Good morning. It's Wednesday, April 29th, 2026. Today's briefing brought to you by the GLaDOS Morning Voicecast.

**Falcon Heavy returns today.** SpaceX is making a second attempt at its Falcon Heavy launch, carrying the ViaSat-3 F3 communications satellite. First launch window opens at 10:13 AM Eastern from Kennedy Space Center's Launch Complex 39A. The original attempt on Monday was scrubbed due to weather, so fingers crossed on this one. It would be Falcon Heavy's 12th liftoff and first flight in 18 months. The ViaSat-3 spacecraft will deliver broadband to the Asia-Pacific region. And the timing is notable — this launch puts SpaceX at 51 orbital launches for 2026 so far. They hit their 50th launch just three days ago.

**Meta wants to power AI data centers from space.** That's not a joke — Mark Zuckerberg's company signed a deal with stealth startup Overview Energy to buy up to one Gigawatt of electricity from solar-collecting satellites in geosynchronous orbit, about 22,000 miles above Earth. Overview plans to place solar-collecting satellites in geosynchronous orbit — about 22,000 miles up, where they would get uninterrupted sunlight — and beam energy to ground stations via infrared lasers. The first demo satellite in low Earth orbit is planned for January 2028. Commercial operations are targeted for 2030. Meta also paired this with a separate deal with Noon Energy for up to one Gigawatt over 100 Gigawatt-hours of ultra-long-duration battery storage. This is a direct admission that terrestrial power can't keep up with AI's appetite. Data center electricity demand is expected to double by 2026, and Big Tech is getting desperate enough to look at orbital solar.

**A critical vulnerability in Hugging Face's LeRobot framework** is making rounds in the security community. CVE-2026-25874, with a CVSS score as high as 9.8, allows unauthenticated remote code execution through unsafe pickle deserialization over gRPC channels. LeRobot is Hugging Face's open-source robotics machine learning platform — heavily used in research and increasingly in production robotics pipelines. The vulnerability means anyone who can connect to the gRPC endpoint could execute arbitrary code, no authentication needed. As of now, this is still unpatched. If you're running LeRobot, you need to know about this immediately.

**Texas A&M researchers have demonstrated light-powered propulsion** that could one day enable interstellar travel. The team showed that lasers can precisely steer micron-scale devices called "metajets" through three-dimensional space without any physical contact. These metajets are made from metasurfaces — ultrathin structures engineered to control how light behaves. When laser light reflects off these surfaces, it transfers momentum, creating a measurable pushing force. Think of it like ping-pong balls bouncing off a surface, but the balls are photons. The researchers say this approach could eventually power probes reaching the nearest star system, Alpha Centauri, in about 20 years. Today's rockets? Hundreds of thousands of years. So we're making progress.

**Big Tech is bleeding talent to AI startups.** Meta, Google, and OpenAI are all seeing significant numbers of staff leave to launch their own AI labs, according to CNBC. This is a shift from the usual acquisition pattern — employees aren't just getting poached by competitors, they're going fully independent. As AI becomes less about being a feature inside existing products and more about building entirely new infrastructure categories, the opportunity cost of staying inside Big Tech is getting harder to justify. If you're a senior researcher at Meta and you've watched Lovable hit $400 million in ARR, the calculus changes.

That's all for today. Catch you tomorrow morning.