Month: November 2019

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Blue Origin expands at its HQ and in L.A.

Blue Origin HQ
A monolith adorned with Blue Origin’s feather logo stands at the construction site for a 400,000-square-foot office and warehouse-style facility in Kent, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

KENT, Wash. — Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is rapidly expanding on several fronts, ranging from its headquarters facility south of Seattle to a new beachhead in the Los Angeles area — within the orbit of its main competitor, Elon Musk’s SpaceX.

Just three and a half years ago, Blue Origin’s workforce amounted to 600 employees, and even then, Bezos said his company’s 300,000-square-foot office and production facility in Kent was “busting out of the seams.”

Now the employee count is at around 2,500, heading toward 3,500 in the next year. That’s according to a report from a Bangkok space conference quoting Clay Mowry, Blue Origin’s vice president for global sales, marketing and customer experience.

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Books let you explore parallel universes in print

Parallel universes
One hypothesis for the nature of the cosmos visualizes parallel universes as huge membranes, or branes, that are stacked alongside each other in extradimensional space like books in a cosmic bookcase. A “big bang” results when two branes touch. (NASA Illustration / Dana Berry)

Parallel universes are big in science fiction, popping up in shows ranging from the “Terminator” movies to “The Man in the High Castle” to “Hot Tub Time Machine.” And strangely enough, those fictional tales have their parallels this year in a pair of nonfiction books about parallel universes.

We’re leading off our annual holiday roundup of science books with “The Number of the Heavens” and “Something Deeply Hidden,” and continuing the theme with six other thought-provoking picks about other realities, fictional and factual. If that’s not enough, you’ll also find links to geeky book recommendations from outside sources, plus our own top picks from previous years.

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NASA’s in the market for quick space taxi rides

Starliner and space station
An artist’s conception shows a Boeing Starliner space taxi approaching the International Space Station. (Boeing Illustration)

NASA already has committed billions of dollars to procuring regularly scheduled rides to and from the International Space Station from commercial space taxi operators — but now it says it’s interested in buying short-term trips as well.

The proposed arrangement, detailed on Nov. 26, is aimed at giving a boost to the commercialization of space operations in low Earth orbit, as well as to NASA’s drive to send astronauts to the moon by 2024. It also makes the line dividing government-funded and privately funded space efforts even fuzzier.

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Mixed reality takes you on an expedition to Titan

Expedition Titan
GeekWire’s Alan Boyle (foreground) and University of Washington planetary scientist Baptiste Journaux take a thrill ride through an ice volcano, courtesy of Expedition Titan, a mixed-reality experience at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

It’s doubtful anyone alive today will get to ride through the ice volcanoes of Saturn’s largest moon — but you can do the next best thing at Seattle’s Pacific Science Center, thanks to a mixed-reality experience called Expedition Titan.

The walk-through production is the latest showcase for Hyperspace XR, a startup-in-residence that’s pioneering the frontiers of mixed reality at the science center.

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Cloud-based vertical farming at the supermarket

Infarm kiosk
Lelaina Beyer, one of Infarm’s urban farmers in the Seattle area, harvests greens at the kiosk-sized farm in the produce section of the Kirkland Urban QFC store. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

KIRKLAND, Wash. — The Seattle area offers a rich smorgasbord of geeky tech-as-a-service offerings — ranging from software as a service, to gaming as a service, to pizza as a service.

Now you can add “farming as a service” to the list.

That’s what Infarm is going for, with hydroponic plant-growth cabinets that shrink the acreage needed to grow fresh greens to fit in a grocery-store aisle. The startup, based in Berlin, Germany, has just opened up its first North American “farms” inside a pair of QFC supermarkets east of Seattle, at Bellevue Village and here at Kirkland’s Urban Plaza.

“It’s a merger of agriculture and technology,” Emmanuel Evita, Infarm’s global communications director, told me during today’s “first harvest” in Kirkland.

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TerraPower branches out into medical isotopes

Nuclear processing
A team at Oak Ridge National Laboratory opens a uranium-233 canister inside a glovebox. (ORNL Photo)

TerraPower, the nuclear research venture founded by Bill Gates, is joining with Isotek Systems and the U.S. Department of Energy in a public-private partnership aimed at turning what otherwise would be nuclear waste into radiation doses for cancer treatment.

The partnership matches TerraPower’s demand for radioisotopes with the federal government’s need to dispose of nuclear material that’s been stored for decades at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee.

Isotek, a DOE contractor that’s responsible for overseeing Oak Ridge’s inventory of uranium-233, will use the proceeds from the sale of extracted thorium-229 to accelerate the schedule for disposal of the Cold War stockpile. In a news release, the Department of Energy said the deal will save $90 million in taxpayer dollars.

TerraPower will use the thorium that it purchases from Isotek to further medical applications of radioisotope technologies.

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Echodyne helps DARPA with drone tracking test

Aerial Dragnet
DARPA’s Aerial Dragnet program tests techniques for tracking drone flights over urban terrain. (DARPA Illustration)

When the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency tested an “Aerial Dragnet” system for tracking drones over urban terrain last month, Echodyne lent a helping hand.

Echodyne — a Kirkland, Wash.-based startup backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates — provided the compact radar systems for DARPA’s tests during the week of Oct. 23 in the San Diego area, in conjunction with the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory.

The Aerial Dragnet exercise involved putting Echodyne’s EchoGuard and EchoFlight flat-panel radar systems on two large tethered aerostat balloons that flew as high as 400 feet, as well as on rooftops and towers around San Diego and National City.

DARPA then sent up several types of drones for the systems to detect and track. A key challenge involved being able to distinguish the drones from other objects in the background, including ground vehicles and birds.

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Boeing gives 737 MAX 10 jet a low-key rollout

737 MAX 10 rollout
Employees gather around Boeing’s first 737 MAX 10 jet after its rollout in Renton, Wash. (Boeing Photo)

Hundreds of Boeing employees turned out today for the official rollout of the company’s biggest 737 MAX — a traditional rite in the birth of an airplane that was more muted this time, due to the eight-month-long grounding of all 737 MAX jets.

The 737 MAX 10 is a stretch version of the MAX 9, capable of accommodating 10 more seats (230 vs. 220 maximum) with slightly less maximum range (3,800 vs. 4,080 miles with an auxiliary tank). The smaller MAX 7 and MAX 8 fill out the product line.

Boeing has more than 550 orders and commitments for the MAX 10 from more than 20 customers around the globe. But the whole 737 MAX family is still in limbo because of the grounding that followed two catastrophically fatal accidents last year in October and this year in March.

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Tesla’s Cybertruck rollout shatters expectations

Elon Musk at Cybertruck rollout
Tesla CEO Elon Musk introduces the Cybertruck, which sported cracked windows after a demonstration of the truck’s toughness. “Don’t mind the glass,” Musk said. (Tesla via YouTube)

Amid clouds of smoke and “Blade Runner” hype, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled a hard-edged, all-electric pickup truck that will cost as little as $39,900 and is due to hit the market by as early as 2021.

And then, with hundreds of fans cheering him on, Musk brought out one more thing during his laser-show presentation at Tesla’s design center in Los Angeles: an all-electric, all-terrain vehicle that rolled right into the Cybertruck’s bed for recharging from an onboard outlet.

There’s no sign that the ATV is for sale … yet … but Tesla is already taking refundable $100 deposits for the Cybertruck.

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Starliner space taxi meets up with its rocket

Starliner at launch complex
Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner space taxi is transported out to United Launch Alliance’s vertical integration facility in Florida, where an Atlas 5 rocket is waiting. (ULA Photo)

Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner space taxi was moved to its Florida launch complex and set atop its United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket today in preparation for next month’s uncrewed test mission to the International Space Station.

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