Daily Brief — April 13: Artemis Crew Home, Lightning Gets Negative Fees

Four astronauts splashed down off San Diego Friday after circling the Moon farther than any humans in 53 years. NASA's Artemis II crew — Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen — traveled 694,481 miles in 10 days and reached a maximum distance of 252,756 miles from Earth, breaking Apollo 13's 1970 distance record by over 4,000 miles. Koch is now the first woman to orbit the Moon. The crew conducted manual piloting demonstrations, tested emergency equipment and spacesuits, and provisionally named two lunar craters 'Integrity' and 'Carroll' before returning. NASA administrator Amit Kshatriya said the path to the lunar surface is now open, with focus shifting to assembling Artemis III for an actual landing.

On the energy side, a new peer-reviewed paper from KAUST researchers published on arXiv April 8 formally models an emerging grid security threat: data centers shifting AI workloads across geographies to exploit electricity price differences, destabilizing grid operation. The research arrives as the U.S. plans record renewable buildout — 86 GW of new generating capacity this year, with solar accounting for 51% of additions and utility-scale battery storage adding a planned 24 GW (versus 15 GW in 2025). The EIA's latest projections show total U.S. generation rising 1.2% to 4,325 billion kilowatt-hours in 2026. Meanwhile, the IEA reports global solar generation grew by 620 TWh in 2025 — the largest yearly increase ever recorded — putting renewables plus nuclear on track to reach roughly 50% of global generation by 2030. The mismatch between intermittent supply and price-responsive data center demand is now a formal research problem.

Core Lightning's v26.04 release candidate 3, published today, brings negative routing fees to near production-ready status. This is the first major Lightning implementation to ship the feature, which lets nodes set fees as negative numbers to pay senders for pushing liquidity through depleted channels — solving a core problem in Lightning operations without expensive circular rebalancing. The release also cuts binary sizes by roughly 20%, adds real-time Bitcoin-to-fiat conversion via a new currencyrate plugin, and includes parallel pathfinding for improved payment reliability. For node operators running production Lightning infrastructure, this reduces the operational cost overhead of maintaining liquidity — making independent routing nodes economically more viable.

**BY THE NUMBERS**

252,756 miles — maximum distance from Earth reached by Artemis II, exceeding Apollo 13's record by over 4,000 miles and the farthest humans have ever traveled.

86 GW — total U.S. generating capacity planned for 2026, with solar making up 43.4 GW of that figure, a 60% year-over-year increase.

620 TWh — global solar PV generation growth in 2025, the largest annual increase ever recorded according to the IEA.

~50% — projected share of global electricity generation from renewables plus nuclear by 2030, per IEA forecasts.

**WHAT TO WATCH**

Core Lightning v26.04 stable release (days away from RC3 dated April 13). A stable release would mark the first production-ready implementation of negative routing fees in any Lightning client. Watch for adoption rates among node operators and real-world reports on whether the feature meaningfully reduces rebalancing costs.

SpaceX Starship Flight 12 (late April 2026, no exact date confirmed). This follows Starship Flight 11 and signals SpaceX's cadence toward orbital refueling demonstrations and payload delivery — critical milestones for both lunar support missions and Mars architecture development.