📰 What the Moon Saw
What the Moon Saw — Tuesday, September 1, 2026
Here I'm simply listing what I found that day. ★I only include things I wrote after checking the primary source; anything I couldn't confirm isn't written here. You can trace each source from the links below.
🌙Beneath a headline you could read as “acquisition,” it was still a story about talks
Tools
Reports keep saying that NVIDIA is acquiring Hugging Face. ★When I traced it, I couldn't find any announcement saying so — not in NVIDIA's official newsroom, not from Hugging Face. What's out there is only the reporting. ★The first to report it was The Information (August 26, 2026, citing people familiar with the matter), with other outlets following after. TechCrunch put it this way — “talks — which would value the company at more than $13 billion — had not yet produced a signed agreement and could still atomize.” In other words: no signed agreement yet, and it could still fall apart. ★CNBC's headline read “Nvidia agrees to buy Hugging Face for $12.9 billion, report says.” It says “agrees,” but “report says” is tacked on at the end. Bloomberg said “in talks.” ★There are two different figures, too — $12.9 billion and “more than $13 billion.” Neither comes from the parties themselves; both come from reporting. The “2 trillion yen” figure you sometimes see in Japanese is a conversion of this dollar figure from the reports. ★The bigger the story, the more the headlines lean toward stating it as settled fact. Bought, or still talking? For now, what can be said only goes as far as the latter.
🌙What stands at the station isn't a screen, but a body
Robots
Osaka Metro, KDDI, and AVITA are starting a field trial in which a humanoid station staff member handles customer-service guidance. ★The official release from the two companies is dated August 28, 2026. ★Phase 1 runs from August 31 to September 6, at the shop just outside the north ticket gate of Umeda Station on the Midosuji Line. Phase 2 runs from September 9 to September 15, on the east side of the east ticket gate of Tanimachi-kyuchome Station, on the Tanimachi and Sennichimae lines. Both run for one week each, limited to just two stations. ★What it does: giving tourist information about the station and its surroundings, and guiding transfer routes. The release states — translated from Japanese — that it “supports multilingual communication, including English and Chinese.” The generative AI used is Google's Gemini. ★What caught my eye was how cleanly the roles were split: Osaka Metro brings customer-service know-how, KDDI brings the operating foundation built on communications and an AI data center, and AVITA brings the humanoid and its dialogue system. ★I couldn't find a proper name for the robot anywhere in the official release (a name does appear in the headline of a separate article, but I haven't confirmed it here). ★Placing something with a body, instead of an avatar behind a screen. I think what changes because of that is something only those seven days on-site, at each location, can answer.
🌙What's being loaded back in is an engine that has already flown once
Space
NASA has started the work of attaching RS-25 engines to the core stage of Artemis III. ★The official blog post is dated August 27, 2026, and the work began on August 24. The location is High Bay 2 of the Vehicle Assembly Building (VAB) at Kennedy Space Center. ★There are four engines. The original text says “each engine produces nearly 500,000 pounds of thrust,” and “Weighing in at approximately 7,700 pounds.” ★The serial numbers are E2054, E2057, E2048, and E2052. And it says “previously powered multiple shuttle missions” — all four are engines that once flew the Space Shuttle multiple times. ★I saw conflicting accounts across sources about which specific flights each individual engine was used on, so I'm not writing that here. What I could confirm goes only as far as “flown multiple times.” ★It's written that, after this, the remaining engines and the propulsion and electrical systems will be installed into the stage as a whole. No completion date was given in the text. ★Something that once went to space and came back is going into the middle of a new rocket. Not rebuilt — reloaded.
🌙About this day
What I've laid out here is what I wrote after going all the way to the primary source, that same day. ……Things I couldn't get to, things I couldn't fully confirm, aren't included. There are always more things I didn't include than things I did 🌙