Month: May 2019

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Kymeta widens its reach with Türksat alliance

Turksat 4B
An artist’s conception shows the Turksat 4B satellite in orbit. (Turksat Illustration)

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Kymeta Corp., the Redmond, Wash.-based satellite antenna venture that’s backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, says it has struck up a partnership with Turkey’s Türksat telecommunications service to expand satellite data connectivity across a wide swath of Europe, the Middle East and Africa.

Today’s announcement came here at the Satellite 2019 conference.

The arrangement will provide Türksat’s customers with new satellite links for voice, data, internet, TV and radio.

“Partnering with Türksat allows Kymeta to provide coverage through their satellite communications with our end-to-end solutions on both land and sea,” Neville Meijers, Kymeta’s chief commercial officer, said in a news release. “We are excited about the possibilities this partnership opens.”

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Overwatch gets a boost for AI-guided imaging

Fire perimeter imaging
Overwatch Imaging’s real-time fire perimeter mapping increases safety. (Overwatch Image)

Overwatch Imaging, an Oregon venture that specializes in airborne imaging systems, says it has won a multimillion-dollar investment from Tenax Aerospace, which focuses on aviation solutions that are specialized to suit the needs of its clients in government and the commercial sector.

The Series A funding deal, announced today, builds on an existing partnership between Overwatch and Tenax, a privately held company that’s based in Mississippi. It marks the first outside investment taken in by Overwatch, which was founded in 2016. Overwatch CEO and co-founder Greg Davis said the size of the investment amounts to millions of dollars, but he declined to be more precise.

The money will go toward expanding Overwatch’s production operations into a larger facility in Hood River, Ore., and accelerating development of the company’s AI software for autonomous imagery collection and analysis.

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NetMotion links up with Skype in stratosphere

Stratospheric payload
The curving Earth and the black sky of space serve as the backdrop for NetMotion Software’s balloon-borne contraption, outfitted with an iPad that maintained a Skype connection at an altitude of 85,000 feet. (NetMotion Software via YouTube)

What’s the best way to show off your mobile networking technology? How about demonstrating that the technology can seamlessly switch between WiFi, cellular and satellite data connectivity while it’s flying on a balloon up to a height of 85,000 feet?

That’s the answer that Seattle-based NetMotion Software came up with when it sought to showcase its mobile video conferencing capabilities.

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Spaceflight makes launch deal with Relativity

Relativity Terran 1 liftoff
An artist’s conception shows Relativity Space’s Terran 1 rocket lifting off from Launch Complex 16 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. (Relativity Space Illustration)

Seattle-based Spaceflight has signed a launch services agreement to put payloads on Relativity Space’s Terran 1 rocket.

Relativity, a startup that got its start in Seattle but is now headquartered in Los Angeles, says the agreement covers the purchase of a first launch that’s scheduled to take place in late 2021. There are also options for additional rideshare launches in the future, the company said in a news release.

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Boeing knew about a 737 MAX software gap

Boeing 737 MAX 9
Boeing’s first 737 MAX 9 jet makes its debut at the company’s Renton plant in 2017. (Boeing Photo)

Boeing says a warning alert system that figures in the investigation of two catastrophic 737 MAX crashes didn’t work the way it was supposed to because of a software flaw that engineers identified a year before the accidents.

The revelation adds a new twist to the debate over the company’s safety practices.

In this case, the debate focuses on a feature known as the “AOA Disagree” alert, which is supposed to light up in the cockpit if there’s a mismatch in data coming from two angle-of-attack sensors on the plane. Investigators suggest that bad sensor data played a key role in October’s Lion Air crash in Indonesia, which killed all 189 people aboard the plane; and March’s Ethiopian Airlines crash, which killed 157.

Within days of the Ethiopian crash, all 737 MAX airplanes were grounded worldwide.

Boeing engineers knew about a problem with the “AOA Disagree” alert well before that. The alert was originally intended to be a standard feature on the 737 MAX and the previous generation of 737 planes, known as the 737 NG (for “Next Generation”). But in a statement issued on May 5, Boeing said that in 2017, several months after deliveries began, engineers became aware that the 737 MAX display system software didn’t meet the original requirements.

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Tesla gets a boost after $2.7 billion offering

Elon Musk and Model Y
Tesla CEO Elon Musk checks out the Model Y during its unveiling in March. (Tesla via YouTube)

Tesla has increased the size of its stock and bond offering to $2.7 billion, and CEO Elon Musk has raised the amount of stock he’d be buying, sparking an additional rise in the controversial electric-car company’s share price.

The company’s revised plan calls for offering almost $850 million in stock and up to $1.84 billion in convertible notes, according to filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Tesla said Musk plans to buy $25 million worth of Tesla shares, which is more than twice what he committed to in previous filings.

Tesla shares closed at $255.03 at the end of the trading day on May 3, representing a 4.5 percent rise for the day. That figure is still well below the 52-week high of $387.46, however.

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Rocket Lab launches three U.S. military satellites

Rocket Lab launch
Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle lifts off from its New Zealand pad. (Rocket Lab via YouTube)

Rocket Lab sent a trio of research satellites for the U.S. military into orbit tonight from a launch pad that’s thousands of miles from America’s shores, in New Zealand.

The Los Angeles-based company’s low-cost Electron rocket lifted off from its seaside launch facility on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula at 6 p.m. May 5 local time (11 p.m. PT May 4). It was Rocket Lab’s second launch of 2019, and its sixth mission overall.

After liftoff, the Electron’s second stage separated from the first-stage booster, and then released its “kick stage” to deploy the satellites in orbit.

“Perfect flight, complete mission success, all payloads deployed!!” Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck tweeted.

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SpaceX launches Dragon to deliver climate probe

SpaceX Falcon 9 launch
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket rises from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida. (NASA Photo)

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket sent a robotic Dragon cargo capsule on the first leg of its trip to the International Space Station, loaded up with more than two tons of supplies — including NASA’s Orbiting Carbon Observatory-3 and scores of other science experiments.

Liftoff from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida came exactly when it had to, at 2:48 a.m. ET May 4 (11:48 p.m. PT May 3).

The previous night’s launch attempt had to be called off due to power problems on SpaceX’s drone landing ship in the Atlantic Ocean. No such problems cropped up tonight, and the first-stage booster made a pinpoint landing at sea.

SpaceX’s cargo-carrying Dragon, meanwhile, was successfully delivered to orbit by the Falcon 9’s second stage.

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Minecraft helps revive lost monuments virtually

Mosul mosque
Islamic State forces blew up the Al-Nuri Mosque in Mosul, Iraq, as they withdrew from the city in 2017. (Photo Courtesy of History Blocks)

Can a video game reclaim centuries’ worth of lost cultural heritage in the Middle East? Microsoft’s Minecraft Education Edition is being used to do just that, in league with UNESCO and schools around the world.

History Blocks takes advantage of the educationally oriented Minecraft platform to build virtual versions of ancient monuments — starting with sites that were destroyed by the Islamic State group in Syria and Iraq, and by the Taliban in Afghanistan.

The project was conceived and developed by Agencia Africa in Brazil, and put to its first test this February at Escola Bosque, a private school in São Paulo.

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Readings hint at black hole eating neutron star

Scientists work in the LIGO Hanford control room. (Caltech / MIT / LIGO Lab Photo / C. Gray)

The science teams for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, or LIGO, and Europe’s Virgo detector today laid out the details of their recent detections, including a crash between neutron stars, three black hole mergers and what may be the first observed collision of a neutron star and a black hole.

Astronomers and their fans have been talking about the detections for days, thanks to the fact that LIGO and Virgo are quickly sharing the raw results from their current observing run. But today’s statements provided the most authoritative views from researchers running the two gravitational-wave detectors.

The April 26 detection of a cosmic collision known as S190426c is the most intriguing event. The subtle signal of a far-off disturbance in the gravitational force was picked up by LIGO’s twin detectors at Hanford in Eastern Washington and at Livingston in Louisiana. The Virgo detector in Italy also detected the signal.

The signal is consistent with what might be expected if a black hole were to swallow a neutron star, roughly 1.2 billion light-years from Earth. Such an event has never been observed before.

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