My hardtech week in review, July 20th–24th, 2026
The week drone wingmen went mainstream, Starship stuck it on the third try, and four nuclear founders walked into the Oval Office.
AMERICAN HARDTECH
- Starship Flight 13 launched Friday after a T-0 abort and a scrub, deployed all 20 of the first Starlink V3 satellites, linked them to the ground by radio and laser, and put Ship down in its softest ocean splashdown yet. Every mission goal met. (Universe Today)
- The White House hosted the CEOs of Antares, Deployable Energy, Aalo Atomics, and Valar Atomics after their reactors reached criticality, four founder-led nuclear companies marking the administration's July 4 buildout push in one room. (The Washington Times)
- Anduril unveiled Thunder at Farnborough, an autonomous hybrid-electric tiltrotor built with Archer to fly as a loyal wingman for Apache and Cheyenne helicopters, carrying up to 10 Hellfires, with first flight targeted for next year. (DefenseScoop)
- Etched raised a $300M Series C at a $10.3B valuation, led by Sequoia with a16z and SK hynix, to scale Sohu, its transformer-only inference chip. (TechCrunch)
- The FCC adopted its Space Modernization Order, scrapping decades-old licensing rules for a new framework built to approve satellites in weeks instead of years, with a stated "default to yes." (FCC)
- Three former SpaceX engineers launched 1872 with a $15M seed to build autonomous steel fabrication in a 1903 Cincinnati masonry building, one of the largest seed rounds in Ohio history. (Business Wire)
ALLIED HARDTECH
- United Kingdom: Britain's drone-wingman era arrived in one week — the RAF named its collaborative combat aircraft program Storm Fighter with £300M behind it, and BAE unveiled Brontanax, the UK's first uncrewed CCA, targeting service before 2030. (The War Zone)
- United Kingdom: Farnborough closed with $84.7B in deals across four trade days, Boeing edging Airbus on firm orders 186 to 157. (Aviation24)
- United Kingdom: London's Humanoid raised a $152M Series A at a $1.35B valuation led by Prime Movers Lab, becoming Europe's first pure-play humanoid robotics unicorn, with Bosch set to manufacture its wheeled robots at scale. (Forbes)
- EU / Ukraine: Brussels and Kyiv signed a drone-production deal opening manufacturing sites across member states, as Ukraine pushes from 10 million drones a year toward 20 million. (Euronews)
If this was useful, a follow helps more builders and investors find it.