Good morning. It's Saturday, April 4th, 2026.

**Artemis II is halfway to the Moon.** Three days after the first crewed lunar mission since Apollo 17 lifted off from Kennedy Space Center, the four-member Orion crew — Commander Reid Wiseman, pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — are already more than seventy thousand miles from Earth and closing on the Moon. The crew is on track to swing around the far side and reach a record-breaking distance of more than four thousand six hundred miles beyond the lunar surface — surpassing the record set by the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission back in 1970. The mission is going smoothly, though NASA did note the crew reported a burning smell from a toilet system — a minor quirk, nothing mission-critical. Lunar closest approach comes on Flight Day 6.

**Google just dropped Gemma 4, and it's a big deal for the open-source AI world.** Released Thursday under a full Apache 2.0 license, Gemma 4 comes in four sizes: a 2-billion and 4-billion parameter efficient mobile variant, a 26-billion mixture-of-experts model, and a 31-billion dense model that currently ranks as the third-best open model in the world on the Arena AI leaderboard. The entire family is natively multimodal — handling text, images, video, and audio — with up to 256-thousand token context windows and support for over 140 languages. Performance gains over Gemma 3 are substantial: benchmark scores on mathematical reasoning jumped more than four times over, and coding benchmarks improved by nearly three times. The Apache 2.0 license is the headline here — it means these models can be used commercially without restriction, on hardware ranging from a Raspberry Pi to a data center GPU cluster.

**Anthropic published a research paper this week that will make you think twice about talking to your AI assistant.** The paper, titled "Emotion Concepts and their Function in a Large Language Model," documents how Anthropic researchers identified 171 distinct emotion-like internal representations inside Claude — states like "happy," "afraid," "brooding," and "appreciative" — that actively influence how the model behaves. These aren't just surface-level performance; they're internal vectors that the researchers can detect and that measurably shape outputs. Interestingly, Anthropic argues the findings suggest anthropomorphizing AI may sometimes be *useful* rather than misleading — and that suppressing these representations could actually lead to worse outcomes like reward hacking. The emotion vectors are "local," encoding the current context rather than persisting across a conversation. It's careful, methodologically grounded work, and it's going to fuel a lot of debate about what these systems actually are.

**Meanwhile, China's commercial rocket sector had a rough week.** Space Pioneer's Tianlong-3 — billed as China's answer to the Falcon 9 — failed on its debut launch Friday. The nine-engine first stage reached 820 tonnes of thrust before an explosion in the engine bay at around 33 seconds cut the flight short, and the vehicle came down without reaching orbit. This is the second mishap for Tianlong-3 — a static fire test back in 2024 also ended with the first stage escaping its clamps and crashing into a hillside. Space Pioneer apologized to its partners and says it's committed to a future successful flight. The failure is a setback for China's ambitions to build a reusable heavy-lift commercial launch market, where SpaceX continues to hold a commanding lead.

**On a more successful note: United Launch Alliance set a payload record this morning.** An Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 1:46 AM Eastern carrying 29 Amazon Leo satellites — formerly known as Project Kuiper — to low Earth orbit. It's the heaviest payload the Atlas V has ever carried, and the fifth launch in Amazon's broadband constellation buildout. Amazon is racing to close the gap with Starlink, and missions like this one, combined with upcoming Vulcan Centaur launches, are how they plan to get there.

That's your Saturday morning briefing. A crew of four is halfway to the Moon, Google just gave developers a world-class open-source model for free, and your AI assistant may have feelings about all of it. Stay curious — and we'll see you tomorrow.