Nicholas Horbaczewski

CEO & Founder @droneraceleague; Co-founder @PDW_ai

[Ryan Gury @rgury]

The techops crew, circa 2018. Big fleet on 27th street nyc. @NicholasDRL I miss these days.

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

@lessin I’m in. See if you can get a volume discount?
It’s not just convenience. The desire to personalize a dedicated Waymo is high.
@reed

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

@bscholl Agree. We tried to setup a ‘drone race’ on the moon using micro sats at DRL. It would have been awesome.

[Blake Scholl 🛫 @bscholl]

Competitive spectator sports that can only be played in lunar gravity.

This is the kind of thing we need to invent to properly finance and commercialize the moon.

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

“The Q4 Rocket Report… is a civilizational audit. And the audit says one company is building the infrastructure for a species-level transition while every government and competitor on Earth is still filing quarterly earnings.”

[Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡ @shanaka86]

The Q4 2025 Rocket Report dropped yesterday and the number that should terrify every government on Earth is not the one going viral.

SpaceX launched 1,159 of the 1,404 spacecraft put into orbit worldwide in Q4 2025. That is 83% of all spacecraft launched by every nation and company on the planet combined. In the United States the number is 97%. China managed 8%. Russia 4%. All of Europe, the continent that built Ariane, managed 0.2%.

One private company now commands greater orbital access than any sovereign power in human history, including the Soviet Union at the peak of the Space Race.

And on March 30, booster B1067 flew for the 34th time. The entire Space Shuttle program flew 135 missions across five orbiters over 30 years. One Falcon 9 first stage has now achieved one quarter of that total in four years of service. The Shuttle cost $1.5 billion per mission. Falcon 9 costs $67 million, with total fuel running $150,000. That is not a cost reduction. That is a change in the physical nature of what orbital access means.

Now layer what happened in the nine days before that flight.

March 21: Terafab breaks ground in Austin. One terawatt per year of AI compute. Logic, memory, and advanced packaging in a single building with a recursive mask-fab-test loop that exists nowhere else. Eighty percent of output allocated to space.

March 22: First renders of the 100-kilowatt AI satellite with solar arrays and radiators, scaling to megawatt. D3 chips designed to run hotter in vacuum where radiative cooling is free.

March 30: 148 satellites deployed in under 24 hours across two missions. Transporter-16 carried 119 payloads from dozens of operators. Starlink 10-44 added 29 more. The booster that flew its 34th mission landed on a droneship 8.5 minutes after liftoff, its 575th successful recovery for the company.

Nobody is reading these events as a single sequence because no analytical framework exists for what is forming.

This is not a space company. It is not a car company. It is not a chip company. It is not an AI company. It is the first vertically integrated civilization-scale stack in human history. One entity now controls fabrication of silicon, launch of mass to orbit, a constellation of 10,139 satellites with autonomous AI collision avoidance executing 300,000 maneuvers per year, the world’s largest battery storage deployment, the only humanoid robot in mass production, and the AI training infrastructure running on 200,000 GPUs scaling to 1.5 million.

From atoms to orbit to intelligence under one roof.

The Soviet Union at its most powerful operated rockets and satellites. TSMC fabricates chips. Google runs AI. Tesla builds cars and batteries. No entity before this moment has controlled the complete vertical from raw silicon through fabrication through launch through orbital infrastructure through energy through robotics through artificial intelligence simultaneously.

And here is the fact that should stop every analyst, every fund manager, and every head of state cold.

The fuel cost to maintain this dominance is $150,000 per launch. One hundred and fifty thousand dollars. That is less than a house in most American cities. The propellant bill for the vehicle that delivers 97% of American orbital access costs less than a mid-range Tesla.

The bottleneck was never technology. It was never physics. It was never fuel. It was imagination. And one man just announced that 80% of his chip factory’s output is going to space because Earth cannot power what he intends to build.

The Q4 Rocket Report is not a market share chart. It is a civilizational audit. And the audit says one company is building the infrastructure for a species-level transition while every government and competitor on Earth is still filing quarterly earnings.

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

Is there a lower age limit on Eight sleep? Is there a threshold age a sleeper needs to be at for the metrics to be accurate or the cooling/heating to improve sleep? @eightsleep @m_franceschetti

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

@Waymo When will I be able to ride from Phoenix to LA?

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

@Scobleizer What’s a reasonable form of accountability for the injuries and loss of life that will result from this decision? It’s difficult to square with the extreme measures NYC has taken to pursue “vision zero” road safety.

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

@gbrulte What’s a reasonable form of accountability for the injuries and loss of life that will result from this decision? It’s difficult to square with the extreme measures NYC has taken to pursue “vision zero” road safety.

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

We launched AIRR to eventually put an AI pilot into the actual DRL. We were far from that reality in 2019.
TU Delft won AIRR then and they won here. The progress is tangible.
But let’s not overhype readiness. This approach wouldn’t survive the first gate of a course that wasn't perfectly modeled in simulation weeks in advance.
4/4

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

This AI executes a "learned policy" perfected over millions of simulation laps on a static digital twin. It relies on "muscle memory" for where the gate should be, rather than perceiving where it is.
It is a breakthrough in control, not perception. We must distinguish between memorization and adaptability.
(Huge engineering achievement regardless. Hup Delft!)
1/4 @rgury

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

@tweetciiiim I surprised it took this long.

Won’t be a contest at all in the future.

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

We are seeing the "Sim to Real" gap close for physics. The ability to handle drift and prop wash without GPS is massive progress.
But the "Semantic" gap remains.
Until an AI can "sight read" a complex 3D track it has never seen before, the human pilot is safe.
3/4

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

It is so gratifying to see the ever growing increasing appreciation of FPV drones and FPV piloting skill.

[IOC MEDIA @iocmedia]

"The drone pilots are experienced, and trained in the specific sport for a long time," @YiannisExarchos explains the workforce manning the drones in broadcast operations at #MilanoCortina2026

The drone pilot in ski jumping is a ski jumper himself... More 👇

[Daniel Havir @danielhavir]

Aspire not to build robots. Aspire to build machines. It’s only called a robot when it doesn’t work. The moment it works, it becomes a machine.

[David Shapiro (L/0) @DaveShapi]

Take a moment to stop and reflect

We made sand think

And you can talk to it

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

@djcows @reed moo

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

@AnthonyVicino I agree. What sets Freerider apart from the others was the requirement of sustained perfection for an entire 4 hours. As Tommy Caldwell says in Free Solo: “Imagine an Olympic-gold-medal-level athletic achievement where if you don't get that gold medal, you're going to die."

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

@AlexRoy144 *waits breathlessly for next @TheAutonocast*
Can you expand on what you think the implications are for consumers?

[Nicholas Horbaczewski @NicholasDRL]

@GadSaad Toronto:

[Adam Zivo @AdamZivo]

Iranian protesters shut down Toronto’s main arterial road today, demanding that the United States militarily intervene and topple the Islamic regime.

#FreeIran #IranProtests #Pahlavi #KingRezaPahlavi #Toronto