John Rubino is a former Wall Street financial analyst and author or co-author of five books, including The Money Bubble: What to Do Before It Pops and Clean Money: Picking Winners in the Green-Tech Boom. He founded the popular financial website DollarCollapse.com in 2004, sold it in 2022, and now publishes John Rubino’s Substack newsletter.
NASA was back in the news this week with its moon mission:
NASA’s Artemis II mission, the first crewed lunar flyby in over 50 years, successfully launched on April 1, 2026, and is currently returning to Earth after a historic 10-day journey. The four-person crew, consisting of Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen, traveled 252,756 miles from Earth, breaking the distance record previously held by Apollo 13.
The mission is scheduled to splash down in the Pacific Ocean near San Diego on April 10, 2026, marking a critical test of the Space Launch System (SLS) and Orion spacecraft life support systems for future deep-space exploration. While Artemis II did not land on the Moon, it paved the way for Artemis III (mid-2027) and Artemis IV (early 2028), which are scheduled to conduct the first crewed lunar landing since 1972.
The Real Space Revolution
With all due respect, this is oddly tame stuff. We did similar things back when NASA engineers used slide rules, and computer memory was measured in kilobytes.
Something much more interesting is happening up there, led, naturally, by Elon Musk:
Yesterday SpaceX launched 29 more Starlink satellites from Florida.
Nobody cared. Routine. Another Tuesday.
Here is what actually happened.
Satellite number 10,074 entered an orbit where 300,000 autonomous collision-avoidance maneuvers were executed last year alone. Not by humans. By onboard machine learning that screens conjunction data from 30 million object-transit observations per day, computes probability in real time, and fires ion thrusters if risk exceeds one in a million. The industry standard is one in ten thousand. SpaceX set its threshold 1,000 times stricter and then automated the entire thing.
Three hundred thousand maneuvers. That is 820 per day. Forty per satellite per year. Every single one decided and executed by AI faster than a ground controller could open the alert email.
This is Tesla Full Self-Driving logic running in vacuum at 7.8 kilometers per second.
SpaceX did not stop there. In January they launched Stargaze, a space situational awareness network built on the star trackers already aboard every Starlink satellite. Thirty million observations daily, conjunction screening delivered in minutes instead of hours, and they gave the data away for free to every operator on Earth. They just made themselves the air traffic control system for low-Earth orbit and charged nothing because the real product is not the data. The real product is the standard.
Now connect this to last week.
Terafab breaks ground in Austin. One terawatt per year of AI compute. Eighty percent allocated to space. D3 chips designed to run hotter in vacuum where radiative cooling is free. Satellites with 100-kilowatt solar arrays scaling to megawatt. Optimus robots replicating from raw materials. The Dyson Swarm bootstrap.
Every analyst covering Terafab is modeling chip yields, capital costs, and process nodes. Not one of them is asking the question that determines whether any of it works: how do you manage ten thousand satellites without a single collision, and then scale that to ten million, and then to five billion?
The answer already exists. It launched its 300,000th maneuver months ago. It processes 30 million observations every 24 hours. It operates at a collision-probability threshold three orders of magnitude beyond what any government or competitor has achieved. And it improves with every satellite added because more nodes means more eyes means better models means safer density.
The Hormuz crisis proved that terrestrial supply chains are molecule-dependent and fragile. The Terafab announcement proved that Musk intends to move compute off-planet. But neither of those matter if the orbital environment becomes a debris field. The collision-avoidance AI is the gate. Without it, every satellite launched is a lottery ticket for Kessler syndrome. With it, density becomes self-reinforcing instead of self-destroying.
Nobody is covering this because it is not a product announcement. It is not a keynote. It is infrastructure so foundational that it has become invisible, the way TCP/IP became invisible the moment the internet worked.
SpaceX did not just build a satellite constellation. They built the nervous system of orbital civilization and trained it on 300,000 real-world decisions before anyone realized what they were looking at.
The rockets are visible. The chips are headline news. The AI keeping ten thousand objects from destroying each other in silence at eight kilometers per second is the actual breakthrough.
And yesterday they added 29 more nodes to the network.
If It Works
Like self-driving cars, self-navigating satellite swarms will never be completely error-free. There was, in fact, a “fragment-creation event” just last week, when a SpaceX satellite spontaneously disassembled:
(Tom’s Hardware) – Please, everyone, avoid saying ‘explosion’ in the run-up to SpaceX’s IPO.
Starlink has posted an update on satellite 34343, which it lost communication with on Sunday. The SpaceX-owned global internet firm says that the satellite “experienced an anomaly” while it was in LEO at around 560 km above the Earth. It also used wording to play down any concerns about risk to the thousands of other man-made objects at a similar altitude. However, orbital intelligence agency LeoLabs is less coy and describes Sunday’s incident as a “fragment creation event.”
Rapid Unplanned Disassembly
Following the anomaly on Sunday, Starlink’s official line (as above) was to play down any risks to the International Space Station, Monday’s Transporter-16 mission, or the upcoming launch of NASA’s Artemis II mission. It doesn’t go as far as admitting there is any post-rapid unplanned disassembly debris, but does say that it will “continue to monitor the satellite along with any trackable debris and coordinate with NASA and the U.S. Space Force.”
Naturally, SpaceX and Starlink teams are working to determine the cause of the anomaly and implement any changes necessary to prevent this from happening again. Sadly, the analysis of whatever happened towards the end of last year, when another Starlink satellite tumbled from space after an “anomaly,” didn’t stop this latest debris‑generation incident.
So it remains to be seen if a swarm of millions of low-earth-orbit satellites is safe enough to trust. But the attempt might be the most consequential thing humanity is doing right now.
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