Month: August 2019

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Boeing adds to its investment in Morf3D venture

Ivan Madera
Morf3D CEO Ivan Madera says the company’s vision of becoming a world-class leader in metals additive manufacturing for the aerospace industry is “truly taking form.” (Morf3D Photo via PRNewswire)

Boeing’s venture capital arm has added to its investment in Morf3D, a California startup that focuses of aerospace applications for 3-D printing.

The fresh investment, announced today, follows a Series A investment round that Boeing HorizonX Ventures co-led back in April 2018. The precise amount of the investment hasn’t been released, either for last year’s round or for the newly reported round. However, HorizonX’s investments are typically in the range of seven figures or the low eight figures.

Since its founding in 2015, Morf3D has taken on 3-D printing projects for Boeing as well as Honeywell, Collins and other aerospace companies. Its work for Boeing has focused on aluminum and titanium components for satellites and helicopters.

In today’s news release, Morf3D said the fresh funding follows a significant increase in customer demand.

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Trump kicks off Space Command; Space Force next?

Space Command ceremony
The official flag of the newly revived U.S. Space Command is unfurled at a White House Rose Garden ceremony, with Air Force Gen. Jay Raymond, President Donald Trump, Vice President Mike Pence and Defense Secretary Mark Esper looking on. (White House Photo / Tia Dufour)

President Donald Trump today hailed the revival of the U.S. Space Command to protect America’s technological assets on the final frontier, and put in another pitch for the establishment of a U.S. Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces.

“This is a landmark day — one that recognizes the centrality of space to America’s national security and defense,” the president said.

“As the newest combatant command, SPACECOM will defend America’s vital interests in space — the next warfighting domain. And I think that’s pretty obvious to everybody. It’s all about space,” Trump declared during a White House Rose Garden ceremony that was also attended by Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary Mark Esper and other officials.

“This is a landmark day — one that recognizes the centrality of space to America’s national security and defense,” the president said.

After Trump spoke, Esper signed the documents establishing the Space Command.

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Billionaires Jack Ma and Elon Musk debate AI

Jack Ma and Elon Musk
Jack Ma and Elon Musk discuss the peril and promise of artificial intelligence at a Shanghai AI conference. (Xinhua via YouTube)

n the debate over artificial intelligence, whose side is Elon Musk on?

Musk, who’s in charge of SpaceX, Tesla and the Neuralink brain interface venture, sized up the odds with AliBaba founder Jack Ma today during a widely watched one-on-one session at the World Artificial Intelligence Conference in Shanghai.

The way Musk sees it, the prospects aren’t great for humans if future AI agents decide to go rogue. That’s despite pronouncements from AI researchers who say machines won’t match humans anytime soon when it comes to general intelligence, as opposed to specialized AI applications such as playing chess or Go.

“The biggest mistake I see artificial intelligence researchers making is assuming that they’re intelligent,” Musk said. “Yeah, they’re not, compared to AI. And so a lot of them cannot imagine something smarter than themselves.”

Musk said future AI agents will be “vastly smarter” than humans. “So what do you do with a situation like that?” he asked. “I’m not sure. I hope they’re nice.”

For his part, Ma saw more promise than peril in AI.

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Jeff Bezos touts space postcard campaign for kids

Jeff Bezos and kids
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, the founder of Blue Origin, checks out some of the postcards submitted for spaceflight as part of his nonprofit Club for the Future campaign. (Jeff Bezos via Twitter)

When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled a mockup of Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander in May, he also unveiled a more down-to-earth enterprise: the Club for the Future, a nonprofit effort aimed at promoting science education through fun space-oriented projects.

Its first project? A campaign to solicit postcards that would be flown into space aboard Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket, and then sent back to the kids who submitted them.

Today in a tweet, Bezos says thousands have responded so far.

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SpaceX sweetens the deal for ride-along satellites

SpaceX Falcon launch
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket executes a 64-satellite launch for Seattle-based Spaceflight in December 2018. Now SpaceX is planning rideshare missions without Spaceflight’s involvement. (SpaceX Photo)

Three weeks after announcing that it’s getting into the rideshare market for launching small satellites, SpaceX slashed its prices by more than half – and said it’ll be offering rideshare opportunities on its Starlink broadband satellite launches as often as once a month.

Today’s moves suggest that SpaceX is amping up its effort to get in on the small-satellite launch market, using a strategy pioneered by Seattle-based Spaceflight.

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Hey, kids! Name NASA’s 2020 Mars rover

Mars 2020 rover
This artist’s concept depicts NASA’s Mars 2020 rover on the surface of Mars. (NASA / JPL-Caltech)

NASA says a student will provide the official name for its 2020 Mars rover, continuing a tradition that began 16 years ago.

The space agency will kick off its “Name the Rover” contest on Sept. 3, just as most elementary schools and high schools are getting back into session.

One grand prize winner will name the rover and win an invitation to the spacecraft’s launch next July from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida.

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It’s a double whammy of gravitational waves!

Image: Black hole merger
A computer simulation shows two black holes shortly before they merge into one. (Credit: SXS)

Two detections of gravitational waves, separated by a mere 21 minutes, set off a flurry of excitement among astronomers today.

Was it a binary black-hole merger? A double observation of a single black-hole merger, created by gravitational lensing effects? A glitch affecting the analytical systems at the world’s gravitational-wave detectors? Or merely a coincidence of cosmic proportions?

“This is a genuine ‘Uh, wait, what?’ We’ve never seen that before…….’ moment in gravitational wave astronomy,” Robert Rutledge, a physicist at McGill University, tweeted today. “If you’d like to see how double-checks and confirmations and conclusions occur – pay attention, in real time. Happening now.”

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SpaceX’s Starhopper takes one giant leap

Starhopper fires engine
SpaceX’s Starhopper fires its methane-fueled Raptor engine during a test hop. (Elon Musk via Twitter)

A prototype rocket that looks more like a water tower took a 500-foot-high hop today in Texas, blazing a methane-fueled trail for a spaceship that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk plans to send to the moon and Mars within a few years.

SpaceX’s Starhopper served as a test vehicle for Musk’s Starship launch system – which would consist of a Super Heavy booster with 35 next-generation Raptor engines, plus a Starship craft with six Raptors.

Starship could be used to loft people, cargo or fuel out of Earth orbit and onward to deep space. “One day Starship will land on the rusty sands of Mars,” Musk wrote in a tweet after today’s test.

If Musk’s vision comes to fruition on his current timetable, Starship’s first Mars landing could happen in the mid-2020s. But he had a less ambitious goal for the Starhopper rocket that was tested today.

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Bell shows off its autonomous delivery drone

Bell drone
Bell’s flight team checks out the APT 70 aircraft after an autonomous test flight. (Bell via YouTube)

When it comes to self-flying drones capable of delivering packages, Amazon isn’t the only game in town.

Today Bell reported that it’s begun putting its Autonomous Pod Transport 70, or APT 70, through test flights at a facility near its headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas. The tests are being conducted under an experimental type certificate through the remainder of the year, Bell said in a news release.

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Astranis reserves a satellite ride with SpaceX

Astranis satellite
An artist’s conception shows an Astranis satellite in geostationary orbit. (Astranis Illustration)

A California-based startup called Astranis Space Technologies has signed a deal with SpaceX for the launch of its first geostationary satellite, which is due to widen Alaska’s access to broadband internet service in 2021.

The deal calls for SpaceX to launch Astranis’ microsatellite as a secondary payload on a Falcon 9 rocket, during a launch window beginning in the last quarter of 2020, CEO and co-founder John Gedmark announced today in a Medium post. SpaceX confirmed the deal in an email pointing to the post.

“We’re excited about what this means for Alaska, one of the most rugged states in America, and by extension, one of the hardest to serve with broadband internet,” Gedmark said.

Satellite broadband internet promises to connect billions of people in the world who don’t currently have easy, cheap access to global networks.

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