Happy Tuesday, and happy (almost) Q4 to all who celebrate. Isn’t it just a little too perfect that Starship made orbit 18 years to the day after Falcon 1 itself first reached it? Such suspicious symmetry really lends credence to a certain someone’s belief that “the most entertaining outcome is the most likely.” Or even that it’s all one big simulation.

IN THIS WEEK’S EDITION:

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In April, yours truly finally went to Taiwan, after half a decade of theorycrafting from afar and surely very original thoughts about “concentration risk with Chinese characteristics.” (Here’s the full confession from that trip.) Being there drove home just how central Taiwan is to how American technology gets made, even as the United States works to bring more leading-edge logic production back home. Stats rarely make a great story, but the sheer scale of TSMC's foreign direct investment (FDI) tells it well:

That last tranche is meant to add four more advanced fabs in Arizona, bringing TSMC’s planned American footprint to 12 manufacturing and packaging facilities. But pledges are pledges (and planned investments are “planned” until actualized). As of last Friday, Taiwan’s economic ministry had approved $44B of TSMC’s U.S. investment since 2020, with $20B of it this July. Back home, meanwhile, TSMC runs 19 fabs and packaging plants, with 13 more under construction.

The “dependency” is actually only accelerating. Our goods deficit with Taiwan has gone from $30.2B (2020) → $47.8B (2022) → $73.8B (2024) → $146.6B (2025), nearly doubling in a single year as imports jumped 73% to $201.4B. This year is running hotter still, at $127.8B through July, up ~81% on the same stretch last year.

If anything here deserves an indictment, it's not our current industrial policy but the last three decades of strategic amnesia. And these trendlines are pretty easy to explain. There’s an all-consuming AI supercycle taking place, if you hadn’t noticed, and demand for leading-edge inference is about as inelastic as it gets. Most of those chips are still made in Taiwan. When Chairman C.C. Wei announced TSMC's latest $100B American capex boost in July, he pinned it on "the strong multi-year demand from our leading U.S. customers." Planned investment, meanwhile, is spent over years on some of the most capital-intensive megaprojects ever attempted. And even after a fab comes online, it takes time to ramp up, and longer still to build out surrounding suppliers, packaging capacity, and so on.

Our take: Put AI demand next to the time it takes to stand up the most complex machine humanity has ever built, and it's no surprise the first curve is much steeper. This gap shows up as the trade deficit. It’s also a good chance for us to practice what we preach and resist the siren song of “The Press Release Economy.” Celebrate the announcements, pledges, and planned commitments, by all means. And then: trust, but verify.

THE BLACKBIRD STIRS… Sometime this spring, the fastest jet ever flown went missing. Satellite imagery shows that NASA 844, the last SR-71 built and the final Blackbird to fly, hasn’t been on its longtime outdoor display at Armstrong Flight Research Center since at least mid-May. Per Aviation Week, the jet was pulled into a hangar for inspection, and NASA has been calling around to former SR-71 program members. All this as bossman Jared Isaacman is teasing a reinvigorated X-plane portfolio. (NASA flew 844 as a high-speed research platform until Oct. 9, 1999.)

The lore is strong with this one. Built by Kelly Johnson’s Skunk Works in the early 1960s with (!) slide rules, the Blackbird cruised at 85,000 feet and Mach 3.2, so fast that her standard evasive maneuver was to accelerate. By most counts, reportedly more than 4,000 missiles were fired at Blackbirds, and each one missed. Her titanium skin was fitted loosely enough to grow at Mach 3, which meant she leaked fuel whenever she cooled down, and some of that titanium was bought covertly via CIA shell companies from the Soviet Union, the very country she was built to spy on. (Then, of course, we can’t forget this the legendary LA “speed check” story from pilot Brian Shul’s memoir, Sled Driver.)

However romantically compelling, the case for revival remains complicated, not to mention absurdly difficult. Taken seriously, a bona fide Blackbird RTF would be a textbook tribal knowledge problem, as the people who knew the jet’s strange routines are mostly retired. Plus, the tooling is gone, its JP-7 fuel is no longer in regular production, every other surviving SR-71 was demilitarized (thus unflyable), and the last reactivation estimate (post-9/11, for the GWOT) was $40-45M. If that was the cost, in 2001 dollars, after only two years of inactivity, what might it be today?!

And yet here we are. America’s space and aeronautics program, at its best, is never one to take “no” or “never” for an answer. You can feel in your bones that something is brewing. We, FWIW, are firmly on record that we should be flying faster. But what do you think? Many of you will have strong opinions (and stronger color commentary)… so vote, then sound off with your thoughts.

PROFILES IN COURAGE… Call us old-fashioned, but we're suckers for a great magazine cover story… even as proprietors of an online publishing business. This week’s cover of Time belongs to none other than Admiral Samuel Paparo, a fighter pilot turned four-star who now commands the U.S. Pacific Command. With 400,000 personnel, some 200 ships, and half the Earth’s surface (~100M square miles) under its responsibility, Paparo’s force has the stated goal of winning without fighting. Put differently, his whole job is to keep the worst war of this century from ever starting. "If I do my job right," he says, "history will never know my name."

That line reminds us of another commander we were thinking about recently (#037). Shortly before leading Artemis II farther from Earth than any human had ever gone, Commander Reid Wiseman said… “I hope we are forgotten… [because] if we’re forgotten, then Artemis has been successful.” These two men, in very different situations, aim for the same thing: obscurity. Because it will mean we kept going deeper into the solar system, and that we stopped a dark chapter from being written — one we still need to be ready to face. As Adm. Paparo tells Time: “Mine is not a heroic story… Heroism is service that happens at the unforgiving hour. The best service prevents the unforgiving hour.”

01 / THE ROBOT GAP… China put 354,000 industrial robots to work last year, good for the lion’s share (59%) of all new installations worldwide in 2025. The U.S. installed nearly 38,500: a respectable second place, but a nine-to-one gap vs. China. Most of those robots are homegrown, too: PRC suppliers provided 55% of the robots installed there last year, as its factories become both customers and a proving ground for robot OEMs. Recall the doom loop we laid out in The Last Hardware Problem: no deployment → no data → no improvement → no deployment. A key piece of the puzzle for the West: to compete in robotics, we need more places at home to deploy them!

Speaking of people building robots of the future: Edward Mehr, co-founder/CEO of Machina Labs, is announcing a new joint venture with "an indefinite time horizon, substantial capital requirements, no clearly defined liquidity event, and the two founders have agreed to concentrate a frankly irresponsible percentage of their future assets into a single enterprise." Translation: 💍. Congratulations, and godspeed, to this new founding team!

02 / AI TAKE THE WHEEL… Our dear friends at AstroForge have lifted the wraps on Autonomy-1, a spacecraft designed to fly its entire mission, from separation onward, without a single command from Earth. The Huntington Beach asteroid miners have built Solo, an in-house transformer model that rides on top of deterministic, physics-based flight control software and makes decisions in real time. Solo will fly in “shadow mode” on DeepSpace-2 later this year (hitching a ride on Intuitive Machines’ third lunar mission) and take full command of Autonomy-1 next year.

03 / ABOUT THAT RIDE… The pilotless, uncommandable probe will ride aboard Stoke Space’s fully reusable Nova rocket, per a new update published by our friends at Stoke (+ a PA Founding Sponsor). Pathfinder Flight 1 is targeted for early ‘27 out of Cape Canaveral’s historic SLC-14, carrying Autonomy-1 and a NASA heliophysics payload. Now, dear reader, a reminder: this is a maiden orbital attempt carrying a privately financed probe. Risks abound! But fresh off $1B in new financing, Stoke is stacking up milestones: Zenith engines with serial numbers in the teens shipping to the test stand, and its first upper stage through fit checks. We have high hopes and deep confidence in these two teams delivering, and we’re far from the only ones. Last but not least, Stoke signs their updates "Ad astra per aspera." Our kind of rocket company!

04 / A CLEVER WORKAROUND… We’re about seven months into Iran's blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which normally carries ~25% of the world’s seaborne oil and ~20% of its LNG (and don’t forget the "Non-O&G Commodity Hostages" from #043, like helium, copper, aluminum, and fertilizer, all stuck at anchor). For Abu Dhabi’s ADNOC and other nearby producers, ship-to-ship (STS) transfer has emerged as the workaround: shuttle tankers load inside the Gulf, run the strait, and hand off crude hose-to-hose to supertankers waiting in the Gulf of Oman. Per Kpler, ~2.5M barrels a day were on pace to move this way in September, ~40% of the ~6.5M b/d currently moving through Hormuz. Shipping costs a fortune in the meantime: the benchmark rate to haul Gulf crude to China now tops $30 a barrel, over a quarter of the delivered cost vs. 2-3% before the war. The fight's not over: as noted last week (#063), JPMorgan's commodities desk has given up modeling an endgame, and early September saw US and Iranian strikes on tankers. Still, a good reminder of something our community likes to say: "constraints breed creativity." (Hopefully we didn’t trigger too many engineers with that.)

05 / FROM SKY CRANES TO SPACE REACTORS… Adam Steltzner will keynote the Mars Society’s convention at USC on Oct. 24. Adam is now NASA HQ’s Chief Engineer for Special Projects, overseeing Space Reactor-1 Freedom (#044), the Moon Base initiative, and more. He knows a thing or two about the hard part — getting to Mars — as the JPL lead behind Curiosity’s Sky Crane landing system and chief engineer on Perseverance. Now he's got a harder job than ever, engineering at the systems-of-systems level, where a space reactor, a Moon base, and a stack of never-built-before hardware all have to work, and work together. Strikes us as a great fit: ambitious programs need engineers who have led from the front and already excelled in the improbable-things department.

Fifteen years and fifteen billion dollars after the program began, on September 28, 2026, Starship reached orbit. She opened her Pez payload dispenser, and out came 26 Starlink V3 satellites, each built to move a terabit per second… and enough, all told, in a single ascent, to grow the backbone of the global internet by ~1%.

We've been watching her grow up for a while now (#028, #045, #063). But many of you had the better view down at Starbase, pulling long nights and mornings and afternoons and then nights again on the Starship program. Some of you are still there in South Texas; others have carried what you learned into the wild, to new, crazy hard-tech startups, hardware programs, and moonshots of your own.

One thing’s for sure: a new gateway to space opened yesterday. Shaun Maguire got it right when he said “she will change the course of humanity.”

Signing off today with the easiest thing to say right now:

What a time to be alive!

With that, we’ll see y’all back here next week.