Month: May 2017

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Next generation inspired by Jeff Bezos’ tales

Jeff Bezos and kids
eff Bezos gets his picture taken with students at the Museum of Flight. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

By Chelsey Ballarte and Alan Boyle

When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos visited the Museum of Flight this weekend to answer questions from students, the kids did not hold back.

“That’s one of the great things about kids,” Bezos said on May 20. “There are always questions.”

Scores of elementary-school and middle-school students came from the Seattle area as well as from Deer Park, a city just north of Spokane on the other side of the state, to cram into the museum’s “Apollo” exhibit and meet America’s second-richest person (after Bill Gates).

The kids asked about Bezos’ successful expedition to recover sunken rocket engines from the Apollo moon missions, about his Blue Origin space venture, and about his own life story. One questioner picked up on a report that, as a toddler, Bezos dismantled his crib with a screwdriver because he wanted to sleep in a real bed.

“Have you always been that independent?” the boy asked.

“I’ve always been, uh, focused,” Bezos replied.

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Jeff Bezos lays out vision for city on the moon

Blue Moon lander
Artist’s concept shows Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander on the lunar surface. (Blue Origin Illustration)

SpaceX billionaire Elon Musk may have his heart set on building a city on Mars, but Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ space vision looks closer to home. He’s gazing at the moon.

“I think we should build a permanent human settlement on one of the poles of the moon,” Bezos said today during a Q&A with kids at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. “It’s time to go back to the moon, but this time to stay.”

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Jeff Bezos shares Apollo’s lessons with kids

Jeff Bezos
Jeff Bezos takes questions from kids at the Museum of Flight. (GeekWire Photo / Chelsey Ballarte)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos came to Seattle’s Museum of Flight today to talk with students about the decades-old rocket engines he rescued from the sea – but he stayed to share some down-to-earth lessons for life on this planet.

“Be proud, not of your gifts, but of your hard work and your choices,” the billionaire told more than 100 kids and grown-ups who crammed themselves into the central gallery for “Apollo,” the museum’s new exhibit focusing on the 1960s space race.

The highlight of the show is a display of components from the mighty F-1 engines that powered Apollo astronauts on the first leg of their journey to the moon. Bezos backed a multimillion-dollar effort to recover the Saturn V engines from the bottom of the Atlantic.

Today, he stood between those artifacts and an intact F-1 engine, which was lent to the museum by NASA, as he answered questions from elementary-school and middle-school students.

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‘Alien megastructure’ star caught in the act

Image: Comets and star
his illustration shows a star behind a shattered comet. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech)

Tabby’s Star – also known as KIC 8462852 or the “alien megastructure” star – is at it again. And this time the world is watching. The star in the constellation Cygnus has intrigued astronomers for a year and a half because they can’t quite explain why it periodically dims. One hypothesis is that aliens are building an energy-generating Dyson sphere around the star, but less way-out possibilities include cometary storms or blobs of circumstellar material. This week, a team on the Canary Islands detected unusual readings from Tabby’s Star, just in time to alert fellow astronomers around the world to turn their telescopes toward it.

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‘Alien: Covenant’ delivers the gory goods

'Alien: Covenant'
“Alien: Covenant” expands the film franchise’s monster menagerie. (Twentieth Century Fox)

Spoiler Alert: This item avoids discussing major plot twists in “Alien: Covenant,” but wait until after you see the movie to read it if you want to stay totally in the dark.

We’ve seen enough “Alien” movies by now that we pretty much know what should be coming, and “Alien: Covenant,” the latest installment in the space-horror franchise, turns the dial up to 11.

There are new ways to pick up alien infections, new ways for incubating monsters to pop out of their hosts, and new ways for the crew members of the colony spaceship Covenant to fall for alien set-ups they totally should have seen coming.

If only they had watched the first “Alien” movie from the year 1979, they could have saved themselves a lot of grief in the year 2104.

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Apollo moon rocket engines fill place of honor

Concannon at museum
David Concannon, who put together a team to find components from the F-1 rocket engines that sent NASA astronauts on their way to the moon, recounts the adventure at the Museum of Flight with the recovered components in the background. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

Almost 50 years after they were fired up, rocket engines that sent NASA’s Apollo crews on the first leg of their trips to the moon have reached their final destination at last, in the spotlight at the Museum of Flight’s “Apollo” exhibit in Seattle.

During a press preview today, the museum showed off the mangled components from the Saturn V first-stage engines for two Apollo moon missions, alongside an intact 18-foot-high F-1 rocket engine on loan from NASA.

It was a bittersweet moment for David Concannon, who put together the team that found the engines in 2013 with backing from Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos.

“I didn’t see this until two hours ago, and I was overwhelmed,” Concannon told GeekWire today. “I still am. … It’s a really sad moment. I’m proud of what we and Jeff did, but it’s kinda like sending your son off to college.”

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Want to fly like a CEO? Rent this plane

Dining on Dream Jet
You can dine in elegance on Deer Jet’s Dream Jet. (GeekWire Photo / Chelsey Ballarte)

Now anybody can fly like a VIP: All you have to do to take Deer Jet’s super-elegant 787 Dreamliner for a ride is fork over $70,000 an hour.

Just don’t call it luxury travel.

“This plane is not ‘luxurious,’ The philosophy for the design is natural. … It’s to make you feel very comfortable, so you can save your energy and you can do your job better,” Frank Fang, vice president of China-based Deer Jet, told GeekWire during a tour of the plane, which was sitting in front of Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

“It’s just a little bit expensive,” Fang added with a smile.

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Spaceflight buys Rocket Lab Electron launch

Rocket Lab Electron rocket
Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket is prepared for flight. (Rocket Lab Photo)

Seattle-based Spaceflight says it’s struck a deal to buy the full capacity of a single Electron rocket launch from L.A.-based Rocket Lab, so it can send other ventures’ small satellites into orbit at cut-rate prices. The dedicated-rideshare mission follows the model that Spaceflight set with SpaceX for a Falcon 9 launch, now expected to go up next year.

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Canada’s PM rocks Microsoft’s CEO Summit

Justin Trudeau at Microsoft Canada
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau speaks at the opening of the Microsoft Canada Excellence Centre in Vancouver in June 2016. Microsoft President Brad Smith is beside Trudeau. (Microsoft via YouTube)

So far, this year’s Microsoft CEO Summit has been all about Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s talk today, but there’s been precious little information available about who else is attending – and Trudeau may be one of the big reasons why.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates created the annual summit back in 1997, to give global business leaders an opportunity to share their experiences and learn about new technologies that will have an impact on business in the future. The event’s attendee list is kept largely confidential, as is the substance of the discussions.

This year, Microsoft says the summit’s two themes are “trust in technology” (as in cybersecurity, international hacking, privacy and the flow of data) and “the race to space” (as in privately funded space efforts such as Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket venture).

Usually, Microsoft lists a few folks who are attending the summit on the company’s Redmond campus, just to give a sense of the event’s cachet. For example, last year’s headliners included Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett and Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson (who is now the Trump administration’s secretary of state)

This year, however, the spotlight has fallen almost exclusively on the hunky 45-year-old Trudeau, the first sitting head of government or state to address the summit. Microsoft isn’t saying anything about the other 140-plus VIPs attending the discussions. “Out of respect for the privacy of our guests, we are not providing any additional information,” a Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire via email.

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Alaska Airlines plans flights from Everett

Paine Field passenger terminal
An artist’s conception shows the passenger terminal that’s planned for Everett’s Paine Field. (Propeller Airports Illustration)

Bugged by I-5 traffic to Sea-Tac? Alaska Airlines is promising a work-around: The Seattle-based airline says it will start running regularly scheduled passenger flights out of Everett’s Paine Field starting next year.

“As our region continues to grow at a record pace, and Sea-Tac Airport nears capacity, the time is right to bring air service to our valued guests living in the North Sound,” Alaska Airlines CEO Brad Tilden said today in a news release. “Today’s news means less time stuck in traffic on Interstate 5 and more time enjoying your vacation or making the most of your business trip.”

Alaska said it would offer nine daily flights from Paine Field, using Boeing 737s and Embraer 175 regional jets, subject to government approvals.

“We’re not quite ready to share details of the routes,” John Kirby, Alaska’s vice president of capacity planning, said in an airline blog posting. “But I can tell you they won’t be limited to short, regional flights. We’re talking daily, nonstop flights to some of our most popular destinations.”

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