Month: October 2025

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Cosmic Space

Flight log: Six spacefliers go suborbital with Blue Origin

Liftoff for Blue Origin New Shepard rocket
Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket ship rises from its Texas launch pad. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture sent six more people on a brief suborbital space trip today aboard a New Shepard rocket ship. The flight, known as NS-36, was Blue Origin’s 36th New Shepard mission and the 15th crewed flight.

Today’s 10-minute flight was conducted at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. It followed Blue Origin’s standard procedure, with liftoff coming at 8:40 a.m. CT (6:40 a.m. PT). The reusable booster sent the crew capsule to a height of 65.7 miles (346,791 feet, or 106 kilometers), and then flew itself back to a landing pad.

Meanwhile, the crew got out of their seats to float in zero gravity and look out the windows at the black sky of space and the Earth below. They got back in their seats for a parachute-aided descent that ended with touchdown at 8:50 a.m. CT (6:50 a.m. PT).

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Stoke Space is reportedly raising sky-high funding

Stoke Space hotfire test of booster engine
Stoke Space’s Zenith booster engine blazes during a hot-fire test in 2024. (Stoke Space Photo)

Update: Stoke Space has raised $510 million in Series D funding to accelerate development of its fully reusable medium-lift rocket. Check out the full story.

Previously: Stoke Space, one of the Seattle area’s up-and-coming space startups, is said to be raising hundreds of millions of dollars in a funding round that it hasn’t yet publicly acknowledged. A report about the round, based on two unidentified sources, was published today by The Information.

The Information quoted its sources as saying that the funding round could total as much as $500 million, and would value Stoke at nearly $2 billion. That figure would be roughly twice as much as the $944 million valuation that was cited by Pitchbook as of January. The round’s lead investor is said to be Thomas Tull’s United States Innovative Technology Fund.

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Scientists enlist AI to map regions of the brain in detail

Illustration: Color-coded cutaway view of mouse brain
An AI-produced rendering shows a map of mouse brain regions, overlaid with network motifs. (UCSF Illustration)

Scientists say an artificial intelligence program that they compare to ChatGPT has helped them create one of the most detailed maps of the mouse brain to date, with 1,300 regions and subregions marked on the map.

Some of those subregions have never been charted before — and the researchers say there’s more to come. “I think there are already indications that we can go beyond what we see now,” said Bosiljka Tasic, director of molecular genetics at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science.

The mapping effort, led by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco and the Allen Institute, is detailed in a study published today in the journal Nature Communications.

“Our model is built on the same powerful technology as AI tools like ChatGPT,” senior author Reza Abbasi-Asl, a neuroscientist at UCSF, said in a news release. “Both are built on a ‘transformer’ network which excels at understanding context.”

That context could be important for treating neurological ailments, Tasic told me. “Location is everything in the brain,” she said. “Defining the geography of the brain, and then defining all these regions and their functions, not only leads to better understanding, but also better ability to treat.”

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Jeff Bezos sees orbital data centers as ‘next step’ in space

Jeff Bezos at Italian Tech Week 2025
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, speaks at Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin. (Italian Tech Week via YouTube)

What’s the next killer app for the final frontier? According to Jeff Bezos, it’s a future fleet of gigawatt data centers, flying in orbit and powered by sunlight.

Bezos — who founded the Amazon retail giant as well as his privately held Blue Origin space venture — pointed to the prospects for orbital data centers on Oct. 3 during a fireside chat at Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin. He cast the technology as the most cost-efficient way to satisfy the tech industry’s need for more power to fuel advances in artificial intelligence.

But don’t expect cloud computing to leave Earth behind immediately. Bezos estimated that the transition from Earth-based to space-based data processing would take more than 10 years.

“I bet it’s not more than 20 years,” he said. “We’re going to start building these giant gigawatt data centers in space. So, these giant training clusters, those will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7.”

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