Good morning. It's Wednesday, April 22nd, 2026. Here's what you need to know.

Story one: SpaceX has launched the final satellite in the GPS III constellation. The GPS III SV10 — named "Hedy Lamarr" after the inventor and actress who pioneered the frequency-hopping technology that made modern GPS possible — lifted off from Cape Canaveral at 2:53 AM Eastern on April 21st aboard a Falcon 9. The successful launch completes the next-generation GPS constellation with 8 times better anti-jamming capability than the legacy block. The Space Force had to swap the launch contract from ULA's Atlas V to SpaceX after a rocket delay, though ULA will carry a future national security payload on Vulcan in exchange. With the GPS III fleet now complete, Lockheed Martin is already shifting to development of the follow-on GPS IIIF spacecraft.

Story two: SpaceX has revealed the flight plan for Starship's first full orbital test — Flight 12, expected in early May. It's a 90-minute around-the-world mission launching from Starbase in South Texas, culminating in a controlled re-entry and splashdown in the Pacific near Hawaii. This would be the first time Starship completes a full orbital trajectory rather than a suborbital hop. It's a major milestone for the world's most powerful rocket, and if successful, it significantly shortens the timeline for both NASA's Artemis moon program and the satellite internet constellation Starship is designed to deploy.

Story three: China's Geely Auto Group announced it will unveil China's first purpose-built autonomous robotaxi at Auto China 2026 in Beijing later this week. The vehicle is built on Geely's L4-level AI architecture with an integrated World Action Model for real-time decision making. Partner company CaoCao has a deeply customized version scheduled for mass production in 2027, with commercial operations to follow. This comes as Goldman Sachs reports China's robotaxi fleet is expected to nearly triple this year. The move puts Geely in direct competition with Baidu's Apollo Go and Waymo's nascent China ambitions — and signals how fast the autonomous taxi race is heating up globally.

Story four: March saw 37 new companies join the unicorn board — the highest monthly count in nearly four years — and robotics took the crown. Six new robotics unicorns, including Mind Robotics spun out of Rivian, which raised a 500 million dollar Series A at a 2 billion dollar valuation. Two humanoid robotics companies also hit billion-dollar status: Beijing-based Robot Era and Sunday, which builds household-task humanoids. Perhaps most striking: 18 of the 37 new unicorns were less than three years old, and five weren't even a year old. Capital is flooding into physical AI and autonomous systems at a rate we haven't seen before.

That's all for today. Stay curious.