Jeff Hein works in his art studio. (Uplift Aerospace Photo)
Uplift Aerospace and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket venture plan to put paintings where virtually no art has gone before: on the side of a rocket ship.
The “canvases” for these works are exterior panels that will be mounted on Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard spaceship, sent to the space frontier during an uncrewed test flight, then returned to Earth for delivery to the paintings’ purchasers.
Two Utah artists known for their realist and surrealist paintings — Jeff Hein and Mark R. Pugh — will come up with creations that are meant to weather the aerodynamically challenging ascent and descent through the atmosphere. Uplift Aerospace has conducted tests to ensure that the paint’s adhesion, integrity and relative coloration will endure the rigors of space travel. But the tests also suggest that the trip will alter the art. And that’s OK.
“The Mona Lisa would not move today’s viewer quite so poignantly without the telltale signs of its now centuries-old story and its emergence from the brush of a Renaissance master,” Dakota Bradshaw, a museum specialist who’s associated with the project, said in a news release. “Journey and story will also leave a unique and indelible mark on Uplift Aerospace’s first artwork to return from space travel.”
The network will be capable of sending targeting data directly from a remote-sensing satellite in space to a weapons platform on the ground, making use of laser communications between satellites in low Earth orbit. By the late 2020s, the system is expected to play a key role in countering emerging threats such as hypersonic attack vehicles.
“This is a very important step toward building the National Defense Space Architecture. It represents one of the Space Development Agency’s first major contract activities, and it might also highlight the importance of SDA — its ability to quickly obligate appropriate funds and execute toward their mission,” Mark Lewis, acting deputy under secretary of defense for research and engineering, told reporters.
“As the Netflix ‘Space Force’ series likes to say, space is hard,” he said. “Space is hard, but sometimes we make it harder than it has to be. The SDA is showing us that sometimes we don’t need to make it that hard.”
The two Colorado-based companies receiving awards today will build 10 satellites each for the first phase of the project, known as Tranche 0. Lockheed Martin is due to receive $187,542,641 under the terms of a firm, fixed-price contract. York Space Systems, a relative newcomer in the satellite industry, will receive $94,036,666.
Tranch 0’s data-transport-layer satellites are to be launched no later than September 2022, with a “capstone” demonstration of the mesh network’s capabilities planned in late 2022 or early 2023.
SDA Director Derek Tournear said today’s contracts represent the first step for a network that will comprise hundreds of satellites by 2026.
“We’re pushing on completely developing a new architecture that breaks the old model,” Tournear said. A big part of the new model will involve relying on commercial providers and “spiral development” to add innovations as the constellation is built out, he said.
“We’ll see this as an era of new space, basically showing the concept that you can utilize commoditized components in a very rapid manner to meet military utility and military specifications,” Tournear said.
Each set of 10 spacecraft will include seven equipped with the hardware for four laser-enabled optical cross-links between satellites. The other three satellites will have two optical cross-links, plus a standard Link 16 transceiver to communicate with ground installations.
Tournear said the satellites will be interoperable with other commercial and military space assets — including remote-sensing spacecraft, military communication satellites and commercial telecom constellations. He told me his team is talking with ventures including SpaceX, which already has launched hundreds of satellites in low Earth orbit for its Starlink broadband network. (Other parts of the U.S. military are testing Starlink’s capabilities for military applications.)
The Space Development Agency says the satellites will be sent into orbits ranging from 600 to 1,200 kilometers (370 to 740 miles) in altitude. That’s higher than the altitude that was recommended last week for minimizing negative effects on astronomical observations. But Tournear noted that the Tranch 0 satellites will be smaller and less numerous than, say, Starlink satellites.
The first batches of satellites won’t make use of the brightness-reducing measures that SpaceX has been implementing, he said. But there’ll be many more satellites to come.
“We’re going to be building out roughly one satellite a week for each of the [orbital] layers … and then launching them out on a cadence that allows us to replenish and add new capabilities that we’re going to be soliciting,” Tournear said.
In its contract announcement, the Department of Defense said the work of building the Tranche 0 satellites would be done in seven U.S. states plus Germany, Canada and Spain.
About 3.3% of York’s work is to be performed in Bothell, Wash., the Pentagon said. Bothell-based Tethers Unlimited has partnered with York previously, and Tethers CEO Bob Hoyt told me that his company has been in on some of York’s proposals for the National Defense Space Architecture. But he said he hasn’t yet heard whether Tethers Unlimited will play a role in the contract awarded today.
Neuralink co-founder Elon Musk holds a brain implant device between his fingers. (Neuralink via YouTube)
With grudging assistance from a trio of pigs, Neuralink co-founder Elon Musk showed off the startup’s state-of-the-art neuron-reading brain implant and announced that the system has received the Food and Drug Administration’s preliminary blessing as an experimental medical device.
During today’s demonstration at Neuralink’s headquarters in Fremont, Calif., it took a few minutes for wranglers to get the swine into their proper positions for what Musk called his “Three Little Pigs demonstration.”
One of the pigs was in her natural state, and roamed unremarkably around her straw-covered pen. Musk said the second pig had been given a brain implant that was later removed, showing that the operation could be reversed safely.
After some difficulty, a third pig named Gertrude was brought into her pen. As she rooted around in the straw, a sequence of jazzy electronic beeps played through the sound system. Musk said the tones were sounded whenever nerves in the pig’s snout triggered electrical impulses that were picked up by her brain implant.
“The beeps you’re hearing are real-time signals from the Neuralink in Gertrude’s head,” he said.
Eventually, Neuralink’s team plans to place the implants in people, initially to see if those who have become paralyzed due to spinal cord injuries can regain motor functions through thought alone.
Musk said the implant received a Breakthrough Device designation from the FDA last month. That doesn’t yet clear the way for human clinical trials, but it does put Neuralink on the fast track for consultation with the FDA’s experts during preparations for such trials.
Neuralink has received more than $150 million in funding, with roughly two-thirds of that support coming from Musk himself. Today he said the venture had about 100 employees. He expects that number to grow. “Over time, there might be 10,000 or more people at Neuralink,” he said.
This cutaway graphic shows the design of the Versatile Test Reactor. (DOE Illustration)
BELLEVUE, Wash. — TerraPower, the nuclear energy venture that’s backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, has gotten a boost on two fronts in its campaign to pioneer a new generation of safer, less expensive reactors.
On Aug. 24, the Idaho National Laboratory announced that an industry team including TerraPower has been selected to begin contract negotiations to design and build the Versatile Test Reactor, a federally financed facility that’s meant to test advanced nuclear reactor technologies. The team is led by Bechtel National Inc., with GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy among the other industry partners. (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is on the concept development team.)
“We received excellent proposals from industry, which is indicative of the support to build a fast-spectrum neutron testing facility in the United States,” Mark Peters, director of the Idaho Falls lab, said in a news release. “We are excited about the potential for working with the BNI-led team.”
The plan calls for work on the project to begin in 2021, and for the reactor to be completed by as early as 2026.
Then, on Aug. 27, the Bellevue-based venture announced that it’s working with GE Hitachi on a reactor architecture that could supplement solar and wind energy systems with always-on electricity.
The system architecture, known as Natrium, would involve building cost-competitive, sodium fast reactors as well as molten-salt energy storage systems. The heat generated by the 345-megawatt reactors could be stored in the molten-salt tanks, and converted into grid electricity to smooth out fluctuations in renewable energy.
Adam Lacy-Hulbert studies the mechanisms of immunity at the Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason. (BRI / Virginia Mason Photo)
A team including researchers from Seattle’s Benaroya Research Institute at Virginia Mason has identified a new pathway for protecting cells from deadly viruses — including the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 as well as the Ebola virus.
In the newly published study, the research team pinpoints two genes that have already been the subject of biomedical studies. One gene is called the MHC class II transactivator, or CIITA. The second gene is known as CD74 — specifically, a variant known as p41.
Those genes have previously been thought to be involved in conventional immune responses involving T cells and B cells. The new findings, resulting from a screening technique called transposon-mediated gene activation, shed light on a different way in which the genes block infection.
The researchers found that CIITA can induce resistance in human cell lines by activating CD74 p41, which in turn disrupts the processing of proteins on the coat of the Ebola virus protein. That stops the virus from being able to infect its target cell. The same process blocks the entry pathway for an assortment of coronaviruses — including the SARS-CoV-2 virus that’s behind the current pandemic.
Krysta Svore, who leads the Microsoft Quantum – Redmond group at Microsoft Research, explains how quantum computing hardware works at a Seattle science meeting in February. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Those three organizations have already been working together through the Northwest Quantum Nexus to develop the infrastructure for quantum computers, which promise to open up new possibilities in fields ranging from chemistry to systems optimization and financial modeling.
The initiatives announced today are likely to accelerate progress toward the development of commercial-scale quantum computers, Chetan Nayak, Microsoft’s general manager for quantum hardware, said in a blog posting.
“Today marks one of the U.S. government’s largest investments in the field,” he said. “It is also a noteworthy moment for Microsoft, which is providing scientific leadership in addition to expertise in workforce development and technology transfer.”
Thousands of satellites are due to go into low Earth orbit. Caveat: Satellites not shown to scale. (NOIRLab / NSF / AURA / P. Marenfeld)
If the vision of putting thousands of satellites into low Earth orbit to provide global broadband internet access comes anywhere close to fruition, there’s no way to avoid a negative impact on astronomy.
But the magnitude of the damage depends on what satellite operators, policymakers, professional researchers and amateur astronomers do.
That’s the bottom line from a report issued today by the American Astronomical Society and the National Science Foundation’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory, or NOIRLab.
The report recaps findings from a virtual workshop conducted from June 29 to July 2. The workshop brought together more than 250 stakeholders in the satellite-vs.-sky controversy, including representatives from Amazon, OneWeb and SpaceX.
“Our team at the AAS was enthusiastic to partner with NOIRLab and bring representatives of the astronomical and satellite communities together for a very fruitful exchange of ideas,” AAS President Paula Szkody, an astronomer at the University of Washington, said in a news release. “Even though we’re still at an early stage of understanding and addressing the threats posed to astronomy by large satellite constellations, we have made good progress and have plenty of reasons to hope for a positive outcome.”
SpaceX has already launched more than 650 of its Starlink satellites, with the aim of providing broadband access for the billions of people who are currently underserved. OneWeb, which was recently acquired by an Indian-British consortium after going through bankruptcy proceedings, has launched 74 satellites. And Amazon’s Project Kuiper is making plans for its own 3,236-satellite constellation.
Since then, SpaceX’s representatives have been talking with astronomers about how to mitigate the effect of the satellites’ reflective glare, which is at its worst just after sunset and just before sunrise.
“SpaceX has set an excellent example of a collaborative effort between astronomy and industry to manage this problem, and we certainly hope to see other operators following suit,” Jeff Hall, an astronomer from Arizona’s Lowell Observatory who heads AAS’ committee on light pollution, told reporters today during a teleconference.
As an experiment, SpaceX reduced the reflectivity of one of the Starlink satellites launched in January. Lori Allen of NSF’s NOIRLab said that “DarkSat” was about half as bright as the standard satellites, representing a reduction in visual magnitude from 5.2 to 6.2. (The higher the magnitude, the dimmer the object on a logarithmic scale.)
SpaceX is continuing to work on the reflectivity issue, and its most recent Starlink launch sent up 57 satellites equipped with specially designed sun visors. Allen said it was too early to determine how much the visors cut down on the glare from those satellites — in part because the coronavirus pandemic has forced astronomers to cut back on their observing time.
Based on observations as well as simulations, the report says mega-constellation ventures should reduce the reflectivity of their satellites to make them fainter than a 7th-magnitude star. (Such stars are the faintest objects that can be seen with the naked eye in dark skies.)
The report also calls for satellites in low Earth orbit to fly no higher than 600 kilometers (373 miles).
At altitudes higher than that, the satellites would catch the glint of the sun throughout the night in summer skies. “There’s no place to hide in the middle of the night from such a satellite constellation,” said Tony Tyson, an astronomer at the University of California at Davis who is also chief scientist for the Vera Rubin Observatory in Chile.
That’s a big problem for OneWeb, which is seeking to put tens of thousands of satellites in 1,200-kilometer-high orbits. It’s less of a problem for SpaceX (which is reserving orbital spots at altitudes between 328 and 614 kilometers) and for Amazon’s Project Kuiper (which is targeting heights ranging from 590 to 630 kilometers).
Even at lower altitudes with lower brightness, there’s no avoiding some disruption to astronomical observations. To minimize interference, the report calls on astronomers and satellite operators to develop software for tracking satellites and planning observations more precisely.
“There was this idea — well, actually it came from SpaceX — of having an app that we could all use, amateurs and professionals alike, to tell us precisely when something’s going to come across your field of view, and that’s beautiful,” Tyson said. “I think we can see the light at the end of that tunnel. … Any solutions that we come up with can be adopted by anybody, anytime.”
Tyson said software can also be used to remove some of the artifacts left behind in astronomical imagery by satellite trails. “The jury is out on that,” he said. “It’s quite challenging. These satellite trails are actually quite broad, so a fair fraction of pixels are impacted.”
As contentious as the satellite glare issue is today, it’s sure to get even stickier when the number of satellites rises from hundreds to thousands, to tens of thousands — and when the Vera Rubin Observatory hits prime time in the mid-2020s.
The Rubin Observatory’s wide-field Simonyi Survey Telescope — named after a billionaire software executive and space traveler who lives in the Seattle area — will be optimized to catalog thousands of near-Earth asteroids, study exoplanets in fine detail and shed light on the secrets of dark matter. But for all those efforts to be successful, the observatory will have to find ways to dodge all those satellites.
“It’s making a visual color motion picture of the universe,” Tyson said. “So it’s the perfect machine, unfortunately, to run into these things.”
A follow-up workshop, known as Satellite Constellations 2 or SATCON2, is tentatively planned for early to mid-2021.
Update for 7 p.m. PT Aug. 25: Meredith Rawls is a member of the team at the UW’s DIRAC Institute who also works on the data management team for the Rubin Observatory. What’s more, she contributed to a research paper that’s heavily referenced in today’s SATCON1 report. Here’s what she told me about the state of the satellite-vs.-sky controversy in an email:
“It’s heartening that SpaceX is working to darken their satellites, but they are just one operator. Dimmer satellites is not the same as fewer satellites. While there are lots of technical things that scientists can do to minimize scientific impacts, this is a significant amount of work that nobody has planned or budgeted for, and doesn’t begin to address wider-reaching environmental or cultural effects of a drastically changed night sky.”
Check out her talk about Starlink and the mega-constellation challenge, presented last month as part of the Astronomy at Home lecture series:
This stylized schematic shows a Co-LOCKR protein device on the surface of a cell. (Institute for Protein Design Illustration)
The age of molecular-scale computing is entering a new era, thanks to the development of a system that uses synthetic proteins and Boolean logic to identify cancer cells.
The proteins can lock onto chemical markers on the surface of cells in predetermined combinations, performing the roles of logical AND, OR and NOT gates. It’s similar to the way binary computers do their thing, but with biochemistry rather than electronic bits.
“We were trying to solve a key problem in medicine, which is how to target specific cells in a complex environment,” Marc Lajoie, one of the lead authors of a study published today in the journal Science, explained in a news release.
“Unfortunately, most cells lack a single surface marker that is unique to just them. So, to improve cell targeting, we created a way to direct almost any biological function to any cell by going after combinations of cell surface markers,” Lajoie said.
Lajoie worked on the effort during his stint as a postdoctoral scholar at the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design. He’s now co-director for protein and cell engineering at Lyell Immunopharma, a California-based startup aiming to commercialize the technique.
A mock-up of the lander designed by Blue Origin and its partners stands tall at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas. (Blue Origin Photo)
An all-star space industry team led by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has assembled a mock-up of its proposed lunar lander right where it’ll do the most good, in a training area at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas.
The full-scale engineering module showcases Blue Origin’s Blue Moon descent element, which Bezos unveiled last year; as well as the ascent element designed by Lockheed Martin. It stands more than 40 feet tall in Johnson Space Center’s Space Vehicle Mockup Facility, alongside mock-ups of the space shuttle, space station modules and next-generation space capsules.
Members of the industry team — from Blue Origin and Lockheed Martin as well as Northrop Grumman and Draper — will collaborate with NASA engineers and astronauts to test out the lander’s usability and make any necessary tweaks in preparation for crewed lunar landings that could begin as early as 2024. The tweaks could address such details as the size of the hatch, the placement of the windows and the arrangement of the controls.
An automated camera documents the Falcon Heavy rocket’s first ascent from Kennedy Space Center in February 2018 with SpaceX’s hangar in the foreground. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)
Update: A federal district judge in California ruled against SpaceX and ordered its case against the Air Force to be vacated. The order was issued under seal on Sept. 24, but an Oct. 2 filing indicated that the court decided in the Air Force’s favor on all of SpaceX’s claims.
Both sides in the long-running dispute laid out their positions in a notice filed in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles on Aug. 14, a week after the U.S. Space Force announced that United Launch Alliance and SpaceX were the winners in a competition for future launches.
In the August filing, SpaceX said the funding gave ULA an “unwarranted advantage” and called for the Space Force’s Space and Missile Systems Center to “rectify” its errors, presumably by providing more funding for SpaceX.
Lawyers for the federal government and ULA said the competition for development funding was decided fairly. They said no rectification was warranted, especially considering that SpaceX proposed its Starship super-rocket for development funding but ended up offering a different launch vehicle — a modified Falcon Heavy rocket — for the Space Force’s future heavy-lift launches.
