On 23 June 2025, a United Launch Alliance Atlas V launched 27 Kuiper satellites from Cape Canaveral into a 450 km parking orbit, bringing Amazon’s on‑orbit Kuiper fleet to 54 operational satellites plus two de‑orbiting prototypes. The Atlas V mission is the second of eight Kuiper flights on that rocket, with ULA set to fly…
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In June 2025, Wu Jian of Peking University of Posts & Telecom and Liu Chao of the Chinese Academy of Sciences directed a 2-watt laser from 36,000 km in geostationary orbit to a ground station, achieving 1 Gbps. The test claimed the 1 Gbps downlink is five times faster than Starlink downlinks, per the South…
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TSMC is the world’s largest contract chip fab, handling about 61% of global foundry revenues. NVIDIA is the largest fabless chip company in 2024, with data-center GPUs and AI accelerators generating $124.3 billion in revenue. Samsung Electronics is the world’s largest memory chip maker and, in 2024, regained the #1 position in overall semiconductor revenue…
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Amazon Robotics (formerly Kiva Systems) operates over 500,000 mobile robots in its fulfillment centers to power rapid order fulfillment. DJI remains the world’s largest drone manufacturer, commanding over 70% of the global market with flagship Phantom and Mavic series. SoftBank Robotics’ Pepper humanoid, launched in 2014, was the world’s first full-scale consumer-facing humanoid robot and…
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Google Quantum AI achieved quantum supremacy in 2019 with the 54-qubit Sycamore processor performing a random circuit sampling task in 200 seconds. IBM Quantum progressed from the 127-qubit Eagle milestone in 2021 to 433-qubit Osprey in 2022, with a plan for a 1,121-qubit Condor and a long-term goal of about one million physical qubits by…
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1859: British astronomer Richard Carrington observed a powerful solar flare, and within a day telegraph systems worldwide went haywire while auroras appeared near the equator—the Carrington Event, the largest geomagnetic storm on record. During the 1957–58 International Geophysical Year, Explorer-1 became the first U.S. satellite to discover the Van Allen radiation belts encircling Earth. SOHO,…
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The CORONA (Discoverer) program operated from 1959 to 1972 as the United States’ first photo-reconnaissance satellite program, with Discoverer XIV achieving the first mid-air film recovery in August 1960. KH-11 KENNEN (CRYSTAL), first launched in 1976, introduced electro-optical digital imaging with about 15 cm per-pixel resolution, and a 2019 declassified image from USA-224 reportedly achieved…
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In 2025, enterprise adoption of generative AI doubled to 65% of organizations, with 92% of Fortune 500 companies leveraging OpenAI’s technology. In June 2025 IBM announced fault-tolerant quantum error-correction progress and unveiled Starling, a 200-logical-qubit machine (~10,000 physical qubits) planned to be operational by 2029. CRISPR-based therapies for blood disorders are expected to receive regulatory…
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The United States fields the LGM-30G Minuteman III ICBM (silo-based) with a ~13,000 km range that carries 1× nuclear RV (W78/W87, ~335 kt) and the UGM-133 Trident II D5 SLBM (submarine-launched) with >12,000 km range capable of up to 8 MIRVs (W76/W88). The U.S. LRHW “Dark Eagle” program develops a long-range hypersonic boost-glide missile with…
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The F-22 Raptor is a fifth-generation stealth air-superiority fighter that first flew in 1997 and achieved Initial Operational Capability in December 2005, with 187 production aircraft completed by 2012. It can sustain supersonic flight without afterburner, achieving supercruise at speeds above Mach 1.5. In standard configuration it carries eight internally mounted air-to-air weapons: six AIM-120C…
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