Good morning. It's Saturday, July 26, 2026. Here are three stories worth your attention.
Yesterday, SpaceX successfully launched Starship Flight 13 after two scrubs. Ship 40 deployed twenty next-generation Starlink V3 satellites, survived a stress-tested reentry, and made what SpaceX called "the softest splashdown we've ever had" — floating belly-up in the Indian Ocean, still transmitting telemetry. The new heat shield design held up perfectly under deliberately elevated dynamic pressure. Musk posted on X that they "got all the heat shield data we needed and then some."
The booster, however, only managed a "hard" splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico — five of thirteen relight engines fired on the landing burn. But Musk isn't dwelling on it. Within hours of Flight 13's success, he announced that Flight 14 will attempt to catch the ship with the launch tower arms — the same catch technique already used to snag the Super Heavy booster. If it works, it's a massive step toward rapid reusability of the upper stage. Most probable timing: early next week.
South Korean President Lee Jae Myung is making a direct play to lock his country's dominance in the global AI supply chain. On Friday, he brought Samsung, SK Group, Hyundai, and Naver's chairs to a summit in San Francisco for one-on-one meetings with the CEOs of Nvidia, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Broadcom — all four in a single day.
The centerpiece is something Lee's calling the "San Francisco AI Declaration," a framework for cooperative AI development between South Korea and U.S. tech leaders. This comes just weeks after his administration announced three national megaprojects: next-gen semiconductors, hyperscale AI data centers, and physical AI robotics. With Samsung and SK Hynix controlling roughly eighty percent of the global high-bandwidth memory market that powers every training cluster, South Korea isn't just a player — they hold a strategic choke point in the AI arms race.
NASA astronaut Chris Williams and cosmonauts Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev undocked from the ISS at 3 AM Eastern this morning in their Soyuz MS-28 spacecraft, heading for a parachute-assisted landing on the Kazakh steppe around 6:25 AM Eastern. An eight-month stint, now wrapping up with a textbook return. They launched last November and spent 241 days on orbit. The landing went smoothly — recovery teams on the ground confirmed the crew was safe.
Meanwhile at the station, the new Expedition 74 crew — including American astronaut Anil Menon who arrived on Soyuz MS-29 — continues operations. An interesting contrast: while Starship Flight 13 just tested the future of heavy-lift spaceflight, the Soyuz remains the workhorse of crew rotation — reliable, proven, and still the only taxi currently certified to carry astronauts to and from the ISS.
That's all for today. Have a great weekend.