Month: November 2018

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Sales campaign lifts off for Plimp hybrid airship

Plimp hybrid airship
Egan Airships has tested a drone-sized prototype of its Plimp hybrid airship. (Egan Airships Photo)

What do you get when you cross an airship and an airplane? If you’re willing to spend more than $4 million, you could get the Plimp hybrid aircraft that’s envisioned by Seattle-based Egan Airships.

The patented concept calls for mounting a helium-filled balloon on an airframe that has wings equipped with adjustable propellers. The result is a not-quite-lighter-than-air vehicle that rises like the Goodyear Blimp but can cruise like an airplane at speeds of more than 80 mph.

“This is a brand new approach. As you see it fly, what was not obvious becomes intuitive,” said the company’s co-founder and president, James Egan, a Seattle attorney who was recently in the news in connection with a lawsuit challenging the Seattle City Council’s repeal of a head-tax measure.

After years of work on the design and prototype testing, Egan is trying to drum up enough interest among potential buyers to move ahead with the years-long process of getting the plane built and certified.

It’s an unorthodox sales pitch: If customers are willing to pay $4 million plus overages, in installments spread out over the course of four years, they’ll get a Plimp Model J aircraft that’s capable of carrying either a ton of payload in cargo mode, or two pilots and eight travelers in passenger mode.

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Boeing issues bulletin in wake of 737 MAX crash

Lion Air 737 MAX
An artist’s conception shows the Boeing 737 MAX 8 jet. (Boeing Illustration)

Boeing says it has issued an operations manual bulletin to address concerns about erroneous readings from a sensor that has been implicated in last week’s fatal crash of a Lion Air 737 MAX 8.

The jet dove into the Java Sea at high speed on Oct. 29, minutes after its takeoff from Jakarta in Indonesia. All 189 people aboard the plane were killed. Safety investigators said that pilots on the plane were dealing with inaccurate airspeed readings and asked to return to the airport just before the crash.

Boeing’s newly issued bulletin focuses on the 737 MAX’s angle-of-attack sensors, or AOA sensors, which are supposed to provide data about the angle at which wind is passing over the airplane’s wings. Boeing said the action was taken after the Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee indicated that the Lion Air jet experienced erroneous input from one of those sensors.

In a statement released late Nov. 6, Boeing said the bulletin directs operators to “existing flight crew procedures to address circumstances where there is erroneous input from an AOA sensor.”

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Asteroid probe sees a diamond in the sky

Two years after its launch, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft is closing in on a near-Earth asteroid named Bennu and sending back pictures that provide one gem of a 360-degree view.

On Nov. 2, OSIRIS-REx captured imagery over the course of a four-hour, 11-minute period to take in a full rotation of the diamond-shaped space rock from a distance of about 122 miles.

The view is whetting astronomers’ appetite for even closer looks at Bennu, which is currently about 80 million miles from Earth. Over the next few weeks, OSIRIS-REx will carefully survey the quarter-mile-wide asteroid’s terrain as it edges closer. During December, it’ll execute three flybys, coming within just a few miles of the surface. And early next year, it’ll settle into a close-in orbit and conduct a months-long survey.

All that’s just a buildup for the main event: the probe’s descent to the surface in mid-2020 for the collection of samples that will be packed up for delivery to Earth in 2023.

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Was interstellar object an alien sail? Not so fast

'Oumuamua
An artist’s conception shows what the interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua might look like. (ESO Illustration / M. Kornmesser)

‘Oumuamua is long gone from the inner solar system, but the mystery surrounding the interstellar interloper has been rekindled, thanks to a research paper written by two Harvard astronomers.

The paper, suggesting that the cigar-shaped object could have been an alien light sail, sparked headlines as well as skepticism from colleagues claiming that the astronomers were jumping to conclusions.

Among the skeptics is Doug Vakoch, who heads up METI, a San Francisco-based organization devoted to the study of alien contact. (The acronym stands for “Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”)

“I’d love to think that ‘Oumuamua is an extraterrestrial spacecraft that whipped past Earth, propelled by a stream of photons hitting its solar sail. But we need to be wary of conjuring up an explanation that fits the data gathered at one point in time, when we have no opportunity for follow-up observations,” Vakoch told me in an email.

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Russian computer crash in space? Nyet problem!

Space station telemetry
A black-and-white view of the International Space Station is overlaid with telemetry data in an image from an approaching Soyuz craft in 2014. (NASA TV)

One of the three computers on the Russian side of the International Space Station has crashed, but orbital operations are unaffected because the two other systems are in working order, Russia’s space agency reported today.

“To restore the computer to work, it is necessary to restart it,” Roscosmos said in a status report. That will happen on Nov. 8.

Roscosmos said the two other computer systems are sufficient for safe operation of the station indefinitely, but it wants the third one back online “to ensure the reliability” of next week’s scheduled docking with an uncrewed Russian Progress cargo spacecraft.

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Stratolaunch fires up its rocket engine preburner

Preburner test firing
A full-scale fuel preburner for Stratolaunch’s PGA rocket engine undergoes a test firing at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. (Stratolaunch Photo)

Stratolaunch Systems, the space venture founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, says it has successfully completed the first hot-fire test of a key component for its hydrogen-fueled PGA rocket engine.

The full-scale hydrogen preburner was fired up last Friday at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, less than a year after design work started.

“This is the first step in proving the performance and highly efficient design of the PGA engine. The hot-fire test is an incredible milestone for both the propulsion team and Stratolaunch,” Jeff Thornburg, vice president of propulsion at Stratolaunch, said today in a news release.

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Battleground shifts in fight over fake news

National Guard at work
Staff Sgt. Wiggin Bernadotte, a cyber warfare operator in the Washington Air National Guard’s 262nd Cyberspace Operations Squadron, works with Capt. Benjamin Kolar, a cyberspace operations officer in the 262nd, on an electrical substation simulator. The exercise is part of the Air National Guard’s effort to help secure and protect voting systems on Election Day. (JBLM / DVIDS / DOD Photo / Paul Rider)

Facebook and Twitter have been cracking down on political disinformation during the current election cycle, but there are signs that the fight against fake news has spread to new battlefields, ranging from LinkedIn to text messages.

In Washington state, the Air National Guard has called out its cyberspace operations unit to protect the voting system. And the battle won’t end when the votes are tallied.

“Be aware of the ‘voter fraud’ debate that will inevitably follow the election — no matter the results,” University of Washington information scientist Jevin West, one of the instructors for a “Calling B.S.” class that went viral, told GeekWire in an Election Day email.

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3-D printer and recycler is set for space delivery

Refabricator testing
Payload development engineer Marko Baricevic of Tethers Unlimited Inc. conducts flight certification tests at Marshall Space Flight Center. (NASA Photo / Emmett Givens)

There’s nothing new about having a 3-D printer in space, but how about a 3-D printer that also recycles plastic to turn old stuff into new? Just such a gizmo is due to be delivered to the International Space Station next week.

Bothell, Wash.-based Tethers Unlimited built the device, which is about the size of a mini fridge and is known as the Refabricator, in cooperation with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. After months of testing, the Refabricator is on the payload manifest for Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo resupply flight, scheduled for liftoff from Virginia’s Wallops Flight Facility on Nov. 15.

If all proceeds according to schedule, the uncrewed Cygnus craft should arrive at the station a couple of days after launch. Once the cargo is unloaded, the Refabricator will be installed and put through a series of test prints.

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HyperSciences blasts past $3M in funding campaign

HyperSciences test
HyperSciences CEO Mark Russell, at right, grins for the camera while a teammate prepares for a projectile test firing. (HyperSciences Photo)

HyperSciences’ hypersonic blaster technology can be used to send projectiles up into the air, or down into rock — either way, the Spokane, Wash.-based startup says things are looking up.

The company’s unorthodox SeedInvest securities offering has raised more than $3 million so far. “We are actually on our way toward the full $10 million,” HyperScience CEO and founder Mark Russell told GeekWire. The SeedInvest effort builds on $3 million in previous investments, including support from the Washington Research Foundation, Kick-Start II, Cowles Company and The Toolbox.

Thanks to the fresh funding, about 10 employees are being added in Spokane as well as in Austin, Texas.

Why set up an HQ2 in Austin? It’s near the site where HyperSciences is getting ready for a rock-blasting demonstration of its HyperDrill device. “It looks like a reasonable site for us,” said Russell, who’s a veteran of the Seattle startup scene as well as Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

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SpaceShipOne turns blue to salute Paul Allen

SpaceShipOne
The SpaceShipOne rocket plane is illuminated in blue light at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The Saturday night lighting served as a tribute to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who backed the prize-winning SpaceShipOne project. (NASM / Steven VanRoekel Photo)

It wasn’t just Seattle’s skyline that turned blue on the night of Nov. 3: Back east in the nation’s capital, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum cast a blue spotlight on the history-making SpaceShipOne rocket plane in honor of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who provided the money that helped it fly to space.

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