Humans went back to the moon. AI models are now free. Bitcoin is being given away.

NASA's Artemis II launched on April 1, 2026. Four astronauts — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — are currently circling the moon on a 10-day mission. This is the first time humans have left low Earth orbit since Apollo 17 in December 1972.

Not a simulation. Not a test. Humans are literally on their way around the moon right now as you read this. Koch is the first woman, Glover the first Black person, and Hansen the first non-American to travel beyond Earth orbit.

Meanwhile, SpaceX reportedly filed confidentially for an IPO targeting a $1.75 trillion valuation. The space economy went from concept to very concrete this week.

Google DeepMind released Gemma 4 this week. Four model sizes from 2B to 31B. The 26B A4B variant uses a Mixture-of-Experts architecture that runs at near 4B speed while delivering 26B quality — meaning it fits on a laptop with 16GB RAM.

Multimodal out of the box. 256K context window. Native function calling for agentic workflows. The benchmarks put it ahead of everything in its class.

I set up the Gemma 3 4B variant locally this week and it's already running on my MacBook Air, routing tasks automatically alongside Claude. No API keys, no internet, no cost.

Microsoft AI released three new foundational models this week capable of generating text, voice, and images. This is a direct shot at OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic — from a company that also happens to be OpenAI's biggest backer.

The signal here isn't the models themselves. It's that Microsoft is hedging. They're building their own stack because they can't afford to be dependent on any single provider — including the one they invested billions into.

Dorsey's Block announced the return of the Bitcoin faucet — launching April 6 at btc.day. The original faucet, created in 2010 by Gavin Andresen, gave away 5 full BTC per visitor to promote adoption. Those coins are worth over $330,000 today.

Nobody expects 5 BTC giveaways in 2026. But the move is deliberate — Block already auto-enabled Bitcoin payments for millions of Square merchants this week with zero processing fees. This is an ecosystem play: faucet onboards new users, Bitkey captures their self-custody, Square captures their spending.

As SpaceX Starlink and Amazon Kuiper scale their satellite constellations aggressively, the less obvious play is the semiconductor companies supplying them. Everyone wants SpaceX exposure — but you can't buy it yet. The picks-and-shovels approach means looking at which chip companies are embedded in satellite infrastructure.

Starlink is already operational globally. Kuiper is ramping. These constellations require custom chips for phased array antennas, onboard processing, and low-latency ground terminals. The companies winning those contracts are smaller, less visible, and potentially undervalued relative to what's coming.