Month: June 2018

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SpaceX rocket sends robot pal to space station

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifted off today from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida, sending an AI-enabled, sphere-shaped robot companion to keep the International Space Station’s crew company.

The European CIMON robot, complete with a video-screen smiley face, is packed aboard an uncrewed Dragon capsule along with nearly three tons of additional experiments and supplies for the space station.

Launch came at 5:41 a.m. ET (2:41 a.m. PT) after a trouble-free countdown. The rocket ascended to eastward just before sunrise, producing spectacular views of the illuminated exhaust plume in the sky.

“I’m glad I got the opportunity to see the Dragon’s Tail in person,” one of the spectators, Taylor Harris, said in a tweet.

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Simulated moon dirt turns up real challenges

Simulated moon dirt
Off Planet Research’s co-owners, Vince Roux and Melissa Roth, hold samples of lunar dirt and moon rocks. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

RENTON, Wash. — When commercial ventures start setting up shop on the moon, they may well run into nasty clouds of grit that clog up airways and gum up equipment.

Those are just the sorts of unpleasant surprises that Off Planet Research wants to help those ventures avoid.

The Lacey, Wash.-based company produces simulated soil that can be used for earthly testing of lunar operations.

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Facebook cancels its internet drone program

Facebook says it’s ending its campaign to build a fleet of high-altitude drones to boost internet connectivity, after spending millions of dollars on the years-long effort. In a Facebook blog post, engineering director Yael Maguire noted that other companies were building high-altitude platform stations, or HAPS. “Going forward, we’ll continue to work with partners like Airbus on HAPS connectivity generally, and on the other technologies needed to make this system work, like flight control computers and high-density batteries,” Maguire said.

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Virgin Orbit gets ready to start test launches

Stephen Eisele
Virgin Orbit Vice President Stephen Eisele talks about his company’s air-launch system during the NewSpace conference in Renton, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

RENTON, Wash. — British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit venture is getting ready to put its LauncherOne rocket system through its first flight test in a little more than a week, the company’s vice president for business development said today.

The first flight will be a captive-carry test, Virgin Orbit’s Stephen Eisele said during the Space Frontier Foundation’s NewSpace conference in Renton. That means an inactive LauncherOne rocket would be attached to a pylon built onto a converted Boeing 747 jet that’s known as Cosmic Girl.

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OceanGate sub hits Titanic depth of 4,000 meters

Titan submersible
The Titan submersible rests on its underwater platform. (OceanGate Photo)

OceanGate successfully lowered its Titan submersible to a depth of 4,000 meters in waters off the coast of the Bahamas, during a series of uncrewed dives aimed at testing the integrity of the craft’s carbon-fiber hull. The Everett, Wash.-based team lowered the sub on a monofilament line on June 25 while sensors measured the strain on the hull. OceanGate CEO and chief pilot Stockton Rush will conduct solo dives later this summer in preparation for five-person dives to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic next June. The 4,000-meter milestone is significant because that’s how deep the Titanic is.

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Hubble hints that interstellar object is a comet

Observations made by the Hubble Space Telescope and ground-based observatories indicate that the cigar-shaped interstellar object known as ‘Oumuamua got an unexpected boost in speed and a shift in its trajectory as it passed through the inner solar system last year. Scientists surmise that the source of the boost was an outflow of gas and dust from ‘Oumuamua, which suggests that the object is more like an active comet than a passive asteroid.

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NASA resets Webb Telescope launch for 2021

Webb Space Telescope
The mirror for NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope rises from a shop floor at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center during assembly. (NASA Photo)

NASA says the launch of its flagship James Webb Space Telescope is being rescheduled for no earlier than 2021, with its total price tag boosted to $9.66 billion.

That price tag includes a development cost of $8.8 billion, which breaks the $8 billion development cost cap mandated by Congress in 2011. That was the last time the Webb project went through a do-or-die debate.

“Congress will have to reauthorize Webb through this next cycle of authorization,” NASA Associate Administrator Steve Jurczyk said today during a teleconference announcing the reset.

NASA officials strongly supported going ahead with the telescope, which is in the latter stages of testing and assembly. The general-purpose telescope is expected to build on the trailblazing observations of the Hubble Space Telescope and provide unprecedented insights about exoplanets and the farthest frontiers of the observable universe.

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Why SpaceX and Boeing can sell extra seats to orbit

Sunita Williams in SpaceX Dragon mockup
NASA astronaut Sunita Williams wears a SpaceX spacesuit as she sits in a mockup for a Crew Dragon spaceship. (SpaceX Photo)

RENTON, Wash. — When NASA’s Phil McAlister worked out the contracts with SpaceX and Boeing to ferry astronauts to and from the International Space Station, he made sure they could make some money on the side.

The contracts contain a clause that allows the companies to propose putting a private spaceflight participant in one of the extra seats aboard SpaceX’s Dragon craft or Boeing’s Starliner spaceship, said McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight development at NASA Headquarters.

“Contractually, we put a hook in there,” McAlister said today at the Space Frontier Foundation’s annual NewSpace conference in Renton. “I made sure it was there. It was very important for that capability to be in the contract.”

The clause kicks in once SpaceX and Boeing get their space taxis certified for flight, which could happen as early as next year.

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Buzz Aldrin shares his latest moon plan amid turmoil

Buzz Aldrin
Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin acknowledges that the change in tone on his Twitter account has “unfortunately resulted in an exchange or two.” (Buzz Aldrin via Twitter)

Buzz Aldrin wants people to know that he has some cool new ideas about how to get to the moon — not just because they’re cool, but also because they show his mind is working.

“That’s not an inactive, incapacitated, dependent mind,” the 88-year-old Aldrin, who became one of the first humans to walk on the moon during 1969’s Apollo 11 mission, told me today during a wide-ranging telephone interview.

That’s an issue nowadays, due to a legal fight that’s pitting Aldrin and his new business managers against two of his children and his former business manager.

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Boeing leads $16M investment in Matternet

Matternet drone
A Matternet drone flies over Zurich. (Matternet Photo)

Boeing HorizonX Ventures has taken the lead role in a $16 million Series A funding round for Matternet, a California company specializing in drone delivery operations in urban environments.

Other investors include Swiss Post, Sony Innovation Fund and Levitate Capital, the companies said today. Matternet aims to use the funds to expand operations in the U.S. and other parts of the world.

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