New Space Economy

Moonshot AI announced Kimi K3 on July 16, 2026, describing it as a 2.8-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with native visual understanding and a one-million-token context window. The model became available through Moonshot’s application programming interface, with the release of downloadable weights scheduled for July 27, 2026. That distinction matters because, as of Ju...

Value-added services in the space industry are the commercial, government, and technical services that take a space-based capability and convert it into something more useful than the original signal, image, orbit slot, or transmission. A raw satellite image may show a port, a crop field, a wildfire boundary, or a moving ship. A value-added service turns that image into a vessel...

In June 2026, NASA published its 84-page Earth Science Applications Guidebook around a direct premise: Earth science creates public value when people can use it to make decisions. The guidebook divides that work into understanding NASA Earth science, developing an Earth Action proposal, and managing a funded project. Its emphasis is less on producing another map or model than on...

On August 17, 1958, Pioneer 0 rose from Cape Canaveral and exploded 73.6 seconds after liftoff. That failed launch begins the 123-entry record used here, which runs through the successful Artemis II crewed lunar flyby in April 2026. Between those dates, the Moon changed from a destination no spacecraft had reached into a mapped, sampled, instrumented, and repeatedly visited world.

On July 23, 2026, the Pew Research Center survey reported that 36% of U.S. adults believe China is more advanced than the United States in developing artificial intelligence (AI). Only 12% say the United States is ahead, 18% judge the countries about equal, and 33% are unsure.