Manifest Space with Morgan Brennan Istari CEO Will Roper on Blue Origin’s moon dust battery and the infrastructure enabling it 12/3/25
Dec 3, 2025
Will Roper, CEO of Istari Digital and former Pentagon official, dives into groundbreaking developments like a moon dust battery designed in collaboration with Blue Origin. He details how AI facilitates this innovation by extracting heat from lunar regolith to generate energy. Roper also explains Istari's unique AI guardrails that promote creativity while minimizing errors. He discusses upcoming projects and the necessity of regulatory acceptance for AI in engineering, aiming for a transformative future in aerospace.
AI Snips
Chapters
Transcript
Episode notes
Deterministic Guardrails For Creative AI
- Istari's infrastructure creates deterministic guardrails around generative AI so models can be creative yet provably safe.
- This separation lets teams combine probabilistic generation with mathematical checks to ensure requirements and compliance are met.
Moon-Dust Battery Designed By AI
- Blue Origin used Istari to agentically design a moon-dust battery that vacuums lunar regolith and extracts heat for power.
- The AI converted human engineering requests into requirements, ran simulations, and was checked against outcomes via Astari.
Ground: Connect Data Without Consolidation
- Astari calls its platform 'ground' to contrast with cloud: data stays where owners want while a connection protocol links it securely.
- The system connects heterogeneous tools and models without consolidating data, enabling cross-system agentic workflows.