Rocket Lab's Neutron Stage 2 and Thrust Module have arrived at Wallops Island, Virginia, ready for launch pad testing. Rocket Lab confirmed the arrival at 1:03 AM GST on Thursday. After a barge trip through Chesapeake Bay from the Neutron Factory in Maryland, both assemblies have been offloaded on Wallops Island and are now going through arrival checkouts. Next up, the company says: integrated fluids testing and the launch mount at Launch Complex 3. The Thrust Module is the key piece. Neutron's launch mount has no strongback by design, so the Thrust Module is the rocket's only physical connection to the pad. Testing it on the mount now lets Rocket Lab check that interface before the full vehicle is assembled. Neutron is a 43-metre reusable rocket built to lift 13,000 kg to low Earth orbit. Nine 3D-printed Archimedes engines power the first stage, and a single Archimedes Vacuum engine powers Stage 2. Why it matters: in mid-October Rocket Lab moved Neutron's first launch to 2027 after finding voids in a carbon-fibre tank dome. Flight hardware reaching the pad shows the rest of the programme moving while that dome is rebuilt.

Neuralink says a person with ALS reached 75 words per minute through its brain implant in their first week. The company shared its first speech restoration numbers just after midnight GST on Thursday 29 October. One participant in its VOICE study turned attempted speech into text and voice at 75 words per minute, with a 5.8% word error rate, on a 125,000-word vocabulary. The data was presented at the 2026 Annual NEALS Meeting, the Northeast ALS Consortium's yearly conference, by Dr Nader Pouratian, the study's principal investigator at UT Southwestern in Dallas. For context, a 2023 Stanford speech implant study in Nature reported 62 words per minute with a 23.8% error rate on a 125,000-word vocabulary. VOICE is an early feasibility study of Neuralink's N1 implant, placed by its R1 surgical robot, for people with severe speech loss. Only one participant's figures have been released so far, and the device is still investigational and not approved by the FDA. Until now, Neuralink had shown speech demos without publishing speed or accuracy figures.

Google has unveiled Gemini 4 Carbon, its new frontier AI model, just two weeks after Gemini 4 Argon. Announced just after 9:00 PM GST on Wednesday, Carbon takes the top spot on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v5.0 with 59, ahead of Claude Opus 5.5 on 58, GPT-6 Astra on 57 and Argon on 50. The big jump is in cybersecurity. Carbon scores 88.2% on SEC-bench Pro for finding real vulnerabilities, 54.8% on ExploitGym and 71.0% on CWE-bench for patching. Google says it more than doubles Argon's success rate at generating secure code in internal tests, and that its teams have seen it run for days on long engineering tasks. It is not top everywhere: GPT-6 Astra still leads FrontierSWE 2 and Claude Opus 5.5 leads OSWorld-2.1. You can't use it yet. Access starts this week for a small group of cyber defenders through Google's Fairwind Program, with developers, businesses and consumers to follow. API pricing starts at $2 per million input tokens and $10 per million output tokens, rising to $4 and $20 later.

SpaceX says Starship Ship 42 has finished its static fires, clearing the last big engine test before Flight 15. In a post at 8:10 PM GST on Wednesday, SpaceX confirmed the ship completed a full-duration firing of all six of its Raptor engines, plus a separate single-Raptor burn simulating the deorbit burn it needs to come home. It also released new footage from the test stand and from inside the engine bay. The six-engine test ran at the Massey's site at Starbase, Texas, at about 1:45 AM GST on Wednesday and lasted roughly a minute. The single-engine burn came the night before. That means both Flight 15 vehicles have now been fired up. Super Heavy Booster 22 lit all 33 of its engines in a full-duration static fire on 25 October. What is left is final outfitting, an FAA licence and a launch date, none of which SpaceX has announced yet. Elon Musk has said Flight 15 will try to catch both the booster and the ship with the launch tower arms.

Amazon's first Leo satellite launch on ULA's Vulcan rocket is set for Friday 13 November, carrying 40 satellites. ULA and Amazon Leo announced the date at about 7 PM GST on Wednesday, pending range approval. All 40 satellites, Amazon's largest Leo payload yet, are already stacked on Vulcan inside a dedicated integration building at Cape Canaveral. Vulcan will fly in its most powerful VC6L setup: two Blue Origin BE-4 engines, six solid rocket boosters, the long 70 ft fairing and a shorter Centaur V upper stage tuned for low orbit. The boosters get an improved nozzle design, with more testing running in parallel. For scale, Atlas V carried 27 to 29 Leo satellites per launch. Amazon has put nearly 400 into orbit across 14 missions so far, which it says makes Leo the third-largest constellation up there. This is the first of 38 Vulcan missions Amazon has booked, and the second Vulcan mission is already being readied in a second integration building. An Ariane 6 with 36 more satellites follows no earlier than 23 November.

Rendezvous Robotics has raised $20 million to build spacecraft that assemble themselves in orbit. The Colorado startup announced the oversubscribed seed round at 5 PM GST on Wednesday. MaC Venture Capital and Toyota Ventures led it, and it is the company's first priced round. The idea is to stop squeezing satellites into a rocket fairing. Instead, a spacecraft launches as a stack of independent tiles, roughly 1 metre across, that manoeuvre, line up and lock together in orbit using electromagnetic forces. The tiles can later be rearranged, added to or swapped out if something fails. The tech grew out of TESSERAE, which Dr Ariel Ekblaw invented at MIT. Earlier versions have flown on Blue Origin's New Shepard and on two missions to the ISS. Next up: a parabolic flight campaign in November, then 32 tiles assembling into a 3D structure on the ISS in December. In 2028, no earlier than April, seven tiles will join into one spacecraft in orbit, split apart and rebuild into a different shape, with no robot arm helping.