The complete field record · 2024—2026
All
issues
110 weekly reports on the systems moving from experiment to infrastructure.
Every issue covers four developments, preserves its research trail, and calculates reading time at 150 words per minute for dense technical prose.
Field reports
Newest first · Filter by time- 50Frontier Mechanics Week 50: Oracle’s $30B year, desktop fusion, robot guard dogs, and a $600B space economyOpenAI reportedly rented an extraordinary cloud, Avalanche squeezed fusion onto a table, Asylon paired drones with quadrupeds, and space crossed a large accounting line.
- 49Frontier Mechanics Week 49: Hadrian’s factories, Auriga’s track, H20 returns, and ChatGPT actsAutomated manufacturing raised $260 million, electromagnetic launch found seed capital, Nvidia resumed China sales, and OpenAI unified its agents.
- 48Frontier Mechanics Week 48: Firefly files, SpaceX reaches $400B, Nvidia redesigns for China, and a teenager relays satellitesPublic markets got a launch prospectus, private markets repriced SpaceX, export rules shaped another GPU, and Apolink raised for continuous orbital contact.
- 47Frontier Mechanics Week 47: Amazon’s millionth robot, Genesis launches, Cloudflare charges crawlers, and OpenAI tokens aren’t equityWarehouse automation reached seven digits, a robotics-model startup raised $105 million, websites got a tollbooth, and Robinhood sold synthetic exposure.
- 46Frontier Mechanics Week 46: Gemini runs onboard, satellites return, a space gun loads, and EV batteries feed AIGoogle compressed robot intelligence, Lux Aeterna designed reusable spacecraft, Longshot built kinetic launch, and Redwood aimed old batteries at data centers.
- 45Frontier Mechanics Week 45: Tesla’s robotaxi begins, Nvidia backs nuclear, Midjourney moves, and Europe funds defense spaceAustin received a small driverless fleet, TerraPower added an AI investor, Midjourney generated video, and European space funding followed security demand.
- 44Frontier Mechanics Week 44: V-JEPA predicts, Tesla picks a date, Proxima bends fusion, and Aethero cools orbitMeta trained a video world model, Tesla promised Austin rides, stellarator capital grew, and a startup built tougher space computers.
- 43Frontier Mechanics Week 43: SmolVLA on a laptop, Amazon’s agent lab, Impulse’s $300M, and ispace’s second crashA compact robot model ran locally, Amazon merged agents with robotics, orbital logistics found capital, and another lunar lander failed in the final kilometers.
- 42Frontier Mechanics Week 42: space-made chips, open humanoids, R1 on one GPU, and Rocket Lab’s sensor dealSpace Forge funded orbital materials, Hugging Face put robots on a developer budget, DeepSeek compressed reasoning, and Rocket Lab bought infrared eyes.
- 41Frontier Mechanics Week 41: Claude 4 reasons, OpenAI buys io, SpaceX buys a supplier, and Golden Dome growsAnthropic released long-running agent models, Jony Ive’s hardware startup joined OpenAI, SpaceX internalized a component maker, and missile defense moved toward orbit.
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