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Moon lander mission will carry DNA to the final frontier

Astrobotic moon lander prepared for launch
Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander is prepared for placement within its launch vehicle’s fairing. (Astrobotic Photo)

A mission to send a commercial lander to the moon, set for launch in a couple of days, will bring the fruition of projects that have been in the works for years — including projects that aim to put DNA into cold storage on the final frontier.

Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s robotic Peregrine lander is scheduled to begin a circuitous 40-day trip to the moon with liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:18 a.m. ET Jan. 8 (11:18 p.m. PT Jan. 7). NASA TV will stream coverage of the countdown.

It’ll mark the first launch for United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket, and the first use of the BE-4 engines built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture for Vulcan’s first-stage booster — coming nearly 10 years after the partnership between ULA and Blue Origin was announced.

A successful touchdown next month would go into the history books as the first soft landing of a commercially built spacecraft on the lunar surface — in fact, the first soft lunar landing of any U.S.-built spacecraft since Apollo 17 in 1972. Among the payloads placed aboard the lander is the Iris mini-rover, which would become the first U.S.-built vehicle to wheel around the moon since the Apollo era.

Several NASA-supported payloads will take measurements at the landing site, around a region known as the Gruithuisen Domes, during a science mission that’s projected to last a couple of weeks. Other payloads include micro-robots from Mexico, an art project called MoonArk, mementos and bits of cryptocurrency.

And then there’s the DNA. Samples of DNA — either contributed by donors or synthesized to contain coded information — will be riding on the Peregrine lander as well as the Vulcan’s Centaur V upper stage.

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NASA boosts far-out radio dishes and other wild ideas

Concept illustrations from NIAC Phase I projects
This collage highlights several concepts proposed by 2024 NIAC Phase I awardees. (NASA Illustration)

A proposal to build a far-flung set of radio antennas to measure the cosmos is one of 13 far-out concepts to receive seed funding from the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts program.

University of Washington astronomer Matthew McQuinn will receive a grant of $175,000 to flesh out his plan for a solar-system-scale interferometer capable of determining cosmological distances with precision that’s an order of magnitude beyond what’s possible today.

The plan would require building and launching a constellation of four radio dishes, each measuring at least several meters (yards) in diameter. The detectors would have to be widely separated, far out in deep space. How far out? “The science gets interesting when they are more than about 10 AU apart,” McQuinn told me in an email. That distance of 10 AU is just a bit less than the width of Jupiter’s orbit.

The detectors would be on the lookout for fast radio bursts that flash from beyond our Milky Way galaxy. By measuring the difference in arrival times at the different detectors, scientists could calculate the distance to the source of a burst with sub-percent precision. “It’s kind of like GPS localizations, but applied to fast radio bursts,” McQuinn explained.

In his proposal, McQuinn says such measurements could lead to new discoveries in fields ranging from gravitational-wave detection to the study of dark matter. McQuinn and a UW colleague, Kyle Boone, lay out the details in a research paper that was published last year in The Astrophysical Journal Letters.

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SpaceX launches satellites that cellphones could use

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ignition
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lights up its engines to send Starlink satellites to space from a California launch pad. (SpaceX via Twitter / X)

The first satellites capable of providing direct-to-cellular service via SpaceX’s Starlink network and T-Mobile’s cellular network have been sent into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Six of the cell-capable satellites were among a batch of 21 Starlink satellites launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 7:44 p.m. PT Jan. 2. The satellites were deployed successfully, and the rocket’s first-stage booster made a routine landing on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean.

SpaceX plans to launch hundreds of the upgraded satellites in the months ahead, with the aim of beginning satellite-enabled texting later this year. 4G LTE satellite connectivity for voice and data via unmodified mobile devices would follow in 2025, pending regulatory approval.

“Today’s launch is a pivotal moment for this groundbreaking alliance with SpaceX and our global partners around the world, as we work to make dead zones a thing of the past,” Mike Katz, president of marketing, strategy and products for Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile, said today in a news release.

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Federally funded lab enlists AI to safeguard security

Portrait of Court Corley, chief scientist for AI at PNNL
Court Corley leads the Center for AI @PNNL. (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Photo / Andrea Starr)

Bringing artificial intelligence to bear on issues relating to nuclear weapons might sound like the stuff of a scary sci-fi movie — but at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, it’s just one of the items on the to-do list.

One of PNNL’s research priorities is to identify and combat complex threats to national security, and AI can help meet that priority by detecting attempts to acquire nuclear weapons or associated technology.

Nuclear proliferation detection is one of the potential applications that could get an assist from the Center for AI @PNNL, a newly announced effort to coordinate research that makes use of AI tools — including the generative AI tools that have captured the attention of the tech world over the past year or two.

“For decades we’ve been doing artificial intelligence,” center director Court Corley, PNNL’s chief scientist for AI, told me in a recent interview. “What we’re seeing now, though, is an exceptional phase shift in where AI is being used and how it’s being used.”

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The Year in Aerospace: Count down to big missions

ULA Atlas V rocket launches Amazon Project Kuiper satellites in October
United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket lifts off with two prototype Amazon satellites in October 2023. (ULA Photo)

If 2022 was packed with headline-grabbing aerospace developments — including the first pictures from the James Webb Telescope and the first launch of NASA’s giant moon rocket — 2023 was what you might call a rebuilding year.

This year began with high hopes for aerospace companies with a significant presence in the Seattle area, ranging from Boeing to Blue Origin to SpaceX. A lot of those hopes had to be put on hold, basically because everything in the space industry takes longer than expected. Nevertheless, there were plenty of developments worthy of note in the aerospace world, including a milestone for the tech industry: the first launch for Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite program.

To mark the transition from 2023 to 2024, I’m serving up my top five aerospace stories from the past year, plus the top five developments to watch for in the year ahead. If all goes according to plan, 2024 could be one of the biggest years since I started writing “Year in Space” roundups in 1997. But if there’s one thing that the past 26 years have taught me, it’s that all doesn’t go according to plan.

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Orbite is raising funds for spaceflight training programs

Illustration: Interior view of Orbite astronaut training facility
Artwork shows an interior view of Orbite's future Astronaut Training and Spaceflight Gateway Campus. (Orbite Illustration)

Orbite Space, a venture that aims to offer down-to-Earth spaceflight training programs on a “try before you fly” basis, is raising more capital amid the company’s preparations for an expansion of operations.

The financial arrangements were reported this week in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

In the filing, Orbite reports an equity offering of $6.775 million and says that $2.725 million of the offering has already been sold. The company says those amounts include the conversion of previously issued convertible securities. So far, seven investors have taken part in the offering, according to the SEC filing.

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After launch revival, Blue Origin aims to fly people ‘soon’

Blue Origin New Shepard booster descends for a landing
Blue Origin's New Shepard booster descends toward its landing in Texas. (Blue Origin Photo)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture today sent its New Shepard rocket ship on its first suborbital trip to space in 15 months — and although no people were on the craft this time, the research mission boosted confidence that crewed flights will resume in the new year.

“Following a thorough review of today’s mission, we look forward to flying our next crewed flight soon,” launch commentator Erika Wagner said as she wrapped up Blue Origin’s streaming-video coverage.

Her fellow commentator, Eddie Seyffert, said everything looked good during the 10-minute-long flight. “I would call this the best day at work for me,” he said.

The flight from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas followed the profile that the New Shepard program has used for 23 previous missions over the past nine years — including six crewed flights. Liftoff came at 10:42 a.m. CT (8:42 a.m. PT), and the rocket booster sent the capsule toward the 100-kilometer (62-mile) line that marks the internationally accepted space boundary.

Capsule separation took place a little more than two minutes after launch. The reusable booster landed itself on a pad not far from where it was launched. Meanwhile, New Shepard’s capsule rose to a height of 65.8 miles (106 kilometers) above ground level, and then descended to its own parachute-assisted landing in the Texas desert.

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Blue Origin reschedules its return to spaceflight

Blue Origin New Shepard rocket ship on Texas launch pad
The New Shepard rocket ship is readied for launch from Launch Site One in West Texas. (Blue Origin Photo)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is heading back to the launch pad again on Dec. 19 to send its New Shepard rocket ship on an uncrewed space mission for the first time in 15 months.

The first launch attempt ended today with a postponement, due to a ground system issue that needed troubleshooting at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas.

The second attempt is scheduled for no earlier than 10:37 a.m. CT (8:37 a.m. PT), depending on weather and technical readiness. Blue Origin will provide streaming video coverage of the countdown, launch and landing via its website starting at T-minus-20 minutes.

This mission, known as NS24, will send 33 science payloads to the edge of space and back, providing a few minutes of zero gravity for research purposes. It’s essentially a do-over for a flight in September 2022 that ended prematurely due to a malfunction of the New Shepard booster’s hydrogen-fueled rocket engine.

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Pacific Northwest National Lab creates a new AI center

PNNL team monitoring electrical grid activity
Keeping the electrical grid humming is one focus of AI research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. (PNNL Photo / Andrea Starr)

The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is shining a brighter spotlight on artificial intelligence by creating the Center for AI @PNNL, but don’t expect the lab’s researchers to build a better chatbot.

Instead, the center is meant to advance AI applications that boost PNNL’s capabilities in its traditional focus areas, including scientific discovery, national security and energy resilience.

“The creation of the Center for AI @PNNL will leverage and amplify these capabilities for even greater impact in service of our nation,” PNNL Director Steven Ashby said today in a news release.

Today’s announcement coincides with the annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS, which is taking place this week in New Orleans. The center’s creation serves as further evidence that AI tools are rapidly transforming a wide range of scientific and technical fields.

“The time is right for PNNL to focus its AI-related efforts,” said Court Corley, PNNL’s chief scientist for AI and director of the new center. “The field is moving at light speed, and we need to move quickly to keep PNNL at the frontier.”

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Amazon reveals that its satellites are using lasers

Illustration: Globe with satellite mesh pattern and laser connection highlighted
This graphic shows how Project Kuiper would use optical signaling between satellites. (Amazon Illustration)

Ending years of speculation, Amazon has acknowledged that its Project Kuiper satellites will use laser-based links to communicate with each other, and says the system has already been successfully tested in orbit.

Such a system — known as optical inter-satellite links, or OISL — passes along data more quickly and efficiently than sending signals down from satellites to ground stations, through fiber-optic cables and then back up to other satellites.

“With optical inter-satellite links across our satellite constellation, Project Kuiper will effectively operate as a mesh network in space,” Rajeev Badyal, Project Kuiper’s vice president of technology, said today in a news release. “This system is designed fully in-house to optimize for speed, cost and reliability, and the entire architecture has worked flawlessly from the very start.”

Amazon said the infrared laser system was tested using two prototype satellites that were launched into low Earth orbit in October. The system was able to maintain data transmission speeds of 100 gigabits per second (Gbps) over a distance of nearly 621 miles (1,000 kilometers) during test windows lasting an hour or more.

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