Author: Alan Boyle

Mastermind of Cosmic Log, contributor to GeekWire and Universe Today, author of "The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference," past president of the Council for the Advancement of Science Writing.

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Virgin Galactic wins license for new spaceship

Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, known as VSS Unity, is pulled behind a Range Rover vehicle during its first taxi test at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)

Virgin Galactic says it’s received an operator license from the Federal Aviation Administration for flying its SpaceShipTwo rocket plane into outer space with commercial payloads.

The craft, known as VSS Unity, has just begun on-the-ground taxi tests at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port – and it’s on track to begin flight tests as early as this month.

During today’s first taxi test, a Range Rover SUV pulled Unity down Mojave’s runway to evaluate and calibrate the craft’s navigation and communication/telemetry systems, Virgin Galactic said.

The initial flight tests will involve carrying Unity into the air while it’s firmly attached to its White Knight Two mother ship. If those captive-carry tests go well, White Knight Two will start releasing Unity for unpowered glide flights, and then for rocket-powered flights.

Virgin Galactic’s operator license, issued on July 29, clears the way for test flights from Mojave and for the transport of scientific and experimental payloads.

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Tesla, SolarCity strike $2.6 billion merger deal

A Tesla electric car is parked on an overlook with a view of Tesla’s Gigafactory 1 facility in Nevada. (Credit: Tesla Motors)

The boards of directors for Tesla and SolarCity, two companies that have billionaire Elon Musk as a top executive, have given the green light for a $2.6 billion merger.

The two companies said the combination would create “the world’s only vertically integrated sustainable energy company,” bringing together Tesla’s electric car line and its home battery offerings with SolarCity’s power-generating business.

“By joining forces, we can operate more efficiently and fully integrate our products, while providing customers with an aesthetically beautiful and simple one-stop solar + storage experience: one installation, one service contract, one phone app,”Tesla and SolarCity said in a joint press release.

The approvals came after a review of Tesla’s merger proposal, the terms of which were laid out publicly last month. Musk helped orchestrate the deal, but he stayed out of the review or the board vote to head off conflict-of-interest concerns. He serves as the CEO of Tesla, and he’s the chairman of SolarCity as well as the biggest shareholder of both companies.

In a tweet, Musk emphasized that his privately held space venture, SpaceX, does not figure in the deal and would never merge with Tesla.

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How aerodynamics saved chute-less skydiver

Skydiver Luke Aikins descends. (Credit: Mondelez International / Fox / Stride Gum via Tumblr)

Kids, don’t try this at home: Veteran skydiver Luke Aikins made an amazing injury-free landing without a parachute on national television on July 30 – thanks to decades of experience, two years of planning, a bouncy 100-by-100-foot net, and the realities of aerodynamics.

The 42-year-old Aikins leaped out of an airplane at 25,000 feet, maneuvered himself in midair during his two-minute descent to head for the target zone set up at the Big Sky movie ranch in California’s Simi Valley, and flipped over at the last second to slam into the net at about 120 mph.

When the net was lowered, Aikins raised his arms in triumph and hugged his wife and other well-wishers. “I’m almost levitating. It’s incredible!” The Associated Press quoted him as saying.

The whole thing was broadcast live for “Heaven Sent,” a special that aired on the Fox network. The stunt made Aikins the first skydiver to leap from so high and land safely without a parachute or wingsuit.

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Policymakers need to address automation and AI

Robonaut 2 is at work aboard the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both promising to bring good-paying jobs back to America, but analysts say neither of them has addressed one of the biggest challenges looming ahead: the impact of automation and the rise of artificial intelligence.

Some argue that the challenge will soon become impossible to ignore.

“Job losses due to automation and robotics are often overlooked in discussions about the unexpected rise of outside political candidates like Trump and Bernie Sanders,” Moshe Vardi, an expert on artificial intelligence at Rice University, said before this month’s conventions.

Vardi pointed out that manufacturing employment has been falling for more than 30 years, and yet U.S. manufacturing output is near its all-time high.

“U.S. factories are not disappearing: They simply aren’t employing human workers,” Vardi said.

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‘Mars’ blends visions from today and from 2033

An astronaut surveys a Martian landscape in a scene from “Mars,” a National Geographic Channel miniseries due to air in November. (Credit: National Geographic / Imagine / RadicalMedia)

National Geographic Channel’s “Mars” miniseries blends a fictional tale about Mars colonists in 2033 with modern-day musings about Red Planet missions – and so does today’s trailer for the six-part series, which is due to air in November.

The book/TV project has some heavy hitters behind it, including executive producers Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, who were also behind the movie “Apollo 13.”

Heavy hitters also appear on screen in the trailer.

Go to GeekWire to watch the trailer.

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‘I believe in science’: Hillary Clinton wows geeks

Hillary Clinton declared her belief in science. (Credit: DNC / YouTube / Imgflip)

Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention tonight may not have been rated as highly as President Barack Obama’s address the night before, but there was at least one line that got the attention of the geekerati: “I believe in science.”

The applause line came in the context of climate change policy, one of the issues that distinguishes Clinton from her GOP foe, Donald Trump. He didn’t address the subject in his own acceptance speech, but he’s definitely in the climate skeptic camp.

“Obama’s talking about all of this with the global warming and … a lot of it’s a hoax,”he said last December. “It’s a hoax. I mean, it’s a money-making industry, OK? It’s a hoax, a lot of it.”

In contrast, Clinton embraced the mainstream view that greenhouse-gas emissions are having an effect on climate patterns, and those effects could get dramatically worse unless policymakers take action.

“I believe in science,” she said, chuckling as she let that sink in with the crowd. “I believe climate change is real, and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good-paying, clean-energy jobs.”

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Are moonshots hazardous to heart health?

NASA astronaut James Irwin salutes the American flag during the Apollo 15 mission in 1971. Irwin experienced irregular heart rhythms while on the lunar surface, and suffered at least two serious heart attacks after returning to Earth. He died in 1991. (Credit: NASA)

Is deep-space radiation hazardous to your cardiovascular system? A newly published study focusing on the Apollo astronauts suggests that it is, but the sample size is too small to firm up the connection.

The suggestion of a link comes out of a study published today in Scientific Reports, an open-access journal affiliated with Nature.

A research team led by Florida State University’s Michael Delp looked at the medical histories of seven Apollo astronauts who took part in lunar missions and have since died. They compared those histories with similar mortality statistics for astronauts who stayed in low Earth orbit, as well as astronauts who never got into orbit.

The aim was to find out whether the increased exposure to radiation that astronauts get when they travel beyond Earth’s protective magnetic field might have added health impacts.

“We know very little about the effects of deep space radiation on human health, particularly on the cardiovascular system,” Delp explained in a news release. “This gives us the first glimpse into its adverse effects on humans.”

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Dream Chaser spaceship prototype is set to fly

Sierra Nevada Corp.’s Dream Chaser flight test vehicle is ready to go at the company’s Colorado spacecraft assembly facility. (Credit: Sierra Nevada Corp.)

Sierra Nevada Corp. says its full-scale Dream Chaser test vehicle is at last ready to be sent to a NASA center in California, for a fresh round of checkouts that will culminate in a series of flights over the Mojave Desert.

The announcement comes three years after the uncrewed Dream Chaser prototype made its first free flight at California’s Edwards Air Force Base. A spaceworthy version of the shuttle-like winged craft is destined to carry cargo to and from the International Space Station as soon as 2019, and eventually SNC wants to have it carry people as well.

Since the flight test in 2013, the prototype has been upgraded at SNC’s assembly facility in Colorado. Mark Sirangelo, corporate vice president of SNC’s Space Systems business area, said the vehicle would be shipped westward by truck. It’s due to arrive at NASA’s Armstrong Flight Research Center, near Edwards, by September.

The start of Phase 2 testing will represent a milestone for the 12-year-old Dream Chaser program.

“From my aviation background, it’s a little more than a rollout,” Sirangelo told GeekWire. “It’s a vehicle that’s actually ready to fly.”

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Jeff Bezos joins Pentagon advisory board

Jeff Bezos is the founder of Blue Origin as well as Amazon. (Credit: Blue Origin)

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is joining the Defense Innovation Advisory Board, a 15-member panel that’s meant to help the Pentagon adopt some of the private-sector ideas that have fueled America’s tech industry.

The panel is chaired by a tech titan who’s arguably one of Bezos’ biggest competitors: Eric Schmidt, the executive chairman of Alphabet, Google’s parent company. Other members include LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, Instagram COO (and Facebook veteran) Marne Levine, Code for America founder Jennifer Pahlka and astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson.

Defense Secretary Ashton Carter announced Bezos’ appointment this week, and numbered him among “the most innovative minds in America.”

In addition to founding Amazon, Bezos owns The Washington Post and the Blue Origin space venture. During an April fireside chat at the Space Symposium in Colorado Springs, Bezos told me that he was “very excited” about Blue Origin’s potential involvement in space missions for the Defense Department.

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Chinese space junk sparks meteor reports

YouTube user Ian Norman captured this view of the fireball in the skies over Alabama Hills, Calif. (Credit: Ian Norman via YouTube)

A bright streak in the sky generated hundreds of meteor sighting reports from Southern California to British Columbia, but it didn’t take long for the flash to be traced to the re-entry of a Chinese rocket stage.

The fireball was seen across a wide swath of the western United States between 9:30 and 10 p.m. PT Wednesday. More than a dozen Washington state observers on the east side of the Cascades filed reports with the American Meteor Society. But Western Washington? Not so much, probably because of sighting angles as well as sky conditions.

The fireball’s trajectory matched up with the track of a second-stage booster from a Chinese Long March 7 rocket that was launched on Monday. This launch sent up several experiments and satellites, but it also served as an initial flight test for a vehicle that’s expected to send payloads to China’s present and future space stations.

The U.S. military’s Joint Space Operations Center confirmed that the rocket stage fell through the atmosphere and broke up as it passed over California and Nevada, heading eastward.

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