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Fiction Science Club

A late author’s last novel bridges far-flung ancient realms

Three Minoan women in a fresco from the Palace of Knossos
This reconstructed image of a fresco from the Palace of Knossos on the island of Crete shows three Minoan women with their hair in ponytails. “The Curve of the World” throws a spotlight on Minoan seafarers. (Credit: Carole Raddato, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Long before Homer wrote the Odyssey, Minoan seafarers were plying the trade routes of the Mediterranean and spinning stories of adventure — but when it comes to imagination on an outlandish scale, the late science-fiction author Vonda N. McIntyre’s tale about a transoceanic Minoan odyssey just might have awed even Homer.

McIntyre finished the manuscript for her final book, “The Curve of the World,” less than two weeks before she died of pancreatic cancer in 2019. Since then, a team of writers and editors assembled by Clarion West — the Seattle-based literary nonprofit that McIntyre founded in 1971 — has been working to get the novel in shape for publication.

That work is now complete. The book has made its debut, and Clarion West is celebrating with a virtual book launch party on May 16.

Nisi Shawl, an award-winning science-fiction and fantasy writer, admits to “fan-girling” during the editing process. “The sheer joy of the prose, the sensual array of delights that are offered, every bit of the way, the writing is just so pleasurable,” Shawl says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

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Amazon Leo revs up work on satellite broadband network

Amazon Leo executive Chris Weber at Mission Operations Center, wearing black-and-krypton T-shirt
Chris Weber, vice president of business and product for Amazon Leo, takes part in coverage of a satellite launch. (Credit: United Launch Alliance)

REDMOND, Wash. — Chris Weber isn’t ready to say yet exactly when Amazon Leo will start letting individual customers sign up for satellite broadband service, but when it happens, he’ll have the right wardrobe for the debut.

During a recent interview at Amazon Leo’s Mission Operations Center in Redmond, Weber sported running shoes in a shade of purple with the Leo brand emblazoned on the back.

“It’s not purple, it’s krypton,” Weber, who came over from GitLab in 2024 to become Amazon Leo’s vice president of business and product, told me. “Krypton is the color when our thrusters fire in space, so we picked that. It was obviously available in the Amazon palette. … There’s a lot of meaning and thought that went into our brands, and we’re quite excited about that.”

It’s been a year since Amazon Leo, formerly known as Project Kuiper, began its multibillion-dollar campaign to send up thousands of satellites to provide broadband internet access across the globe. So far, 304 satellites have been deployed over the course of 11 launches — and Weber said the Amazon Leo team will be running twice as hard in the year ahead.

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Blue Origin might look beyond Jeff Bezos’ backing

Blue Origin New Glenn rocket lifting off from Florida launch pad
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket lifts off from its Florida launch pad in April. (Blue Origin Photo)

For more than a quarter-century, Jeff Bezos has been funding his Blue Origin space venture primarily with his gains from Amazon, the other big company he founded — but according to a report in the Financial Times, Blue Origin is now weighing a plan to seek outside investment for the first time.

The report says Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp told employees at a recent all-hands meeting that the company might have to turn to external fundraising if it went ahead with plans to increase its launch cadence significantly. The Financial Times attributed its report to two unidentified sources who attended the meeting. We’ve reached out to Blue Origin for comment and will update this report with anything we hear back. The company doesn’t typically comment on claims attributed to unidentified sources.

Blue Origin launched its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket for the first time in January 2025, and two more New Glenn missions have followed since then. The most recent launch took place last month but failed to put its payloads in their proper orbit. As a result, New Glenn is grounded until the company completes an investigation and takes corrective actions under the oversight of the Federal Aviation Administration.

Past reports have suggested that Blue Origin was targeting as many as 12 New Glenn launches this year, and as many as 100 launches per year in the longer term.

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Universe Today

Pluto-like world’s thin atmosphere poses a mystery

Illustration: Time-sequence view of star being eclipsed by trans-Neptunian object
Artwork shows how light from a star would be dimmed and then blocked as a mini-world with a thin atmosphere passes in front. (Credit: NAOJ)

Scientists are puzzling over another oddball on the edge of the solar system: This time, it’s an icy object less than a quarter of Pluto’s size with a thin atmosphere – a layer of gas that’s not typically found around objects so small.

A Japanese team of researchers — including an amateur astronomer — laid out the curious case of 2002 XV93 this week in the journal Nature Astronomy. 2002 XV93 traces an elliptical path beyond the orbit of Neptune in the icy Kuiper Belt, never coming closer to the sun than 3 billion miles. Like Pluto, it’s locked in a resonance with Neptune that keeps its orbit relatively stable.

The Japanese astronomers, led by Ko Arimatsu of the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan, tracked the mini-world with several telescopes as it passed in front of a background star in January 2024. They found that the light from the star gradually dimmed before it disappeared behind 2002 XV93, as if the light was filtered through a thin layer of gas.

That finding posed a puzzle: Based on estimates of its size, 2002 XV93 shouldn’t have enough gravitational pull to hold onto an atmosphere for longer than, say, 1,000 years.

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Universe Today

Pentagon releases UFO files from moon trips and more

Apollo 17 image with three light-colored dots highlighted in inset
An image from NASA's Apollo 17 mission in 1972 shows lunar terrain with an inset photo highlighting three light-colored specks. (NASA Photo)

The Department of Defense has released a fresh batch of images and transcripts relating to reports of unidentified anomalous phenomena, formerly known as UFOs, including pictures and descriptions from NASA’s Apollo missions to the moon.

Today’s release on the War.gov website was the first in a series planned by the Trump administration’s Presidential Unsealing and Reporting System for UAP Encounters, or PURSUE. “Additional files will be released by the Department of War on a rolling basis,” the Pentagon said in a news release.

The batch includes pictures taken by astronauts on the moon during Apollo 12 in 1969 and Apollo 17 in 1972, with enlarged sections highlighting what appear to be bright spots or streaks in the sky. There’s even a transcript from the Gemini 7 mission in 1965, in which astronaut Frank Borman describes a “bogey” and a debris field consisting of “hundreds of little particles.”

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Interlune wins $6.9M from NASA to analyze lunar gases

Interlune engineers working with hardware in Regolith Lab
Interlune engineers Alex Lewandowski and Jessica Wu check test equipment in the company's Regolith Lab. (Interlune Photo)

NASA has awarded a $6.9 million contract to Seattle-based Interlune for the development of a system that can extract gases such as helium-3 and hydrogen from lunar soil and rocks.

The system will be developed and tested on Earth under the terms of an 18-month Small Business Innovation Research Phase III grant, and then launched to the moon on a commercial robotic lander in 2028. Interlune says the project meshes with its plan to extract and market lunar helium-3 for applications on Earth ranging from quantum computing and medical imaging to neutron detection and commercial nuclear fusion.

“We’re gathering data and advancing technologies that serve multiple purposes across industry and government,” Rob Meyerson, co-founder and CEO of Interlune, said today in a news release. “NASA’s continued investment in space technology enables technology development projects like this one to ensure America’s leadership in building the lunar economy.”

Interlune’s payload will include a robotic arm and scoop to gather up moon dirt (technically known as regolith), a particle-sorting device, hardware for heating up lunar material and harvesting the gases that are given off, a multispectral camera capable of determining helium-3 concentrations, and a mass spectrometer that can analyze the gases.

“For the first time ever, we will measure volatile gases by heating lunar regolith while on the moon, dramatically advancing the scientific community’s understanding of its properties,” Interlune chief scientist Elizabeth Frank said. “The data we collect will also tell us how much power is needed to extract resources like helium-3.”

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PowerLight uses a laser beam to keep military drone aloft

Powerlight laser system on left, laser-powered drone on the right
PowerLight's laser system (at left) beamed power to the military drone shown at right. (PowerLight Photos)

Kent, Wash.-based PowerLight Technologies says its laser power beaming system has been used successfully to keep a military-grade, fixed-wing drone in the air for hours during a series of tests for the Department of Defense.

The flight demonstrations concluded this month at the Poinsett Electronic Combat Range at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C. The tests were conducted in partnership with Kraus Hamdani Aerospace, sponsored by U.S. Central Command and the Pentagon’s Operational Energy – Innovation Directorate.

PowerLight’s system was installed on a KHA K1000ULE drone, which operates under a $270 million deployment contract from the AFCENT Battle Lab. The tests demonstrated end-to-end operation of a kilowatt-class wireless power system, from target acquisition and precision tracking through beam delivery and safety management.

During the tests, the beaming system acquired and tracked the drone at altitudes up to 5,000 feet, delivering power while steering and focusing the infrared laser beam in real time.

PowerLight, formerly known as LaserMotive, started out more than 15 years ago with power-beaming systems capable of keeping small quadcopters in the air continuously. The latest tests marked the first demonstration of a wireless system capable of sustained, autonomous power delivery at operationally relevant ranges and power levels for a large, fixed-wing military drone.

Currently, such drones must land to refuel or recharge once their onboard power source is depleted. Continuous wireless power could theoretically keep them airborne indefinitely.

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Blue Origin aces rocket reuse, but satellite goes awry

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket rises from its Florida pad
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket rises from its Florida pad, sending an AST SpaceMobile satellite into space. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture used a previously flown New Glenn rocket booster to send a satellite into space today, marking a first for the company.

It was also New Glenn’s first launch failure.

The first-stage booster — nicknamed “Never Tell Me the Odds” — made its second successful touchdown on a floating platform in the Atlantic Ocean, drawing cheers from the Blue Origin team. But hours later, AST SpaceMobile said that its BlueBird 7 satellite was not deployed into its intended orbit.

“BlueBird 7 was placed into a lower than planned orbit by the upper stage of the launch vehicle,” the Texas-based company said in a news release. “While the satellite separated from the launch vehicle and powered on, the altitude is too low to sustain operations with its onboard thruster technology and will [be] deorbited. The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company’s insurance policy.”

The rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 7:25 a.m. ET (4:25 a.m. PT). The twice-used booster made its first flight last November when it launched NASA’s Escapade probes on a mission to Mars. Blue Origin’s Florida team recovered and refurbished the booster for today’s launch.

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Muon detectives share the Breakthrough Prize glory

David Hertzog with muon storage ring at Fermilab
University of Washington physicist David Hertzog checks out the Muon g-2 experiment at Fermilab in 2018. (Photo Courtesy of David Hertzog)

University of Washington physicist David Hertzog can’t wait to find out how hundreds of researchers who worked on a geeky project known as the Muon g-2 Collaboration will react when they hear they’ve each won thousands of dollars for that work.

The money is coming from this year’s $3 million Breakthrough Prize for fundamental physics, which was awarded tonight during a gala ceremony in Los Angeles. Hertzog and his colleagues decided that the prize should be divided equally among everyone who was an author on research papers relating to the decades-long series of muon experiments.

“There are students who were in and out of this thing — two years or less,” he said. “They’re going to be shocked out of their lives about something they did a long time ago that they don’t remember doing. They’re going to get a phone call or email from the Breakthrough people, and they’re going to go, ‘What!?’ That’s kind of fun.”

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Quantum computing gets its day in the spotlight

Facade of IonQ's quantum computer factory in Bothell, Wash.
Washington state funding will support the expansion of IonQ's quantum computer factory in Bothell, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Leaders of the Pacific Northwest’s computing community gathered in downtown Seattle today to mark World Quantum Day — and Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson gave them one more reason to celebrate. Or rather, 500,000 reasons.

Ferguson took the occasion to announce that $500,000 would be directed from the Governor’s Economic Development Strategic Reserve Fund to support the expansion of IonQ’s quantum computer manufacturing facility in Bothell, Wash. The 100,000-square-foot factory opened in 2024 and is ramping up production.

Over the next 18 months, Maryland-based IonQ plans to add about 100 engineering positions in Bothell, paying an average salary of $177,000. Over the next five years, the expansion is projected to generate between 1,200 and 2,000 regional jobs.

The Strategic Reserve Fund makes use of unclaimed lottery prize money for investments that deliver significant job creation and capital investment in Washington state. The newly announced award will go to the Economic Alliance of Snohomish County for building upgrades, workforce expenses and other expansion costs.

The state’s funding is coming on top of more than $14 million in private investment. “Quantum is the future, and it’s being built here,” Ferguson said in a news release.

The news was greeted with applause at Northwest Quantum Day, an all-day conference presented by Northwest Quantum Nexus and co-hosted by K&L Gates.

April 14 is marked as World Quantum Day for a geeky reason: The date (4/14) commemorates one of the foundational numbers of quantum mechanics, Planck’s constant (4.14 X 10-15 eV ⋅ s).

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