NASA engineer Christine Gregg inspects an experimental construction robot. (NASA Photo / Dominic Hart)The Mars Society says it’s making progress on launching a startup incubator in the Seattle area, with artificial intelligence and biotech as its first targets. Its long-term goal? To make a profit, yes, but also to support the development of technologies needed to sustain settlements on the Red Planet.“A successful Mars colony will need to be highly innovative, and it will have the chance to be highly innovative — and because of those facts, it will make inventions that will meet its own needs but also be licensable on Earth,” Mars Society President Robert Zubrin said last week at the nonprofit group’s annual conference at the University of Washington. “Those inventions — as it were, IP as exports from Mars — will be one of the main economic supports of the Mars city-state,” Zubrin said. “So, people sometimes ask me, ‘Well, if you think that a Mars inventors colony could actually be profitable, why not create it here on Earth first?'”That’s the idea behind the Mars Technology Institute. James Burk, the Mars Society’s Seattle-based executive director, said the institute would be modeled on the tech industry’s Y Combinator, a California-based startup accelerator that provides seed money and guidance for promising ventures in return for a share of their equity.Burk said he’s been talking government officials and representatives of other organizations in the Seattle area — including Bellevue College — about setting up a home base for the institute

Varda Space Industries has raised $90 million in a series B funding led by Caffeinated Capital and will use the capital to build its infrastructure that supports pharmaceutical manufacturing in space.

Varda space raises $90M to build manufacturing factories in space.