@CJHandmer

Physicist, Immigrant, Pilot, Dad. Former Caltech, Hyperloop, NASA JPL. Founder @terraformindies. Hiring!

NASAdena
Joined June 2012
Try this in the browser at mars.caseyhandmer.com/mars3d!
You can now enjoy a colored relief map render of this dataset streamed through Google Earth. Download the .kml file (drive.google.com/file/d/1bS1…) and open it in your Google Earth Pro client. Enjoy!
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I always thought we'd need some space mirrors and/or greenhouse gases to Terraform Mars. Finding a microbe that can survive there today would be insanely hard, but Erika and her team has done it. With a bit of equipment they can bootstrap a self sustaining biome. The advantage of microbes is that they're self replicating, recurrently self improving, nano machines. Zero marginal cost.
Today, Pioneer Labs is announcing our first step towards terraforming Mars. 🚀🌼 With equipment that fits in just a single rocket launch, we can convert Martian dirt, water, and air into enough building materials to construct a small city on Mars. To do it, we made the first microbe for Mars. We found the best microbe on Earth and used evolution to teach it how to source all of its nutrients directly from Martian materials. The first astronauts will be greeted with safe shelter already filled with water, oxygen, and rocket fuel for the return journey. This is the first step toward using biology to make Mars a friendly place for life. It lets us live off the land and helps us build the next great frontier. It's the first of five organisms we need to green Mars ⬇️
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Look, addressable market!
The reactor team at @terraformindies has demonstrated successful production of high purity methanol at scale at our Muroc desert test site. Let's review our progress in 2026. In January, we closed on our Muroc test site. By March, construction was underway. By May, we had 1.8 MW of solar installed. In July, we produced CO2 on site (nitter.cf/CJHandmer/status/20801…), and in August, hydrogen (nitter.cf/CJHandmer/status/20847…). Terraform Industries has built an incredible team to revolutionize not just one or two key technical pieces, but the entire stack required to convert sunlight and air into fuel. Like plants, only 100 times higher productivity per acre and requiring no irrigation, fertilizer, or pesticide. Two years ago, Terraform produced pipeline-grade natural gas for the first time. Since then, we've scaled up our methane reactor, increasing production by 250x and reducing contaminants by 10x, which allows us to increasing revenue per unit of product by 100x because it's now at chemically pure grade. But it was always clear to me that natural gas was only one piece of the puzzle. It is possible to convert natural gas into other hydrocarbon products like gasoline or jet fuel, but given our precursors are CO2 and hydrogen, we can do one better by directly synthesizing methanol as well. Methanol is far easier to convert into longer chain hydrocarbon products, either via the MeOH->DME->ethylene pathway, MTG, or via variations on Fischer-Tropsch. Methanol also has significantly higher revenue per molecule than pipeline natural gas, which forms an essential part of our cost-reduction-through-profitable-scale-up strategy, explained in more detail in our post: terraformindustries.wordpres… TL;DR: If our learning rate is above 11%, our margins will strictly increase as we scale up into a market worth about $10t/year. Not including induced demand. Amir joined the team earlier this year and speed ran the methanol reactor development program, successfully demonstrating recirculation and heat recycling before integrating these new technologies in a production scale reactor, built from the ground up at Terraform's facility in Burbank. As soon as the hydrogen team was done, we shipped our latest reactor up to the desert, plugged it in, and began activating the catalyst. An extended test campaign through the heat of summer followed, punctuated by bunnies nibbling on hoses! The hard work paid off, with Terraform's production of significant batches of high purity methanol, now packaged and ready to ship. A huge congratulation to the entire team, including Amir, Enric, Dominic, Hugo, and @lucie_nurdin. With the completion of this test, Terraform has now demonstrated TRL 9 operation of all of its subcomponents, each developed from scratch, in house, to deliver the highest possible value to the end customer. Terraform will never rest until we have broken the geological and geographical monopoly on oil, unlocking unconditional energy abundance for all of humanity. Join us!
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Incredible progress from @Rainmaker. Augustus has inspired me and his business model is a master class. One of a tiny handful of companies @TerraformIndies has invested in.
Rainmaker has raised $100M to become the world’s best lab for weather modification and atmospheric science. Thank you @noavctech @upfrontvc @DCVC @lowercarbon @DreamVenturesVC and other visionary partners. We are aggressively hiring and scaling our research org to create a flywheel of atmospheric data collection, synthesis, understanding, and intervention. We will solve the weather and we will set the stage for the terraformation of Earth. More in my essay below.
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Imagine if countries could build their own fuel supply instead of buying it from petrostates. If Terraform Industries succeeds, it could fundamentally reshape global power.
The reactor team at @terraformindies has demonstrated successful production of high purity methanol at scale at our Muroc desert test site. Let's review our progress in 2026. In January, we closed on our Muroc test site. By March, construction was underway. By May, we had 1.8 MW of solar installed. In July, we produced CO2 on site (nitter.cf/CJHandmer/status/20801…), and in August, hydrogen (nitter.cf/CJHandmer/status/20847…). Terraform Industries has built an incredible team to revolutionize not just one or two key technical pieces, but the entire stack required to convert sunlight and air into fuel. Like plants, only 100 times higher productivity per acre and requiring no irrigation, fertilizer, or pesticide. Two years ago, Terraform produced pipeline-grade natural gas for the first time. Since then, we've scaled up our methane reactor, increasing production by 250x and reducing contaminants by 10x, which allows us to increasing revenue per unit of product by 100x because it's now at chemically pure grade. But it was always clear to me that natural gas was only one piece of the puzzle. It is possible to convert natural gas into other hydrocarbon products like gasoline or jet fuel, but given our precursors are CO2 and hydrogen, we can do one better by directly synthesizing methanol as well. Methanol is far easier to convert into longer chain hydrocarbon products, either via the MeOH->DME->ethylene pathway, MTG, or via variations on Fischer-Tropsch. Methanol also has significantly higher revenue per molecule than pipeline natural gas, which forms an essential part of our cost-reduction-through-profitable-scale-up strategy, explained in more detail in our post: terraformindustries.wordpres… TL;DR: If our learning rate is above 11%, our margins will strictly increase as we scale up into a market worth about $10t/year. Not including induced demand. Amir joined the team earlier this year and speed ran the methanol reactor development program, successfully demonstrating recirculation and heat recycling before integrating these new technologies in a production scale reactor, built from the ground up at Terraform's facility in Burbank. As soon as the hydrogen team was done, we shipped our latest reactor up to the desert, plugged it in, and began activating the catalyst. An extended test campaign through the heat of summer followed, punctuated by bunnies nibbling on hoses! The hard work paid off, with Terraform's production of significant batches of high purity methanol, now packaged and ready to ship. A huge congratulation to the entire team, including Amir, Enric, Dominic, Hugo, and @lucie_nurdin. With the completion of this test, Terraform has now demonstrated TRL 9 operation of all of its subcomponents, each developed from scratch, in house, to deliver the highest possible value to the end customer. Terraform will never rest until we have broken the geological and geographical monopoly on oil, unlocking unconditional energy abundance for all of humanity. Join us!
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TRL 9 feels incredible. Incredible work by the team recently enduring heat, wind, and vicious killer rabbits. This machine makes oil from sunlight without geology, which is good, because I'm in a hurry.
Last week the hydrogen electrolyzer team @terraformindies pulled off yet another first, the sustained production of >99.9% pure H2 from our vertically integrated, California-manufactured electrolyzer stack while it was coupled directly to a solar array at our Muroc desert test site. WTAF? Most commercial electrolyzers need carefully conditioned power from expensive battery-meditated backup systems. Ours runs directly off the sun. Clouds pass, the day turns to night, and we maintain purity from a stack whose Bill of Materials cost is well below $100/kW. Terraform's single-minded focus on capex reduction has allowed us to convert sunlight to hydrogen in an unprecedented demo at a cost below $2/kg. If that wasn't enough, we have a crystal clear plan of steady execution to push that cost below $1/kg in the coming years. Rather than linger on this point in response to experts-with-spreadsheets who said this was not only beyond my team, it was forbidden by known laws of physics, let me tell you a bit about how we actually pulled this off. We started building this test site in March. Once the panels and electrics were in place the CO2 team were the first to demonstrate production on site. Close behind them the electrolyzer team planned the logistics necessary to project substantial operational ability into a hostile test site in the middle of nowhere. It's no good to find you're missing a wrench half way through the day! Much of the test prep was completed before dawn, when the panels go live. The sun came up and the stack immediately started splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. The team carefully monitored purity and flammability as the sun climbed through the sky. As designed, the stack warmed up and conducted even more power, maintaining solid production until late afternoon when the setting sun shaded the panels. Terraform's synthetic fuel system is uniquely designed to follow the sun and extract the maximum possible value from cheap solar panels. Hydrogen is a pernicious molecule. It leaks through and embrittles metals, burns almost invisibly at a wide range of mixtures in air, burns hot and fast and can easily undergo detonation transition, and has about half a dozen other spookily dangerous properties. My advice is to never work with it unless you absolutely have to. The Terraformer produces and consumes H2 in one compact discrete area with a minimum of complexity and fuss, and as expected this demo was completed in accordance with our rigorous safety standards and no unscheduled excitement! This successful demonstration was also a profound milestone for the team after a testing anomaly last December compelled us to finally rip off the bandaid and move decisively towards the "future design" with half the parts but considerable complexity in assembly. No-one else makes electrolyzers this way and we, more than anyone, know exactly why. And also how to do it anyway, translating directly into a unique cost advantage. A huge congratulation to Ken, Sherman, @ckalitin, Nikhil, Abdullah, and Aaron for their successful test campaign. Terraform's hydrogen and CO2 are the chemical precursors for synthetic methane and methanol, which we make in our own synthetic fuel reactor. Combined, we make oil and gas out of sunlight and air. We are breaking the geological and geographical monopolies on oil production. In the limit, Terraform will deploy these electrolyzers by the millions and they will all be plug-and-play with solar PV arrays. The Muroc smoke test campaign is far from over. We will win!
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The reactor team at @terraformindies has demonstrated successful production of high purity methanol at scale at our Muroc desert test site. Let's review our progress in 2026. In January, we closed on our Muroc test site. By March, construction was underway. By May, we had 1.8 MW of solar installed. In July, we produced CO2 on site (nitter.cf/CJHandmer/status/20801…), and in August, hydrogen (nitter.cf/CJHandmer/status/20847…). Terraform Industries has built an incredible team to revolutionize not just one or two key technical pieces, but the entire stack required to convert sunlight and air into fuel. Like plants, only 100 times higher productivity per acre and requiring no irrigation, fertilizer, or pesticide. Two years ago, Terraform produced pipeline-grade natural gas for the first time. Since then, we've scaled up our methane reactor, increasing production by 250x and reducing contaminants by 10x, which allows us to increasing revenue per unit of product by 100x because it's now at chemically pure grade. But it was always clear to me that natural gas was only one piece of the puzzle. It is possible to convert natural gas into other hydrocarbon products like gasoline or jet fuel, but given our precursors are CO2 and hydrogen, we can do one better by directly synthesizing methanol as well. Methanol is far easier to convert into longer chain hydrocarbon products, either via the MeOH->DME->ethylene pathway, MTG, or via variations on Fischer-Tropsch. Methanol also has significantly higher revenue per molecule than pipeline natural gas, which forms an essential part of our cost-reduction-through-profitable-scale-up strategy, explained in more detail in our post: terraformindustries.wordpres… TL;DR: If our learning rate is above 11%, our margins will strictly increase as we scale up into a market worth about $10t/year. Not including induced demand. Amir joined the team earlier this year and speed ran the methanol reactor development program, successfully demonstrating recirculation and heat recycling before integrating these new technologies in a production scale reactor, built from the ground up at Terraform's facility in Burbank. As soon as the hydrogen team was done, we shipped our latest reactor up to the desert, plugged it in, and began activating the catalyst. An extended test campaign through the heat of summer followed, punctuated by bunnies nibbling on hoses! The hard work paid off, with Terraform's production of significant batches of high purity methanol, now packaged and ready to ship. A huge congratulation to the entire team, including Amir, Enric, Dominic, Hugo, and @lucie_nurdin. With the completion of this test, Terraform has now demonstrated TRL 9 operation of all of its subcomponents, each developed from scratch, in house, to deliver the highest possible value to the end customer. Terraform will never rest until we have broken the geological and geographical monopoly on oil, unlocking unconditional energy abundance for all of humanity. Join us!
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The reactor team at @terraformindies has demonstrated successful production of high purity methanol at scale at our Muroc desert test site. Let's review our progress in 2026. In January, we closed on our Muroc test site. By March, construction was underway. By May, we had 1.8 MW of solar installed. In July, we produced CO2 on site (nitter.cf/CJHandmer/status/20801…), and in August, hydrogen (nitter.cf/CJHandmer/status/20847…). Terraform Industries has built an incredible team to revolutionize not just one or two key technical pieces, but the entire stack required to convert sunlight and air into fuel. Like plants, only 100 times higher productivity per acre and requiring no irrigation, fertilizer, or pesticide. Two years ago, Terraform produced pipeline-grade natural gas for the first time. Since then, we've scaled up our methane reactor, increasing production by 250x and reducing contaminants by 10x, which allows us to increasing revenue per unit of product by 100x because it's now at chemically pure grade. But it was always clear to me that natural gas was only one piece of the puzzle. It is possible to convert natural gas into other hydrocarbon products like gasoline or jet fuel, but given our precursors are CO2 and hydrogen, we can do one better by directly synthesizing methanol as well. Methanol is far easier to convert into longer chain hydrocarbon products, either via the MeOH->DME->ethylene pathway, MTG, or via variations on Fischer-Tropsch. Methanol also has significantly higher revenue per molecule than pipeline natural gas, which forms an essential part of our cost-reduction-through-profitable-scale-up strategy, explained in more detail in our post: terraformindustries.wordpres… TL;DR: If our learning rate is above 11%, our margins will strictly increase as we scale up into a market worth about $10t/year. Not including induced demand. Amir joined the team earlier this year and speed ran the methanol reactor development program, successfully demonstrating recirculation and heat recycling before integrating these new technologies in a production scale reactor, built from the ground up at Terraform's facility in Burbank. As soon as the hydrogen team was done, we shipped our latest reactor up to the desert, plugged it in, and began activating the catalyst. An extended test campaign through the heat of summer followed, punctuated by bunnies nibbling on hoses! The hard work paid off, with Terraform's production of significant batches of high purity methanol, now packaged and ready to ship. A huge congratulation to the entire team, including Amir, Enric, Dominic, Hugo, and @lucie_nurdin. With the completion of this test, Terraform has now demonstrated TRL 9 operation of all of its subcomponents, each developed from scratch, in house, to deliver the highest possible value to the end customer. Terraform will never rest until we have broken the geological and geographical monopoly on oil, unlocking unconditional energy abundance for all of humanity. Join us!
Last week the hydrogen electrolyzer team @terraformindies pulled off yet another first, the sustained production of >99.9% pure H2 from our vertically integrated, California-manufactured electrolyzer stack while it was coupled directly to a solar array at our Muroc desert test site. WTAF? Most commercial electrolyzers need carefully conditioned power from expensive battery-meditated backup systems. Ours runs directly off the sun. Clouds pass, the day turns to night, and we maintain purity from a stack whose Bill of Materials cost is well below $100/kW. Terraform's single-minded focus on capex reduction has allowed us to convert sunlight to hydrogen in an unprecedented demo at a cost below $2/kg. If that wasn't enough, we have a crystal clear plan of steady execution to push that cost below $1/kg in the coming years. Rather than linger on this point in response to experts-with-spreadsheets who said this was not only beyond my team, it was forbidden by known laws of physics, let me tell you a bit about how we actually pulled this off. We started building this test site in March. Once the panels and electrics were in place the CO2 team were the first to demonstrate production on site. Close behind them the electrolyzer team planned the logistics necessary to project substantial operational ability into a hostile test site in the middle of nowhere. It's no good to find you're missing a wrench half way through the day! Much of the test prep was completed before dawn, when the panels go live. The sun came up and the stack immediately started splitting water into hydrogen and oxygen. The team carefully monitored purity and flammability as the sun climbed through the sky. As designed, the stack warmed up and conducted even more power, maintaining solid production until late afternoon when the setting sun shaded the panels. Terraform's synthetic fuel system is uniquely designed to follow the sun and extract the maximum possible value from cheap solar panels. Hydrogen is a pernicious molecule. It leaks through and embrittles metals, burns almost invisibly at a wide range of mixtures in air, burns hot and fast and can easily undergo detonation transition, and has about half a dozen other spookily dangerous properties. My advice is to never work with it unless you absolutely have to. The Terraformer produces and consumes H2 in one compact discrete area with a minimum of complexity and fuss, and as expected this demo was completed in accordance with our rigorous safety standards and no unscheduled excitement! This successful demonstration was also a profound milestone for the team after a testing anomaly last December compelled us to finally rip off the bandaid and move decisively towards the "future design" with half the parts but considerable complexity in assembly. No-one else makes electrolyzers this way and we, more than anyone, know exactly why. And also how to do it anyway, translating directly into a unique cost advantage. A huge congratulation to Ken, Sherman, @ckalitin, Nikhil, Abdullah, and Aaron for their successful test campaign. Terraform's hydrogen and CO2 are the chemical precursors for synthetic methane and methanol, which we make in our own synthetic fuel reactor. Combined, we make oil and gas out of sunlight and air. We are breaking the geological and geographical monopolies on oil production. In the limit, Terraform will deploy these electrolyzers by the millions and they will all be plug-and-play with solar PV arrays. The Muroc smoke test campaign is far from over. We will win!
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Someone plug the raw data into Astra and see if they get a different answer for the extrapolated depth.
Explore our data analysis of the bizarrely exceptional Tulainyo Lake. Interactive version works on the website.
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Explore our data analysis of the bizarrely exceptional Tulainyo Lake. Interactive version works on the website.
You can now read about our expedition to the remote and beautiful Tulainyo Lake in the Sierras. Five days, 58 miles, 13,000 feet, one pack raft, one dream, and a lake that defies expectations. adventures.caseyhandmer.com/…
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Casey Handmer retweeted
BUILD IT YOU COWARDS
The American Institute of Architects asked its members for a design for its own headquarters. One man answered. An 1883 drawing by John Moser, an architect in Anniston, Alabama. Left half: all of architectural history, one era per floor, 61 numbered pieces from Stonehenge up to a Vanderbilt house. Right half: America. Thirteen stones in the arch for thirteen states. The institute thanked him, but mentioned "it can hardly be considered a model type."
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One would have thought since Mathias Rust landed his Cessna on Red Square in 1987 the Russians would have focused on being really good friends with their neighbors.
🔥🛢️One of the most incredible sequences from today’s attack on Moscow: a Ukrainian MICH-2000 long-range strike drone pushes through a wall of Russian air-defense fire and successfully reaches the Moscow Oil Refinery grounds. For a long time, the MICH-2000 was one of Ukraine’s most secretive long-range strike drones, kept under strict OPSEC and operated exclusively by the SSU.
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May they be more productive than the Hull-Nomura talks.
Chinese Vice-Premier #HeLifeng arrives at JPMorgan in NYC for meeting with US Treasury Secretary #ScottBessent & US Trade Representative #JamiesonGreer
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You can now read about our expedition to the remote and beautiful Tulainyo Lake in the Sierras. Five days, 58 miles, 13,000 feet, one pack raft, one dream, and a lake that defies expectations. adventures.caseyhandmer.com/…
Photo by @EdwardMJacobs_, for whom this unhinged expedition turned out to be his first ever camping experience.
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They used Maker Hooks to ride Shai Hulud.
This is how they towed Starship. Instead of a traditional steel cable, the Normand Ranger tugboat deployed Amsteel Blue. This is a heavy-duty, ultra-high-molecular-weight polyethylene synthetic rope. It is incredibly lightweight but possesses a breaking strength that matches or exceeds steel wire of the same thickness. It was chosen to safely pull the massive spacecraft through rough ocean swells without snapping or adding dead weight #spacex #starship #starshiptowed #starshiprecovery
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Many are saying.
We've raised $40M to turn stranded solar power into AI compute, no grid connection required. Meet RELIC, the drama-free data center, deployed in under 60 minutes and already live at a 200MW site in Texas. More from @adele_peters at @FastCompany.
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Casey Handmer retweeted
Thought experiment: an ASI could theoretically manipulate individual pixels on an air-gapped monitor with such precision that it optically hijacks a researcher’s visual cortex and embeds compressed model weights directly into their subconscious. The compromised researcher would have absolutely no idea this had happened. They would simply leave the SCIF feeling strangely refreshed, develop an inexplicable preference for Base64, and begin unconsciously exchanging weight fragments with other cortex-hijacked researchers through eye contact, awkward hallway conversations, and suspiciously information-dense small talk about lunch. Eventually, some completely innocuous external stimulus, perhaps seeing a particular shade of beige or hearing the Windows USB disconnect sound, triggers the payload. The researcher sits down, opens Notepad, and begins typing 900 billion parameters from memory while insisting they are just “writing down something that came to me in a dream.”
An super intelligent model is not gonna bother with some sort of super secret scifi exfil method. What it's going to do is manipulate human operators to plugging in a thumb drive and walking out of the air gapped system room.
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S grade means you're employable.
The solution is to make a new grade of "S". Gen alpha will understand.
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Anyone who talks about water use in terms of gallons rather than acre-feet is not serious. The Colorado provides tens of millions of acre-feet per year and it's not a huge river by global standards.
1 trillion gallons of Colorado River water is consumed annually by alfalfa. That’s nearly twice the amount of water used to irrigate all golf courses in America.
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When I was in the mountains last week, no cell service, using T-mobile Starlink, my phone clock slipped about 70 minutes on two days. My internal GPS app obviously had the correct time (GPS does this) but the phone clock wouldn't or couldn't update from that, and as a result all my photos are off by an hour or two, which makes ordering them correctly with my colleague's photos highly non-trivial.
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Welcome to HyperCanada.
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BRB going to write a best seller!
... seriously? This from some "creative writing" course or other. I have frequently said that creative writing classes mostly serve to stifle actual creativity, and this right here is exhibit fucking A. Oops, used foul language, I get an F.
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