Weekend Briefing No. 630

Making Babies in Space -- Anthropic and the DoD -- Returning to the Moon

Welcome to the weekend. Check out my March playlist.

---

---

Prime Numbers

3.5 — US mortgage rates on 30-year fixed loans dropped below 6% for the first time in 3.5 years, falling to the 5% range and potentially unlocking the spring homebuying season as wages now grow faster than home prices.

69 — A permanent docking pier was towed from the Pacific Northwest to Antarctica’s McMurdo Station over 69 days, replacing the traditional seasonal ice pier that became unusable in 2025 and providing the first long-term mooring infrastructure for America’s largest polar research facility.

91,000,000 — USAID support for health initiatives saved 91 million lives over 20 years, but the agency’s 2025 dismantling also ended decades of biodiversity funding that protected endangered species, employed community eco-guards worldwide, and pioneered locally-led conservation across Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

---

Making Babies in Space

We’ve sent hundreds of people to space, but only 105 were women—and we have no idea how many of them menstruated up there. The only data we have on pregnancy beyond Earth comes from ten pregnant rats launched into orbit in 1983, during a rare Cold War collaboration between American and Soviet scientists who had to smuggle their work past Reagan’s travel bans and propaganda threats. Those rats gave birth to live pups, proving mammalian pregnancy could survive microgravity, but their labor required twice as many contractions and their offspring showed impaired balance for days—rewired by an environment where mothers rolled on ceilings instead of walking on ground. Now Musk wants to send a million people to Mars in 30 years, but if pregnancy is vulnerable to four days in space, we’re building cities on a planet where giving birth might be impossible and children—if they survive—may evolve into something no longer recognizably human. Pioneer Works (7 minutes)

---

Anthropic & the DoD

Anthropic’s contract with the Department of Defense prohibited Claude from being used for mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous killing. This wasn’t illegal (the Biden and Trump teams both agreed to these terms initially), and the Pentagon had straightforward regulatory fixes available that wouldn’t require corporate execution, but War Secretary Hegseth chose the nuclear option anyway: designating Anthropic a “supply chain risk” reserved for foreign adversaries, potentially forcing its investors to divest and making every AI company suddenly wonder if their property rights mean anything at all. The message to American business is now explicit—capitulate to whatever terms the government demands or face destruction—which means higher costs of capital for AI, slower infrastructure development, and foreign governments treating U.S. AI systems as unreliable precisely when the technology might be entering its most transformative phase. What’s dying here isn’t just one contract dispute but the assumption that democratic control and governmental control are the same thing. Hyperdimensional (6 minutes)

---

Trust at Scale

When I started Weekend Briefing 12 years ago, I didn't think I'd reach 630 editions and 275,000 subscribers. It's been personally rewarding. And it’s one of the highest ROI channels for finding new clients for my law firm, Westaway. The strategy is simple, but the execution is hard: build trust with the people who matter to your business through exceptional newsletters. Everything in business is downstream of trust. But most founders are too spread thin to do it well and consistently. That's why I co-founded Future Forest with my close friend Banks Benitez. It's an end-to-end newsletter service for professional services businesses. One flat monthly rate gets you a full team: writers, editors, content strategists, and email marketing experts obsessed with the craft. The companies working with us are landing 5- and 6-figure clients directly from their newsletters. Banks only has capacity for a few new clients each quarter. If you’re interested, click the link to grab time on his calendar to discuss. Future Forest (Sponsored)

---

Returning to the Moon

In 1968, Susan Borman told NASA that if her husband’s crew got stranded in lunar orbit, they’d ruin the moon for everyone—no one would look at it without thinking of three dead men. They orbited anyway, read from Genesis on Christmas Eve to a third of humanity, and people said they’d saved 1968. Now, 54 years after the last moon mission, Artemis II will carry the first woman and first person of color past the lunar surface, traveling farther from Earth than any human ever has—not to land, but to prove the systems work and shake off half a century of rust. This isn’t Apollo redux, it’s a test flight for permanent presence. The mission profile is deliberately simple—loop around the moon and come home—because NASA needs to verify everything works before attempting landings with a 165-foot-tall Starship lander that requires 20 fuel tanker launches just to gas up. If you’re building anything complex, this is the pattern: prove the foundation before adding complexity, even when the timeline pressures are enormous and China says they’ll land by 2030. The four astronauts—Wiseman, Glover, Koch, and Hansen—will endure 5,000°F reentry temps in a skip-entry descent, but commander Wiseman won’t let himself imagine seeing the far side yet, because “no matter what your expectation is, the reality will be different.” Time (7 minutes)

---

How Africa Develops

Joe Studwell’s first book argued that land reform, export discipline, and directed credit explained Asia’s economic miracle—and that any country could follow the same path. A decade later, China’s growth has halved, and Africa, which seemed ready to follow, hasn’t grown in per capita terms at all. His sequel asks whether the Asian model still works on a continent that inherited far worse starting conditions: lower population density, deeper poverty, almost no education infrastructure, and colonial land policies designed to concentrate rather than distribute wealth. The uncomfortable truth buried in Studwell’s case studies: the model works brilliantly for agriculture but barely exists for manufacturing. Ethiopia doubled crop production in a decade by backing smallholders; Botswana got rich from diamonds without building factories; Rwanda grew through tourism; even Mauritius pivoted away from manufacturing toward finance. Manufacturing as a share of output peaks at 16 percent in Zimbabwe—versus China’s 25 percent with 80 times the population. Meanwhile, the world has changed: automation means manufacturing generates a third fewer jobs per unit of output than in the 1960s, China’s wage advantage over Africa today is one-fifth of what China’s was over America in 2000, and the current American posture is sweeping tariffs, not the open markets that made Asia’s rise possible. If you’re building a development strategy today, the lesson isn’t that the Asian model failed—it’s that the window for export-led manufacturing may have already closed, and nobody’s found what replaces it. The Work In Progress (6 minutes)

---

Solar’s Growth

Solar grew 35 percent in 2025 and passed hydroelectric power for the first time, generating enough additional electricity to cover two-thirds of the year’s rising demand. Solar added 85 terawatt-hours while overall demand for electricity rose 121, meaning renewables are nearly growing fast enough to absorb increasing consumption, but not quite. The gap got filled by coal, which rose 13 percent, not because anyone planned it but because natural gas hardware has long delays and Trump reversed the ban on LNG exports, making domestic gas more expensive. The economics are becoming unstoppable—43 GW of new solar capacity is planned for 2026, far more than the 27 GW added last year—but the politics are creating weird distortions. Energy Secretary Chris Wright ordered coal plants slated for closure to stay available, though it’s unclear if they’re even running, since they wouldn’t be closing if they could compete economically. If you’re building energy infrastructure, the story is about timing: renewables plus battery storage (24 GW being added this year) will likely outpace demand growth within a few years, but market friction and policy interference mean the transition includes a coal bump that wouldn’t exist in a purely economic scenario. ARS Technica (4 minutes)

---

The Invisible Epidemic

James is 62, doesn’t have a job or family at home, and spent an entire day—grocery store, lunch, TV—without interacting with anyone, then rated his life a zero on a 10-point ladder. He’s not an outlier: people under 34 spend 30 percent less time with family than in 2003 and half as much time with friends, while time spent alone went up across every age group. The time-use survey data shows a pattern—those who rate their lives lowest on the ladder spend their weekends alone, while those at the top spend weekends with others. The results are tragic. Social isolation increases premature death by 50 percent, the same effect as smoking 15 cigarettes daily, but loneliness makes socializing feel threatening, creating a vicious cycle where isolation convinces you that you don’t matter and you’re unworthy of love. Humans evolved to survive in groups, so when isolated, we’re convinced we’re in danger—which means admitting loneliness is admitting you’re hurting on a primal level, so we don’t talk about it and it stays invisible. Youtube (4 minutes)

---

Should We Work Together?

Hi! I’m Kyle. This newsletter is my passion project. When I’m not writing, I run a law firm that helps startups move fast without breaking things. Most founders want a trusted legal partner, but they hate surprise legal bills. At Westaway, we take care of your startup’s legal needs for a flat, monthly fee so you can control your costs and focus on scaling your business. If you’re interested, let’s jump on a call to see if you’re a good fit for the firm. Click here to schedule a one-on-one call with me.

---

Weekend Wisdom

Trust is built with consistency. - Lincoln Chafee