Month: April 2017

Categories
GeekWire

Here’s what it’s like in Blue Origin’s spaceship

Alan Boyle in Blue Origin capsule
GeekWire’s Alan Boyle sits in one of the padded seats inside a mock-up of the crew capsule for Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship. The door of the capsule’s hatch is just to the right of Boyle’s head. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – The seats in Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship are like a dentist’s chair that’s fully extended, with a big difference. You can float out of this one when weightlessness sets in.

Of course, we couldn’t get the zero-G experience when we tried out the seats in a mock-up of the New Shepard crew capsule, on display here at the 33rd Space Symposium. But we did get a condensed version of the 11-minute flight scenario, from launch to landing.

Our guide for the sit-in was Ariane Cornell, a member of Blue Origin’s strategy and business development team. Five other journalists and I ducked our heads, stepped through the hatch and settled into the six seats placed around the periphery of a cabin that’s about the size and shape of a big igloo.

Get the full story and video on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

How Blue Origin builds on Amazon’s success

Blue Origin's Jeff Bezos
Blue Origin’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, peers out the window of a New Shepard crew capsule mock-up. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos has long said that he’s using his personal fortune to fund his Blue Origin space venture, and today he hinted at just how many billions of dollars he intends to spend.

“My business model right now for Blue Origin is, I sell about $1 billion a year of Amazon stock, and I use it to invest in Blue Origin,” he told reporters here at the 33rd Space Symposium. “So the business model for Blue Origin is very robust.”

Bezos threw out the figure half-jokingly, after noting that he typically doesn’t reveal how much he’s spending. But he made clear that his in-house space effort, headquartered in Kent, Wash., takes a noticeable chunk out of his estimated $78 billion fortune.

He said the development cost for Blue Origin’s New Glenn orbital launch system, which should be taking off from a Florida launch facility by 2020 or so, is likely to be on the order of $2.5 billion.

And then there’s the New Shepard suborbital rocket ship, which has successfully flown to space and back five times during uncrewed test flights launched from Blue Origin’s West Texas facility. The space-flown booster and a mock-up of New Shepard’s crew capsule are on display this week at the Space Symposium.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

SpaceX exec compares rockets to airplanes

Gwynne Shotwell
SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell watches a video of a Falcon 9 rocket landing during her talk to the 33rd Space Symposium. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell isn’t satisfied with last week’s history-making relaunch and landing of a previously flown Falcon 9 rocket.

The way she sees it, rocket reusability doesn’t really count unless the rocket can be reused “almost as rapidly as you turn around an aircraft.”

“Our challenge right now is to refly a rocket within 24 hours,” she said here today at the 33rd Space Symposium. “That’s when we’ll really feel like we got the reusability just right.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Get a peek at Blue Origin’s lunar lander

Blue Moon lander
Blue Origip President Rob Meyerson shows off a concept for the Blue Moon lunar lander during a session at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. Other panelists include Jonathan Arenberg, chief systems engineer for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope; former astronaut John Grunsfeld; and Mary Lynne Dittmar of the Coalition for Deep Space Exploration. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Blue Origin, the space venture backed by Amazon billionaire CEO Jeff Bezos, is providing a first look at the design for the Blue Moon lander it wants to use for deliveries to the lunar surface in the 2020s.

It’s been more than a month since Blue Origin’s plan for sending payloads to the moon for a permanent settlement came to light – but the company’s president, Rob Meyerson, lifted a veil a bit higher by showing off an artist’s conception of the lander here at the 33rd Space Symposium.

As the four-legged lander design was displayed on screen, Meyerson told the crowd that the spacecraft could be launched on NASA’s own heavy-lift Space Launch System rocket, or SLS, which is currently under development. It could also go on United Launch Alliance’s existing Atlas 5 rocket, or on Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket – which is due to start flying by 2020.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

BlackSky Spectra serves up satellite imagery

Multispectral imaging
An image from BlackSky Spectra displays visible-light imagery, synthetic aperture radar readings and infrared data over Panama City and the Miraflores Locks. The imagery comes from Airbus Pléiades, Airbus TerraSAR-X and USGS Landsat. (Spaceflight Industries Photo)

Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries lifted the curtain on another satellite imaging service today: BlackSky Spectra, a Web-based platform that knits together pictures in a wide range of wavelengths, from visible light and infrared to radar imagery.

The on-demand service lets users easily search through more than 25 million archival images – and order up fresh pictures – from a multispectral, multinational squadron of satellites.

“BlackSky is transforming how we look at the world by integrating the widest variety of sensors into a revolutionary, easy-to-use service,” Jason Andrews, CEO of Spaceflight Industries, said today in a news release. “Increasing our capacity to take images and expanding the data set enables organizations to understand our changing world like never before.”

The new satellites in the BlackSky network include Airbus’ Pléiades, SPOT6/7, KazEOSat-1 and TerraSAR-X. They join 21AT’s TripleSat, SIIS’s KOMPSAT2/3/3A/5 and UrtheCast’s Deimos-2 on BlackSky’s menu.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Zunum Aero has big plans for electric planes

Zunum Aero planes
Artwork shows Zunum Aero’s hybrid electric airplanes in flight. (Zunum Aero Illustration)trans

Four years after its founding, Zunum Aero is finally going public with a plan to build hybrid electric airplanes that could revolutionize service to regional airports in the 2020s.

“This is our coming out of stealth,” said Ashish Kumar, the founder and CEO of the company, which is headquartered in Kirkland, Wash.

Zunum, whose name comes from the Mayan word for hummingbird, aims to develop 10- to 50-seat aircraft that can pave the way for what Kumar calls a “golden age of regional travel.”

To follow through on that vision, the company has patented its concept and has won backing from the Boeing Co. as well as from JetBlue Technology Ventures, a subsidiary of JetBlue Airways.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Get a colorful 3-D view of human stem cells

3-D stem cell
A color-coded visualization shows a human stem cell as its nucleus undergoes mitosis and segmentation. (Allen Institute for Cell Science)

Imagine being able to see inside a transparent human stem cell, like the “Visible Man and Woman” models in biology class. That’s what the Seattle-based Allen Institute for Cell Science lets you do with its brand-new data imaging platform, the Allen Cell Explorer.

The cells you see on the screen aren’t made-up animations: They’re based on an analysis of high-quality photomicrographs documenting more than 6,000 induced pluripotent stem cells, or IPS cells, derived from human skin cells.

The IPS cells underwent gene editing to attach fluorescent markers to 11 different types of structures that make up the cells’ machinery – and that’s not all. The institute then applied deep-learning computational methods to predict the complete structure of each cell, based on their glowing patterns.

“This is the first time researchers have used deep learning to try and understand the elusive question of how actual cells are organized,” Rick Horwitz, the institute’s executive director, said in a news release.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Space geeks check out Blue Origin spaceship

Blue Origin spaceship
A crane hoists Blue Origin’s space-flown New Shepard booster into position at the Space Symposium in Colorado. (Ariane Cornell Photo via Twitter)

Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship is continuing its farewell tour this week with a stopover at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Colo., and there’s even a mockup of the crew capsule for would-be space tourists to sit in.

The Seattle area’s best-known space company, founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos back in 2000, is making a splash by erecting the slightly toasted rocket booster near the Colorado conference’s hottest hot spot, the Broadmoor Hotel.

Tweets tell the story, starting with a snapshot of Blue Origin President Rob Meyerson and Ariane Cornell, who’s on the company’s strategy and business development team.

Get the full story on GeekWire.