that combination will have a serious edge.

Source: Futurism Source: The New Yorker

hello, future. it’s me, kev.

…and this is a dispatch from the digital frontier. It’s time to meet the future NOW — with the latest on markets, tech, and freedom. The day is 131. The year is 2025. The planet is Earth.

The planet has complete 35.89 percent of its orbit around the Sun. My name is Kevin Cirilli —> LinkedIn. iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora. Sign-up to receive the future in your inbox here.

Subscribe now

Back to the future...

Share mtf.tv | meet the future

Imitation is the most sincerest form of flattery…

Bloomberg’s Sunday night headline with not one… not two… but THREE Bloomberg journalists writing —> Why Brain Implants Are More Than a Sci-Fi Fantasy.

O-n-w-a-r-d…

BREAKING: NEURALINK COULD RESTORE BASIC VISION TO THE BLIND BY 2027 — BY SENDING CAMERA FEEDS STRAIGHT INTO THE BRAIN. Elon Musk’s Neuralink is targeting the ability to give blind people functional sight as early as next year by completely bypassing the eyes. Camera-equipped glasses would capture the world in real time, with AI converting the feed into electrical signals delivered via electrodes implanted in the visual cortex. These signals create phosphene perceptions — tiny flashes of light the brain can learn to interpret as outlines, movement, objects, and lighting changes — enough to dramatically improve navigation and independence.

--> THIS IS A SCIENTIFIC STUNNER THAT COULD REWRITE WHAT “SEEING” MEANS FOR MILLIONS. Early versions will be low-resolution and basic, not full natural vision, but even limited capability represents a massive leap for spatial awareness and daily life. The project has already received accelerated regulatory status, and Neuralink’s precision surgical robot is designed to thread ultra-fine electrodes while avoiding blood vessels and minimizing tissue damage.

--> WHAT MAKES NEURALINK’S APPROACH DIFFERENT FROM TRADITIONAL VISION RESEARCH? It skips attempts to repair the retina or optic nerve and goes straight to a direct neural interface. This opens a longer-term path toward enhanced perception — potentially including infrared, thermal, or other frequencies beyond normal human vision — turning a medical restoration tool into a platform for sensory augmentation. Discoveries like this keep neurotechnology exciting, unpredictable, and full of real-world possibility for both accessibility and human capability expansion.

Source: VINnews

SPACE

MERCURY HIDES A 10-MILE-THICK DIAMOND LAYER AT ITS CORE-MANTLE BOUNDARY. New research reveals that Mercury, the smallest planet in our solar system, likely contains a massive diamond layer roughly 9 to 11 miles thick at the boundary between its mantle and core. Formed about 4.5 billion years ago, this layer resulted from the planet’s carbon-rich composition under extreme pressure as its metallic core crystallized, pushing carbon upward in the form of diamond rather than graphite.

--> THIS FINDING REWRITES OUR UNDERSTANDING OF MERCURY’S INTERIOR AND ITS UNIQUE CHEMISTRY. The diamonds likely influence how heat escapes from the planet’s liquid outer core, which could help explain the persistence of Mercury’s surprisingly strong magnetic field. What was once assumed to be a graphite-dominated crust and interior is now understood to include this substantial diamond reservoir, highlighting how Mercury’s formation near the Sun created conditions unlike any other rocky planet.

--> HOW DID A WHOLE LAYER OF DIAMONDS END UP THERE? During Mercury’s early magma ocean phase and especially as its core cooled and solidified, carbon became concentrated in the remaining liquid. At the immense pressures of the core-mantle boundary, diamond became the stable form of carbon and, being less dense, floated upward to accumulate. Laboratory experiments replicating these ancient conditions, combined with data from NASA’s MESSENGER mission, confirmed that sulfur in the melt helped enable this process by lowering crystallization temperatures.

Source: The Brighter Side of News

SOUND ON

FOCUS BEATS AND 432HZ TUNING ARE TAKING OVER HOME OFFICES AND OPEN-PLAN WORKSPACES — BUT DOES THE FREQUENCY ACTUALLY HELP YOU CONCENTRATE? From remote workers wearing noise-canceling headphones to people in bustling offices queuing up “deep focus” playlists, millions are now using binaural beats, ambient soundscapes, and specifically 432Hz-tuned music to stay locked in during the workday. The idea that tuning music slightly lower than the standard 440Hz creates a calmer, more aligned brain state has spread rapidly through productivity communities, wellness apps, and study playlists — reviving an ancient notion that certain frequencies can harmonize the mind and body.

--> THE TREND HAS EXPLODED BECAUSE DISTRACTIONS ARE RELENTLESS. Whether it’s the chaos of working from home with kids and notifications or the constant low-level noise of open offices, people are actively engineering their auditory environment to trigger flow states. Playlists labeled “432Hz Focus Music,” “Binaural Beats for Productivity,” and “Brainwave Entrainment for Deep Work” rack up millions of streams, with users swearing the lower pitch helps them tune out the world and sustain attention for hours.

--> BUT THE SCIENCE BEHIND THE SPECIFIC 432HZ CLAIM IS THIN. While many report feeling calmer or more focused when listening to lower-pitched or specially tuned tracks, studies show little evidence that 432Hz has unique “brain-tuning” powers compared to other relaxing music. Any benefits appear to come from general factors — slower tempos that naturally slow breathing and heart rate, personal preference, and the placebo effect of believing the frequency is special — rather than any cosmic or neurological magic tied to that exact number.

Source: ScienceAlert

With gratitude,

Kev

ABOUT mtf.tv’s meet the future: mtf.tv’s meet the future is a cutting-edge platform focused on addressing key challenges at the intersection of national security, technology, and business. With a mission to embrace freedom to meet the future’s challenges and opportunities, mtf.tv offers forward-thinking media offerings and forums. mtf.tv produces the daily HELLO FUTURE show on iHeart Media’s Premiere Network, which reaches 9 in 10 Americans. iHeart | iTunes | Spotify | Amazon | Pandora

Kevin Cirilli, founder of mtf.tv and former chief Washington correspondent for Bloomberg TV and Radio, brings you SPACE <GO>. His work has appeared on Bloomberg, Yahoo Finance, Fox Business Network, C-SPAN, and CBS.

NO SMOKING GUN — BUT TRANSPARENCY JUST WENT FULL THROTTLE.
The Trump administration today released the first batch of never-before-seen UAP files — 162 documents, videos, and images — putting raw government records on unidentified anomalous phenomena directly into the public domain. No confirmed extraterrestrial life. No recovered alien craft. But this is the most aggressive declassification effort in UAP history.

—> WHAT JUST DROPPED: The files include Apollo 12 and Apollo 17 mission transcripts and photos showing strange bright particles and jagged objects tumbling past spacecraft windows — one astronaut describing it as “a whole bunch of big ones… It looks like the Fourth of July.” Also released: FBI photos from New Year’s Eve 1999 capturing black dots pacing U.S. aircraft, plus military videos and eyewitness reports of unresolved sightings. Everything is now live at WAR.GOV/UFO.

—> THE POLITICS OF ALIENS — WHY THIS MATTERS NOW: I’ve been covering UAPs as a national-security and institutional-trust issue on mtf.tv and HELLO FUTURE (my iHeart Media show) for years — back when the topic still drew eye-rolls. In my earlier dispatch, mtf.tv: USA back to the Moon… The politics of aliens…, I laid out why disclosure isn’t fringe: it’s a power story, a trust story, and a generational story. Today’s release proves the point. What was once dismissed is now official policy under a second Trump term.

—> MORE COMING — THIS IS JUST ROUND ONE: 162 files today. Additional drops are scheduled on a rolling basis under the new PURSUE program, including more videos flagged by whistleblowers.

—> WHY YOU CARE: No aliens in the files — yet. But the Overton window just blew wide open. This is maximum transparency in action: raw data over spin, public scrutiny over classification. In an era where trust in institutions is the scarcest resource, handing the American people the original source material is a power move. Whether you’re a skeptic, believer, or data-driven observer, the conversation just got real.

Sources: AP News; Fox News; NBC News; CBS News; USA Today

Subscribe to meetthefuture.substack.com for unfiltered dispatches on the stories shaping the future — tech, markets, national security, and the frontiers we actually control.

With gratitude,
Kev
meetthefuture.substack.com | mtf.tv