Month: May 2017

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Boeing makes first 737 MAX delivery

Malindo Air 737 MAX
Malindo Air’s first 737 MAX 8 jet is already painted in livery that reflects the airline’s future rebranding as Batik Air Malaysia. (Boeing Photo)

Boeing today marked the first delivery of a new-generation 737 MAX jet with an official handover to Malaysia-based Malindo Air at the Seattle Delivery Center.

The delivery came after Boeing sent about 30 of the engines for its 737 MAX planes back to their manufacturer due to concerns about potentially defective turbine disks.

Those concerns cropped up last week. and forced Boeing to ground its MAX fleet for several days. Inspectors found that the plane Malindo received was unaffected by the flaw, and Boeing says it’s now gotten the go-ahead from the Federal Aviation Administration to resume all flight activities.

Malindo, which is changing its name to Batik Air Malaysia later this year, will be the first airline to fly the 737 MAX 8 commercially.

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Einstein’s love life vs. his love of physics

'Genius' TV show
Albert Einstein and his wife, Mileva Maric (played by Johnny Flynn and Samantha Colley) look over a scientific paper in “Genius,” a TV series on the National Geographic Channel. (NGC via YouTube)

National Geographic Channel’s “Genius” TV series on Albert Einstein spends almost as much time on the famous physicist’s love life as it does on his theory of relativity – and his most recent biographer, Walter Isaacson, says that’s just as it should be.

“In my biography, I begin and end by saying there’s a ‘unified field theory’ that connects Einstein’s personality with his physics, and the genius of the TV series ‘Genius’ is that it shows this,” said Isaacson, who has written biographies of Benjamin Franklin and Steve Jobs as well as “Einstein: His Life and Universe.”

Isaacson said the series’ fourth episode, airing tonight, illustrates that point. It focuses on Einstein’s “miracle year” of 1905, when he laid out not just one but four groundbreaking scientific papers, including the theory of special relativity.

But it also dwells on Einstein’s tempestuous relationship with his first wife, Serbian-born physicist Mileva Maric, who helped him with his math.

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HP Enterprise unveils computer made for Mars

Star Trek and The Machine
In a video tied to the 2016 movie “Star Trek Beyond,” Hewlett Packard Enterprise imagines a time when Starfleet trainees learn about the rise of The Machine. (HPE Discover via YouTube)

What does a prototype computer with 160 terabytes of memory have to do with missions to Mars? The way Kirk Bresniker sees it, a giant leap in computing is required for the giant leap to the Red Planet.

“That’s actually what we need to wrap around that crew,” Bresniker, chief architect at Hewlett Packard Labs, told GeekWire.

Bresniker said the latest prototype in a Hewlett Packard Enterprise research project known as The Machine, unveiled today, represents one not-so-small step toward the kind of computer that could be included on a Mars mission.

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SpaceX rocket launches Inmarsat satellite

SpaceX launch
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket rises from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, sending an Inmarsat satellite into space. (SpaceX via YouTube)

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket today launched the Inmarsat-5 F4 telecommunications satellite to a geostationary transfer orbit ranging beyond 22,000 miles in height – so high that there was no chance to bring the first-stage booster back for a landing.

The rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center at the beginning of the launch window, at 7:21 p.m. ET (4:21 p.m. PT).

Over the past year, SpaceX has made Falcon 9 booster landings seem almost routine. But missions aimed at putting satellites in geostationary orbits typically require so much oomph that there’s not enough fuel for a controlled descent.

Instead, the first stage tumbled back down to crash harmlessly into the Atlantic Ocean. SpaceX didn’t even bother to install landing legs on the rocket.

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Five tips for future Mars explorers

Mars miniseries
The “Mankind to Mars” panel presentation incorporates video clips from National Geographic Channel’s “Mars” miniseries. (NGC / Imagine / RadicalMedia)

If you want to maximize your chances of weathering Mars’ harsh radiation environment, get in the habit of eating broccoli.

That’s a bit of far-out diet advice from Ray Arvidson, a veteran of robotic Red Planet missions going back to the Viking landers in the 1970s.

Arvidson, a planetary scientist at Washington University in St. Louis, was among a trio of space experts holding forth at “National Geographic Live: Mankind to Mars,” a multimedia panel presentation hosted by the Seattle Symphony at Benaroya Hall.

The traveling show is inspired by the National Geographic Channel’s hybrid docudrama TV series, “Mars,” which finished its first six-episode season last December and has gotten the green light for a second season.

Arvidson and his fellow panelists – “Night Sky Guy” commentator Andrew Fazekas and Vanderbilt astrophysicist Jedidah Isler – make liberal use of video clips and graphics from the TV show to make their points about the prospects for finding traces of life on Mars, and perhaps building settlements there.

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Jeff Bezos says BE-4 rocket test went awry

BE-4 rocket engine testing
In a photo from March 2017, the BE-4 rocket engine’s powerpack is installed on a stand at Blue Origin’s West Texas proving ground for startup transient testing. (Blue Origin Photo)

In a rare update, the Blue Origin space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos reported that it lost a set of powerpack test hardware for its BE-4 rocket engine over the weekend, but added that such a setback is “not unusual” during development.

“That’s why we always set up our development programs to be hardware-rich,” the company tweeted today. “Back into testing soon.”

Blue Origin is headquartered in Kent, Wash., but the BE-4 is being tested at its facility in West Texas, on ranchland owned by Bezos. The powerpack is the heart of a rocket engine, pumping fuel and oxidizer to the engine’s combustion chamber.

The current round of engine testing is key to the company’s fortunes: Blue Origin is planning to use the BE-4, which is powered by liquefied natural gas, on its own New Glenn orbital-class rocket. Blue Origin already has started lining up satellite customers for the New Glenn.

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NASA plays it safe for SLS rocket’s first flight

SLS launch
An artist’s view shows NASA’s Space Launch System launching an Orion capsule. (NASA Illustration)

NASA has broken the news to the White House and the world that speeding up the first crewed flight of its exploration launch system wouldn’t be worth the added cost and risk.

That means the first launch of NASA’s heavy-lift Space Launch System will fly without astronauts, as originally planned. And it will fly later than planned: NASA officials said today that liftoff will have to be delayed to 2019, although it’s too early to be more precise about the time frame.

The determination comes after weeks of discussions focusing on whether the flight plan for what’s known as Exploration Mission 1, or EM-1, could be tweaked to put people on board. Such a scenario would give the White House more to celebrate in President Donald Trump’s first term.

“We decided that while it’s technically feasible … the baseline plan that we had in place was the best way for us to go,” Robert Lightfoot, NASA’s acting administrator, told reporters today during a teleconference.

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200th spacewalk is short but does the job

A small water leak cropped up in one of the hoses designed to keep NASA astronaut Jack Fischer’s spacesuit cool while he waited to begin today’s 200th spacewalk on the International Space Station. That had a domino effect on the preparations, drawing down battery power and forcing NASA to trim back the time allotted to the outing from six and a half hours to a little more than four hours. The schedule still gave Fischer and NASA’s Peggy Whitson enough time to accomplish the spacewalk’s primary task.

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Elon Musk posts views of his first tunnel tests

Boring machine
The tunnel boring machine nicknamed “Godot” sits in a below-ground chamber. Elon Musk reportedly acquired the pre-owned machine from L.A. Metro. (Elon Musk via Instagram)

Elon Musk, the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, demonstrated once again that he’s serious about boring tunnels beneath Los Angeles. But not boringly serious.

In a series of Twitter and Instagram posts, the billionaire brainiac showed off pictures of The Boring Company’s experimental tunneling machine (nicknamed “Godot,” after the famous Samuel Beckett in which the characters wait for something to happen, which doesn’t happen).

One video clip focuses on Godot’s slowly rotating cutter head, which will look familiar to anyone who’s kept track of Seattle’s recently departed Bertha machine.

But the piece de resistance is a clip showing the test run of a prototype sled, through what is obviously SpaceX’s mile-long Hyperloop tube track in Hawthorne, Calif. The lights that flash as the sled zooms through the tube earn the video a cautionary label. “Warning, this may cause motion sickness or seizures,” Musk writes.

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Trump’s cybersecurity plan points to the cloud

White House Matrix
The White House cybersecurity plan is taking shape. (White House / Pho.to / GeekWire Graphic)

President Donald Trump today signed a long-awaited executive order aimed at beefing up cybersecurity at federal government agencies – with a shift of computer capabilities to the cloud as a key part of the strategy.

“We’ve got to move to the cloud and try to protect ourselves instead of fracturing our security posture,” Homeland Security Adviser Tom Bossert told reporters during a White House briefing.

The executive order gives the lead role in managing the cloud shift to the director of the White House’s newly established American Technology Council, which is due to meet for the first time next month.

Although the council’s full roster of members has not yet been announced, the director is said to be Chris Liddell, who formerly served as chief financial officer at Microsoft and General Motors.

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