Month: December 2019

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Blue Origin puts postcards and art on a space ride

Blue Origin New Shepard launch
A drone’s-eye view shows Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship blasting off from its West Texas launch pad. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

Thousands of postcards, an array of science experiments and a couple of art projects took a suborbital ride to space today on Blue Origin’s New Shepard spaceship, during a test flight aimed at blazing a trail for space travelers.

Today’s uncrewed flight was the 12th test mission for the New Shepard program, which is just one of the space initiatives being pursued by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ space venture. It’s been seven months since the previous test flight in May.

Liftoff from Blue Origin’s suborbital launch facility in West Texas came one day after weather concerns forced a postponement. Even today, the launch team had to wait for heavy fog to clear before sending up the 60-foot-tall reusable spacecraft at 11:53 a.m. CT (9:53 a.m. PT).

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Blue Origin counts down to suborbital test flight

Blue Origin landing
Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster lands itself at the end of a test flight in July 2018. (Blue Origin Photo)

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is counting down to today’s uncrewed flight test of its New Shepard suborbital spaceship, with a cargo manifest that should warm kids’ hearts for the holidays.

The company plans to fly thousands of postcards that have been gathered through its educational program, known as the Club for the Future. It’ll also send up two student-built art projects inspired by OK Go’s geeky music videos.

This will be the 12th New Shepard test mission, and it will mark the flight of Blue Origin’s 100th commercial payload to space and back.

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Japan’s NEC to invest in D-Wave quantum venture

D-Wave computer
A team member at D-Wave Systems, based in Burnaby, B.C.,, works on the dilution refrigerator system that cools the processors in the company’s quantum computer. (D-Wave Systems Photo)

Burnaby, B.C.-based D-Wave Systems says it will collaborate with Japan’s NEC Corp. on hybrid services that combine quantum and classical computing, in a deal that includes a $10 million NEC investment in D-Wave.

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Microsoft and Ford use quantum traffic strategy

Mercer Mess in Seattle
Snarled traffic in Seattle’s South Lake Union neighborhood. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

Traffic congestion in Seattle can get so bad that it seems as if you need a next-generation quantum computer to make sense of it — and that’s exactly what Microsoft and Ford are aiming to do.

The quantum frontier hasn’t yet reached the point at which a general-purpose computer can solve the mother of all traffic jams. But the two companies are using quantum-inspired simulations to address the optimization problem that arises when all the drivers are following the same app-generated driving directions.

“While we’re still in the early stages of quantum computing development, encouraging progress has been made that can help us take what we’ve learned in the field and start to apply it to problems we want to solve today, while scaling to more complex problems tomorrow,” Ken Washington, chief technology officer at Ford Motor Company, wrote today in a Medium post.

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Harbour Air’s electric seaplane makes first flight

Harbour Air's electric seaplane
Harbour Air’s all-electric seaplane takes its first test flight. (Harbour Air via Twitter)

The cheers seemed louder than the motor when Harbour Air’s all-electric seaplane made its first flight over the Fraser River today, marking a milestone for zero-emission propulsion.

Vancouver, B.C.-based Harbour Air had the decades-old de Havilland Beaver plane converted to use Redmond, Wash.-based MagniX’s 750-horsepower Magni500 electric motor, and today’s flight from the airline’s terminal south of Vancouver’s airport kicked off what’s expected to be a two-year-long certification process.

Harbour Air and MagniX have been building up to the milestone for months. On Monday, the plane’s floats lifted out of the water briefly for a “skip test,” but today’s straight-line trip up the river and back was considered the first honest-to-goodness flight test. Harbour Air CEO Greg McDougall was at the controls.

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Quantum bits: Intel unveils cryogenic chip

Intel's new quantum chip
Stefano Pellerano, principal engineer at Intel Labs, holds the cryogenic control chip known as Horse Ridge. (Intel Photo / Walden Kirsch)

Microsoft, Amazon and Google aren’t the only companies making headway in quantum computing. Intel is showing off a new type of chip for processing qubits, D-Wave Systems is getting a new CEO, and IBM is gearing up for quantum-safe cryptography.

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Boeing helps Disney deploy Star Wars drones

Boeing’s heavy-duty drones, dressed up as X-Wing fighters, flew in for a cameo at last week’s dedication of Disney’s new “Rise of the Resistance” thrill ride in a Star Wars theme park.

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T-cell films show promise as cancer-fighting therapy

T-cell film
A diagram shows how a thin film of patterned nitinol can be used to hold CAR T cells, with fibrin protein used as a binding agent. (Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Graphic)

Researchers at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center have demonstrated the effectiveness of a new method for getting immune cells to fight solid tumors — by spreading them like jam onto ultra-thin sheets of metal mesh, and then laying the mesh onto the tumors.

So far, the technique for delivering genetically engineered T cells has been used only on mice — but the preclinical study published today in Nature Biomedical Engineering could help set the stage for the mesh to be used on humans as well.

“Cell therapies to fight cancer have had great success in blood cancers, but haven’t worked well with solid tumors,” senior study author Matthias Stephan, a faculty member in the Fred Hutch Clinical Research Division, explained in a news release.

“Our findings take a significant step toward making cell therapies effective against solid tumors by showing that a thin metal mesh loaded with T cells engineered to fight ovarian cancer cleared tumors in 70% of the treated mice,” he said.

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Mega-constellations spark fears about space traffic

Starlink streaks
An image of the NGC 5353/4 galaxy group, made with a telescope at Arizona’s Lowell Observatory on May 25, shows the trails of reflected light left by SpaceX’s freshly launched Starlink satellites as they pass through the telescope’s field of view. The brightness diminishes once the satellites reach their intended altitude. (Lowell Observatory Photo via IAU / Victoria Girgis)

The retired commander of the U.S. Strategic Command says the tens of thousands of satellites that SpaceX, OneWeb and Amazon are planning to put into orbit over the next few years will require a new automated system for space traffic management — and perhaps new satellite hardware requirements as well.

Retired Gen. Kevin Chilton laid out his ideas for dealing with potentially catastrophic orbital traffic jams at the University of Washington on Friday, during the inaugural symposium presented by UW’s Space Policy and Research Center.

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Rocket Lab launches shooting-star satellite

Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket lifted off from its New Zealand launch pad today, sending a shooting-star satellite and six other miniaturized satellites into orbit.

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