Tech
Private space pilots are flying orbital missions for the US Space Force
Militaries routinely send satellites to fly by rival vehicles and suss out their capabilities, but scaling up this kind of reconnaissance is increasingly seen by the U.S. military as a challenge best handled by the private sector.
That’s why two space startups, True Anomaly and Rocket Lab, completed a rendezvous mission for the U.S. Space Force last week so complex, it was like something out of “Top Gun.” Their two rival satellites met up in orbit, close enough for one to capture imagery of the other.
The exercise, dubbed Victus Haze, demonstrated the close inspection of a space vehicle soon after it arrived in orbit, a necessity in a world where the U.S., Russia, and China are deploying novel space weapons.
“China and Russia launch capabilities to space on a regular basis, and part of the Space Force’s job is to understand what those capabilities are,” True Anomaly CEO Even Rogers, a veteran of the U.S. military’s space efforts, told TechCrunch. “Right now we have gaps in our collection capability.”
The June mission saw Rocket Lab, a rocket-building rival to SpaceX that recently announced its acquisition of Iridium, launch a spacecraft called Puma just 16 hours and 42 minutes after receiving notice, which is notable because most rocket launches are buttoned up months in advance.
A Jackal spacecraft built by True Anomaly was waiting in orbit to intercept it. As part of the exercise, the company didn’t know where Puma would arrive in space but used onboard sensors to find and identify its target from 2,000 kilometers away. The Jackal then flew close to the target — exactly how close is classified — and orbited it, capturing imagery of different parts of the vehicle, before returning to its starting point in orbit.
True Anomaly’s CEO said that, outside of NASA and Space Force space flight missions with humans, “this is probably the most complex rendezvous and proximity operation between two spacecraft in modern history.”
Bringing together two spacecraft in orbit, where they’re both moving at speeds approaching 17,500 mph, is no easy feat. Previous private demonstrations, like those performed by Northrop Grumman’s maintenance satellites or Astroscale’s orbital garbage hunting missions, operate on slower time frames.
And now things get interesting: The two companies are prepared to perform new exercises in the weeks ahead with increasing difficulty, which could include Rocket Lab’s Puma trying to evade True Anomaly’s Jackal and performing its own inspection maneuvers.
Founded in 2022 by Rogers and a cadre of former military space experts, True Anomaly planned to build both the hardware and software to enable the new tasks assigned to the U.S. Space Force when it was created in 2019. After several years of development missions, last month’s demonstration has begun to realize that vision.
“That’s the secret sauce of this company,” said Seth Winterroth, a partner at Eclipse Ventures who sits on True Anomaly’s board. “It’s not one spacecraft architecture or one piece of software or a certain set of payloads — it’s a deep, deep understanding of what tactics and doctrine look like in this domain.”
True Anomaly has raised just over $1 billion, including a $650 million round in March. Now the company will look to compete for a number of task orders, particularly in the Space Force’s $6.2 billion Andromeda program, which looks to the private sector for exactly this kind of maneuverable reconnaissance.
“Flight heritage is everything, and demonstrated capability is what speaks the loudest with these opportunities,” Rogers said.
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Tech
Yep, we’re using OpenClaw to date now
Ben Guez has “a bunch of potential international wives in [his] DMs,” thanks to an automated script he set up using OpenClaw, Claude code, and Instagram trial reels.
“I think it’s crazy, like the potential is insane right now,” Guez, a content creator and startup founder, told TechCrunch. “I’m not sure if everyone’s gonna think it’s good, but I mean, it’s working.”
How is Guez wooing so many women? First, he uses the open source AI agent OpenClaw to track World Cup match results. After each game, OpenClaw triggers Claude to create and post a nearly identical Instagram “trial reel” with the same template. In the video, Guez stares out a train car window looking dejected, with the caption: “I can’t believe {COUNTRY} lost… If any {COUNTRY} girls need emotional support… my DMs are open.”
Guez has made the same post, save for the country name, more than a dozen times. But you can’t tell when you look at his profile, since trial reels don’t show up on a creator’s public page. Since he launched this automation, Guez has gotten over one million views and 200 DMs in a few days. That volume is even more impressive considering that Guez says in his profile that he will only answer DMs sent via Canary, his AI language learning app, which means that these women have to download his app.
You have to hand it to him: Guez is really taking “work smarter, not harder” to another level. But once these women realize he doesn’t actually care about Tunisian soccer, wouldn’t they feel played?
“They’re not feeling angry, they’re more impressed, like, ‘Oh, you’re thinking outside of the box, you’re a genius,’” Guez said. “I think as long as you’re open [about] what you’re doing, I think it’s fine.”
TechCrunch was not able to independently verify the actual reactions of these women, so we’ll just have to take Guez’s word for it. But we can tell you that Guez isn’t the only guy getting creative with the viral AI assistant. While Guez’s methods are a bit more outrageous, other people see OpenClaw as a way to streamline the process of setting up dates.
Jeff Weisbein, founder of a tech PR firm, uses OpenClaw to help him figure out where to take dates across different neighborhoods in South Florida.
“I’m meeting women who are in various parts of South Florida, so I don’t know all of the restaurants or things to do,” Weisbein told TechCrunch. “I have my bot just kind of do all the research and make a document with links to why it’s a choice for whatever type of date it is.”
When I fill him in on Guez’s OpenClaw scheme, he bursts out laughing.
“I guess I’m not leveraging OpenClaw to the fullest,” he said. “But definitely in the realm of using OpenClaw to facilitate a task that I would manually have to do otherwise.”
Like Guez, Weisbein doesn’t hide the fact that he’s using AI tools to help plan dates (it backfired, though, when one woman told him, “I hate AI agents”). In a way, asking OpenClaw where to go for happy hour in Fort Lauderdale isn’t that different from Googling the coolest neighborhood bars, but Weisbein says he would draw the line at using AI to mediate his actual conversations with women.
“I have seen people create bots and ways to swipe using OpenClaw, and I wouldn’t do that. They say it’s a numbers game, but if that’s what it takes… that seems like a pretty terrible way to do it,” he said. “I feel like you shouldn’t delegate your communication when you’re in a relationship with someone to AI.”
People seem hesitant to let AI meddle once there’s an actual connection, but a tech worker named Cailey said that once she’s decided to end a flirtation, she doesn’t mind using Claude to break things off.
“I started using Claude and created an automation that crafts ‘I no longer wish to see you’ messages based on a few key terms I would enter about the date. It’d then automatically send them for me at random times so that I wouldn’t feel the anxiety of when to send,” she told TechCrunch. “It worked really well, until I mentioned it to someone I was on a date with, who I then had to send an automated message to, and he asked if he was talking to Claude or Cailey.”
What’s worse: getting ghosted, or getting broken up with by an AI?
OpenClaw rocked the tech world with its potential when it went viral this spring, but security advocates have continuously warned users about the dangers of giving an AI assistant unilateral control over all of your accounts.
For Lazer Cohen, the co-founder of the security-focused OpenClaw alternative NanoClaw, there are steep privacy implications of outsourcing personal relationships to AI, even if his company advertises date planning as a potential use case on X.
“Whenever you’re giving an agent access to personal information and accounts, you need human-in-the-loop approval,” Cohen told TechCrunch. “We’ve all heard the stories of OpenClaw creating dating profiles for people without their knowledge or consent, or OpenClaw dating coaches spilling to other groups that they’re being used as a dating coach too.”
NanoClaw has found its way into Cohen’s love life, though he uses it in a way that’s a bit more wholesome than mass-producing reels that ask heartbroken soccer fans to slide into his DMs.
“My wife and I personally use our NanoClaw assistant, Rosie, to manage the schedules of our five children,” he said. “But ‘claws’ are widely used to help couples get to the child-rearing phase.”
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Tech
Rivian raises EV sales forecast as Q2 production ramps up
Rivian is telling investors that it might see a better sales year than it expected, despite the many headwinds working against electric vehicles in the U.S. right now.
Rivian previously said it would ship between 62,000 and 67,000 vehicles this year, but the company now expects to deliver between 65,000 and 70,000 vehicles, the company said on Thursday.
It’s a small but potentially meaningful bump for the company, which only shipped 42,247 electric vehicles last year. The new forecast comes as EV sales growth has cooled off in the U.S., driven in part by Congress killing the $7,500 federal EV tax credit, and President Trump’s administration axing environmental regulations that encouraged the production and purchase of electric vehicles.
The new forecast could be a sign that the company’s high expectations for its brand new mass-market EV, the R2 SUV, are justified.
Rivian didn’t offer a specific reason for this newfound confidence, only saying it outperformed its own expectations in the second quarter thanks to “robust growth quarter-over-quarter in EDV and R1, coupled with the introduction of R2 deliveries.” (EDV is the name Rivian uses for its electric commercial van.)
Rivian said on Thursday that it built 12,613 vehicles last quarter and delivered 12,194. It had only expected to ship between 9,000 and 11,000.
Rivian has high hopes for the new R2 SUV, which it starting selling last month, starting at around $58,000. The company has expanded its factory in Normal, Illinois, to produce them, and is also building an entirely new production facility in Georgia as it works to manufacture hundreds of thousands of R2s per year.
Rivian hasn’t explicitly said how many R2s it expects to sell this year, but the company’s chief financial officer Claire McDonough has mentioned a range of 20,000 to 25,000 units. It’s unclear if that number has now increased along with the new forecast bump, or if the company expects the excess deliveries to come from its commercial vans and more expensive R1 line of trucks and SUVs.
Either way, more deliveries this year would be good news for Rivian’s bottom line, as the company is still working its way out of a multibillion-dollar hole. The company had said it may finally turn a regular profit in 2027, but it recently pushed that goal off to invest in developing autonomous software, mostly because it now has a deal to supply self-driving R2 SUVs to Uber.
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Tech
Tesla saw a massive sales jump in the second quarter
Tesla delivered more than 480,000 vehicles in the second quarter of this year, an increase of more than 120,000 from the first quarter, in a sign that the company is still able to attract new buyers for its EVs despite a downturn in the U.S. market.
The company said Thursday that it built 451,758 in the second quarter, 442,936 of which were Model 3 sedans and Model Y SUVs. It delivered 467,762 of those vehicles, with the remaining 12,364 being “other models” — which includes the Cybertruck and the final-production Model S sedans and Model X SUVs. It was the company’s best second quarter by raw delivery numbers ever, and easily outpaced Wall Street’s expectations.
It’s Tesla’s best quarter for overall sales since the third quarter of 2025, when it shipped just shy of 500,000 vehicles around the world. And while the company still has an uphill battle to stop a two-year trend of declining overall sales, the second quarter results show Tesla is finding ways — through geographic expansion, and cheaper versions of the Model 3, Model Y, and Cybertruck — to buck that trend.
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