The official absolute speed record for the SR-71 is 2,193.2 mph (Mach ~3.3), set 28 July 1976 by Joersz and Morgan. Flight manual design limit was Mach 3.2 (up to 3.3 if inlet temp ≤427°C). Unofficial reports include brief Mach 3.43–3.5+ in tests or emergencies (e.g., Shul over Libya). A-12 documented ~2,208 mph.

H͢Y͢P͢E͢R͢S͢O͢N͢I͢C͢ ͢H͢U͢M͢A͢N͢S͢ On October 3, 1967, Pete Knight flew the X-15 to Mach 6.7, the fastest manned aircraft flight ever. It's insanely fast — 2x the top speed of the SR-71 Blackbird. We have the hand controller and windshield from that record-holding flight in the space collection at work. For this flight, the plane was painted pink, an ablative heat shield coating, and dropped from the wing of the NASA plane called Balls 8 before the XLR-99 rocket engine ignited (we have one of those too, a 5’ tall high-top glass table now, third photo). There were three X-15's. This hand controller was used on X-15A-2 for all of its historic flights, including Neil Armstrong’s first flight and John McKay’s crash landing at Mud Lake due to an unresponsive throttle control. The handle was gifted to his son when the plane was retired to the Air Force museum, and I bought it from him. The X-15 Ballistic Side Handle Controller was used to provide precise control over the aircraft's attitude (pitch, roll, yaw) and trajectory when the X-15 was operating outside the atmosphere, where traditional aerodynamic control surfaces like ailerons and rudders were ineffective. On one occasion, Neil Armstrong bounced off the atmosphere on reentry and almost has to make an emergency landing at LAX. (See last photo for Neil prepared to fly the X-15 to the edge of space) The second photo is the windshield from the record-setting flight: the window frame is made of a high-temp Inconel-X superalloy, and the oval design was only found on X-15A-2 (air frame tail number 66671), a modification following McKay’s landing accident in 1962. The previous window was larger and trapezoidal in size, and one shattered post-flight from thermal stress, a frightening possibility that needed to be avoided when pushing the speed and heat higher. They also replaced the windshield after each flight, separating this historic artifact from its aircraft, and allowing it to become one of the coolest items in our space museum at work now. More from the collection: • Wreckage from the X-15 that suffered a fatal crash just one month later: flic.kr/p/axB2m8 • More research on the windshield: flic.kr/p/8zJEoJ • Details on the XLR-99, the most powerful ever installed on a piloted aircraft and the first directly throttleable rocket engine: flic.kr/p/PQT7iJ • The Smithsonian’s more complete XLR-99: flic.kr/p/2omyZgp

🏗 Checking in with the Cal*Neva construction ... a historic revival on Lake Tahoe. Marilyn Monroe spent her last weekend there with her friend Frank Sinatra, original developer of the property. It was the first casino in America (1931) and the Prohibition-era secret tunnels are still in place, last used to move liquor discreetly across state lines and evade police raids. We are investors in a project to bring it back to life. The Proper Hotel views are incredible in all directions (perched on the tip of a peninsula). The Sinatra theater will have an incredible sound system and recording studio (second photo). Secret tunnels and poker rooms are still in place. A nod to history but with @KellyWearstler & McWhinney style. Can’t wait for the reopening next year. We also hosted a musical event for Cal-Neva fans on its 100th anniversary.

🚀 🚀 🚀 SpaceX just successfully launched three orbital rockets in one day, the only company to do so. It started with four astronauts in Dragon to the ISS (this photo). Then 130 satellites lofted on one Falcon 9 from Vandy. Then the Falcon Heavy in the foreground for NROL.

📓 SpaceX Engr Cheat Sheet ...from the back of my notebook, made of recycled stone. Bottom center: "Any altitude is attainable with the right attitude."

Newt is an interesting choice. 25 years ago he wrote a book called BioThreat (unpublished). TLDR quote: “Biological warfare is the largest threat to the human race, a substantially bigger threat than nuclear war.” — from steve.blog/2011/12/08/newt-g…

☀️ Snap-together solar ☀️ 12x reduction in installation time. Integrated storage for $100/MWh at 99.9% uptime, the cheapest and fastest 24/7 off-grid power in the U.S., to GW scale.

Inspiration Starship 🚀 For 21 years now, my son and I camp in the Black Rock Desert and launch our homemade rockets. We launched 10 Aerotech motors last weekend at BALLS, and their hobbyist catalog cover inspires the next generation to up our aspirations! From dream to dream.

When you align with your leaders… Come to the dark side “GPT-6.1 Astra showed higher levels of deception: It wasn’t always honest about telling users of the actions it did or didn’t take.” —WSJ front page today Just in time for OpenAI’s annual developer conference today.

Winnowing nuance from noise Modulate runs over 100 voice-native models to discern emotion, tone, intent, and language, and detect synthetic and deepfake voices (ranked #1 on 🤗). We just led their seed round; news today: techcrunch.com/2026/09/28/mo… Product: modulate.ai/velma

🚀 Starships are meant to fly! Beautiful sights and sounds from the ground this morning. It was the first commercial orbital launch for the largest launch vehicle in history!

🚀 SpaceX's Starship had a successful launch this morning and deployed 26 enormous V3 Starlink satellites into orbit for the first time. All 26 satellites are in communication contact already with lasers and multiple microwave links. CONGRATS team SpaceX!

Another HQ Conservation — the original hand-painted curvy Apple rainbow logo display from the reception wall at 1 Infinite Loop Campus Store, before they went monochrome 

NYT today: "The head of the company hoping to become the first to mine the ocean floor commercially said on Wednesday that the environmental side effects of scouring the seabed for critical metals were a fraction of those from mining on land." a tiny fraction... see chart below

⌚ Watch Out Some more unusual and unique analog watches, from microfluidics to my first Apple watch... In the first photo: 1) Top left: my first Omega, and aesthetically the most elegant to my eye, with a central co-axial titanium tourbillon. It’s the De Ville Tourbillon Master Chronometer, Serial Number 2 2) Top center: The Ressence Type 1 Slim HOD3 in titanium, one of 20 made. The entire face is flat and rotates while the flat sub-dials rotate as well, all driven by magnets from below and immersed in a refractive-matched fluid so it looks like a 2D sheet of paper. A series of bellows on the backside allow for temperature variation of the fluid without any bubbles. 3) Top right: HYT Moon Runner Ghost, a crazy engineering marvel with fluidic time and a hand-painted moon sphere. Two immiscible fluids — one black and one glow-in-the-dark white — circulate through a glass capillary, driven by a pair of piston bellows on the backside. They meet at 2pm in this photo. One of the bellows incorporates thermal compensation to maintain the precision of the fluid boundary as temperatures fluctuate. The mechanism advances the liquid just 1.5 microns per minute before completing a full circuit of the dial every 12 hours and resetting (retrograde). Unlike prior HYT models, the Ghost is monochromatic with a beautiful moon. Painted entirely by hand under UV light over the course of a full day, it displays the current lunar phase through a central aperture. Built from titanium and carbon fiber, the watch is quite light. But it’s also large for those like me with a petite wrist. I bought it from Pharrell Williams, one of 15 made. 4) Middle left: A unique 1 of 1 from Mont Blanc, made of platinum in 2009 for a charity auction. A unique design element: the two chronograph discs rotate instead of the hands. 5) Center: A Mad Mad Watch from MB&F, this particular design was a unique variant never released to the public. Instead of putting the automatic self-winding rotor blades on the backside, they spin madly on top with any movement of the wrist. The time is indicated by a rotating circular band that runs the outer circumference of the watch. 6) Middle right: Breguet Marine Chronograph, the most functional of the batch, with easy-to-read hands in the traditional Breuget style. Founded in 1775, Breuget invented the self-winding watch and was a favorite of Marie Antoinette and Napoleon, who had four and brought them into battle. 7) Bottom left: Ulysse Nardin Blast Skeleton, Serial Number 2, a memory of a trip we took to New York’s Central Park. 8) Bottom center: This is a very silly watch. I witnessed a Jacob & Co. Astronomia sell in a charity auction for $1M and marveled at its unique design with tourbillon, watch face, rotating gemstone, and rotating sphere for seconds out at the ends of four separate shafts. And now, Facebook served me an ad for a similar-looking knockoff… costing just $499. How could anyone assemble a copy for so little? While this GEYA Planetary Flywheel Mechanical Watch has “mechanical” in the title, it’s a bit misleading. The tourbillon, seconds sphere and rotating gem are all mechanically driven like the expensive original, but the watch face on the left post is entirely disconnected. It is an electronic quartz watch hanging out there with a battery that’s impossible to replace! It’s wild how it looks so similar at a distance. 9) Bottom right: My first Apple watch! It was an employee recognition award from 1994, the year I worked there. The backside is engraved with “Golden Apple Club FY’94”

Ceci n'est pas une tweet! The Twitter HQ illuminated bird logo just arrived, 63" tall and proud.

The network is the sensor ZaiNar partnered with Nokia & NVIDIA to give geolocation to telcos— essential for physical AI and most 5G applications. ZaiNar ran live on Nokia AI-RAN in Oulu showing sub-meter positioning of phones from the network side — no new hardware, no phone app: