Hardware

FCC approved SpaceX satellite phone service calling it a public safety win — the 911 call gets through. But the dispatcher does not know where you are. The infrastructure that was supposed to fix that stopped working in 2020.

China just tested proximity operations with its Qingzhou cargo spacecraft 5 km from a target satellite. No international framework governs that capability — and Beijing is developing it faster than anyone is writing the rules.

TakeMe2Space has 17 employees and a cubesat bolted to its launch vehicle. To make a 50kW orbital data center pencil out, launch costs must drop 17x — from $3,600/kg to $200/kg. Starship is the bet. The $5M seed round is not the capital stack for that bet.

AI labs are hitting a power wall — and the physics of heat is proving harder to solve than the software.

Taiwan wants democracies to trust it with their military communications. The problem: the island’s semiconductor fabs — the reason the world cares about Taiwan — sit within artillery range of the mainland it must defend.

NASA certifies spacecraft materials with Earth fire tests — but nobody has burned anything on the Moon to verify those tests work at 1/6g. An experiment to answer this launches late 2026, after crewed landings. Lunar gravity may let fires burn far longer than on Earth.

ADEOS-II died 10 months after launch in 2003. Nobody knows why. In 2027, a Japanese inspection spacecraft will fly within meters of the wreckage — and the answers have been sitting there for 23 years.

Voyager invested in Max Space because a 350m3 habitat fits on one Falcon 9. The 2026 launch is a 20m3 demo. Thunderbird Station at 350m3 is a 2029 target. NASA studies peg minimum viable at ~317m3 per module.

Aethero says its next satellite will hit 16,000 TFLOPS — 100x its last mission. But the previous satellite, launched March 30, is still in health checks. Titan does not fly until October. The defense community is watching anyway.

The AI chip industry discovered its next bottleneck is not compute — it is the wiring between chips. Nvidia and Broadcom just answered that question the same way: light, through the same TSMC platform. What that means for every fab and photonics startup is the story.

Data centers are hitting a thermal wall: silicon becomes unreliable above 150°C, limiting how much power can reach AI chips. Intel Foundry just demonstrated something that could change that, on a production-scale 300mm wafer.