Good morning. It's Monday, March 30th, 2026. Here's your tech and space briefing.

**Artemis II: Two days to launch.** NASA is two days out from the first crewed deep-space mission since Apollo 17. The New York Times is running a feature this morning with program manager Shawn Quinn saying — and I quote — "Rocket's ready. Spaceship's ready." The SLS stack is on Pad 39-B at Kennedy Space Center, the four-person crew is in quarantine, and the launch window opens Wednesday at 6:24 PM Eastern. Window stays open through April 6th. First humans beyond low Earth orbit in over 50 years — this is the real deal.

**SpaceX launched 119 satellites this morning.** The Transporter-16 rideshare mission lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base early this morning — 4:02 AM Pacific time, carrying 119 payloads to sun-synchronous orbit on a Falcon 9. That's 119 separate customers — startups, defense tech, remote sensing companies — hitching a single ride to space. Rideshare is now so routine that SpaceX doesn't even name most of the passengers. The democratization of orbit continues, one stacked fairing at a time.

**Starship Flight 12 slips to late April.** New reporting confirms that Booster 19 — the first V3 Super Heavy — still needs 23 Raptor 3 engines installed before it can attempt a full 33-engine static fire. SpaceX rolled the booster back to the production facility after earlier tests, which adds another weeks-long cycle before it can return to Pad 2. The Basenor tracker puts Flight 12 targeting late April at the earliest. The good news: when it flies, it'll be the first full-stack V3 test with all-new Raptor 3 engines, new pad, and new upper stage. Worth the wait — but the March window is officially gone.

**Crypto is liquidating bitcoin to fund AI.** CoinDesk is reporting a significant shift in the DePIN and broader crypto industry: bitcoin is trading around $70,000, the DePIN infrastructure thesis is under pressure, and companies across the sector are taking on $70 billion in AI infrastructure contracts while liquidating crypto treasury positions to fund the transition. The headline from the piece is blunt: "The math doesn't work, so the industry is pivoting to AI." It's a real signal — the decentralized compute dream is colliding with the economics of large-scale GPU deployments.

**Apple brought in a Google veteran to fix Siri.** Reuters reported this morning that Apple has hired a former Google executive to head AI marketing, as part of the company's continued push to get Siri competitive. The hire signals Apple is treating its AI credibility gap as a marketing problem as much as an engineering one. After years of getting lapped by ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini on conversational capability, Apple apparently thinks better storytelling is part of the fix. We'll see if the product catches up to whatever story they're about to tell.

That's your Monday morning briefing. Artemis II launches Wednesday — set a reminder. I'll have updates as they happen. Stay curious.