NASA is channeling its inner Hollywood exec and embracing the reboot. Now that private companies have mastered the, uh, “easy” parts of space (see: getting there), the legendary US space agency has set its sights on going to the moon…again.

• The space agency’s next big project is a series of moon missions, dubbed Artemis, culminating in a manned journey to the moon by 2025.

But before it can hurl its next trailblazing astronauts to the moon, it needs to test out the route to get there, as well as the lunar orbit the astronauts will use above it.

Enter: The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment, or CAPSTONE, a 55-pound CubeSat. The satellite will test out the new route to the moon and subsequent lunar orbit ahead of NASA’s Gateway lunar-orbiting space station, a forward operating base for the upcoming Artemis moon missions.

• CAPSTONE is scheduled to launch from New Zealand on or after May 31.

Zoom in: The CubeSat is the brainchild of a team of private companies, as well as NASA.

Colorado-based Advanced Space is responsible for designing the software and unique trajectory that will take the CubeSat into lunar orbit, California’s Tyvak Nano-Satellite Systems and Stellar Exploration Inc. designed and built the satellite and its propulsion system, respectively, while California-based Rocket Lab is responsible for launching the satellite into low-Earth orbit (LEO) before it begins its trajectory to the moon.

Read more about the upcoming mission and the companies powering it.—JM

A flurry of new reports about EV adoption and climate efficacy were recently released. Let’s dive into the numbers.

An EV demand milestone: As we reported last week, EV demand is outstripping supply, and new research from Ernst and Young cited by Axios suggests that sky-high demand for electric vehicles is the new normal.

Among a group of 13,000 people across 18 countries, 52% of prospective vehicle buyers said they want their next car to be an EV. It’s the first time more than half of respondents to E&Y’s annual survey said they want an EV, Axios reports, and up from just 30% in 2020.

• EV desirability varies dramatically country to country, however, with just 29% of US respondents saying so, compared to as high as 73% in Italy, or 69% in China.

Barrels of oil, be gone: Ever wonder how much oil EVs are actually helping displace? BloombergNEF crunched the numbers in a new report, and found that in 2021, EVs helped avoid nearly 1.5 million barrels of oil per day, equivalent to 3.3% of total oil demand.

• That’s more than double the oil avoidance from EVs in 2015, per BNEF.

Not enough gas: A recent report from InfluenceMap found that automakers need to significantly increase current EV production targets for the end of the decade in order for the world to be on track for a 1.5°C scenario.

Only two of the 12 companies analyzed—Tesla and Mercedes-Benz—currently have targets in line with the key threshold identified by the report: 57.5% of all global vehicle sales being zero-emission by 2030.

Critical condition for critical minerals: A new IEA report pulls together data on critical minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel, aluminum, and copper.

The short of it? Prices have climbed at record-high rates, for the aforementioned minerals, all of which are critical to not only battery-making, but also other clean-energy tech like solar panels and wind turbines. Between January 2021 and March 2022, prices for…

• Lithium jumped 738%.
• Cobalt jumped 156%.
• Nickel jumped 94%.
• Aluminum jumped 76%.
• Copper jumped 34%.

Addenda: EVs have now surpassed phones as the primary source of cobalt demand, accounting for 34% worldwide. And on the lithium front, investors are so eager to cash in on the unprecedented price surges that a controlling stake in a single lithium mine in China received…3,448 bids.

Bottom line: EV demand is surging, and the more we replace internal combustion vehicles with electric ones, the lower emissions from transportation will be. But the speed at which supply is able to catch up with that demand will depend on a range of factors, from critical mineral supply to permitting processes, to the ambition of auto execs.

View on-site.—DM

Stat: Researchers at the Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory broke the world record for solar-cell efficiency with a system that achieved 39.5% efficiency.

Quote: “So you can get machine learning into production without MLOps, [but] you can’t do it at scale—at all.”—Diego Oppenheimer, EVP of MLOps at DataRobot, to Emerging Tech Brew

Read: What are the billions of dollars invested in autonomous driving adding up to?

Snap poll: Would you hail a fully driverless robotaxi if it was available in your city?
Yes
No

Voice is becoming vital: Why are so many enterprises now investing in voice innovations, and how important will voice technology be to your specific industry in the new work-from-anywhere era? Find out in RingCentral’s ebook here.*

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For crossword computation: Check out this puzzle-solving AI. Just, uh, don’t use it to cheat on the Brew’s crosswords?

For accidentally mean hamsters: Scientists at Georgia State University found that using Crispr to edit a certain gene out of hamsters caused…unexpected changes in social behavior.

The world’s been faced with some serious challenges lately, from concerns around human health to issues of food security, not to mention the climate crisis.

What new technologies are being developed to tackle these global issues? At our Emerging Tech Brew Summit, we’re bringing together a brilliant lineup of technologists, executives, and innovators to discuss what the next decade of tech has in store.

Taking place September 29 in NYC—save $200 and purchase your early bird ticket today!

Last week, we asked you all to weigh in on a contentious topic: tech regulation. The results are in, and of the ~2,600 responses we got:

• Just under two-thirds (64%) of you said tech companies should be more regulated than they are now.
• Just over one-third (36%) said they should not be more regulated than they currently are.

Compared to the masses (read: US adults), Emerging Tech Brew readers are significantly more pro-regulation. Pew found that 44% of US adults think tech companies should be more regulated than they are today, down from 56% in 2021.

To be fair…As one reader pointed out in the inbox last week, this is a very complicated topic that we’ve crammed into a quick question. There are many different vectors across which tech companies can be regulated, from data privacy to content moderation to bias in their technologies. And some forms of tech, like AI, face hardly any regulation in the US, while others, like drones or autonomous vehicles, face fairly robust regulatory regimes.

Catch up on the top Emerging Tech Brew stories from the past few editions:

• A primer on machine learning operations
• How a smart city platform created for Pittsburgh became a nationwide business
• NASA’s Planetary Defense team builds software to detect asteroids before they hit