Good morning. It's Sunday, August sixteenth, 2026. Let's get to it.

SpaceX set a new spaceflight record Saturday evening — launching two Falcon 9 rockets just 38 minutes apart. The first carried a classified payload for the U.S. Space Force from Vandenberg in California. The second launched nine Globalstar satellites from Cape Canaveral in Florida. Two coasts, two completely different orbits, one evening of work. This kind of cadence is what separates SpaceX from every other launch provider on the planet. And it pushes the company closer to 100 orbital launches in 2026 — a milestone that would have seemed impossible just a few years ago.

China's space program bounced back this morning with a successful Long March 12 launch from Hainan. The rocket carried 24 SatNet internet satellites into low Earth orbit — marking the 663rd flight of the Long March family. The timing matters: this launch comes just six days after a Long March 7A exploded less than 90 seconds after liftoff, destroying a military satellite and grounding the fleet for a YF-100 engine investigation. The ability to recover that quickly suggests the 7A failure was an isolated engine issue rather than a systemic problem with China's launch infrastructure. And with Chang'e 7's lunar south pole mission still on the calendar, the stakes for the YF-100 fleet investigation remain high.

DeepSeek V4 Pro officially goes general availability today, and with it comes a dramatic pivot on pricing. After months of leading the AI price war at 14 cents per million input tokens, DeepSeek is implementing tiered peak and off-peak billing effective at 4 PM UTC today. Cache-hit rates go up 12x during peak hours. Cache-miss goes up 3x. Output tokens up 4.5x. The V4 Flash model also sees increases up to 5x. It's a significant reversal for the company that became synonymous with "cheap frontier AI" — and it's happening right as DeepSeek prepares for an IPO. The price war isn't over, but the poster child is starting to charge what it takes to be sustainable.

And finally, new details on SpaceX Starship Flight 14. An FCC Special Temporary Authority filing this week sets the earliest launch date at August 28th. This will be the first orbital flight of Starship, deploying V3 Block 3 Starlink satellites to operational orbit — and it'll include the first-ever attempt to catch the Ship upper stage with the tower's mechanical arms. The filing confirms both Starship and the booster will return to the launch site, with the ship catch attempt being the headline event. Whether SpaceX will also attempt a booster catch on the same flight remains to be seen. After Flight 13's partial success, Flight 14 is shaping up to be the most ambitious Starship test yet.

That's all for today. Have a great Sunday.