A prototype for SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket was destroyed tonight during a pressure test on its pad at the company’s South Texas facility.
Month: February 2020
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk took a rare deep dive into the workings of his company’s Starlink broadband satellite operation in Redmond, Wash., today at the Air Force Association’s Air Warfare Symposium in Florida.
He also put in a pitch for robotic fighter jets … and for Starfleet Academy.
The discussion of Starlink satellite development came during a nearly hourlong fireside chat with Lt. Gen. John Thompson, commander of the Air Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center in Los Angeles.
The program manager for Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner space taxi acknowledges that more rigorous testing might have turned up the software glitch that spoiled plans to rendezvous with the International Space Station during an uncrewed test flight in December.
Hundreds of middle-school and high-school students will gather at Seattle’s Museum of Flight on March 2 to chat with NASA astronaut Jessica Meir on the International Space Station while the world watches on the Web.
Relativity Space, the rocket company that was born in Seattle and headed south to Los Angeles, says it’s moving into a new 120,000-square-foot headquarters and factory in Long Beach, Calif., that will use giant robotic 3-D printers to make launch vehicles.
How do you handicap a unicorn race? When it comes to the race for the GeekWire Awards, the category for Next Tech Titan is wide open.
The five-startup field includes at least three Seattle-area companies with a unicorn-class valuation of $1 billion or more. The other two companies seem well on their way to that level (if they’re not there already).
Microsoft billionaire Charles Simonyi is the only man on Earth to buy a multimillion-dollar ride to orbit not just once, but twice — so it’s worth considering the advice he has for future commercial spacefliers:
“Don’t sweat the small stuff,” he said at a Hacker News Seattle Meetup on Feb. 26. “Don’t worry, be happy. It’s going to work out.”
At least that’s the advice he gave a 9-year-old girl who attended Simonyi’s talk. He noted that the girl, who came to the event with her mother, was about the same age as one of his daughters.
“I’m convinced that people of your age will go to space,” Simonyi told her. “Not that they’ll live there. But I don’t think there’s anybody here who hasn’t flown, right? So it’s going to be somewhat the same.”
SATSOP, Wash. — Amid the ruins of what was meant to be a nuclear power plant, a robot catches a whiff of carbon dioxide — and hundreds of feet away, its master perks up his ears.
“I think I’ve got gas sensing,” Fletcher Talbot, the designated human operator for Team CSIRO Data61 in DARPA’s Subterranean Challenge, told teammates who were bunkered with him in the bowels of the Satsop nuclear reactor site near Elma.
Moments after Talbot fed the coordinates into a computer, a point appeared on the video scoreboard mounted on a wall of the bunker. “Hey, nice,” one member of the team said, and the whole squad broke into a short burst of applause.
Then it was back to the hunt.
The robot’s discovery marked one small step in the Subterranean Challenge, a multimillion-dollar competition aimed at promoting the development of autonomous robots to seek out and identify victims amid the rubble of an urban disaster area, or hazards hidden in the alleys of a hostile cityscape.
Billionaire software executive Charles Simonyi spent tens of millions of dollars on trips to the International Space Station, but something completely different gets him up in the morning nowadays: going to work at Microsoft to create a better digital whiteboard.
The 71-year-old Microsoft veteran confessed his love of whiteboards on Feb. 26 during a Hacker News Seattle Meetup.
“Is it the most important thing in the world? Probably not,” he told the standing-room crowd. “Is it important that we all do the most important thing in the world? I don’t know.”
For the first time, one commercial satellite has docked with another satellite in geosynchronous orbit, demonstrating a technology that will be crucial for on-orbit servicing and reducing space junk.