Daily Brief — April 14: Artemis Splashes Down

NASA's Artemis II crew splashed down Friday off San Diego after breaking the distance record Apollo 13 set in 1970. Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen traveled 694,481 miles total, reaching a closest lunar approach of 4,067 miles above the surface. During the mission, the crew took manual control of the Orion spacecraft and validated emergency procedures and life support systems. The test flight gathered critical data for Artemis III, which will attempt an actual lunar landing. This is the first time humans have returned from the Moon since Apollo 17 in 1972.

Core Lightning v26.04rc3 dropped April 13, and with it, a long-awaited feature finally reaches production: negative routing fees. Here is what that means in plain terms. Routing nodes on the Lightning Network often exhaust their outbound liquidity — they run out of the ability to send payments because all available capacity sits on the other side of a channel. With negative fees, a node operator can now set fees as negative numbers, essentially paying senders to push liquidity back through depleted channels. It replaces costly on-chain rebalancing with a market signal. The same release also pads peer messages to uniform length, making it harder to infer node activity from traffic patterns — a genuine privacy win for operators. A new `currencyrate` plugin adds real-time fiat conversion directly within Core Lightning.

Researchers published 'Ammoniated Covalent Organic Frameworks for Water-Lean Carbon Capture' in the Journal of the American Chemical Society on April 1. The advance matters because conventional carbon capture sorbents depend on humidity for speed but incur large energy penalties in wet regeneration. This water-lean architecture targets lower regeneration energy and better compatibility with industrial flue gas — exactly what data centers chasing climate commitments while powering AI infrastructure actually need. BCG's recent analysis found that gas plants paired with carbon capture are the only power source scoring consistently well across cost, speed, scalability, and emissions. Global operational carbon capture capacity stands at just over 50 MtCO₂ per year today, but announced projects indicate expansion to around 430 MtCO₂ per year by 2030.

**BY THE NUMBERS**

86 GW — the record U.S. utility-scale generating capacity planned for addition to the grid in 2026, with solar making up 51% of additions and battery storage at 28%.

10,193 — operational Starlink satellites currently in orbit, accounting for roughly two-thirds of all active satellites; SpaceX is on track to launch its 1,000th Starlink of 2026 this week.

965.6 EH/s — Bitcoin network hashrate as of Tuesday morning, with on-chain fees at the floor: fastest confirmation at 2 sat/vB.

430 MtCO₂ per year — projected global carbon capture capacity by 2030, up from 50 MtCO₂ per year today.

**WHAT TO WATCH**

Core Lightning v26.04 final release (expected within days of RC3 on April 13) — The move from release candidate to stable will mark negative routing fees as production-ready. Watch whether adoption by major routing nodes accelerates Lightning rebalancing efficiency and whether the privacy improvements in message padding shift operator behavior.

SpaceX's 37th Starlink mission of 2026 (Tuesday, April 14, early morning from Cape Canaveral) — This launch crosses the 1,000-satellite mark for the year. The pace (one mission every 3.8 days) is worth tracking against SpaceX's stated cadence targets and any orbital debris or regulatory friction that might slow deployment.