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Amazon revs up for the internet satellite market

Atlas V launch of prototype Amazon Kuiper satellites in 2023
A United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket sends two prototype satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper to orbit in 2023. (ULA Photo)

Get ready for Amazon’s Project Kuiper to pick up the pace in the megaconstellation space race.

So far, SpaceX’s Starlink satellite megaconstellation has dominated the market for broadband connectivity from low Earth orbit. In the nearly 10 years since SpaceX founder Elon Musk unveiled the project in Seattle, the Starlink network has attracted more than 5 million subscribers and more than $2 billion in U.S. government contracts (including work on the Starshield national security network).

But the year ahead promises to bring heightened competition: Like Starlink, Project Kuiper aims to offer high-speed internet access from the skies for hundreds of millions of people around the world who are currently underserved.

Following up on last year’s successful test of two prototype satellites, Amazon plans to begin launching operational Kuiper satellites in early 2025, with service due to begin by the end of the year. Pricing details haven’t yet been announced, but Amazon says “affordability is a key principle of Project Kuiper.”

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Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket passes its pre-launch test

New Glenn hotfire test at night
Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket executes a hotfire test on its launch pad. (Blue Origin Photo)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it’s put its orbital-class New Glenn rocket through its last major test in preparation for its first-ever launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

“All we have left to do is mate our encapsulated payload … and then LAUNCH!” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in an update posted to the X social-media platform.

Today’s integrated vehicle hotfire test took place just hours after the Federal Aviation Administration issued a five-year license for New Glenn launches and landings. The first launch hasn’t yet been officially scheduled but is likely to take place soon. “We are really close, folks,” Limp said in an earlier update on X.

New Glenn, which is named after the late astronaut and senator John Glenn, has been in the works for more than a decade. The first launch will send up Blue Origin’s Blue Ring Pathfinder, a demonstrator spacecraft that will test the communications, power and control systems for the company’s Blue Ring space mobility platform.

During today’s pre-launch rehearsal, all seven of New Glenn’s first-stage BE-4 engines fired simultaneously for 24 seconds while the booster was held down on the pad. The engines were brought up to 100% thrust for 13 of those seconds.

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How to tame AI: More regulations, or maybe a boycott?

Gary Marcus and Ted Chiang on stage
Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus, left, chats with science-fiction author Ted Chiang at Town Hall Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Have the risks of artificial intelligence risen to the point where more regulation is needed? Cognitive scientist Gary Marcus argues that the federal government — or maybe even international agencies — will need to step in.

The Food and Drug Administration or the Federal Aviation Administration could provide a model, Marcus said last week during a fireside chat with Seattle science-fiction author Ted Chiang at Town Hall Seattle.

“I think we would like to have something like an FDA-like approval process if somebody introduces a new form of AI that has considerable risks,” Marcus said. “There should be some way of regulating that and saying, ‘Hey, what are the costs? What are the benefits? Do the benefits to society really outweigh the costs?’”

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Cosmic Science

Oops! That’s not Amelia Earhart’s plane — it’s a rock

Airplane-shaped rock formation
A sonar image shows a rock formation previously thought to be the wreckage of Amelia Earhart's airplane. (Credit: Deep Sea Vision)

Once again, a seemingly promising lead in the search for traces of missing aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart and her plane has fizzled out.

Hopes of solving the 87-year-old mystery were raised in January when Deep Sea Vision, a team of underwater archaeologists and robotics experts led by former Air Force intelligence officer Tony Romeo, said they captured a fuzzy sonar image that looked like an airplane.

Deep Sea Vision said the find was notable because the shape was detected about 100 miles from Howland Island, in an area of the Pacific Ocean where the team suspected Earhart and her navigator, Fred Noonan, may have gone down during their attempt to fly around the globe in 1937.

“You’d be hard-pressed to convince me that’s anything but an aircraft, for one; and two, that it’s not Amelia’s aircraft,” Romeo said on NBC’s “Today” show when the discovery was announced.

Unfortunately for Romeo and his team, higher-resolution sonar imagery revealed that the shape was merely a natural rock formation lying more than 16,000 feet beneath the ocean surface. The new sonar view was captured this month by an autonomous underwater vehicle.

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Stoke Space CEO blazes a trail to total rocket reusability

Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa in front of propellant tank sections at rocket factory
Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa at the startup’s rocket factory in Kent, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

KENT, Wash. — Like two of the world’s best-known billionaires, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa is passionate about making spaceships as reusable as airplanes.

“Part of the big thesis of the company is, how do you build a fully, rapidly reusable space vehicle that goes to space, performs a function, comes back and turns around and flies again,” he says. “That’s not a new vision. We’ve been dreaming about fully reusable spacecraft since the ’50s and ’60s, and probably before that. So the big question is, how do you do it?”

Unlike Bezos or Musk, Lapsa isn’t a billionaire. Instead, he made his case to backers who have billions of dollars to invest. Those backers include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, whose investments in Stoke have been made through Breakthrough Energy Ventures, a fund that focuses on clean-tech innovations for the climate challenge.

Rockets that fight climate change? That’s part of Lapsa’s uncommon perspective on the benefits of reusable rocket ships.

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Blue Origin launches a couple of two-timers into space

New Shepard booster landing
New Shepard’s booster comes in for a landing at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in Texas. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent six more people to the edge of space today — including the first husband-and-wife pair to make two trips together to the final frontier, and a science communicator who describes herself as “the Space Gal.”

The six spacefliers were launched from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 9:30 a.m. CT (7:30 a.m. PT) aboard the company’s New Shepard suborbital rocket ship. They raised Blue Origin’s tally of spacefliers to 47 — a number that now accounts for roughly 6% of all the humans who have flown into space,

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Universe Today

Starship’s booster (and Donald Trump) make a splash

Starship liftoff as seen from above
SpaceX's Starship lifts off from its Texas pad for the launch system's sixth flight test. (Credit: SpaceX)

SpaceX’s Starship launch system went through its sixth flight test today, and although the Super Heavy booster missed out on being caught back at its launch pad, the mission checked off a key test objective with President-elect Donald Trump in the audience.

Trump attended the launch at SpaceX’s Starbase complex in the company of SpaceX CEO Elon Musk, who has been serving as a close adviser to the once and future president over the past few months. In a pre-launch posting to his Truth Social media platform, Trump wished good luck to “Elon Musk and the Great Patriots involved in this incredible project.”

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Microsoft and Atom push ahead on the quantum frontier

Atom Computing quantum computer in server room
Atom Computing is working with Microsoft on fault-tolerant quantum computers. (Atom Computing Photo)

Microsoft and Atom Computing say they’ve reached a new milestone in their effort to build fault-tolerant quantum computers that can show an advantage over classical computers.

Microsoft says it will start delivering the computers’ quantum capabilities to customers by the end of 2025, with availability via the Azure cloud service as well as through on-premises hardware.

“Together, we are co-designing and building what we believe will be the world’s most powerful quantum machine,” Jason Zander, executive vice president at Microsoft, said in a LinkedIn posting.

Like other players in the field, Microsoft’s Azure Quantum team and Atom Computing aim to capitalize on the properties of quantum systems — where quantum bits, also known as qubits, can process multiple values simultaneously. That’s in contrast to classical systems, which typically process ones and zeros to solve algorithms.

Microsoft has been working with Colorado-based Atom Computing on hardware that uses the nuclear spin properties of neutral ytterbium atoms to run quantum calculations. One of the big challenges is to create a system that can correct the errors that turn up during the calculations due to quantum noise. The solution typically involves knitting together “physical qubits” to produce an array of “logical qubits” that can correct themselves.

In a paper posted to the ArXiv preprint server, members of the research team say they were able to connect 256 noisy neutral-atom qubits using Microsoft’s qubit-virtualization system in such a way as to produce a system with 24 logical qubits.

“This represents the highest number of entangled logical qubits on record,” study co-author Krysta Svore, vice president of advanced quantum development for Microsoft Azure Quantum, said today in a blog posting. “Entanglement of the qubits is evidenced by their error rates being significantly below the 50% threshold for entanglement.”

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Universe Today

America’s particle physics plan gets a status update

Illustration with subatomic particles and galaxy bubbles
Physics experiments address mysteries at subatomic and astronomical levels. (Illustration by Olena Shmahalo for U.S. Particle Physics)

RALEIGH, N.C. — Particle physicist Hitoshi Murayama admits that he used to worry about being known as the “most hated man” in his field of science. But the good news is that now he can joke about it.

Last year, the Berkeley professor chaired the Particle Physics Project Prioritization Panel, or P5, which drew up a list of multimillion-dollar physics experiments that should move ahead over the next 10 years. The list focused on phenomena ranging from subatomic smash-ups to cosmic inflation. At the same time, the panel also had to decide which projects would have to be left behind for budgetary reasons, which could have turned Murayama into the Dr. No of physics.

Although Murayama has some regrets about the projects that were put off, he’s satisfied with how the process turned out. Now he’s just hoping that the federal government will follow through on the P5’s top priorities.

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Blue Origin wins a new customer for New Glenn launches

Illustration: AST SpaceMobile satellites in orbit
An artist’s conception shows AST SpaceMobile’s Bluebird satellites in orbit. (AST SpaceMobile Illustration)

AST SpaceMobile plans to use Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket to launch some of the satellites for its space-based cellular broadband network in 2025 and 2026.

New Glenn has been under development at Jeff Bezos’ privately held space venture for more than a decade. Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin says the orbital-class rocket’s first launch is “on track” to take place this year at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

Texas-based AST SpaceMobile is one of several satellite companies that have struck deals for New Glenn launches in advance of the rocket’s first mission.

“New Glenn’s performance and unprecedented capacity within its seven-meter fairing enables us to deploy more of our Block 2 BlueBird satellites in orbit, helping provide continuous cellular broadband service coverage across some of the most in-demand cellular markets globally,” Abel Avellan, AST SpaceMobile’s founder, chairman and CEO, said in a news release.

“It’s an honor to support AST SpaceMobile’s deployment of their next-generation BlueBird satellites, which will expand connectivity across the globe and positively impact many lives,” Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said. “New Glenn is purpose-built for these kinds of innovative and ambitious missions.”

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