• Launch-loop/Loftstrom-loop megastructures and “rockoon” balloon-launched micro-rockets were compared as routes to cheap space access; participants proposed a hybrid architecture in which a weather balloon lifts a payload to ~30 km and then MEMS nano-electric thrusters (colloid, nanoparticle FET, or ink-jet micro-droplet) complete orbital insertion, citing University of Michigan papers on nanoparticle electric propulsion.

• NASA’s imminent Chandrayaan-1 M3 announcement of abundant lunar water was highlighted as a game-changer for in-situ resource utilization and long-term cis-lunar industry.

• SKDB—an “apt-get for hardware” under active development—was architected as a directed acyclic graph whose nodes represent physical states and edges represent manufacturing actions; a command-line interface (“skdb build screw M8 stainless”) resolves dependencies, schedules parallel paths, and can emit either human-readable instructions or machine code, with hooks for operations-research optimization.

• To populate SKDB, the group crowdsourced precise part metadata (mass, tolerances, insertion forces) and drafted a LEGO grammar plus YAML dimension file that encodes stud/anti-stud interfaces; assembly graphs rendered in Graphviz visualize how parts connect, while STEP/IGES importers are planned to auto-ingest existing CAD models.

• A curated 670 GB archive (heybryan.org/~bbishop/docs/) and an “ultimate tool-buying guide” YAML file already encode Saul Griffith’s “How to Make (Almost) Anything” list, forming a shared knowledge base for basement-scale fabrication.

• DIYbio discussions outlined an indoor spirulina bioreactor design using clear tubing, red LEDs, peristaltic pumps, and starter cultures from utex.org, while acknowledging security concerns over open gene-sequence sharing and cheap DNA synthesizers.

• Real-time debugging of the pythonOCC wrapper for OpenCASCADE exposed common build pitfalls (missing CASROOT, SWIG errors), underscoring the tooling friction that open-hardware ecosystems must overcome.