Category: Cosmic Space

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Cosmic Space

Satellites swarm to look at Beirut blast aftermath

Beirut explosion via BlackSky satellite
An image captured by the BlackSky Global-4 satellite shows the site of the Beirut chemical explosion at 8:22 a.m. local time Aug. 5. Image resolution is about 1 meter (3 feet) per pixel. (BlackSky Global Monitoring Photo)

The aftermath of this week’s Beirut chemical explosion has been covered in triplicate by U.S. satellite imaging systems — with other nations’ satellites, drones and on-the-scene videos adding perspective.

All that imagery helped outside observers quickly verify that the killing blast was caused by the blow-up of a years-old stockpile of ammonium nitrate, which is typically used as fertilizer but can be turned into dangerous explosives.

The Aug. 4 explosion killed at least 100 people, injured thousands more, sent out a shock wave that damaged buildings up to 6 miles away, and generated a seismic shock that was felt as far away as Cyprus.

BlackSky is due to have two more Global satellites launched as soon as this week, as rideshare payloads on a SpaceX Falcon 9 under an arrangement with Seattle’s Spaceflight Inc. They’re among the first satellites built for BlackSky by Tukwila, Wash.-based LeoStella, a joint venture between Spaceflight Industries and Europe’s Thales Alenia Space. The deployment timetable calls for 16 BlackSky satellites to be on duty in low Earth orbit by early next year.

Two of BlackSky’s competitors, Planet and Maxar Technologies, also shared before-and-after views of the Beirut blast scene today:

https://twitter.com/_danjuna/status/1291012916183998465

BlackSky, Maxar Technologies and Planet have all won study contracts from the National Reconnaissance Office, under a program aimed at assessing the companies’ ability to provide imagery for the defense and intelligence communities.

NRO says it will start a new round of commercial imagery procurements in late 2020, with an eye toward satisfying government requirements into the 2023 time frame. So the efforts to capture over Beirut isn’t merely meant to satisfy curiosity; they serve to demonstrate what the companies can do for national defense.

In addition to the satellite pictures from those three U.S. companies, there’s a surfeit of sobering imagery from other satellites and drones. Here’s a sampling:

To contribute online to Beirut relief efforts, check out the Lebanese Red Cross and Impact Lebanon on Just Giving.

This report was published on Cosmic Log. Accept no substitutes.

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Cosmic Space

China launches Mars probe amid big questions

Tianwen-1 launch
China's Long March 5 rocket sends the Tianwen-1 probe on the first leg of its trip to Mars. (CNSA Photo)

China’s most advanced space probe — Tianwen-1, whose name means “Heavenly Questions” — is on its way to Mars, beginning a quest that will be riddled with questions.

Some of those questions are definitely heavenly in nature: How are reservoirs of potentially precious water ice distributed beneath the Martian surface? Where are the best places to find traces of past life, or to shelter future explorers?

But the biggest question about Tianwen-1 is more down to Earth: Can the Chinese actually pull this off?

“Tianwen-1 is going to orbit, land and release a rover all on the very first try, and coordinate observations with an orbiter. No planetary missions have ever been implemented in this way,” mission team leaders wrote last week in Nature Astronomy. “If successful, it would signify a major technical breakthrough.”

The mission’s start looked auspicious, although it lacked the level of official reportage that Western space enthusiasts are used to.

A video stream from Douyu.com showed China’s Long March 5 rocket sending the 5-ton probe skyward from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island at 12:41 p.m. local time July 23 (9:41 p.m. PT July 22). China’s official Xinhua news agency confirmed the launch in a bulletin issued a couple of minutes later.

The plan calls for Tianwen-1 to make a seven-month cruise to Mars and enter a polar elliptical orbit next February.

Tianwen-1 is one of three Mars probes being launched this summer to take advantage of a favorable celestial alignment that comes around only every 26 months. The other two spacecraft are the United Arab Emirates’ Hope orbiter, which was launched earlier this week; and NASA’s Perseverance rover, which is due for liftoff next week.

NASA’s recent Mars missions may make the interplanetary trip look easy. But over the past five decades, trips to the Red Planet have been so fraught with risks that mission managers used to joke darkly about a “Great Galactic Ghoul” who gobbled spacecraft bound for Mars.

Only NASA and the Soviet Union have successfully landed probes on Mars, and the Soviet Mars 3 lander lasted just 110 seconds on the ground before giving up the ghost in 1971.

Several NASA probes have gone astray, including Mars Observer in 1993 as well as Mars Climate Orbiter and Mars Polar Lander in 1999. China has fallen victim to the ghoul’s grip as well: Its first Mars probe, a piggyback orbiter known as Yinghuo-1, was lost when the Russian spacecraft it was riding on, Phobos-Grunt, failed to get out of Earth orbit after its launch in 2011 and eventually fell into the Pacific.

Since that failure, China’s robotic space program has had much more success: The Chang’e-3 mission put a rover on the lunar surface in 2013, and a little more than five years later, Chang’e-4 became the world’s first mission to explore the moon’s far side at ground level.

Tianwen-1’s agenda is similarly ambitious: The orbiter is meant to conduct a global high-resolution survey of Mars over the course of a full Martian year, or nearly two Earth years. Two or three months after entering Martian orbit, a lander will unhook from the orbiter, descend through the atmosphere and make a soft landing in Utopia Planitia with the aid of a parachute, retrorockets and airbags.

If that touchdown is successful, the lander will disgorge a 500-pound rover that’s bristling with six scientific instruments — including two cameras, a meteorology station, a magnetometer, a surface composition analyzer and a ground-penetrating radar that could map those hidden concentrations of subsurface water ice.

Mars’ reservoirs of water ice would be crucial for sustaining human exploration and settlement of the Red Planet. In the past, Chinese experts have talked about sending astronauts there sometime after 2040. But that’s an issue for another day. In the meantime, China — and the rest of the world’s spacefaring nations — will have to deal with lots of slightly less lofty heavenly questions.

Update for 1:25 a.m. PT July 23: NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine wished Tianwen-1 safe travels in a tweet:

https://twitter.com/JimBridenstine/status/1286177196491575297

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Cosmic Space

Hope rises: Emirates’ first Mars probe lifts off from Japan

Hope H-2A launch
A Japanese H-2A rocket launches the United Arab Emirates' Hope probe from Tanegashima Space Center. (MHI / MBRSC via YouTube)

The United Arab Emirates’ first-ever mission to Mars got off to a fiery start today with the launch of the Hope orbiter from Japan.

A two-stage Mitsubishi H-2A rocket sent the car-sized probe into space from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center at 2:58 p.m. PT today (6:58 a.m. local time July 20). Two previous launch attempts had to be called off due to unacceptable weather.

An Emirati team based at the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center in Dubai is in charge of the $200 million mission. The probe itself was built in the U.S. with help from research institutions including Berkeley, Arizona State University and the University of Colorado’s Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, or LASP.

Learning the tools of the space exploration trade is one of the Hope mission’s on-the-ground objectives. The United Arab Emirates has had several satellites launched into Earth orbit, but this is the nation’s first interplanetary probe.

“Collaboration and knowledge transfer have been key to the development of the Emirates Mars Mission,” project director Omran Sharaf said in a pre-launch news release.

About an hour after launch, the probe was deployed from the H-2A’s second stage and sent out of Earth orbit to start the seven-month, 306 million-mile cruise to Mars. Emirati mission controllers will track Hope’s progress with an assist from NASA’s Deep Space Network.

Hope’s three instruments — a high-resolution imager, an infrared spectrometer and an ultraviolet spectrometer — are aimed at providing data about Mars’ atmosphere on a par with what Earth-observing weather satellites provide.

That should help flesh out the global picture of Martian weather provided by other nations’ orbiters, including NASA’s MAVEN and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, India’s Mars Orbiter Mission and the European Space Agency’s Mars Express.

One of the key scientific questions has to do with how hydrogen and oxygen are escaping from the upper atmosphere — a phenomenon that, over the course of billions of years, is thought to have turned Mars from a hospitable home for life to the cold, dry planet it is today.

“Hope will capture the ebbs and flows of weather on Mars to a degree that wasn’t possible before,” said LASP’s director, Daniel Baker. “It’s a showcase for how space exploration has become an increasingly international endeavor.”

The primary phase of the mission is meant to last a full Martian year, or a little less than two Earth years, but if all goes well that mission is likely to be extended.

Hope was the first of three Mars probes scheduled for launch during this summer’s rapid-transit opportunity. (Such opportunities come only every 26 months.)

China is expected to launch its Tianwen-1 spacecraft — including an orbiter, a lander and a rover — sometime in the next week or so. And NASA’s Mars Perseverance rover is due for liftoff from its Florida launch pad no earlier than July 30.

Less than an hour before launch, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said that the UAE’s space program was a “shining example” of international space cooperation — and that last year’s flight of the Emirates’ first astronaut gave NASA “another partner” in human spaceflight during the ramp-up to Artemis moon missions.

Bridenstine said both the Hope orbiter and the Perseverance rover were aptly named.

“All of us believe that this is critical for our nation: to inspire the next generation, to provide hope and demonstrate perseverance,” he said. “The naming of these two robots, if you will, is absolutely perfect. … This is a very serious mission that is going to give us a lot of data and information on how we might one day, together even, explore Mars with humans.”

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Cosmic Space

It’s the summer of Mars: Check your Red Planet IQ

Hope orbiter
Artwork shows the United Arab Emirates' Hope orbiter at Mars. (Illustration Credit: MBRSC)

It’s been more than two years since the most recent launch to Mars, but traffic to the Red Planet is due to pick up dramatically in the next couple of weeks.

The United Arab Emirates could start things off as soon as Sunday (July 19) with the launch of its first-ever interplanetary probe, the Hope orbiter. Liftoff from Japan’s Tanegashima Space Center is set for as early as 5:58 p.m. ET (1:58 a.m. UAE time July 20), with a Japanese H-2A rocket providing the ride.

The UAE is an up-and-comer in the space business, as evidenced by last year’s first space mission by an Emirati astronaut. This Mars mission celebrates the Emirates’ 50th anniversary as a nation, and is being carried out by the Mohammed bin Rashid Space Centre in collaboration with a variety of U.S. research institutions.

The car-sized Hope orbiter is designed to provide a weather-satellite style view of the Martian atmosphere over the course of its two-year-long primary mission. Hope’s launch has been delayed a couple of times due to unfavorable weather in Japan, but once liftoff takes place, it should be clear sailing to orbital insertion at Mars next February.

China is next up with its Tianwen-1 orbiter, lander and rover. The spacecraft should be sent on its way from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site atop a Long March 5 rocket sometime next week.

Assuming all goes as advertised, Tianwen-1’s landing platform will touch down on a Martian plain known as Utopia Planitia next February. The rover will roll off the platform, take pictures, analyze rock samples and use a radar instrument to hunt for pockets of subsurface water.

Meanwhile, the orbiter will be snapping high-resolution pictures from above and serving as a communications relay. Tianwen (which means “Questioning the Heavens”) is China’s first Mars mission and could lay the groundwork for a sample return mission in the late 2020s.

NASA is also preparing for a sample return mission. On July 30, it’s due to launch the Mars Perseverance rover from Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket.

Perseverance takes advantage of the same basic chassis design and plutonium-powered batteries used for the Curiosity rover, which is still in operation eight years after landing on Mars. But its instruments are optimized to look for the chemical signs of ancient microbial life.

After the one-ton, SUV-sized rover makes its February touchdown in Jezero Crater, one of its primary tasks will be to collect promising samples of Martian rock and soil for eventual return to Earth. Perseverance is also packing a mini-helicopter called Ingenuity, which could become the first powered aircraft to fly on another planet.

There’s a reason why all these spacecraft are due for takeoff this summer, heading for a landing next February. Because of the orbital relationship between Earth and Mars, the optimal opportunity for a trip to the Red Planet comes every 26 months.

NASA’s Mars InSight lander took advantage of the 2018 opportunity, and now it’s time once again for Mars-bound missions to lift off — or wait for the next turn in 2022.

There’ll be a lot more on the Red Planet menu in the next few weeks, and this Mars IQ test should serve as an appetizer. Are you a space cadet or a Mars commander? If you’ve read this story, you should get at least the first quiz question right…

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Cosmic Space

5 years after flyby, the case for Pluto still holds up

Pluto and Charon
A composite image from NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft shows enhanced-color views of Pluto at lower right and Charon, its largest moon, at upper left. (NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI Photo)

It was exactly five years ago today that NASA’s New Horizons probe made a history-making flyby past Pluto — and since then, the mission’s scientific discoveries and newly raised mysteries continue to pile up.

“I think the solar system literally saved the best for last with Pluto,” New Horizons’ principal investigator, Alan Stern of the Southwest Research Institute, said in his anniversary blog post. “Of course, I’m a little biased — as we all are on New Horizons — but I can’t think of a more beautiful and scientifically richer way to have completed the first era of the reconnaissance of the planets.”

This year marks another, more personal anniversary: It’s been 10 years since the publication of “The Case for Pluto,” my book about the put-upon planet. Back then, the big question was whether Pluto deserved the planet label — and although I argued the case that it does, the clash over classification really isn’t that big of a deal anymore.

You can call Pluto a dwarf planet (my preferred term), a Kuiper Belt object or a “bloog.” (That last term is the one Caltech astronomer and self-described Pluto-killer Mike Brown came up with to make fun of the tiff over terminology.)

But in light of New Horizons’ discoveries, you can never call Pluto uninteresting.

It’s interesting to leaf through the pages of “The Case for Pluto” and size up how the speculation from 2010 matches up with the science as we know it in 2020. In honor of the fifth anniversary of the flyby and the 10th anniversary of the book, here are updates on five of the big questions about Pluto:

Is there liquid water on Pluto? Looks like it. New Horizons’ pictures of tectonic structures and mountains made of water ice, plus an analysis of the dwarf planet’s mass distribution, suggest that there are bodies of liquid water hidden beneath the surface layer of nitrogen ice. What’s more, shifts in the state of that water due to freezing may be what’s driving the creation of new faults in the surface ice.

“If Pluto is an active ocean world, that suggests that the Kuiper Belt may be filled with other ocean worlds among its dwarf planets, dramatically expanding the number of potentially habitable places in the solar system,” New Horizons team member James Tuttle Keane, a planetary scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said today in a mission recap.

Does Pluto have plains of methane? Sort of. One of Pluto’s best-known features, a light-colored, heart-shaped zone that was named Tombaugh Regio in honor of the dwarf planet’s discoverer, is dominated by a plain known as Sputnik Planitia. The plain is made up of patchy nitrogen-ice glaciers, but New Horizons also detected the presence of frozen methane, carbon monoxide and water (in the form of icebergs).

A close analysis of the imagery led scientists to conclude that grains of methane sand have risen to the surface of Sputnik Planitia and are being blown around into icy dunes, probably by gentle winds in Pluto’s ultra-thin, nitrogen-rich atmosphere.

Will Pluto’s atmosphere freeze out? The latest evidence suggests a freezing trend. Pluto cycles through seasons in the course of its 248-Earth-year orbit, the dwarf planet’s elliptical orbit is currently taking it farther away from the sun. That means the already-chilly planet and its atmosphere will be getting even colder.

At the time of the New Horizons flyby, scientists saw signs that the atmosphere was still holding steady rather than freezing into flecks of ice, probably due to thermal inertia. But this year, a Japanese team reported that the pressure has apparently dropped by more than 20% since 2016. That’s a much more dramatic collapse than expected, and will need to be confirmed (or discounted) by follow-up observations.

Are there ice volcanoes? You bet … not only on Pluto but on its largest moon, Charon. The pictures from New Horizons suggest that slushy “cryolava” has blurped out onto the surfaces of the two worlds through fissures in the surface ice.

Although the flyby went by too quickly to see the actual blurping, scientists spotted large central pits on two Plutonian mountains known as Wright Mons and Piccard Mons that they believe serve as the mouths of ice volcanoes. And in a region on Charon called Vulcan Planitia, the New Horizons team saw signs of a huge flow of ammonia-rich water ice.

Is there another Planet X out there? Ask again later. Even when “The Case for Pluto” was written, there was plenty of speculation over whether an undetected planet much bigger than Pluto lurked on the solar system’s edge. Caltech’s Mike Brown and other researchers said anomalies in the orbits of objects in the Kuiper Belt hinted at the presence of what they called Planet Nine.

Years of searching through telescope data haven’t yet turned up hard evidence for Planet Nine’s presence, and some astronomers now speculate that the anomalies associated with the hypothetical planet are due instead to the gravitational influence of a grapefruit-sized black hole. Others suggest it’s just a glitch in the data.

Even if Planet X is crossed out. there’s much more to be discovered on the solar system’s last frontier.

The New Horizons team is still sorting through the data sent back from the last year’s follow-up flyby of a double-lobed Kuiper Belt object known as Arrokoth. A huge compendium of Pluto research, running to more than 1,000 pages in length, is being prepared for publication.

Stern and his colleagues are already working to identify a potential target for New Horizons’ third Kuiper Belt flyby. And they’re talking about sending out an orbiter with powerful sensors to conduct a longer-lasting survey of Pluto and the Kuiper Belt.

“By the time we mark the 10th anniversary of the Pluto flyby in July 2025, such a mission could even be under construction,” Stern wrote today.

Who knows? Maybe a 15th-anniversary edition of “The Case for Pluto” will be in the works as well.

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Cosmic Space

What to know before you go comet-hunting

Comet NEOWISE
An unprocessed image from NASA’s Parker Solar Probe shows Comet NEOWISE on July 5, shortly after its closest approach to the sun. The sun is out of frame to the left. (NASA / JHUAPL / Naval Research Lab / Parker Solar Probe / Brendan Gallagher)

This summer’s sky spectacle is a shooting star that was discovered in March by NASA’s Near-Earth Object Wide-Field Explorer, or NEOWISE. Comet NEOWISE (also known as C/2020 F3) zoomed around the sun last week, and is now visible to the naked eye. But only if you know exactly where, when and how to look.

Although there’s lots of buzz about NEOWISE, this is no “great comet” — just a pretty good one. If you’re expecting to look up above your head and see a celestial portent of “Game of Thrones” proportions, you’re going to be disappointed.

But if you’re angling to see this season’s most-talked-about sky show with your own eyes, here are five strategies to maximize your chances:

Go late or go early: Because it’s so soon after the northern solstice, the celestial alignments make it theoretically possible to see Comet NEOWISE in morning or evening skies, with emphasis on the word “theoretically.”

For the next few days, the comet will be higher in the sky in the morning, which means predawn viewing is preferred. The best time is around 3 to 4 a.m.; the farther north you are, the earlier you should get up. Around July 15, the comet’s outward trajectory from the sun will turn it into more of an evening star, with prime time coming at 10:30 p.m., about an hour and a half after sunset.

Look north: Your viewing spot should have an unobstructed view to the northern horizon — to the northeast for morning viewing, or to the northwest for the evening. To find optimal views of the horizon, scan Google Maps (with Street View). And to figure out exactly where to look in the sky, study the charts from Sky & Telescope, SpaceWeather.com, The Sky Live, Heavens Above and EarthSky.

Comet NEOWISE should be visible in the northeast by 3 a.m. July 11 — close to the horizon and to the left of Venus, the brightest object in eastern skies.

Seek clarity: The fact that NEOWISE is so close to the horizon means that sky conditions are crucial. There’s a good chance the comet could be lost in hazy or humid skies. And if there are clouds stretching across the horizon, that could be a deal-breaker. Finding out you’re clouded out at 3 a.m. is a truly rude awakening.

To determine if the forecast is favorable, click on over to Digital.Weather.gov, focus in on your viewing area and select “Sky Cover (%)” from the drop-down menu. Then move the slider bar to your planned viewing time (for example, “At Jul 11, 3 a.m.”) and check whether conditions are expected to be blue (set your alarm) or gray (sleep in).

Bring binoculars: Although NEOWISE is bright enough for naked-eye viewing, your naked eyes will see it pretty much as a fuzzy star. To make out the comet’s tail clearly, you’ll probably need to break out the binoculars or a telescope.

Skywatchers have been putting up some impressive pictures of NEOWISE and its double tail — a curving tail of cosmic dust illuminated by the sun, plus a dimmer, bluish tail of ions streaming straight out. You just have to remember that those photos are typically enhanced or stacked to bring out details you won’t be able to see with your own eyes.

Be realistic: Most celestial phenomena are subtler than the hype makes them out to be, so don’t get frustrated if that turns out to be the case for NEOWISE. While you’re out there comet-hunting, take a moment to check out other celestial wonders — ranging from the International Space Station and passing satellites to the moon, planets and meteors.

Even if you miss seeing NEOWISE with your naked eyes, you can still connect with the comet by checking out the views from the space station, NASA’s Parker Solar Probe and the scores of dedicated comet-hunters whose photos appear on SpaceWeather.com, EarthSky and other online galleries.

Update for 2 p.m. PT July 13: I discovered that 4 a.m. is really too late to look for the comet in northern-latitude locations (like Seattle). I totally missed seeing it at 4 a.m. on July 11 — but had much better luck at 3 a.m. on July 13, when it was still dark enough to spot NEOWISE in advance of the predawn glow. I’ve changed the time references in this story for the benefit of those still trying to catch sight of the comet before dawn.

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Cosmic Space

50 shades of black holes for 17 years of Cosmic Log

Alan Boyle and black holes
Alan Boyle talks about black holes during Infinity Box Theatre's "Centrifuge" production at Seattle's Theatre Off Jackson. (Robert Falk Photo)

This week marks 17 years since Cosmic Log was founded, and to celebrate the occasion, here’s the text of a talk I gave this month at Theatre Off Jackson for Infinity Box Theatre’s “Centrifuge” production of science-oriented one-act plays. My talk, titled “Fifty Shades of Black Holes,” set the scene for a three-actor drama about a black hole expedition. To take a walk down Cosmic Log’s memory lane, check out our archives.

●

I bet you never thought you’d be learning about black holes, the holographic principle and digital consciousness theory tonight. But you’ll be getting a taste of all of that in just a few minutes, in Harold Taw’s play about the Primrose Protocol.

My name is Alan Boyle. I’m the aerospace and science editor at GeekWire, and you can consider this a prologue to set the scientific scene.

I actually write about black holes every so often – for example, I was in Washington, D.C., last month for the unveiling of the first-ever image of a supermassive black hole. This one is in M87, a galaxy that’s about 55 million light-years away. But our own Milky Way galaxy also has a black hole at its center, a mere 26,000 light-years away.

If you’re up on your science fiction, you probably know that a black hole is a gravitational singularity so dense that nothing, not even light, can escape its grip. But that’s just one of the ways in which black holes bend our conception of reality.

Light waves from stars behind a black hole are bent by its gravitational field, which produces the aura you see around the circular edge of the event horizon.

Oh, the event horizon … This is important. That marks the edge of the region where anything that falls in can’t get out. But if you were heading toward the event horizon, you wouldn’t necessarily know when you crossed it – at least at first. You could keep falling toward the center of a black hole for hours before bad stuff starts happening.

Eventually, though, the gravitational field would become so strong that if you were falling feet first, your feet would be pulled in faster than your head. Your whole body, and all the atoms in it, would be stretched out like a noodle. Stephen Hawking is credited with coming up with the technical term for this effect: spaghettification.

Once an object falls past the event horizon, it’s gone. But for physicists like Hawking, that’s a big problem. In science class, you’ve probably heard it said that energy can neither be created nor destroyed – it can only be transferred or changed in form. Theoretical physicists say the same thing about information: It can neither be created nor destroyed.

So what happens to the information about things that fall in a black hole? Some physicists say that the information is somehow encoded on the surface of the event horizon, perhaps as tiny fluctuations in a black hole’s gravitational field.

It’s similar to the way the information for a 3-D object can be encoded on a 2-D hologram – like the shiny square that’s on the back of a credit card. Physicists call this idea the holographic principle. Some even suggest that at its most basic level, the universe we live in just might be an encoded two-dimensional surface that we decode into our perception of three dimensions.

If that’s the case, it’s not hard to imagine that everything in our reality – including ourselves – can be translated into the code of a deeper reality. And if our descendants ever figure out that code, maybe millions of years from now, could our shades be re-created from the fluctuations we left behind? What is real?

I’m going to stop right here, at the edge of the event horizon. I’ll leave it to the actors of “The Primrose Protocol” to plunge ahead, into the void.

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Cosmic Space

Listen to a two-pack podcast about Blue Origin

Image: Bezos and Boyle
Jeff Bezos and Alan Boyle get a selfie taken next to a nozzle for Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine.

Journalists got a first-of-its-kind tour of Blue Origin’s rocket factory this week, personally conducted by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos. While the memories were still fresh, Cosmic Log’s Alan Boyle recounted the tour and talked about Bezos’ vision on two podcasts:

  • On GeekWire Radio, host Todd Bishop asks why Bezos decided to lift the veil on Blue Origin’s operation after 16 years of secretiveness.
  • On KUOW’s “The Record,” host Bill Radke gets the details on a tour that’s reminiscent of Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory. “No Oompa-Loompas, but lots of rocket engines.”