Tech
How Autonomous Drone Warfare Is Emerging in Ukraine
WHEN KYIV-BORN ENGINEER Yaroslav Azhnyuk thinks about the future, his mind conjures up dystopian images. He talks about “swarms of autonomous drones carrying other autonomous drones to protect them against autonomous drones, which are trying to intercept them, controlled by AI agents overseen by a human general somewhere.” He also imagines flotillas of autonomous submarines, each carrying hundreds of drones, suddenly emerging off the coast of California or Great Britain and discharging their cargoes en masse to the sky.
“How do you protect from that?” he asks as we speak in late December 2025; me at my quiet home office in London, he in Kyiv, which is bracing for another wave of missile attacks.
Azhnyuk is not an alarmist. He cofounded and was formerly CEO of Petcube, a California-based company that uses smart cameras and an app to let pet owners keep an eye on their beloved creatures left alone at home. A self-described “liberal guy who didn’t even receive military training,” Azhnyuk changed his mind about developing military tech in the months following the Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. By 2023, he had relinquished his CEO role at Petcube to do what many Ukrainian technologists have done—to help defend his country against a mightier aggressor.
It took a while for him to figure out what, exactly, he should be doing. He didn’t join the military, but through friends on the front line, he witnessed how, out of desperation, Ukrainian troops turned to off-the-shelf consumer drones to make up for their country’s lack of artillery.
Ukrainian troops first began using drones for battlefield surveillance, but within a few months they figured out how to strap explosives onto them and turn them into effective, low-cost killing machines. Little did they know they were fomenting a revolution in warfare.
The Ukrainian robotics company The Fourth Law produces an autonomy module [above] that uses optics and AI to guide a drone to its target. Yaroslav Azhnyuk [top, in light shirt], founder and CEO of The Fourth Law, describes a developmental drone with autonomous capabilities to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz.Top: THE PRESIDENTIAL OFFICE OF UKRAINE; Bottom: THE FOURTH LAW
That revolution was on display last month, as the U.S. and Israel went to war with Iran. It soon became clear that attack drones are being extensively used by both sides. Iran, for example, is relying heavily on the Shahed drones that the country invented and that are now also being manufactured in Russia and launched by the thousands every month against Ukraine.
A thorough analysis of the Middle East conflict will take some time to emerge. And so to understand the direction of this new way of war, look to Ukraine, where its next phase—autonomy—is already starting to come into view. Outnumbered by the Russians and facing increasingly sophisticated jamming and spoofing aimed at causing the drones to veer off course or fall out of the sky, Ukrainian technologists realized as early as 2023 that what could really win the war was autonomy. Autonomous operation means a drone isn’t being flown by a remote pilot, and therefore there’s no communications link to that pilot that can be severed or spoofed, rendering the drone useless.
By late 2023, Azhnyuk set out to help make that vision a reality. He founded two companies, The Fourth Law and Odd Systems, the first to develop AI algorithms to help drones overcome jamming during final approach, the second to build thermal cameras to help those drones better sense their surroundings.
“I moved from making devices that throw treats to dogs to making devices that throw explosives on Russian occupants,” Azhnyuk quips.
Since then, The Fourth Law has dispatched “more than thousands” of autonomy modules to troops in eastern Ukraine (it declines to give a more specific figure), which can be retrofitted on existing drones to take over navigation during the final approach to the target. Azhnyuk says the autonomy modules, worth around US $50, increase the drone-strike success rate by up to four times that of purely operator-controlled drones.
And that is just the beginning. Azhnyuk is one of thousands of developers, including some who relocated from Western countries, who are applying their skills and other resources to advancing the drone technology that is the defining characteristic of the war in Ukraine. This eclectic group of startups and founders includes Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO, whose company Swift Beat is churning out autonomous drones and modules for Ukrainian forces. The frenetic pace of tech development is helping a scrappy, innovative underdog hold at bay a much larger and better-equipped foe.
All of this development is careening toward AI-based systems that enable drones to navigate by recognizing features in the terrain, lock on to and chase targets without an operator’s guidance, and eventually exchange information with each other through mesh networks, forming self-organizing robotic kamikaze swarms. Such an attack swarm would be commanded by a single operator from a safe distance.
According to some reports, autonomous swarming technology is also being developed for sea drones. Ukraine has had some notable successes with sea drones, which have reportedly destroyed or damaged around a dozen Russian vessels.
The Skynode X system, from Auterion, provides a degree of autonomy to a drone.AUTERION
For Ukraine, swarming can solve a major problem that puts the nation at a disadvantage against Russia—the lack of personnel. Autonomy is “the single most impactful defense technology of this century,” says Azhnyuk. “The moment this happens, you shift from a manpower challenge to a production challenge, which is much more manageable,” he adds.
The autonomous warfare future envisioned by Azhnyuk and others is not yet a reality. But Marc Lange, a German defense analyst and business strategist, believes that “an inflection point” is already in view. Beyond it, “things will be so dramatically different,” he says.
“Ukraine pretty rapidly realized that if the operator-to-drone ratio can be shifted from one-to-one to one-to-many, that creates great economies of scale and an amazing cost exchange ratio,” Lange adds. “The moment one operator can launch 100, 50, or even just 20 drones at once, this completely changes the economics of the war.”
Drones With a View
For a while, jammers that sever the radio links between drones and operators or that spoof GPS receivers were able to provide fairly reliable defense against human-controlled first-person-view attack drones (FPVs). But as autonomous navigation progressed, those electronic shields have gradually become less effective. Defenders must now contend with unjammable drones—ones that are attached to hair-thin optical fibers or that are capable of finding their way to their targets without external guidance. In this emerging struggle, the defenders’ track records aren’t very encouraging: The typical countermeasure is to try to shoot down the attacking drone with a service weapon. It’s rarely successful.
A truck outfitted with signal-jamming gear drives under antidrone nets near Oleksandriya, in eastern Ukraine, on 2 October 2025.ED JONES/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
“The attackers gain an immense advantage from unmanned systems,” says Lange. “You can have a drone pop up from anywhere and it can wreak havoc. But from autonomy, they gain even more.”
The self-navigating drones rely on image-recognition algorithms that have been around for over a decade, says Lange. And the mass deployments of drones on Ukrainian battlefields are enabling both Russian and Ukrainian technologists to create huge datasets that improve the training and precision of those AI algorithms.
A Ukrainian land robot, the Ravlyk, can be outfitted with a machine gun.
While uncrewed aerial vehicles (UAVs) have received the most attention, the Ukrainian military is also deploying dozens of different kinds of drones on land and sea. Ukraine, struggling with the shortage of infantry personnel, began working on replacing a portion of human soldiers with wheeled ground robots in 2024. As of early 2026, thousands of ground robots are crawling across the gray zone along the front line in Eastern Ukraine. Most are used to deliver supplies to the front line or to help evacuate the wounded, but some “killer” ground robots fitted with turrets and remotely controlled machine guns have also been tested.
In mid-February, Ukrainian authorities released a video of a Ukrainian ground robot using its thermal camera to detect a Russian soldier in the dark of the night and then kill the invader with a round from a heavy machine gun. So far these robots are mostly controlled by a human operator, but the makers of these uncrewed ground vehicles say their systems are capable of basic autonomous operations, such as returning to base when radio connection is lost. The goal is to enable them to swarm so that one operator controls not one, but a whole herd of mesh-connected killer robots.
But Bryan Clark, senior fellow and director of the Center for Defense Concepts and Technology at the Hudson Institute, questions how quickly ground robots’ abilities can progress. “Ground environments are very difficult to navigate in because of the terrain you have to address,” he says. “The line of sight for the sensors on the ground vehicles is really constrained because of terrain, whereas an air vehicle can see everything around it.”
To achieve autonomy, maritime drones, too, will require navigational approaches beyond AI-based image recognition, possibly based on star positions or electronic signals from radios and cell towers that are within reach, says Clark. Such technologies are still being developed or are in a relatively early operational stage.
How the Shaheds Got Better
Russia is not lagging behind. In fact, some analysts believe its autonomous systems may be slightly ahead of Ukraine’s. For a good example of the Russian military’s rapid evolution, they say, consider the long-range Iranian-designed Shahed drones. Since 2022, Russia has been using them to attack Ukrainian cities and other targets hundreds of kilometers from the front line. “At the beginning, Shaheds just had a frame, a motor, and an inertial navigation system,” Oleksii Solntsev, CEO of Ukrainian defense tech startup MaXon Systems, tells me. “They used to be imprecise and pretty stupid. But they are becoming more and more autonomous.” Solntsev founded MaXon Systems in late 2024 to help protect Ukrainian civilians from the growing threat of Shahed raids.
A Russian Geran-2 drone, based on the Iranian Shahed-136, flies over Kyiv during an attack on 27 December 2025.SERGEI SUPINSKY/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
First produced in Iran in the 2010s, Shaheds can carry 90-kilogram warheads up to 650 km (50-kg warheads can go twice as far). They cost around $35,000 per unit, compared to a couple of million dollars, at least, for a ballistic missile. The low cost allows Russia to manufacture Shaheds in high quantities, unleashing entire fleets onto Ukrainian cities and infrastructure almost every night.
The early Shaheds were able to reach a preprogrammed location based on satellite-navigation coordinates. Even one of these early models could frequently overcome the jamming of satellite-navigation signals with the help of an onboard inertial navigation unit. This was essentially a dead-reckoning system of accelerators and gyroscopes that estimate the drone’s position from continual measurements of its motions.
In the Donetsk Region, on 15 August 2025, a Ukrainian soldier hunts for Shaheds and other drones with a thermalimaging system attached to a ZU23 23-millimeter antiaircraft gun.KOSTYANTYN LIBEROV/LIBKOS/GETTY IMAGES
Ukrainian defense forces learned to down Shaheds with heavy machine guns, but as Russia continued to innovate, the daily onslaughts started to become increasingly effective.
Today’s Shaheds fly faster and higher, and therefore are more difficult to detect and take down. Between January 2024 and August 2025, the number of Shaheds and Shahed-type attack drones launched by Russia into Ukraine per month increased more than tenfold, from 334 to more than 4,000. In 2025, Ukraine found AI-enabling Nvidia chipsets in wreckages of Shaheds, as well as thermal-vision modules capable of locking onto targets at night.
“Now, they are interconnected, which allows them to exchange information with each other,” Solntsev says. “They also have cameras that allow them to autonomously navigate to objects. Soon they will be able to tell each other to avoid a jammed region or an area where one of them got intercepted.”
These Russian-manufactured Shaheds, which Russian forces call Geran-2s, are thought to be more capable than the garden variety Shahed-136s that Iran has lately been launching against targets throughout the Middle East. Even the relatively primitive Shahed-136s have done considerable damage, according to press accounts.
Those Shahed successes may accrue, at least in part, from the fact that the United States and Israel lack Ukraine’s long experience with fending them off. In just two days in early March, upward of a thousand drones, mostly Shaheds, were launched against U.S. and Israeli targets, with hundreds of them reportedly finding their marks.
One attack, caught on videotape, shows a Shahed destroying a radar dome at the U.S. navy base in Manama, Bahrain. U.S. forces were understood to be attempting to fend off the drones by striking launch platforms, dispatching fighter aircraft to shoot them down, and by using some extremely costly air-defense interceptors, including ones meant to down ballistic missiles. On 4 March, CNN reported that in a congressional briefing the day before, top U.S. defense officials, including Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, acknowledged that U.S. air defenses weren’t keeping up with the onslaught of Shahed drones.
Russian V2U attack drones are outfitted with Nvidia processors and run computer-vision software and AI algorithms to enable the drones to navigate autonomously.GUR OF THE MINISTRY OF DEFENSE OF UKRAINE
Russia is also starting to field a newer generation of attack drones. One of these, the V2U, has been used to strike targets in the Sumy region of northeastern Ukraine. The V2U drones are outfitted with Nvidia Jetson Orin processors and run computer-vision software and AI algorithms that allow the drones to navigate even where satellite navigation is jammed.
The sale of Nvidia chips to Russia is banned under U.S. sanctions against the country. However, press reports suggest that the chips are getting to Russia via intermediaries in India.
Antidrone Systems Step Up
MaXon Systems is one of several companies working to fend off the nightly drone onslaught. Within one year, the company developed and battle-tested a Shahed interception system that hints at the sci-fi future envisioned by Azhnyuk. For a system to be capable of reliably defending against autonomous weaponry, it, too, needs to be autonomous.
MaXon’s solution consists of ground turrets scanning the sky with infrared sensors, with additional input from a network of radars that detects approaching Shahed drones at distances of, typically, 12 to 16 km. The turrets fire autonomous fixed-winged interceptor drones, fitted with explosive warheads, toward the approaching Shaheds at speeds of nearly 300 km/h. To boost the chances of successful interception, MaXon is also fielding an airborne anti-Shahed fortification system consisting of helium-filled aerostats hovering above the city that dispatch the interceptors from a higher altitude.
“We are trying to increase the level of automation of the system compared to existing solutions,” says Solntsev. “We need automatic detection, automatic takeoff, and automatic mid-track guidance so that we can guide the interceptor before it can itself flock the target.”
An interceptor drone, part of the U.S. MEROPS defensive system, is tested in Poland on 18 November 2025.WOJTEK RADWANSKI/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
In November 2025, the Ukrainian military announced it had been conducting successful trials of the Merops Shahed drone interceptor system developed by the U.S. startup Project Eagle, another of former Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s Ukraine defense ventures. Like the MaXon gear, the system can operate largely autonomously and has so far downed over 1,000 Shaheds.
What Works in the Lab Doesn’t Necessarily Fly on the Battlefield
Despite the progress on both sides, analysts say that the kind of robotic warfare imagined by Azhnyuk won’t be a reality for years.
“The software for drone collaboration is there,” says Kate Bondar, a former policy advisor for the Ukrainian government and currently a research fellow at the U.S. Center for Strategic and International Studies. “Drones can fly in labs, but in real life, [the forces] are afraid to deploy them because the risk of a mistake is too high,” she adds.
Ukrainian soldiers watch a GOR reconnaissance drone take to the sky near Pokrovsk in the Donetsk region, on 10 March 2025.ANDRIY DUBCHAK/FRONTLINER/GETTY IMAGES
In Bondar’s view, powerful AI-equipped drones won’t be deployed in large numbers given the current prices for high-end processors and other advanced components. And, she adds, the more autonomous the system needs to be, the more expensive are the processors and sensors it must have. “For these cheap attack drones that fly only once, you don’t install a high-resolution camera that [has] the resolution for AI to see properly,” she says. “[You install] the cheapest camera. You don’t want expensive chips that can run AI algorithms either. Until we can achieve this balance of technological sophistication, when a system can conduct a mission but at the lowest price possible, it won’t be deployed en masse.”
While existing AI systems are doing a good job recognizing and following large objects like Shaheds or tanks, experts question their ability to reliably distinguish and pursue smaller and more nimble or inconspicuous targets. “When we’re getting into more specific questions, like can it distinguish a Russian soldier from a Ukrainian soldier or at least a soldier from a civilian? The answer is no,” says Bondar. “Also, it’s one thing to track a tank, and it’s another to track infantrymen riding buggies and motorcycles that are moving very fast. That’s really challenging for AI to track and strike precisely.”
Clark, at the Hudson Institute, says that although the AI algorithms used to guide the Russian and Ukrainian drones are “pretty good,” they rely on information provided bysensors that “aren’t good enough.” “You need multiphenomenology sensors that are able to look at infrared and visual and, in some cases, different parts of the infrared spectrum to be able to figure out if something is a decoy or real target,” he says.
German defense analyst Lange agrees that right now, battlefield AI image-recognition systems are too easily fooled. “If you compress reality into a 2D image, a lot of things can be easily camouflaged—like what Russia did recently, when they started drawing birds on the back of their drones,” he says.
Autonomy Remains Elusive on the Ground and at Sea, Too
To make Ukraine’s emerging uncrewed ground vehicles (UGVs) equally self-sufficient will be an even greater task, in Clark’s view. Still, Bondar expects major advances to materialize within the next several years, even if humans are still going to be part of the decision-making loop.
A mobile electronic-warfare system built by PiranhaTech is demonstrated near Kyiv on 21 October 2025.DANYLO ANTONIUK/ANADOLU/GETTY IMAGES
“I think in two or three years, we will have pretty good full autonomy, at least in good weather conditions,” she says, referring to aerial drones in particular. “Humans will still be in the loop for some years, simply because there are so many unpredictable situations when you need an intervention. We won’t be able to fully rely on the machine for at least another 10 or 15 years.”
Ukrainian defenders are apprehensive about that autonomous future. The boom of drone innovation has come hand in hand with the development of sophisticated jamming and radio-frequency detection systems. But a lot of that innovation will become obsolete once the pendulum swings away from human control. Ukrainians got their first taste of dealing with unjammable drones in mid-2024, when Russia began rolling out fiber-optic tethered drones. Now they have to brace for a threat on a much larger scale.
An experimental drone is demonstrated at the Brave1 defense-tech incubator in Kyiv.DANYLO DUBCHAK/FRONTLINER/GETTY IMAGES
“Today, we have a situation where we have lots of signals on the battlefield, but in the near future, in maybe two to five years, UAVs are not going to be sending any signals,” says Oleksandr Barabash, CTO of Falcons, a Ukrainian startup that has developed a smart radio-frequency detection system capable of revealing precise locations of enemy radio sources such as drones, control stations, and jammers.
Last September, Falcons secured funding from the U.S.-based dual-use tech fund Green Flag Ventures to scale production of its technology and work toward NATO certification. But Barabash admits that its system, like all technologies fielded in Ukrainian war zones, has an expiration date. Instead of radio-frequency detectors, Barabash thinks, the next R&D push needs to focus on passive radar systems capable of identifying small and fast-moving targets based on the signal from sources like TV towers or radio transmitters that propagate through the environment and are reflected by those moving targets. Passive radars have a significant advantage in the war zone, according to Barabash. Since they don’t emit their own signal, they can’t be that easily discovered by the enemy.
“Active radar is emitting signals, so if you are using active radars, you are target No. 1 on the front line,” Barabash says.
Bondar, on the other hand, thinks that the increased onboard compute power needed for AI-controlled drones will, by itself, generate enough electromagnetic radiation to prevent autonomous drones from ever operating completely undetectably.
“You can have full autonomy, but you will still have systems onboard that emit electromagnetic radiation or heat that can be detected,” says Bondar. “Batteries emit electromagnetic radiation, motors emit heat, and [that heat can be] visible in infrared from far away. You just need to have the right sensors to be able to identify it in advance.” She adds that that takeaway is “how capable contemporary detection systems have become and how technically challenging it is to design drones that can reliably operate in the Ukrainian battlefield environment.”
There Will Be Nowhere to Hide from Autonomous Drones
When autonomous drones become a standard weapon of war, their threat will extend far beyond the battlefields of Ukraine. Autonomous turrets and drone-interceptor fortification might soon dot the perimeter of European cities, particularly in the eastern part of the continent.
A fixed-wing drone is tested in Ukraine in April 2025.ANDREWKRAVCHENKO/BLOOMBERG/GETTY IMAGES
Nefarious actors from all over the world have closely watched Ukraine and taken notes, warns Lange. Today, FPV drones are being used by Islamic terrorists in Africa and Mexican drug cartels to fight against local authorities.
When autonomous killing machines become widely available, it’s likely that no city will be safe. “We might see nets above city centers, protecting civilian streets,” Lange says. “In every case, the West needs to start performing similar kinetic-defense development that we see in Ukraine. Very rapid iteration and testing cycles to find solutions.”
Azhnyuk is concerned that the historic defenders of Europe—the United States and the European countries themselves—are falling behind. “We are in danger,” he says. While Russia and Ukraine made major strides in their drones and countermeasures over the past year, “Europe and the United States have progressed, in the best-case scenario, from the winter-of-2022 technology to the summer-of-2022 technology.
“The gap is getting wider,” he warns. “I think the next few years are very dangerous for the security of Europe.”
This article appears in the April 2026 print issue as “Rise of the AUTONOMOUS Attack Drones.”
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The camera is a pleasant surprise because it outperforms what you can expect from an entry-level device, as people frequently do. A 1.3-inch sensor can shoot 48-megapixel still images with incredible quality, even when cropped or printed. Video in 4K at 60 frames per second with strong dynamic range is a given, so brilliant skies and shaded ground appear natural. Slow-motion recordings can reach up to 100 frames per second in 4K for those instances when you want to emphasize a view of a wave or bird. A three-axis mechanical stabilizer ensures that every shot is absolutely level and smooth, regardless of how the drone moves.
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It looks like a new member is joining the Pixel family, adding to its resurgent smartphone lineup. Code analysis of the latest Android beta points toward a new Pixel laptop that Google might be planning to launch in the near future. Google last launched a laptop, the Pixelbook Go, in 2019, an affordable version of the Pixelbook it put on the shelves back in 2017.
Both the Pixelbook and Pixelbook Go, along with the earlier Chromebook Pixel models, were not what you would call a smash hit with the audience or a runaway commercial success. Ultimately, they triggered Big G’s departure from the laptop segment and a shift in focus toward Pixel smartphones.
The tides are shifting, and it seems ChromeOS is on its sunset ride.
Snippets spotted in Google’s software suggest we might finally see Google’s latest attempt at a laptop, but without the expected Chromebook foundations. Instead, it could be the showcase ride for an entirely new class of machines running Aluminium OS. That said, a Google Pixel laptop does not make much sense right now, as several factors work against it. As one charismatic wrestling star would go, “let me talk to ya” on this!.
Google’s history of failure with past laptop launches
Let’s be fair (read: historically accurate) here. Google doesn’t have a particularly enviable track record with making laptops. The company took several stabs at making a laptop in the past decade, starting with the Chromebook Pixel in 2013, an upgraded Chromebook Pixel in 2015, the Google Pixelbook in 2017, and the Pixelbook Go in 2019.
None of these laptops could set the computing segment on fire or set any long-lasting industry trends, owing to two main factors: pricing and the underlying operating system.
A history of bad pricing at Google
| Device model | Price starting at |
| Chromebook Pixel (2013) | $1,299 |
| Chromebook Pixel (2015) | $999 |
| Pixelbook | $999 |
| Pixelbook Go | $649 |
As you can see from the table, all Google laptops commanded a premium, with launch prices around the $1,000 mark. At that price, you could get a powerful Windows laptop or even a MacBook Air. Why would anyone want to pay that much for a laptop running ChromeOS?
Only the Pixelbook Go launched at around $649. Our review praised its portable design, hardware, and excellent battery life. However, the conclusion remained the same: the software held it back, as you could get a full-fledged Windows PC at that price point.
I plonked $1,649 on the top-end variant with the Core i7 variant, and it’s now eating dust in my drawer. Not because I don’t want to keep it running. The laptop is just utterly slow, and despite numerous hard resets, it won’t even handle Chrome smoothly without stuttering, running utterly hot, and the screen has lost its touch-sensitivity, too.
The state of ChromeOS in 2026
Well, that was nearly a decade ago, but what about now? Maybe ChromeOS has improved enough to go toe to toe with other desktop operating systems? Sadly, the answer is no. If anything, Google seems to have left the operating system in limbo with no drastic improvements.
Yes, there have been pockets of updates here and there, but nothing substantial that makes it a viable competitor. It’s still a browser-based operating system with minimal support for popular creativity and productivity apps. With the scrapping of Google Stadia, gaming is also now almost defunct on ChromeOS.
On the other hand, Linux has improved by leaps and bounds, can run on similar low-powered hardware, and supports gaming and the most popular creative and productivity apps. In fact, Linux is at an all-time high among Steam gaming die-hards. Yes, ChromeOS has simplicity of use in its favor, but that’s about it.
What about the upcoming Aluminium OS?
There is, however, a glimmer of hope on the horizon. Google is working on a new operating system called Aluminium OS, with an expected launch window of 2026. It aims to merge Android and ChromeOS into a single unified platform.
Built on Android from the ground up, it promises native support for all Play Store apps with proper keyboard and mouse support, alongside desktop-grade window management features. It will even support multiple desktops.
The highlight feature of the OS will be Gemini AI, which will supposedly be baked into the core of the OS, which is a significant step up from ChromeOS. That said, Aluminium OS could push forward with its own set of problems, if ChromeOS is anything to go by.
First, it would require more powerful hardware to power the AI features. Ideally, it would need a silicon with a powerful AI accelerator chip (aka NPU) to handle AI-driven tasks, especially those that are executed on-device. Imagine translation, photo editing with generative AI, scam detection, and more, without an internet connection.
Second, since it is based on Android, you will still not get support for full-fledged desktop apps. You might be able to run them using a translation layer, something Apple did with Rosetta when it switched to its own ARM-based processors for Macs, but how well it will work is a big question mark. Windows on ARM has been a mess and only recently started becoming a real possibility.
I can’t imagine Aluminium OS will fare any better in its first swing at serious computing.
Built-in Gemini AI will be the highlight of this new operating system, and hopefully, it will be better than the Windows implementation of Copilot AI and the lackluster Apple Intelligence execution in macOS. This could give Aluminium OS a leg up over the competition, but the fundamental issue, which is a lack of desktop app support, is a problem Google will have to figure out soon, or the new OS will suffer the same fate as ChromeOS.
Rising RAM and SSD prices
By now, it should be clear that the only way a next-generation Google laptop can succeed is by lowering its price. But that might be harder to achieve in today’s market, thanks in no small part to the RAMmageddon that has wreaked havoc in the PC industry and spilled over into the smartphone and gaming segments as well.
With the rising prices of RAM and SSDs, thanks to AI infrastructure gobbling up the world’s supply, the cost of electronics is climbing exponentially. Microsoft has raised prices on its Surface laptops, Sony and Nintendo have raised prices for the PS5 and Nintendo Switch 2 consoles, and Samsung has increased its phone (and laptop, and tablet) prices.
And these are just a few examples. Every other laptop manufacturer has climbed the price ladder, much to the obvious displeasure of buyers and even triggering a panic purchase spell, according to Counterpoint Research. Unfortunately, industry trends suggest it will only get worse before it gets better. And we’re not just talking about new products here.
It might be the first time in history that a gaming console, phone, or laptop costs more in 2026 than it did at launch. In such an unprecedented market, I do not see a way for Google to cut prices on its new laptops, especially with the powerful system requirements for running Aluminium OS, without significantly jeopardizing other aspects of its hardware, which was the only good thing about the older Google laptops.
The MacBook Neo exists at $599
Google’s Aluminium OS foundations sound promising, but they just got a pre-emptive reality check from Apple, in the form of MacBook Neo. If the reportedly upcoming Google laptop existed in a vacuum, there might have been a chance it could succeed.
Last month, Apple did something it had never done before in its history and launched an affordable MacBook starting at just $599. Despite its shortcomings and the corner-cutting Apple had to do to hit that price point, the MacBook Neo turned out to be an excellent laptop, receiving rave reviews all around and selling like hotcakes.
Now, let’s do a thought experiment. If you had to choose between a Pixelbook and a MacBook Neo at $599, a price point Google has never hit before, by the way, which one would you choose?
I would argue that nearly everyone would choose the MacBook Neo. The only thing going in favor of the Pixelbook over similarly priced Windows laptops was its hardware design, and it won’t have that same advantage over the MacBook Neo.
The MacBook Neo features a full metal body, a good display, a quality keyboard, and a best-in-class touchpad. Google will be hard-pressed to build a laptop that good, with that kind of performance, and still hit the $599 price point.
Not to mention, you get the full desktop experience with MacBook Neo because it runs macOS. Even if the new Google laptop is powered by the upcoming Aluminium OS, it will still lack support for desktop apps. Yes, the experience might be better than ChromeOS, but there’s no chance it can compete with a mature operating system like macOS.
Chromebooks sell so well largely because they hit a sub-$300 price point for the education market. But think a year or two ahead, when the current MacBook Neo is selling for $350 or $400 in the resale or refurbished market. Who would buy a Chromebook then?
Does a Chromebook, let alone a Pixelbook, make sense now?
The only reason ChromeOS holds a significant share of the market is due to its education programs and strong ties with schools across the US. If Apple can crack that code and partner with school boards to offer the MacBook Neo as a replacement, the days of ChromeOS are numbered.
Even if Apple doesn’t succeed in schools, MacBook Neo has ensured that the days of premium ChromeOS laptops are over. The upcoming Aluminium OS might be the answer Google is hoping for, but I am skeptical. And that’s why I do not think a new Google laptop makes sense right now. Or ever.
Stepping up from a soundbar has long been the natural next move for home entertainment enthusiasts. Denon’s new AVR-S980H targets precisely that audience with a 7.2-channel AV receiver that prioritises approachability alongside genuine audio performance.
Lyle Smith, President of Sound United at HARMAN, described the receiver as part of Denon’s broader mission to make high-quality audio more accessible, noting that better sound brings people closer to the stories, music and moments they love.
At the core of the AVR-S980H is a 90-watt-per-channel amplifier, a specification that gives the unit enough headroom to drive demanding speakers without distortion whether that’s during high-intensity movie scenes or particularly dynamic music. It reflects the kind of engineering heritage Denon has built over more than a century.
The receiver fits into Denon’s HEOS multiroom audio ecosystem, allowing audio to be streamed between rooms or grouped with other HEOS-compatible devices without additional hardware. A future firmware update will introduce wireless surround support using the Denon Home 200, 400, and 600 speakers, though that functionality will not be available at launch.
For gaming households, the AVR-S980H adds 1440p passthrough and AMD FreeSync support to smooth out fast-moving gameplay and reduce visual tearing, making the receiver a practical upgrade for players who want their audio and visual setup to work in tandem rather than separately.
Connectivity spans Bluetooth, AirPlay 2, Spotify Connect, and HEOS multiroom audio, covering the major wireless streaming formats. To make using the AVR-S980H easy, first-time AVR owners through setup using onscreen instructions rather than assuming prior knowledge of receiver configuration.
The AVR-S980H also scales with the owner’s setup, supporting configurations from a basic stereo pair through to a 5.1.2 Dolby Atmos system, so buyers are not locked into replacing the receiver as their speaker system grows over time.
The Denon AVR-S980H is available now through Denon.com and authorised global retailers, priced at $949 in the US, £799 in the UK, and €899 in Europe.
In a recent episode of “No Priors” — the excellent podcast co-hosted by AI investors Sarah Guo and Elad Gil — Gil made a point about exit timing that’s undoubtedly familiar to founders who’ve spent time with him, but seems particularly useful in this moment of go-go dealmaking.
For most companies, Gil said, there’s roughly a 12-month period where the business is at its peak value, “and then it crashes out” and the window closes. The companies that capture generational returns are often the ones where someone spies that moment instead of assuming the good times will get even better. Lotus, AOL, and Mark Cuban’s Broadcast.com all sold at or near the top, and all are held up by Gil as examples of outfits that foresaw what was coming and smartly pulled the ripcord.
To catch that window, Gil offered a practical suggestion: pre-schedule a board meeting once or twice a year specifically to discuss exits. If it’s a standing calendar item, it drains the emotion out of the equation.
This matters more now than it might have a few years ago. A lot of AI startups exist partly because the foundation models haven’t expanded into their category … yet. As many (like Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz) jokingly acknowledge, that won’t last forever.
As Gil put it: “As you see shift[s] in differentiation and defensibility and all the rest, it’s a good time to ask, ‘Hey, is this my moment? Are these next six months when I’m going to be the most valuable I’ll ever be?’”
A few minutes after the sun retreated behind the Olympic Mountains, we spotted our first satellite. It moved across the sky with an eerie persistence, like a car on cruise control.
“That’s low Earth orbit. That’s pretty standard speed,” Meredith Rawls, an astronomer at the University of Washington and my stargazing guide for the night, tells me.
The primal human experience of gazing into a dark, unblemished night sky — something we’ve been doing for at least 32,000 years, since our ancestors carved Orion onto a mammoth tusk — is vanishing. That nocturnal vista is becoming a dense, industrial field of orbiting debris.
“I tell people, go to a dark site and see the sky now, while it’s like this,” Rawls says, gesturing to the constellations above us. She lets out a laugh. “It’s like, oh my God, what are we doing?”
The scale is hard to overstate. At the turn of the century, there were just over 700 active satellites in space. Now, with plans for hundreds of thousands more satellites — going from 15,000 today to half a million by 2040 — the new space race is not just a visual nuisance, it’s a toxic threat to our existence.
When you look up at the night sky and wonder why the stars are moving, it’s not because you’re seeing a UFO. You’re likely looking at a satellite, and two out of every three belong to Elon Musk’s Starlink.
Starlink is capable of beaming an internet connection to a dish the size of a pizza box, virtually anywhere in the world. The company’s on track for the largest initial public offering in history, largely on the back of all those satellites cruising through the skies.
When Starlink launched its first satellite in 2019, it kicked off a gold rush in space. Amazon plans to send up 60,000 of its own satellites, Chinese companies nearly 60,000 more. Everyone across the globe, it seems, wants a piece of the sky. Rwanda alone applied for 337,320 satellites. In January, Starlink filed for a million orbital AI data centers.
Spacefaring countries are technically bound by the United Nations’ Outer Space Treaty of 1967, but commercial enterprises are another story. And with space increasingly seen as a new theater of war, many nation-states are racing to launch their own mega-constellations.
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The ripple effects are as far-reaching as they are uncertain.
Satellites are expected to disrupt the migratory patterns of birds, dung beetles and seals, which use the stars to navigate.
Space junk from rocket launches and old satellites falls to Earth every day, increasingly through busy airspace. Last year, a piece of titanium and carbon fiber the size of a car tire landed near a school in Argentina.
Many tons of aluminum and lithium aerosols are added to the atmosphere when satellites reach the end of their lives and burn up, eating away at the ozone layer and potentially accelerating climate change.
And, ironically, they’re also threatening to halt space exploration in its tracks, as thousands of satellites zooming at 17,000 miles per hour push us toward a chain reaction known as the Kessler syndrome, an apocalyptic feedback loop in which one collision could create thousands of pieces of debris that would then lead to more collisions.
“You cannot remove all these billions of small fragments from orbit. This will basically limit our access to space forever,” says Hanno Rein, an astrophysicist at the University of Toronto. “This is not going to go away. These small fragments will not necessarily deorbit quickly. They will stay there and make space inaccessible for future generations.”
As I part ways with Rawls, she seems cautiously pleased with how few satellites we saw.
“A real takeaway from our observing session is that there are not yet an overwhelming number of bright satellites,” she says. “I hope you enjoyed your relatively pristine night sky experience.”
I get the feeling that I’m being told to enjoy it while it lasts.
15,000 satellites: How we got here
The Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the world’s first satellite in 1957. It would take another 53 years before we passed 1,000 active satellites. Just 16 years after that, we passed 15,000.
Almost all of that growth is due to one company. When SpaceX launched its first batch of Starlink satellites in May 2019, there were only around 2,000 active satellites. It currently has more than 10,000 in orbit; the next closest operator is OneWeb, with 650. An average of 11 satellites have been launched every day in 2026, and with each one, the risk of collisions that generate dangerous space debris increases.
The causes for the prodigious satellite rise are complicated, but if I had to point to a single moment, I’d choose Dec. 22, 2015, the day that SpaceX landed its reusable Falcon 9 rocket for the first time.
Before the Falcon 9, space was mostly the domain of governments, which launched bus-sized satellites for GPS and weather forecasting. Satellite internet had been around since 2003, but those earlier versions lived in geostationary orbit, around 22,000 miles above the Earth’s surface. That high altitude allowed a single satellite to cover a broader area on the ground, but slow speeds and high latency made it a last resort for most people.
Launching satellites into space is expensive. At the time the Falcon 9 first landed, Musk said it cost around $600 million to build, and another $200,000 in fuel costs to launch. Unlike all previous rocket boosters, the Falcon 9’s can be reused more than 10 times, and it doesn’t require much maintenance in between flights. That brought the launch costs down to $2,500 per kilogram, compared to $12,600 for SpaceX’s first rocket. Seemingly overnight, the economics of satellite launches became a lot more lucrative.
But there was a reason satellite operators had been sticking to the geostationary orbit.
“The closer you come to the Earth, the more satellites you need,” says Barry Evans, a professor of satellite communications at the University of Surrey.
Because SpaceX could reuse the Falcon 9, it was able to make use of low Earth orbit at roughly 342 miles above the ground.
Data has to travel about 60 times farther to reach GEO satellites. Starlink’s lower elevation allows it to deliver a faster connection with lower latency, but it also requires hundreds or thousands of satellites to achieve global coverage. GEO satellites can do it with just a few, though Starlink still doesn’t meet the Federal Communications Commission’s standard for minimum broadband speeds.
Starlink didn’t actually become anyone’s internet provider until 2021. By then, dozens of other companies and countries had joined the race to LEO. Amazon Leo (formerly Project Kuiper) got FCC approval for 3,236 satellites in 2020, China’s Guowang started in 2022 with a planned 13,000 satellites and OneWeb launched the first of its now complete 650-satellite constellation in 2023. So far, Amazon Leo has sent up 241 satellites and expects to start offering service in mid-2026; Guowang has 168 operational satellites in orbit.
“There’s a humongous amount of money going into these satellites,” says Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who tracks satellite launches.
One analysis published in Science found that, between 2017 and 2022, countries collectively filed for over 1 million satellites across more than 300 separate systems.
A million data centers in space?
And those numbers don’t account for the data center boom coming to space. On Jan. 30, SpaceX filed an application with the FCC to launch “a million satellites that operate as orbital data centers.” Last week, Amazon’s Blue Origin filed for its own 50,000 orbital data center constellation.
Amazon, Google, Meta and Microsoft plan to spend $630 billion on Earth-bound data centers and AI chips in 2026 alone. But most people don’t want them — or their enormous water and electricity appetites — in their towns. One study found that electricity rates could rise 8% on average in the US through 2030 due to increased demand from data centers, along with cryptocurrency generation.
Moving them to space would solve the “not in my backyard” problem, and it would theoretically negate their massive water and energy consumption on Earth. As Musk put it recently, “Space has the advantage that it’s always sunny.”
SpaceX hasn’t received the green light yet for its million data centers, but FCC Chair Brendan Carr publicly voiced his approval. There’s currently no timeline for the plan, and SpaceX did not respond to my request for comment, but Musk said on a podcast in January that “in 36 months, probably closer to 30 months, the most economically compelling place to put AI will be space.”
I was met with a lot of raised eyebrows when I asked satellite experts about SpaceX’s plan for 1 million data centers.
“I don’t really think they’re going to do a million anyway. I think it’s going to be more at the 100,000 level. But I’m still very worried about 100,000 and whether that’s sustainable,” says McDowell. “Yes, technically, we can put them up there. But do we really want to?”
These data center satellites will be much larger than the Starlink satellites that beam internet connections back and forth from Earth. Recent comments from Musk indicate they’ll be around 560 feet long — more than five times the size of the most common Starlink satellites in the sky currently.
“We have a couple trends happening at the same time that are concerning. Satellites are starting to get big again, and we’re getting more of them,” says Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow at LeoLabs, a company that tracks objects in orbit.
Tim Farrar, a satellite industry consultant, described the million data centers proposal as the latest in a long line of use cases SpaceX has floated for its Starship rocket, which is still in its prototype phase, from delivering military cargo to international travel via rocket. The Starship is roughly four times bigger than the Falcon 9 and capable of carrying as much as 150 tons to low Earth orbit, but in testing it has exploded on launch roughly half the time.
“To justify making thousands of Starships when they’re reusable, you need to launch them very, very frequently,” says Farrar. “He’s now found this very fortunate confluence of AI demand and issues associated with permitting on the ground.”
‘The new theater of defense’
In mid-2025, Musk called Starlink “the backbone of the Ukrainian army.”
“Their entire front line would collapse if I turned it off,” Musk said in a post on his social media platform X.
Musk was urging an end to the war with Russia, and he wasn’t wrong that Starlink had been instrumental in Ukraine’s military operations. By that point, the Ukrainian army had been using Starlink for more than three years to fly drones, course-correct artillery fire and help troops communicate.
It was an early indicator that Starlink had grown beyond its mission of providing internet connections to rural areas. It was now one of the most coveted tools in a modern military’s arsenal.
Starlink’s involvement in wars on Earth is just the beginning. It’s going to become a military target in space, as will satellites used for GPS, reconnaissance and missile warnings.
As far back as 2019, President Donald Trump declared space the “the next war-fighting domain” when he formally established the United States Space Command as part of the military, and it’s explicitly codified in the Space Force’s founding doctrine.
“Space has become a new theater of defense,” says Joanna Darlington, chief communications officer at Eutelsat, the company that owns OneWeb. “You start getting terrestrial infrastructure destroyed, or submarine cables cut, or satellites jammed by your enemies. The only quick fix for that is satellite today.”
Musk’s involvement was unusually hands-on for an executive at a private company. In mid-2022, the SpaceX CEO denied Ukraine’s request to activate Starlink in Russian-occupied Crimea, citing concerns about escalation. Russia has also reportedly used smuggled Starlink terminals to extend the range of its drone strikes. Musk said in a Jan. 31 post that SpaceX had stopped the use of unauthorized Starlink by Russia.
Soon after, Russia reportedly began working on a missile system capable of hitting Starlink satellites in orbit and creating orbital clouds of debris that would disable multiple satellites at once.
“They become legitimate targets because of the geopolitical influence they have,” says Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Birmingham. “It’s no longer just about providing someone in their apartment fast internet.”
It already tested one such weapon in 2021, when it intentionally destroyed one of its own defunct satellites. That event alone created more than 1,500 pieces of debris larger than a softball and likely hundreds of thousands of smaller pieces, forcing astronauts in the nearby International Space Station to shelter in capsules.
And Chinese anti-satellite technology has advanced so far that it can now threaten any US satellite in low Earth orbit, and likely also those in medium Earth orbit and geostationary orbit, one report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies determined.
What scientists are concerned about
The causes fueling the satellite space race are many and diverse, and so are the effects. Scientists have voiced concerns about a number of unintended consequences that could spring from sending so much metal into orbit.
“We have concerns about the atmosphere, we have concerns about space traffic management. We have concerns about astronomy and concerns about radio interference,” McDowell says. “All of these things become significantly worse at 100,000 and really, seriously problematic.”
Some of them we’re already seeing, and some can only be calculated in a lab and projected into the future.
Earth’s atmosphere as a space dump
Space debris is nothing new, and Russia isn’t the only country that’s been turning low Earth orbit into a garbage dump.
The US destroyed a failing reconnaissance satellite of its own in 2008, and India followed suit in 2019, but those tests produced far fewer — and long-lasting — pieces of debris than Russia’s 2021 test that put ISS astronauts in jeopardy.
But when I talk to astronomers who spend a lot of time thinking about space debris, it’s clear that one event haunts them more than the others.
In 2007, China blew up a weather satellite, creating the largest debris cloud in history. Overnight, 3,533 pieces of softball-or-larger pieces of metal were added to low Earth orbit, and an estimated 150,000 smaller objects. Before the test, there were fewer than 8,000 tracked objects in LEO altogether.
“That one single test increased orbital debris by one third. And that’s still up there,” says Sven Bilen, an engineering professor at Penn State University.
The Secure World Foundation estimates that 2,351 pieces of debris from that single day in 2007 are still in orbit. The Chinese satellite was in orbit 537 miles (865 kilometers) above Earth when it was blown up, compared to the roughly 310 miles (500 kilometers) at which most Starlink satellites operate. That higher altitude means the debris would take longer to be pulled into the Earth’s atmosphere, where it would burn up.
“It’s an exponentially varying atmosphere. By the time you get to 750 kilometers, it’s up there for decades to centuries,” says McKnight. “At 450, 500 kilometers, you’re talking weeks to months.”
It’s worth acknowledging here that space is huge, and 25,000 softball-sized objects zooming hundreds or thousands of miles above our heads doesn’t seem like such a big deal. The problem comes when those objects start occupying the same space as the 15,000 active satellites in orbit.
With space debris moving about 10 times faster than a bullet, even a softball-sized object hitting a satellite would be devastating. That impact would create many more softballs, which could take out even more satellites. This apocalyptic feedback loop is called the Kessler Syndrome, and the scientists I spoke to agree that it’s just a matter of when, not if, it happens.
“We don’t know where we are on that curve, but at some point, every piece of hardware that you put up there is going to be more likely than not to generate additional debris,” Bilen says. “It becomes a runaway phenomenon.”
“If we keep doing what we are doing right now, which is almost nothing, it’s very likely,” Bilen adds. “I don’t know when, but it’s very likely.”
Almost every astrophysicist I spoke with mentioned the 2013 movie Gravity, which famously dramatized a Kessler syndrome-like scenario, depicting astronauts forced to abandon their space shuttle as a debris cloud swarms them. They emphasized that it won’t manifest as a single catastrophic moment like that, but will instead take place over years, as space slowly becomes deadly for astronauts and satellites alike.
“We’re boiling the frog. It’s increasing slowly, and all of a sudden we’ll get to a point and go, ‘Wow, that’s really bad,’” says McKnight. “There are indicators that we’re getting closer, indicators that the timeline is shrinking.”
Satellites maneuver to avoid collisions
Despite some close calls, satellites have so far been exceptionally nimble at avoiding space debris.
When Starlink first launched in 2019, it made a “collision avoidance” maneuver if the probability of impact was greater than 1 in 100,000 — the same number that NASA uses for human spaceflight. Starlink has since moved that number to a more conservative 3 in 10 million.
But even with that more conservative threshold, its satellites still made about 300,000 maneuvers last year alone — an increase from around 200,000 in 2024. Depending on who you ask, that number is evidence of Starlink’s spotless safety record or an unsustainably high number of moving satellites.
If Starlink achieved its goal of 1 million orbital data centers, that would add up to 272 million maneuvers a year, or nine every second, according to Hugh Lewis, the astronautics professor.
“The very fact that you have to maneuver degrades your ability to detect whether you need to maneuver,” says Lewis. “Anybody else who wants to operate in that environment is going to be looking at this fuzzy ball of stuff that’s always moving.”
There’s also a risk of solar storms disrupting satellites’ ability to maneuver. These blasts from the sun occur when twisted magnetic fields reach their breaking point, sending bursts of energy throughout the entire solar system.
Solar storms could slow down your internet temporarily or they could take out satellites altogether, according to researchers at the University of California, Irvine. In February 2022, 38 Starlink satellites were destroyed by one such event.
“We can predict these events sometimes, but certainly not always,” says Sascha Meinrath, professor of telecommunications at Penn State University. “They can rapidly — and by rapidly, I mean, within minutes to hours — dramatically increase the scale of atmospheric drag.”
In response, Starlink’s satellites autonomously adjust their altitude. Neighboring satellites make their own adjustments, and it can take three to four days before they’re stabilized at their original altitudes.
A paper published in December described this as an “orbital house of cards.” The authors estimated that it would take 5.5 days for a “catastrophic collision” to occur if maneuvers stopped or severe situational awareness loss occurred due to an event like a solar storm. In 2018, the year before Starlink launched its first satellites, that number was 164 days. In the four months since the paper was first submitted, the clock has dropped to just three days. (The paper has not been peer-reviewed.)
Three days is already an alarmingly short period of time to avoid “catastrophic outcomes.” What happens if we go from 15,000 satellites to millions?
Space junk doesn’t always stay in space
The Earth’s stratosphere acts as a great filtering system for those of us on the ground. But just as some meteors survive the trip, space debris doesn’t always stay in space. As more rockets are launched and more satellites are deorbited, the likelihood of a piece of them reaching Earth increases.
A January 2025 paper published in Scientific Reports determined that there’s a 26% chance each year that a piece of spacecraft will pass through some of the world’s busiest airspace. When they factored in planned megaconstellations from companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin, the probability of a fatal aircraft collision with reentry debris increased to 7 in 10,000 per year by 2035.
“You hit what’s known as the law of truly large numbers,” says Lewis. “Even if it’s a really, really low likelihood, enough opportunities means it’s going to happen.”
And it has already happened, with alarming frequency. According to NASA, an average of one cataloged piece of debris fell back to Earth every day during the last 50 years. Most of this lands harmlessly in oceans or remote areas — NASA says that “no serious injury or significant property damage” has been confirmed — but a January study published in Science noted that the risks are growing with an increasingly crowded orbit.
A 2022 study published in Nature Astronomy put the danger in starker terms, noting that there’s a 10% chance that someone is killed by space debris over a decade. It also cautioned that this is a conservative estimate given the acceleration of rocket launches.
Last year alone, space junk fell on a mine in Australia, on a farm in Argentina, in the Algerian desert, near a school in Argentina and at a warehouse in Poland. In 2024, fragments from a SpaceX rocket landed 40 miles apart in North Carolina. One 15-inch piece landed on a man’s roof while he was home watching TV.
“It’s fairly difficult to always have a controlled re-entry. As I like to say, we want to have a splash, not a thud,” says McKnight.
In other words, operators should aim to deorbit satellites “over the open ocean, away from populated islands and heavily trafficked airline and maritime routes.” Debris from rocket launches is necessarily closer to civilization. NASA guidelines for debris re-entry say the risk of a human casualty should be less than 1 in 10,000.
“As you get more and more satellites up there, more and more rockets, more and bigger payloads, if this trend is going to hold true, that’s going to be more and more difficult to adhere to,” says McKnight. “If you have enough events, somebody’s going to get hurt.”
Taking out the orbital trash
One way to clean up space debris is to steer satellites toward the atmosphere, where they burn up. With constant propellant needed to overcome atmospheric drag, most satellites in low Earth orbit only last around five to eight years. SpaceX deorbits its Starlink satellites after roughly five years in the sky.
“Deorbiting” is a benign word for a violent process. When a Starlink satellite hits the end of its life, SpaceX operators activate a “drag sail,” which is essentially a kite that slowly pulls the satellite closer to Earth. When it reaches the dense upper atmosphere after a few months, the satellite is incinerated. It’s a spectacular sight from the ground — a fireworks grand finale on a cosmic scale.
Starlink’s satellites weigh roughly as much as a Honda Civic, and an average of almost two were deorbited every day last year.
And scientists fear those burnups could be doing irreparable damage to our atmosphere. As old satellites are ignited on reentry, the plastics and carbon-fiber composites in them release particles of black carbon — the same sooty material produced by a campfire — as well as metals like aluminum and lithium.
“You’re putting a gray blanket in the stratosphere, which is absorbing and heating up aluminum,” says Rajan Chakrabarty, a chemical engineering professor at Washington University in St. Louis who researches the effects of aerosols on the atmosphere. “This extra heat is just going to cause imbalance.”
We’ve only recently started seeing them reach the end of their lives in significant numbers, but scientists are already observing the effects.
One study funded by NASA and published in Geophysical Research Letters in mid-2024 found that a 550-pound satellite releases about 66 pounds of aluminum oxide nanoparticles when it’s deorbited. These nanoparticles grew eightfold from 2016 to 2022, before the satellite space race kicked off in earnest. The most common Starlink satellites weigh 2,750 pounds each; the next generation will weigh 4,409 pounds.
“We projected a yearly excess of more than 640% over the natural level. Based on that projection, we are very worried,” Joseph Wang, one of the authors of the Geophysical Research Letters study, told me in an interview last year, referring to the presence of aluminum particles.
Samples taken in 2023 by scientists with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration — before satellites started getting deorbited en masse — found aluminum and exotic metals embedded in about 10% of the stratosphere. They estimated that this could grow to 50% “based on the number of satellites being launched into low Earth orbit.”
The ripple effects of all this are still unclear. Huge amounts of black carbon could absorb incoming sunlight or scatter it; it could even change how heat moves around the climate system. The many tons of metallic aerosols added to the atmosphere could actually help cool the planet. (Some geoengineering scientists have even proposed this as a solution to climate change.) Another study determined that the warming effect of black carbon could raise stratospheric temperatures by as much as 1.5 degrees Celsius.
Perhaps the most worrying unknown is how this will affect the Earth’s ozone layer, a section of the stratosphere that absorbs radiation from the sun. According to the EPA, ozone depletion leads to health issues like skin cancer, cataracts and weakened immune systems, as well as reduced crop yield and disruptions in the marine food chain.
“We are shooting in the dark. We really don’t know what’s going to happen,” says Chakrabarty. “These things change slowly, and most of the changes are irreversible. It might not be tangible to our eyes, but by the time we feel the effects of a changing climate, it’s going to be too late.”
Wild West: Who is governing the satellite ecosystem?
For as long as humans have been launching objects into orbit, there’s been an effort to set up international guardrails. A year after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the United Nations established the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.
The committee’s early meetings were filled with a sense of guarded optimism about the possibilities for international cooperation that satellite communication could open up. Their grasp of the challenges ahead was equally prescient. At its third meeting in 1962, USSR ambassador Platon D. Morozov accurately charted the dilemma we’re facing today.
“As more and more satellites and other scientific instruments are being launched every year, and since the number of countries conducting such experiments is bound to increase, it becomes important to establish juridical provisions,” Morozov said. In other words, space activities need rules.
Four years later, the Outer Space Treaty was signed by the US, the USSR and the UK, with a core principle stating that “states shall avoid harmful contamination of space.”
That spirit of international cooperation has since waned. In theory, the Outer Space Treaty sets the rules, and individual governments are responsible for enforcing them. But that obligation has often taken a backseat in the US.
“In practice, it’s not quite a rubber stamp, but I wouldn’t describe the FCC’s reviews as especially adversarial,” McDowell says. “Although they do talk about preserving the environment, it doesn’t seem to me to be as high a priority as making money.”
Satellite operations are coordinated globally through the UN’s International Telecommunication Union, which regulates things like spectrum allocation, frequency assignments and orbital positions. What it doesn’t do is coordinate space traffic or instill environmental guidelines.
“There’s no common understanding in terms of what’s right of way in space,” says Victoria Samson, chief director of space security and stability for the Secure World Foundation. “If they can both maneuver, who moves?”
When Starlink was essentially alone in low Earth orbit, this wasn’t much of an issue. They were largely self-policing, but they were widely considered to be responsible operators. But as more and more countries plan their own mega-constellations, frictions have risen to the surface.
In June last year, the European Union proposed a new Space Act, which would require satellite operators to address issues like space debris and collision avoidance. It’s not expected to be adopted until late 2028.
The US State Department responded by saying it has “deep concern” about the “unacceptable regulatory burdens” the legislation would impose on satellite operators. FCC Chair Brendan Carr went as far as to say the US would retaliate if the act is passed. Representatives from the FCC didn’t respond to my requests for comment.
“We just want to make sure that every satellite operator gets a fair shake in Europe,” Carr said at a telecom conference in March. “If Europe wants to go in a different direction, there are European satellite operators that do business in America, and we’ll mirror the regulatory approach that Europe wants to take.”
The tit-for-tat highlights the challenges of regulating an industry whose infrastructure lives a thousand miles above our heads. Nations can decide which companies are allowed to sell satellite services within their borders; it’s another thing to mandate that they behave a certain way in space.
“There are few industries where there’s a global regulatory body,” says Joanna Darlington, the Eutelsat communications officer. “This is the challenge of space, because it doesn’t belong to anyone.”
Why satellites are here to stay
Like it or not, satellites are here to stay, and we’re increasingly reliant on them for disaster relief, emergency response, environmental monitoring, agriculture production and everyday navigation. There’s also Starlink’s 10 million customers around the world, many of whom had never had a modern internet connection before SpaceX launched all those satellites into orbit.
But as wildly successful as the low Earth orbit satellite era has been, it could be creating the conditions for its own demise as space debris keeps accumulating.
“Orbital debris mitigation and cleanup is a massive, massive challenge,” says Bilen. “We can’t even clean up the great garbage patch of the Pacific Ocean, which is right here on the surface of the Earth. Now imagine trying to do that in space.”
Meredith Rawls, the University of Washington astronomer, reminded me that there is one precedent for the global community coming together to tackle a seemingly insurmountable problem: the 1987 Montreal Protocol. The landmark agreement phased out chlorofluorocarbons from household products that had opened a hole in the ozone layer, leading toward a full recovery expected by 2066. Nearly 40 years later, it’s still the only UN treaty ratified by every country on Earth.
Ironically, that recovery is now in danger of being reversed by the satellite space race.
“I actually like the ozone layer as a success story of international cooperation,” Rawls says. “We fixed a thing! Countries worked together to notice something was broken.
“I wonder if we could do that again.”
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Director of Content | Jonathan Skillings
NBC News reports on a 16-person clinical trial of “personalized messenger RNA vaccines” which use the immune system to fight cancer cells. “The goal is not to eliminate existing tumors, but instead to stamp out lingering, undetected cancer cells, and later any new cells that form before they can cause a recurrence.”
Patients still have surgery to remove tumors. After that, the mRNA vaccines are personalized for each individual using genetic material taken from their unique tumor cells. In the clinical trial, after getting the vaccine, the patients also received chemotherapy, which is standard post-op treatment for operable pancreatic cancer… [The article notes that less than 13% of people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer live for more than five years, making it “one of the deadliest cancers.”]
[E]xperts have long believed that people with pancreatic cancer could not generate an immune response against tumors. But after nine doses of the personalized vaccine, [clinical trial participant Donna] Gustafson is one of eight people in the 16-person Phase 1 trial who did just that, producing an army of immune cells called T cells that seek out and destroy tumor cells… [Dr. Vinod Balachandran, a vaccine center director who is leading the trial, said] it was unclear whether the immune response would last and lead to the patients living longer… New data collected during the trial’s six-year follow-up period shows that it may. Those findings will be presented Monday at the American Association for Cancer Research’s annual meeting in San Diego. Six years after treatment, Gustafson and six others who responded to the treatment are still alive…
More research is still needed. Genentech and BioNTech, the two drugmakers behind the vaccine, have already launched a larger Phase 2 clinical trial… Another team is working on an off-the-shelf vaccine that targets a protein called KRAS that is present in as many as 90% of pancreatic cancers. In a small, early trial, about 85% of the participants mounted an immune response to the protein.
Because we get asked a lot.
The Technological Republic, in brief.
1. Silicon Valley owes a moral debt to the country that made its rise possible. The engineering elite of Silicon Valley has an affirmative obligation to participate in the defense of the nation.
2. We must rebel against the tyranny of the apps. Is the iPhone our greatest creative if not crowning achievement as a civilization? The object has changed our lives, but it may also now be limiting and constraining our sense of the possible.
3. Free email is not enough. The decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public.
4. The limits of soft power, of soaring rhetoric alone, have been exposed. The ability of free and democratic societies to prevail requires something more than moral appeal. It requires hard power, and hard power in this century will be built on software.
5. The question is not whether A.I. weapons will be built; it is who will build them and for what purpose. Our adversaries will not pause to indulge in theatrical debates about the merits of developing technologies with critical military and national security applications. They will proceed.
6. National service should be a universal duty. We should, as a society, seriously consider moving away from an all-volunteer force and only fight the next war if everyone shares in the risk and the cost.
7. If a U.S. Marine asks for a better rifle, we should build it; and the same goes for software. We should as a country be capable of continuing a debate about the appropriateness of military action abroad while remaining unflinching in our commitment to those we have asked to step into harm’s way.
8. Public servants need not be our priests. Any business that compensated its employees in the way that the federal government compensates public servants would struggle to survive.
9. We should show far more grace towards those who have subjected themselves to public life. The eradication of any space for forgiveness—a jettisoning of any tolerance for the complexities and contradictions of the human psyche—may leave us with a cast of characters at the helm we will grow to regret.
10. The psychologization of modern politics is leading us astray. Those who look to the political arena to nourish their soul and sense of self, who rely too heavily on their internal life finding expression in people they may never meet, will be left disappointed.
11. Our society has grown too eager to hasten, and is often gleeful at, the demise of its enemies. The vanquishing of an opponent is a moment to pause, not rejoice.
12. The atomic age is ending. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on A.I. is set to begin.
13. No other country in the history of the world has advanced progressive values more than this one. The United States is far from perfect. But it is easy to forget how much more opportunity exists in this country for those who are not hereditary elites than in any other nation on the planet.
14. American power has made possible an extraordinarily long peace. Too many have forgotten or perhaps take for granted that nearly a century of some version of peace has prevailed in the world without a great power military conflict. At least three generations — billions of people and their children and now grandchildren — have never known a world war.
15. The postwar neutering of Germany and Japan must be undone. The defanging of Germany was an overcorrection for which Europe is now paying a heavy price. A similar and highly theatrical commitment to Japanese pacifism will, if maintained, also threaten to shift the balance of power in Asia.
16. We should applaud those who attempt to build where the market has failed to act. The culture almost snickers at Musk’s interest in grand narrative, as if billionaires ought to simply stay in their lane of enriching themselves . . . . Any curiosity or genuine interest in the value of what he has created is essentially dismissed, or perhaps lurks from beneath a thinly veiled scorn.
17. Silicon Valley must play a role in addressing violent crime. Many politicians across the United States have essentially shrugged when it comes to violent crime, abandoning any serious efforts to address the problem or take on any risk with their constituencies or donors in coming up with solutions and experiments in what should be a desperate bid to save lives.
18. The ruthless exposure of the private lives of public figures drives far too much talent away from government service. The public arena—and the shallow and petty assaults against those who dare to do something other than enrich themselves—has become so unforgiving that the republic is left with a significant roster of ineffectual, empty vessels whose ambition one would forgive if there were any genuine belief structure lurking within.
19. The caution in public life that we unwittingly encourage is corrosive. Those who say nothing wrong often say nothing much at all.
20. The pervasive intolerance of religious belief in certain circles must be resisted. The elite’s intolerance of religious belief is perhaps one of the most telling signs that its political project constitutes a less open intellectual movement than many within it would claim.
21. Some cultures have produced vital advances; others remain dysfunctional and regressive. All cultures are now equal. Criticism and value judgments are forbidden. Yet this new dogma glosses over the fact that certain cultures and indeed subcultures . . . have produced wonders. Others have proven middling, and worse, regressive and harmful.
22. We must resist the shallow temptation of a vacant and hollow pluralism. We, in America and more broadly the West, have for the past half century resisted defining national cultures in the name of inclusivity. But inclusion into what?
Excerpts from the #1 New York Times Bestseller The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West, by Alexander C. Karp & Nicholas W. Zamiska
Cloud development platform Vercel has disclosed a security incident after threat actors claimed to have breached its systems and are attempting to sell stolen data.
Vercel is a cloud platform that provides hosting and deployment infrastructure for developers, with a strong focus on JavaScript frameworks.
The company is known for developing Next.js, a widely used React framework, and for offering services such as serverless functions, edge computing, and CI/CD pipelines that enable developers to build, preview, and deploy applications.
In a security bulletin published today, the company said a limited subset of customers was affected by a security breach.
“We’ve identified a security incident that involved unauthorized access to certain internal Vercel systems,” warns Vercel.
“We are actively investigating, and we have engaged incident response experts to help investigate and remediate. We have notified law enforcement and will update this page as the investigation progresses.”
The company says its services have not been impacted and that it is working with impacted customers.
Vercel says it is taking steps to protect its customers, advising them to review environment variables, use its sensitive environment variable feature, and to rotate secrets if needed.
Hacker claims to be selling stolen Vercel data
The disclosure comes after a threat actor claiming to be “ShinyHunters” posted on a hacking forum that they had breached Vercel and were selling access to company data.
It should be noted that while the hacker claims to be part of the ShinyHunters group, threat actors linked to recent attacks attributed to the ShinyHunters extortion gang have denied to BleepingComputer that they are involved in this incident.
In the forum post, the hacker claimed to be selling access keys, source code, and database data allegedly stolen from Vercel, along with access to internal deployments and API keys.
“This is just from Linear as proof, but the access I’m about to give you includes multiple employee accounts with access to several internal deployments, API keys (including some NPM tokens and some GitHub tokens),” reads the forum post.
The attacker also shared a text file containing Vercel employee information, which consists of 580 data records containing names, Vercel email addresses, account status, and activity timestamps. They also shared a screenshot of what appears to be an internal Vercel Enterprise dashboard.
BleepingComputer has not been able to independently confirm if the data or screenshot is authentic.
In messages shared on Telegram, the threat actor also claimed they were in contact with Vercel regarding the incident and that they discussed an alleged ransom demand of $2 million.
BleepingComputer contacted Vercel with additional questions about the breach, including whether any sensitive data or credentials were exposed and if they are negotiating with the attackers, and will update this story if we receive a response.
AI chained four zero-days into one exploit that bypassed both renderer and OS sandboxes. A wave of new exploits is coming.
At the Autonomous Validation Summit (May 12 & 14), see how autonomous, context-rich validation finds what’s exploitable, proves controls hold, and closes the remediation loop.
The winning runner at a Beijing half-marathon for humanoid robots finished the race today in 50 minutes and 26 seconds — significantly faster than the human world record of 57 minutes recently set by Jacob Kiplimo.
Comparing human and robot running times may seem unfair; one social media user observed, “my car can outrun a cheetah too.” Still, the winning time is a massive improvement over last year’s race, when the fastest robot finished in two hours and 40 minutes. (Back then, I scoffed that this “would not be an impressive time for a human.”)
The Associated Press reports that this year’s winner was built by Chinese smartphone maker Honor. It seems the winning robot wasn’t actually the fastest, as a different Honor robot finished in 48 minutes and 19 seconds. But that one was remote controlled — the 50:26 robot was autonomous and won due to weighted scoring.
About 40% of participating robots competed autonomously, while the remaining 60% were remote controlled, according to Beijing’s E-Town tech hub. Not all of them did as well as Honor’s robots, with one robot falling at the starting line and another hitting a barrier.
The HBO drama Euphoria is premiering new episodes. It may be hard to believe that the previous season wrapped up in 2022. On my TikTok “For You” page, I still see 4-year-old clips on the regular.
Season 3 takes place five years after season 2 (see our finale recap here), well after high school. The new season once again stars Zendaya, Hunter Schafer, Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, Alexa Demie, Maude Apatow, Colman Domingo and Eric Dane. It adds new guest stars such as Sharon Stone, Rosalía, Danielle Deadwyler, Natasha Lyonne and Trisha Paytas. According to an official synopsis, season 3 sees “a group of childhood friends wrestle with the virtue of faith, the possibility of redemption and the problem of evil.”
While it’s swapped from HBO Max to Max and back to HBO Max again in the time it’s taken for Euphoria to return to TV, you’ll be able to tune into the HBO streaming service for new episodes each week. Here’s a release schedule for Euphoria season 3.
When to watch Euphoria season 3 on HBO Max
In the US? You can stream episode 2 of Euphoria season 3 on HBO Max on Sunday, April 19, at 9 p.m. ET (6 p.m. PT). It’ll also air on HBO at 9 p.m. ET and PT. Subsequent installments will debut on Sundays through May 31.
- Episode 2, America My Dream: April 19
- Episode 3, The Ballad of Paladin: April 26
- Episode 4, Kitty Likes to Dance: May 3
- Episode 5, This Little Piggy: May 10
- Episode 6, Stand Still and See: May 17
- Episode 7, Rain or Shine: May 24
- Episode 8, In God We Trust: May 31
HBO Max last increased its plan prices in October, raising the ad-supported tier to $11 per month, the ad-free Standard tier to $18.50 per month and the ad-free Premium tier to $23 per month.
You might be able to save money by paying upfront for 12 months of HBO Max, which costs less than paying month-by-month for a year. In addition to HBO Max’s standalone plans, you can bundle it with Disney Plus and Hulu, either with ads for all three services or without.
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