Month: November 2018

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Rocket Lab reports $140M in fresh funding

Rocket Lab factory
Electron rockets are made at Rocket Lab’s production facility in New Zealand. (Rocket Lab Photo)

Fresh on the heels of a successful satellite launch, Rocket Lab today announced that it has received $140 million in new investment.

Rocket Lab said the Series E financing round was led by Future Fund and closed last month, well in advance of last weekend’s “It’s Business Time” mission. The Electron rocket launch from the California-based startup’s pad on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula put six satellites in orbit and tested an experimental drag sail for small satellites.

The new round brings Rocket Lab’s total funding to $288 million and puts the company’s valuation well past a billion dollars, extending its status as a startup “unicorn.”

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SpaceX ties its record for most launches in a year

SpaceX Falcon 9 launch
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lifts off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center, sending the Es’hail-2 satellite into space. (SpaceX via YouTube)

SpaceX sent the Es’hail-2 telecommunications satellite into orbit today, then brought the Falcon 9 rocket’s first-stage booster back down for an at-sea landing.

The Falcon 9 lifted off from Launch Complex 39A at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center after a trouble-free countdown. The only break from SpaceX’s recent routine was the fact that the launch came during daylight hours, at 3:46 p.m. ET (12:46 p.m. PT).

Minutes after launch, the Falcon 9’s second stage separated from the first stage and continued the push to geostationary transfer orbit. That freed up the first stage to go through an autonomous sequence of commands and touch down on SpaceX’s drone ship, “Of Course I Still Love You,” which was standing by hundreds of miles from shore in the Atlantic Ocean. This was the second go-round for that particular first stage. The first go-round came in July when the booster helped launch the Telstar 19 Vantage satellite and came back down for recovery and refurbishment.

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FCC OKs plan for 7,500 SpaceX satellites

Image: Satellite web
An artist’s conception shows a constellation of satellites in orbit. (Credit: OneWeb)

The Federal Communications Commission today gave the go-ahead for SpaceX to operate a constellation of more than 7,500 broadband access satellites in very low Earth orbit — and also gave the go-ahead for other satellite constellations chasing similar markets.

SpaceX’s plan to put 7,518 V-band satellites in 215-mile-high (345.6-kilometer-high) orbits meshes with a complementary plan to put more than 4,400 satellites in higher orbits for Ku- and Ka-band service. Last week, SpaceX filed an amended application seeking to put 1,584 of those satellites into 342-mile orbits instead of the originally specified 715-mile orbits.

The different orbital altitudes are meant to provide a mix of wide-angle and tightly focused transmission beams for global broadband access. SpaceX could start offering satellite internet services as soon as 2020, if all goes according to plan and the company sticks to its launch schedule.

SpaceX’s facility in Redmond, Wash., has the lead role in satellite development for the Starlink constellation. The first Starlink prototypes were launched in February.

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Solar-powered Odysseus drone will fly high in 2019

Odysseus illustration
An artist’s conception shows the Odysseus aircraft in flight. (Aurora Flight Sciences Illustration)

Aurora Flight Sciences, a pioneer in experimental flying vehicles that became a Boeing subsidiary last year, says its solar-powered, high-altitude, long-endurance Odysseus drone will take on its first flight in the spring of 2019.

Odysseus has been years in the making, part of an effort that dates back to the Daedalus Project in the 1980s, before Aurora was founded. MIT’s human-powered Daedalus plane set records in 1988 with a 72-mile flight over the Aegean Sea from Crete to Santorini. One of the leaders of that project was John Langford, who went on to become Aurora’s president and CEO.

“Aurora was founded by the idea that technology and innovation can provide powerful solutions to tough problems that affect all of humankind,” Langford said today in a news release. “Odysseus was an idea born out of Daedalus that is now a real solution to advancing the important research around climate change and other atmospheric chemistry problems.”

Aviation Week reported that Odysseus’ first flight has been scheduled to take place in Puerto Rico on April 23, 2019, the anniversary of Daedalus’ Aegean flight. The first battery-powered test craft is currently undergoing ground testing, and two more solar-powered aircraft are in the works, according to Aviation Week.

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Whew! Chukchi Sea polar bears are in good shape

Polar Bears
An adult female polar bear and a cub stroll on Wrangel Island in the fall of 2017. Hundreds of Chukchi Sea polar bears spend the summer months on the island. (University of Washington Photo / Eric Regehr)

The first census of polar bears living around the Chukchi Sea, straddling Alaska and eastern Siberia, suggests that the population has been stable and healthy over the past decade.

That comes as a welcome contrast to the problems facing polar bears in other Arctic regions as their sea-ice habitat shrinks. The loss of  sea ice is an issue for the Chukchi Sea as well, but the nearly 3,000 bears in that region don’t seem to be feeling the strain as much.

“Despite having about one month less time on preferred sea-ice habitats to hunt compared with 25 years ago, we found that the Chukchi Sea subpopulation was doing well from 2008 to 2016,” Eric Regehr, a biologist at the University of Washington’s Polar Science Center, said today in a news release.

Regehr is the principal author of a study about the census published in the open-access journal Scientific Reports. The census, conducted by researchers from UW and federal agencies, chronicles a decade’s worth of observations — and delves into why the Chukchi Sea bears seem to be faring better than their cousins elsewhere.

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Scientists report super-Earth at Barnard’s Star

Barnard's Star b
An artist’s conception shows what the surface of the reported planet known as Barnard’s Star b might look like. (ESO Illustration / M. Kornmesser)

The astronomical team that found the nearest exoplanet at Proxima Centauri has done it again with the reported detection of a super-Earth orbiting Barnard’s Star, the second-closest star system to our own.

The discoverers acknowledge, however, that they’re not completely sure yet.

“After a very careful analysis, we are 99 percent confident that the planet is there,” Spanish astronomer Ignasi Ribas, lead author of a study about the detection published today by the journal Nature, said in a news release. “However, we’ll continue to observe this fast-moving star to exclude possible, but improbable, natural variations of the stellar brightness which could masquerade as a planet.”

Assuming it exists, Barnard’s Star b would be at least 3.2 times as massive as Earth, tracing a 233-Earth-day orbit. It would be as close to its parent star as Mercury is to our own sun — but because Barnard’s Star is a dim red dwarf, surface conditions would be far too chilly for life as we know it. The surface temperature would be about 275 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (-170 degrees Celsius).

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Virgin Orbit gives its flying launch pad a trial run

Virgin Orbit's Cosmic Girl
Virgin Orbit’s Cosmic Girl carrier airplane taxis down a runway at Victorville Airport in California with a LauncherOne rocket slung under one of its wings. (Virgin Orbit via Twitter)

British billionaire Richard Branson’s Virgin Orbit space venture notched another milestone over the Veterans Day weekend: the first high-speed taxi test of its modified Boeing 747 mothership with a LauncherOne rocket tucked beneath its wing.

In a tweet posted today, Virgin Orbit said the Nov. 11 ground test revved up the plane, nicknamed Cosmic Girl, to a speed beyond 110 knots (125 mph) on a runway in Victorville, Calif. That’s fast enough to simulate an aborted takeoff.

“We also used the day as an opportunity to load real flight software onto LauncherOne for the first time,” the company said.

Branson signaled his approval in a follow-up tweet. “Congratulations to all the team on more exciting progress,” he wrote.

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How Blue Origin’s HQs blazed a trail for Amazon

Jeff Bezos and New Glenn
Jeff Bezos shows off the concept for the New Glenn orbital rocket during a Florida news conference in 2015. (Blue Origin Photo)

The process that Amazon went through to choose New York, Northern Virginia and Nashville as key sites for expansion isn’t the first HQ2 exercise for CEO Jeff Bezos: You could argue that the pattern was set when Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture decided where it’d manufacture and launch its New Glenn rocket.

Blue Origin’s selection process produced far less hype than the yearlong contest that Amazon conducted, and far fewer jobs were at stake. But like the HQ2/3/4 arrangement announced today, the exercise ended up producing multiple winners — as well as disappointed suitors.

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What did pilots know about 737 MAX risk?

Maria Bartiromo and Dennis Muilenburg
Fox Business Network’s Maria Bartiromo asks Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg about the Lion Air 737 MAX crash. (Fox Business Network)

What did 737 MAX pilots know, and when did they know it? That’s become a subject of debate in the wake of last month’s fatal Lion Air crash in Indonesia and the potential role played by an automatic control system that Boeing added to new-model 737s.

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Jeff Bezos unveils Amazon’s flying tribute to vets

Valor unveiled
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, right, pulls the wraps off Prime Air’s newest 767 freighter, christened Valor in honor of veterans. He is joined by Ardine Williams, left, VP of Worldwide People Operations, and Sarah Rhoads, director of Amazon Air. (Amazon Photo / Dan Krauss)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos is big on veterans, and in honor of Veterans Day, he presided over the vet-friendly christening of Valor, Amazon Air’s 40th Boeing 767 freighter.

In a tweet, Bezos said the name pays tribute to “the thousands of Amazonian veterans and military spouses delivering for our customers every day.”

A cheering crowd, including more than 100 Amazon veterans and military spouses, was on hand for today’s ceremony at Long Beach Airport in California. After an appropriate drum roll, Bezos pulled down a banner that was slung over the plane’s nose, revealing the plane’s name.

“Introducing Valor!” Bezos said. Amazon said the name was chosen by Warriors@Amazon, an employee affinity group for veterans.

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