Category: Cosmic Tech

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Cosmic Tech

How watching the watchers could help stop Big Brother

"Big Brother Is Watching You" graffiti on a wall.
"Big Brother Is Watching You," a surveillance slogan made famous in George Orwell's "1984," is stenciled on the wall of an industrial building in Ukraine's Donetsk region. (Credit: Борис У. / Boris U. / 2010 / CC BY-SA 3.0)

If Big Brother is watching us, can we fend him off by watching him back? Thanks to the proliferation of smartphone videos and social media connections, we’re starting to find out.

The past, present and future of surveillance technology was the focus for one of the sessions last week at Seattle Worldcon 2025, this year’s edition of the world’s premier science-fiction convention.

Surveillance societies have been a frequent topic in science fiction, with George Orwell’s “1984” (which gave birth to the slogan “Big Brother Is Watching You”) and “Minority Report” (a 2002 Tom Cruise movie based on a 1956 novella by Philip K. Dick) among notable examples.

But last week’s session focused primarily on fact, not fiction.

Futurist and sci-fi author David Brin noted that his nonfiction book on privacy and freedom, “The Transparent Society,” came out 27 years ago. “Unfortunately, too many of the chapters are completely relevant today,” he said.

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Boom goes supersonic with XB-1 jet’s flight test

Boom's XB-1 demonstrator aircraft in flight
Boom Supersonic's XB-1 demonstrator aircraft has achieved a top speed of Mach 1.1. (Boom Supersonic Photo)

Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 demonstrator aircraft broke the sound barrier during a flight test today, becoming the first civilian jet plane to go supersonic in 22 years.

“Supersonic civil flight is back,” Boom CEO Blake Scholl declared in a posting to X / Twitter.

XB-1 exceeded Mach 1 three times during the 33-minute flight, which was conducted from California’s Mojave Air and Space Port. Boom said the top speed was Mach 1.122, or 750 mph, and the plane reached an altitude of 35,290 feet.

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Cosmic Tech

Boom Supersonic gives its test plane a subsonic debut

Boom XB-1 jet takes off
Boom's XB-1 demonstrator jet takes off for the first time. (Credit: Boom Supersonic)

After a decade of development, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 demonstrator jet took to the air today for the first in a series of test flights that will eventually lead beyond the sound barrier.

The flight at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port achieved a top altitude of 7,120 feet and a top speed of 238 knots (273 mph), Boom said in a news release. That’s nowhere near the speed of sound, but going supersonic wasn’t the goal. Instead, the aim was to start gathering data on the XB-1’s performance from takeoff to landing.

“Today, XB-1 took flight in the same hallowed airspace where the Bell X-1 first broke the sound barrier in 1947,” said Boom’s CEO and founder, Blake Scholl. “I’ve been looking forward to this flight since founding Boom in 2014, and it marks the most significant milestone yet on our path to bring supersonic travel to passengers worldwide.”

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Cosmic Tech

XPRIZE contest offers $5 million for quantum applications

Cryostat at IBM quantum computing exhibit
Components for IBM’s quantum computer are on display at a conference in Switzerland. (Credit: Alan Boyle)

Twenty years after staging its first competition for technological innovations, XPRIZE is offering $5 million to expand one of today’s hottest tech frontiers: quantum computing.

The XPRIZE Quantum Applications competition is aimed at stimulating the development of quantum algorithms that can outdo classical computers when it comes to solving real-world challenges.

It’s a field that’s facing its own set of challenges — for example, the hardware systems that would make use of such algorithms are still under development. And that’s not the only uncertainty factor: Unlike the first XPRIZE, which set up clear guidelines for awarding a $10 million prize for private-sector spaceflight, the goals for the quantum competition have the trademark fuzziness of quantum mechanics.

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Cosmic Tech

GoAERO Prize offers $2M for emergency vehicles that fly

Engineer working on rotorcraft
A scene from the GoAERO Prize introductory video shows an engineer working on a rotorcraft. (GoAERO via YouTube)

A newly announced program called GoAERO is offering more than $2 million in prizes for the development of single-person flying vehicles that are customized for emergency responders — four years after a similar competition ended without awarding its top prize.

The GoAERO Prize program is led by Gwen Lighter, the same woman who was in charge of the earlier GoFly Prize. And as was the case for the GoFly Prize, Boeing is one of the sponsors. Other supporters include NASA, RTX ( the umbrella company for Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace), Iridium and Xwing.

Back in 2017, the GoFly Prize offered $2 million to support the development of personal aerial vehicles — and three years later, the organizers held a fly-off in California to determine the winners.

None of the teams won the $1 million top prize, but a $100,000 prize was awarded to Japan’s teTra Aviation for building a rotor-equipped vehicle that looked like a cross between a motorcycle and an ultralight airplane. At last report, teTra was still developing a commercial version of its vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle, or VTOL.

The GoAERO Prize tightens the focus of the competition to concentrate on VTOL aircraft that are optimized for emergency-response applications — for example, to handle search and rescue, medical emergencies, wildfires, natural disasters or humanitarian crises.

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Super-quiet supersonic jet rolls out for a preview

X-59 on flight apron at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
NASA's X-59 supersonic research aircraft sits outside Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works facility in California. (Lockheed Martin Photo)

Today’s debut of NASA’s X-59 low-boom supersonic jet brought not even a whisper of a sonic boom — because it stayed on the ground at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, Calif.

But later this year, the long, pointy plane is due to test out technologies aimed at reducing the noise that’s associated with supersonic aircraft — and removing obstacles to routine super-high-speed air travel.

At today’s rollout ceremony, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said the X-59 is designed to produce a “gentle thump” rather than the thunderous boom created when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier.

“This breakthrough really redefines the feasibility of commercial supersonic travel over land,” she said. “It brings us closer to a future that we can all understand — cutting flight time from New York to Los Angeles in half.”

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Air Force picks its builders for a swoopy kind of aircraft

Illustration: Blended-wing prototype aircraft in flight
An artist's conception shows a blended wing body prototype aircraft in flight. (U.S. Air Force Graphic)

Get ready for another prototype airplane that looks as if it flew straight out of a science-fiction novel.

The Department of the Air Force has selected JetZero’s design for a prototype aircraft that has a swoopy blended wing body, or BWB, rather than the typical tube-and-wing look.

The design has the potential to decrease aerodynamic drag by at least 30% and provide additional lift. This could translate into extended range, more loiter time and increased payload delivery efficiencies for the Air Force.

“Blended wing body aircraft have the potential to significantly reduce fuel demand and increase global reach,” Air Force Secretary Frank Kendall said in a news release. “Moving forces and cargo quickly, efficiently, and over long distance is a critical capability to enable national security strategy.”

Commercial aviation could benefit as well. “The BWB is the best first step on the path to zero carbon emissions,” JetZero CEO Tom O’Leary said in a news release. “It offers 50% lower fuel burn using today’s engines, and the airframe efficiency needed to support a transition to zero carbon emissions propulsion in the future. No other proposed aircraft comes close in terms of efficiency.”

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WiBotic unveils a pad that can manage drones on its own

PowerPad Pro sitting in a crop field
WiBotic's PowerPad Pro undergoes testing in a farm field. (WiBotic Photo)

Seattle-based WiBotic has made a name for itself with battery charging stations for drones as well as for ground-based robots, and now its best-known charger is getting smarter.

WiBotic’s PowerPad Pro can bring in any type of drone for autonomous charging — without needing a human operator to guide it in — and also download a drone’s high-resolution data for transmission to a remote mission control center.

“We’ve really solved the power and data piece for this,” Ben Waters, Wibotic’s co-founder and CEO, told me.

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IBM marks medical milestone for quantum computers

An overhead view shows IBM's Quantum System One at Cleveland Clinic. (Photo by Ryan Lavine for IBM)
An overhead view shows IBM's Quantum System One at Cleveland Clinic. (Photo by Ryan Lavine for IBM)

IBM and Cleveland Clinic today unveiled the first quantum computer dedicated solely to research in health care and life sciences — a sleek cube of glass and metal that’s likely to generate sci-fi movie concepts for years to come.

Researchers hope IBM Quantum System One will eventually generate new biomedical discoveries as well.

“This includes quantum machine learning to design more efficient immunotherapies and designing quantum-accelerated models to predict drug combinations,” Jeanette Garcia, senior research manager of quantum computational science at IBM, said in an emailed statement.

The potential applications extend beyond medical research.

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German robotics team wins Avatar XPRIZE showdown

NimbRo robot at ANA Avatar XPRIZE finals
Team NimbRo's robot performs tasks at the ANA Avatar XPRIZE finals. (XPRIZE Photo)

Robotic life imitated art this weekend at a telepresence contest in California, and Germany’s Team NimbRo is $5 million richer as a result. The payoff came at the end of the $10 million ANA Avatar XPRIZE competition in Long Beach, sponsored by Japan’s All Nippon Airways and organized by the XPRIZE foundation.

The contest incentivized technologies that allow operators to perform real-time robotic operations remotely — a la the fictional blue-skinned androids who are linked to humans in the “Avatar” movie series (with “Avatar: The Way of Water” premiering next month). The concept is also center stage in “The Peripheral,” a sci-fi novel by William Gibson that’s been adapted for the screen on Amazon Prime Video.

Ninety-nine teams signed up for the Avatar XPRIZE in 2018, kicking off rounds of competition that led to the Nov. 5 finals at the Long Beach Convention and Entertainment Center. The robots had to weigh less than 160 kilograms (350 pounds) and be controlled wirelessly.

This weekend, 17 finalist teams from 10 countries brought in their robotic telepresence systems to perform a series of remote tasks such as traversing an 80-foot-long obstacle course strewn with boulders, flipping switches, using a power drill to unscrew a bolt, and selecting the roughest rock in a collection based strictly by feel.

For the finals, the avatars were controlled by outside judges from a separate room, rather than by team members. Points were awarded based on how quickly and how well the tasks were performed. NimbRo’s robot did all 10 tasks in five minutes and 50 seconds.

A robot built by a French team called Pollen Robotics accomplished all the tasks in 10 minutes and 50 seconds, earning the $2 million second prize. Boston-based Team Northeastern came away with the $1 million third prize. The other $2 million of the prize purse was awarded last year to the teams advancing to the finals.

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