We don’t need a rain dance — we need a systems upgrade. It’s Ryan Duffy, Editor-in-Chief of Per Aspera. Ironically, as this gets sent out, I’m on a flight from Utah to Arizona, carving a path across the Colorado River Basin.

The Basin sustains some 40 million people, irrigates 5 million acres of farmland, and underpins a cool $1.4 trillion in economic activity. The issue? The American Southwest’s source of aquatic sustenance is seriously overtaxed, thanks to rising demand, upstream hydrological shifts, and a century-old water system built for a wetter, smaller region.

Wide-ranging allocation cuts and conservation efforts only slow the crisis — they don’t reverse it. Of the possible responses in our arsenal, desalination gets name-checked often, but rarely treated as a serious, scaled solution.

In this week’s antimemo, we give desal the love it deserves. We explore what real intervention looks like: a solar-powered, off-grid desalination system delivering 4.5 million acre-feet per year — integrated with aquifer recharge and targeted flows to revive the Salton Sea. A closed-loop machine designed not just to supply cities, but to reset the drought math of the West. Welcome to The End of Thirst Traps.

“The End of Thirst Traps”. The American Southwest faces a hydro-economic crisis of staggering proportions. With groundwater levels hitting multi-decade lows, the Colorado River’s flow declining nearly 10% per °C of warming, and a structural deficit of three to five million acre-feet (MAF) per year, we’re witnessing strategic amnesia in our water infrastructure. In Silicon Valley terms, we’re staring down a binary bet: engineer for abundance or default to scarcity.

Within this crisis lies a forty-odd billion-dollar opportunity to fundamentally reinvent water security for the region: a massive solar-powered desalination complex capable of producing 4.5 MAF annually. (Fun fact: our blueprint’s back-of-the-napkin estimates are nearly identical to the Hoover Dam’s buildout costs, in today’s dollars.)

This isn’t incremental thinking; it’s systems engineering at civilization-scale. The blueprint calls for:

• 48 GW desert solar array in the Sonoran desert, backed by 24 GWh of battery storage to power a state-of-the-art seawater reverse osmosis plant.

• Rather than burning hydrocarbons to make water to cool power plants, this closed-loop system runs entirely off-grid — turning sunlight directly into freshwater.

• This system could deliver 4.5 MAF of freshwater each year, from sunlight to taps, farms, datacenters, and more.

• We propose routing 1.5 MAF into the Salton Sea to stem toxic dust storms and revive pestilent playas. Remaining flows feed Phoenix, Tucson, the Imperial Valley, and the Colorado River Delta through largely existing/upgraded distribution infrastructure.

This is the infrastructure moonshot we need. Not a physics problem, but a matter of vision and will (characteristics the American West has never lacked). The technologies exist. The economics work, with an estimated $4-$5B in annual regional value, and the alternative is watching the Southwest’s reservoirs, farmland, and cities wither from dehydration.

OFF-CUFF

Hi, it’s Joy Shin, Creative Director of Per Aspera. 

I’ve been working with Dan Goldin for the past 7 or so years (lucky him 😛). I was his Chief of Staff at a previous company and ever since then we’ve been working together to advance American deep tech. It’s been…. a ride!

One thing I’ve come to appreciate — often in hindsight — are the long drives to site visits. Dan drives (not slowly, he’s mission oriented in mundane tasks as well!) and also gives me a special 1:1 deep tech lecture.

On a trip through the Mojave Desert c. 2021, he brought up a movie I hadn’t thought about in years: Chinatown. I remembered the noir. I’d forgotten the plot was really about water.

As we drove, he reminded me what Chinatown was really about: not a murder, but a land grab. A dramatization of the real California Water Wars — when LA’s power brokers quietly siphoned off the Owens Valley’s water, bankrupted farmers, and triggered acts of sabotage as locals dynamited aqueducts in protest.

It wasn’t fiction. It was real, infrastructure warfare.

It’s a good reminder of what people are driven to do when scarcity hits.

So read the antimemo. We tried to flip the script. Instead of hoarding water and weaponizing drought, it’s about engineering abundance — solar-powered desalination, aquifer recharge and rebalancing the ledger for good.

Albedo’s Clarity-1 satellite — affectionately nicknamed “Clare” — delivers 10 cm optical imagery from Very Low Earth Orbit (VLEO), marking a historic breakthrough in U.S. commercial Earth observation. This level of detail has, until now, been the domain of classified national systems or costly, aircraft-based surveillance. Clare is the first commercial platform to achieve near-aerial fidelity from orbit, with the potential for on-demand, scalable coverage. Operating hundreds of kilometers closer to Earth than traditional satellites, Clare unlocks a new tier of access for infrastructure monitoring, environmental sensing, and dynamic threat detection — without the limitations of airborne tasking. As the U.S. modernizes its geospatial intelligence stack, commercially available 10 cm imagery from a VLEO satellite bus introduces a sovereign, cost-efficient layer of strategic visibility — critical for national resilience across infrastructure, energy, agriculture, water, and environmental systems in a rapidly changing world (like the American Southwest facing escalating water stress!).

This Situation Report provides our weekly pulse check on hard pursuits, industrial developments, and deep tech — a curated snapshot of what matters, from test stands to launch pads, from lab benches to factory floors. Real signals, no BS.

🌌 Impulse breaks away from the pack. Earlier this month, Impulse Space announced a $300M Series C funding round to scale its fleet of orbital transfer vehicles. In-space mobility is a hot sector and this seems to signal that Impulse is starting to pull away as a clear favorite. No surprise: founded by SpaceX propulsion legend Tom Mueller, the startup has already flown its Mira vehicle twice and is preparing to debut Helios, a high-energy kick stage capable of delivering five-ton payloads from LEO to GEO in less than a work day. That kind of high-thrust, rapid maneuvering signals a sharp departure from the slow, power-limited electric propulsion systems that have defined the past decade. Much like the interstate highway transformed terrestrial logistics, Impulse aims to build the infrastructure layer that allows for real-time satellite repositioning, constellation deployment, and deep space assembly. With $525M in total funding and $200M+ in contracts secured, Impulse seems well-positioned to lead in a more mobile, responsive orbital economy.

💥 Supersonic is when people start to listen. On June 6, 2025, President Trump signed an EO repealing the 1973 ban on overland civilian supersonic flight, ending a 52-year freeze that began when sonic booms from military and test flights sparked national backlash. One of the most memorable incidents came in 1957, when John Glenn flew coast-to-coast at supersonic speed for Project Bullet. As he passed over his hometown of New Concord, Ohio, the shockwave startled residents — prompting one neighbor to cry, “Johnny dropped a bomb!” That kind of sonic disruption led to thousands of noise complaints and ultimately the FAA’s prohibition. Now, Trump’s order directs the FAA to repeal those restrictions within 180 days and begin developing noise-based regulations for the next generation of supersonic aircraft. With advances in boom-reduction technology like NASA’s X-59 and private efforts from Boom Supersonic and others, the order aims to reestablish U.S. dominance in high-speed aviation: where flights are faster, quieter, and no longer grounded by 20th-century fears.

🚁 Simplified Flight Era. In late May, the FAA approved Skyryse to begin For-Credit Flight Testing for Skyryse One, a production helicopter that replaces traditional cyclic/collective controls with a single stick, and runs on SkyOS™, a unified flight operating system. For-Credit Flight Testing means the FAA is now watching — and the test flights count toward official certification. Before this phase, a company can fly as much as they want, but it’s all practice. Once it’s for-credit, every flight is now “on the record.” This is the first time a fully software-mediated flight control system is undergoing formal FAA credit testing, signaling potential future pathways for certifying modular, OS-level architectures in rotorcraft. It suggests a shift not just in interface design, but in how flight control laws, redundancy, and pilot authority are validated at the regulatory level.

⚛️ Choose Your Fighter. One by one, the AI titans are picking their energy partners. Meta and Constellation just inked a long-term nuclear power deal. Microsoft has a fusion compact with Helion, while Amazon has signed on with Oklo. Google is investing in SMRs, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has personally backed nuclear microreactor startup Radiant. The throughline is clear: if you want to run frontier models at scale, you need a long-term plan for high-density, zero-carbon baseload—and the public grid won’t cut it. This isn’t just about power purchase agreements, it’s about rearchitecting the energy stack. And if current trends hold—barring a major algorithmic breakthrough that slashes data intensity—the conversation eventually shifts off-planet. Related: See our antimemo on the Realities of Space-Based Compute.

In Case You Missed It…last week’s antimemo was on our loss in manufacturing tribal knowledge and what we can do to combat it.

Zane Hengsperger said it best on X a few days ago…

We traced the quiet collapse of America’s industrial knowledge base — from Saturn V to Stinger missiles.

But this isn’t about bringing back the 1950s. The goal isn’t to reclaim the manufacturing of the past — but to build a bridge to the manufacturing of the 2050s. We lay out five fronts where the future gets built:

🔧 Codified craftsmanship.
🚂 Engineering-driven operators.
🪩 Making manufacturing sexy again.
🧠 Legacy knowledge as leverage.
🇺🇸 National elevation.