The complete field record · 2024—2026
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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- 30Frontier Mechanics Week 30: Athena tips, Starship spins, Shield AI raises, and Eutelsat levitatesA lunar lander reached the surface sideways, another Starship failed, autonomous aircraft drew $240 million, and European defense plans sent a satellite stock up 550%.
- 29Frontier Mechanics Week 29: GPT-4.5 scales old rules, Ocelot corrects errors, iPhone 16e economizes, and constellations thinOpenAI shipped its largest non-reasoning model, Amazon tried a cat-state qubit, Apple rebuilt the entry phone, and satellite proposals met capital discipline.
- 28Frontier Mechanics Week 28: Helix controls two robots, NEO enters the home, Karman mines, and Veo prices videoFigure fused language and action, 1X revealed a domestic humanoid, an asteroid startup raised $20 million, and generated video acquired a per-second meter.
- 27Frontier Mechanics Week 27: Arm’s own chip, analog AI, K2’s big satellite, and a unified GPTAn architecture licensor moved toward silicon, EnCharge priced computation in charge, K2 raised $110 million, and OpenAI simplified a confusing roadmap.
- 26Frontier Mechanics Week 26: a Pixar lamp, housework data, X-energy’s round, and commercial reentryApple made motion expressive, Meta studied human–robot chores, nuclear capital clustered, and a capsule prepared to return cargo through the atmosphere.
- 25Frontier Mechanics Week 25: the DeepSeek shock, o3-mini, Falcon Shores’ exit, and space’s defense pivotA Chinese model erased roughly $600 billion from Nvidia in a day, OpenAI answered with smaller reasoning, Intel skipped a product, and space startups followed government demand.
- 24Frontier Mechanics Week 24: Operator clicks, Stargate spends, robotics gets a decade, and AST raisesOpenAI shipped a browser agent and joined a $500 billion infrastructure promise, Yann LeCun challenged the architecture, and direct-to-device satellites found capital.
- 23Frontier Mechanics Week 23: New Glenn reaches orbit, Starship breaks up, Stoke raises, and the FTC maps cloud powerTwo giant rockets produced opposite headlines, a smaller reusable launcher financed patience, and regulators described model partnerships as control without ownership.
- 22Frontier Mechanics Week 22: $450 reasoning, OpenAI robotics, Apollo at work, and the Mars sample forkA team trained a reasoning model cheaply, OpenAI rehired for robots, Apptronik showed a factory humanoid, and NASA postponed an expensive return plan.
- 21Frontier Mechanics Week 21: New Glenn nears, Starship carries Starlink, Pro loses money, and launch counts compoundBlue Origin approached orbit, SpaceX prepared a payload test, OpenAI admitted premium usage could be unprofitable, and the world counted rockets.
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