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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Eviation changes its team as electric flight test nears

Eviation Alice taxi test
Eviation's all-electric Alice airplane goes through a runway taxi test. (Eviation via YouTube)

Arlington, Wash.-based Eviation says Gregory Davis is assuming the role of interim CEO as part of a planned succession process that reflects the company’s transition to the production phase of its all-electric Alice aircraft.

Davis, who has been serving as Eviation’s president, will take the CEO baton from co-founder Omer Bar-Yohay. Just last month, Roei Ganzarski left the company with Dominique Spragg taking his place as chairman.

Eviation is moving forward toward certification and production readiness for three variants of the Alice airplane, optimized for cargo shipment, commuter passenger service and executive business travel. The aircraft already has undergone months of on-the-ground testing in Arlington.

“Eviation expects to make the first flight of Alice in the upcoming weeks, having completed many preliminary milestones including initial taxi and flight test preparations,” Spragg said today in a news release. “As we complete the technical demonstration phase, Eviation is now preparing for production to make affordable regional air travel a reality in the coming years.”

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GeekWire

Lockheed Martin kills plan for acquiring Aerojet

Aerojet Rocketdyne Redmond facility
Aerojet Rocketdyne engineer Matt Dawson processes rocket engines in Redmond, Wash. (Aerojet Rocketdyne Photo)

Lockheed Martin says it’s terminating its agreement to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne, less than a month after the Federal Trade Commission filed suit to block the $4.4 billion deal.

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‘Kimi’ takes its cue from Alexa, Siri and Seattle tech

Zoe Kravitz in 'Kimi'
Zoë Kravitz portrays a Seattle tech worker in “Kimi.” (Warner Bros. Entertainment Photo / Claudette Barius)

Once again, Seattle’s tech scene provides the backdrop for a high-profile movie on HBO Max — but this time, it’s serious.

Oscar-winning film director Steven Soderbergh’s tech-noir thriller, “Kimi,” echoes movies like “Rear Window” and “The Conversation” in a tale that also reflects the mind-wrenching isolation forced by the COVID-19 pandemic and the concerns raised by smart devices that are capable of tracking our every move.

Zoë Kravitz portrays an employee at a Seattle tech startup that markets a smart speaker and AI voice assistant called Kimi. The startup is gearing up for an IPO that promises a big payoff, but as Kravitz’s character works through a list of audio files that Kimi couldn’t understand, she happens upon a snippet that suggests a crime was committed. Her efforts to get to the truth spark a classic spy chase with some extra tech twists.

It’s a tale far darker than “Superintelligence,” the 2020 romantic comedy starring Melissa McCarthy as a Seattle techie and James Corden as an AI overlord.

Will “Kimi” stir up a debate over AI voice assistants? Does the movie accurately reflect the Seattle vibe? Will it generate as much buzz as Amazon’s Alexa, or will it flop as hard as the Fire Phone? The early indications are mixed: On the Rotten Tomatoes website, for example, the critical consensus is thumbs-up (89%) while the audience score is an emphatic thumbs-down (52%).

To get the verdict from ground zero, we turned to the experts who helped us sort out the fact, fiction and frivolousness in “Superintelligence”: Carissa Schoenick, director of program management and communication at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence; and Kurt Schlosser, GeekWire’s go-to guy for coverage of Seattle’s tech culture.

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Universe Today

Elon Musk lays out his Plan A and Plan B for Starship

SpaceX’s Starship and Super Heavy booster stand tall on the Starbase launch pad in Texas. (SpaceX via YouTube)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk delivered a long-awaited, live-streamed update on his plans for launching the world’s most powerful rocket, with the spotlighted backdrop of a freshly stacked Starship and Super Heavy booster standing on the launch pad at the company’s Starbase facility in South Texas.

The Starship project is key to Musk’s plans to send thousands of settlers to Mars and make humanity a multiplanet species. It’s also key to his plans to put thousands of satellites in Earth orbit for SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network, which is supposed to bring in the money needed for Mars missions.

And as if all that’s not enough, Musk expects Starship to revolutionize space travel and society in ways that can’t be foreseen. “When you have an utterly profound breakthrough, the use cases will be hard to imagine,” he told hundreds of attendees during tonight’s presentation at the Boca Chica base.

Musk exhibited his trademark optimism about the launch system’s development schedule, saying that the Federal Aviation Administration could give its go-ahead for the first Starship orbital launch from Texas as soon as next month. But he said there was a Plan B in case that approval didn’t come soon.

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GeekWire

Falling Starlink satellites highlight space traffic concerns

Starlink satellite deployment
A rocket’s-eye view shows a stack of SpaceX Starlink satellites just before orbital deployment. (SpaceX Photo)

SpaceX says that most of the satellites it launched last week for its Starlink broadband internet constellation are doomed to fall from orbit due to a solar storm.

Based on the company’s analysis, as many as 40 of the 49 satellites — which were built at SpaceX’s facility in Redmond, Wash. — will plunge through the atmosphere and burn up. Some have already made the plunge.

“Ah, how I love the smell of burning satellites in the morning,” Marco Langbroek, a satellite consultant at Leiden University in the Netherlands, joked in a tweet.

In an update, SpaceX stressed that the falling satellites “pose zero collision risk with other satellites and by design demise upon atmospheric re-entry — meaning no orbital debris is created and no satellite parts hit the ground.”

Nevertheless, the satellite failures draw attention to the challenges raised by the rise of satellite mega-constellations, even as the Federal Communications Commission considers SpaceX’s proposal to launch nearly 30,000 second-generation Starlink satellites into new orbital configurations.

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GeekWire

Air Force challenge gives a lift to ‘flying car’ technologies

VTOL concept illustration
Artist’s conception shows an aircraft that makes use of Jetoptera’s propulsion system. (Jetoptera Illustration)

The U.S. Air Force’s tech incubator has given the go-ahead for 11 design concepts aimed at pushing the frontier for aircraft that can take off and land vertically — and at least two of the concepts have roots in the Seattle area.

Among the teams selected to advance in AFWERX’s High-Speed VTOL Concept Challenge are Jetoptera, based in Edmonds, Wash.; and VerdeGo Aero, which is based in Florida but has Bainbridge Island’s Erik Lindbergh as co-founder and executive chairman. Lindbergh is the grandson of aviation pioneer Charles Lindbergh.

AFWERX’s challenge focuses on technologies that the military could use in VTOLs — vertical takeoff-and-landing aircraft that could include next-generation helicopters and other types of vehicles popularly known as “flying cars.” The challenge is being conducted for the Air Force as well as the U.S. Special Operations Command.

The winning teams were chosen from more than 200 entrants in the challenge. Over the next six months, the 11 teams will receive market research investments aimed at advancing their technologies.

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GeekWire

Brazilian airplane maker plugs into electric revolution

ATL-100H hybrid-electric aircraft
Artwork shows Desaer’s ATL-100H aircraft with a hybrid electric propulsion system. (MagniX Illustration)

Everett, Wash.-based MagniX is partnering with the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer Desaer to develop a hybrid-electric version of Desaer’s ATL-100 regional aircraft.

The ATL-100H will make use of two Magni350 electric propulsion units as well as two gas-fueled turboprop engines. MagniX says the configuration is designed to save 25% to 40% of fuel, depending on the range of operation.

“The implications of creating the hybrid electric ATL-100H are far-reaching, and will have a positive impact on environmental sustainability and the aircraft’s operational flexibility in the Brazil region,” Simon Roads, head of sales at MagniX, said today in a news release.

Desaer plans to start flying its gas-fueled ATL-100 prototype in 2023, with the first deliveries expected by 2026. The passenger version of the airplane is designed to seat 19. The hybrid-electric version of the plane is expected to come out after the gas-fueled version, presumably with the same specifications.

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GeekWire

Quantum computing venture leaps into the stock market

Dilution refrigerator system
A team member at D-Wave Systems works on the cooling system for the company’s quantum computer. (D-Wave Photo / Larry Goldstein)

Burnaby, B.C.-based D-Wave Systems, the quantum computing company that counts Jeff Bezos among its investors and NASA among its customers, has struck a deal to go public with a $1.2 billion valuation.

The deal involves a combination with DPMC Capital, a publicly traded special-purpose acquisition company, or SPAC. It’s expected to bring in $300 million in gross proceeds from DPMC’s trust account, plus $40 million in gross proceeds from investors participating in a PIPE arrangement. (PIPE stands for “private investment in public equity.”)

Quantum computing takes advantage of phenomena at the quantum level, processing “qubits” that can represent multiple values simultaneously — as opposed to the one-or-zero paradigm of classical computing. The approach is theoretically capable of solving some types of problems much faster than classical computers.

Founded in 1999, D-Wave has focused on a type of technology called quantum annealing, which uses quantum computing principles and hardware to tackle tasks relating to network optimization and probabilistic sampling.

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Astronomers set up center to save the sky from satellites

Starlink streaks
This time-lapse image of Venus and the Pleiades shows the tracks of SpaceX’s Starlink satellites. (Torsten Hansen / IAU OAE / CC Attribution)

The International Astronomical Union is heading up the creation of a new center to deal with the complications created by broadband satellite constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper.

The IAU Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky From Satellite Constellation Interference will be co-hosted at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab in Arizona and the SKA Observatory’s offices at Jodrell Bank in Britain.

“The new center is an important step towards ensuring that technological advances do not inadvertently impede our study and enjoyment of the sky,” IAU President Debra Elmegreen said today in a news release.

Former IAU General Secretary Piero Benvenuti, the center’s director, said the memorandum of understanding creating the center was signed just a day earlier, and a website for the project hasn’t yet been established.

But the University of Washington’s Institute for Data Intensive Research in Astrophysics and Cosmology, or DIRAC, is already getting a head start on one of the center’s missions — cataloging astronomical images with satellite streaks so they can be made available for analysis.

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Blue Origin explores new frontiers in Phoenix and Denver

Orbital Reef space station
An artist’s concept shows the Orbital Reef space station. (Blue Origin Media)

Blue Origin says it’s hiring in Phoenix and Denver — two Western cities that represent relatively new frontiers for Jeff Bezos’ space venture.

The downtown Phoenix office is focusing on “avionics, systems engineering and integrated supply chain,” Blue Origin says on its career website, while the South Denver office will focus on “program management, systems engineering, avionics, software, integration and mission design” in support of Blue Origin’s launch vehicle and space systems programs.

The Denver area happens to be home to a growing number of space ventures, including past and present partners in some of Blue Origin’s high-profile projects.

Lockheed Martin, for example, was part of a Blue Origin-led team that bid unsuccessfully to build the first crewed lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis program. United Launch Alliance is a customer for Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engines, while Sierra Space is a major partner in Blue Origin’s Orbital Reef space station project.

And speaking of Orbital Reef, the Phoenix area is home to Arizona State University, which is leading the space station project’s research advisory group.

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