Month: June 2018

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Boeing teams with Safran on auxiliary power units

Auxiliary power unit
The tail section of a FedEx 777 Freighter ecoDemonstrator flight-test airplane has been opened to reveal its auxiliary power unit, which contains a 3-D-printed titanium part. (Boeing Photo / Paul McElroy)

Boeing and Safran have set up a joint venture to design, build and service auxiliary power units for airplanes, marking another big step in Boeing’s drive to build a more integrated supply chain.

“This strategic partnership will leverage Boeing’s deep customer and airplane knowledge along with Safran’s experience in designing and producing complex propulsion assemblies to deliver expanded, innovative services solutions to our customers,” Stan Deal, president and CEO of Boeing Global Services, said today in a news release.

News about the 50-50 joint venture comes a little more than a month after Boeing announced a $4.25 billion deal to acquire KLX Inc., a Florida-based aerospace parts distributor.

Both moves are in line with Boeing’s strategy to grow aviation services into a business that contributes $50 billion annually to the company’s bottom line. They also show that Boeing is willing to move away from traditional supply-chain models.

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Physicists add top-quark twist to Higgs boson’s tale

Experiments at Europe’s Large Hadron Collider have produced hard-to-come-by evidence of interactions between the Higgs boson and top quarks. The findings, announced today at a conference in Bologna, Italy, “give a strong indication that the Higgs boson has a key role in the large value of the top quark mass,” Karl Jakobs, spokesperson for the LHC’s ATLAS collaboration, said in a news release.

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Boeing details $100M workforce education plan

Boeing logo
The Boeing Co., which has its corporate headquarters in Chicago, says it’s devoting $100 million to workforce development programs. (Boeing Photo)

Boeing is launching new educational initiatives to follow through on its pledge to spend $100 million of its federal tax savings on workforce development programs.

The initiatives include a partnership with Degreed.com to give employees access to online lessons, certification courses and degree programs.

Another initiative will put $6 million into a partnership with the Thurgood Marshall College Fund and several historically black colleges and universities. That investment will support scholarships, internships and boot-camp programs to help students experience what it’s like to work at Boeing, the company said.

There’ll also be several new programs to help Boeing employees enhance their technical skills and keep up with industry trends. The focus of the first program will be digital literacy, Boeing said.

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Saffron nears finish line for Women’s Safety XPRIZE

Saffron device
Saffron’s emergency alert device is about the size of a half-dollar, and designed to be clipped onto a bra or a waistband. (Saffron Photo)

Students representing the Global Innovation Exchange are nearing the finish line in a competition to create wearable sensors that can send wireless alerts in threatening situations — even if the person wearing the sensor is bound and gagged.

The $1 million Naveen & Anu Jain Women’s Safety XPRIZE — backed by Seattle-area entrepreneur Naveen Jain and his wife, Anu Jain — focuses on the issues of sexual harassment and violence against women.

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SpaceX Falcon 9 sends telecom satellite into orbit

A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sent the SES-12 telecommunications satellite into orbit tonight in a no-drama night launch. Liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida came at 12:45 a.m. ET May 4 (9:45 p.m. PT May 3). The Airbus-built satellite, which relies on electric propulsion, will boost SES’ video and data services in the Asia-Pacific region and the Middle East.

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One space trio comes home, another gets set to fly

The hatch to the International Space Station’s Rassvet module has a lot in common with a revolving door this week, due to today’s homecoming for three spacefliers and Wednesday’s launch of a fresh space trio. After spending more than five months in orbit, NASA’s Scott Tingle, Japan’s Norishige Kanai and Russia’s Anton Shkaplerov left the station on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft and touched down safely in the steppes of Kazakhstan. “That was a good ride!” Tingle said.

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Washington Hyperloop unveils its next pod racer

Hyperloop pod racer
Courtney Klein, Washington Hyperloop team member Sev Sandomirsky and Marc Lemire take a look at the pod racer during its unveiling at the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

The Washington Hyperloop team is counting on the third time being the charm.

But it’s not just a question of superstitious sayings: For SpaceX’s third university Hyperloop competition, the three dozen student engineers and entrepreneurs on the University of Washington’s pod-racing team have reworked the design for their vehicle from the ground up.

“Everything on this pod has been redesigned, manufactured,” said team co-leader Nicole Lambert, a junior who’s majoring in mechanical engineering. “It’s a completely new pod from the last two years.”

The pod racer had its formal unveiling at UW on June 1. It’ll be put to the ultimate test next month,  when SpaceX hosts a series of practice runs and races inside a mile-long enclosed test track next to the company’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif.

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Experts study ways to patrol the final frontier

X-37B landing
Workers in protective suits check out the Air Force’s X-37B Orbital Test Vehicle after its touchdown at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center Shuttle Landing Facility in May 2017. (U.S. Air Force Photo)

Two months after President Donald Trump said the United States may create a new military branch to focus on national security space activities, Politico is reporting that CNA Corp., a federally funded research and development center, is studying ways to make it so.

But will it be a separate Space Force, like the Air Force? A Space Corps, like the Marine Corps (which is overseen by the Department of the Navy)? Or something else?

George Nield, former head of the Federal Aviation Administration’s commercial space transportation office, leans toward the idea of a hybrid civilian/military Space Guard, analogous to the Coast Guard.

During peacetime, the Space Guard could monitor safety issues related to commercial space activities. But during wartime, it would be integrated under the Department of Defense. Such an arrangement would fill a gap in policing the final frontier, Nield said.

“There is, today, no single department or agency that is charged with holistically managing U.S. interests in space,” he said last weekend at the National Space Society’s International Space Development Conference.

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