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737 MAX jet gets drawn into labor dispute

An artist’s conception shows a Southwest Airlines 737 MAX taking to the air. (Credit: Boeing)

Is Boeing’s 737 MAX just a 737 jet, or is it something new? That question figures in a years-long battle between Southwest Airlines and its pilots union.

The fuel-efficient 737 MAX made its maiden test flight in January, and Southwest is due to receive the first plane of that breed in the first half of next year. The airline has put in firm orders for 30 of the MAX 7 variant and 170 of the MAX 8.

The issue is that the yet-to-be-delivered 737 MAX isn’t specifically named in the current labor agreement between the airline and the 8,300-member Southwest Airlines Pilots’ Association. The two sides have been negotiating over a new contract for more than four years, and dispute has become increasingly bitter. The pilots are seeking higher pay and an improved retirement package, while Southwest is seeking more flexible work rules and improvements in productivity.

The negotiations are currently in federal mediation.

For months, Southwest pilots have been saying that they won’t fly the 737 MAX when it’s delivered, because it’s not listed among the planes covered by the existing contract. Today the union filed a lawsuit asking a federal court in Dallas to block Southwest from flying the 737 MAX until the plane is officially listed in a new contract.

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Magnetoshell gets in on NASA’s way-out funding

MSNW’s magnetoshell aerocapture concept could help ease spaceships into orbit. (Credit: MSNW)

A system that would use magnetic fields to ease a spacecraft into orbit after an interplanetary journey has won a $500,000 grant from NASA’s advanced research program for MSNW, a company based in Redmond. Wash.

The money for MSNW is one of eight Phase II awards made through the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts Program, also known as NIAC. Other projects look into such way-out ideas as suspended animation, beamed energy for interstellar travel and a satellite-airplane hybrid that could stay up in the air for months at a time.

MSNW’s magnetoshell aerocapture system is designed to take advantage of aerodynamic drag as well as magnetized plasma to slow a spacecraft down and as it dips through a planet’s atmosphere.

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Gates commits $100M to microbiome project

Humans are hosts to a diverse microbiome, including these organisms. Clockwise from top left are Streptococcus (Credit: Tom Schmidt); a microbial biofilm of mixed species, from human body (Credit: A. Earl, Broad Institute/MIT); Bacillus (Credit: Tom Schmidt); and Malassezia lopophilis (Credit: J.H. Carr, CDC). Image credit: Jonathan Bailey / NHGRI.

The White House has unveiled more than half a billion dollars’ worth of public and private programs aimed at unraveling the mysteries of microbes – and Seattle’s Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will be contributing more than $100 million to that National Microbiome Initiative over the next four years.

The initiative, announced May 13, will take advantage of the key role that microbial communities, also known as microbiomes, play in our gut as well as in agriculture and global ecosystems. Research into the workings on microbiomes could lead to new treatments for diseases, better crops and a healthier environment. Microbial transplants are already being used to treat conditions such as C. difficile, a debilitating bowel disease.

“Clearly, applications are critical. Ultimately the promise of the microbiome has to be realized,” microbiologist Jo Handelsman, associate director for science at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at the White House kickoff briefing.

U.S. Rep. Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat who is also a trained microbiologist, said the scientific payoff “is going to be like splitting the atom, I think, when you get all this done.”

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Solar Impulse makes Rocky flight to Oklahoma

The Solar Impulse 2 plane lands in Tulsa, Okla.,, after an 18-hour flight. (Credit: Solar Impulse)

After crossing the Himalayas and the Pacific, the fuel-free Solar Impulse 2 plane overcame the Rockies on May 12 during the Arizona-to-Oklahoma leg of its round-the-world odyssey.

“As you can imagine, flying over the Rocky Mountains is a challenge for an aircraft like Si2,” the Solar Impulse team said in a blog post. “But perhaps not for the reasons you would expect.”

The altitude wasn’t the biggest concern, although pilot Bertrand Piccard used an oxygen mask to cope with altitudes ranging up to 22,000 feet. Rather, it was the weather. Solar Impulse 2 is designed to soak up enough sunlight during the day to keep flying during the night, but it doesn’t do well during cloudy and stormy weather. That’s just the sort of weather that tends to build up during this time of year in the Rockies.

May 12 provided a window of opportunity for Piccard to make his way over the mountains in northern New Mexico and head eastward. Until this week, the plan was to stop over in Kansas City, Mo., but the Solar Impulse team said “we had to find a different solution” due to difficult weather conditions over the Kansas plains. So Piccard targeted Oklahoma’s Tulsa International Airport instead.

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2007 OR10 deserves a better name

An illustration lines up the solar system’s four largest dwarf planets, with 2007 OR10 in the middle of the pack. (Credit: Andras Pal / Konkoly Observatory, Ivan Eder / Hungarian Astronomical Association, NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

Observations made by NASA’s Kepler space telescope suggest that the icy world known as 2007 OR10 is bigger than astronomers thought –and that’s adding to the pressure to give the probable dwarf planet an official name, nine years after its discovery.

Some of the suggestions pick up on the recent controversy over a British ship-naming contest in which Boaty McBoatface emerged as the overwhelming favorite. So how about Dwarfplanety McDwarfplanetface, or Plutoid McPlutoface?

The cause of all this mirth is a research paper in the Astronomical Journal that provides a new size estimate for 2007 OR10, which lies far out in the Kuiper Belt, the broad ring of icy material just beyond Neptune. The object traces an eccentric orbit that takes 547.51 Earth years to complete, and ranges as far out as 66.9 times Earth’s distance from the sun (6.2 billion miles).

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Hyperloop One zooms through speed test

Hyperloop One’s propulsion test sled zooms down a Nevada desert track. (Credit: Hyperloop One)

The newly renamed Hyperloop One venture sent an electrically propelled sled down a Nevada test track at speeds that went beyond 100 mph in just two seconds, marking the public debut of its rapid-transit propulsion system.

Hundreds of journalists and VIPs watched the open-air propulsion test, which represents a milestone in the effort to commercialize a high-speed transportation system conceived three years ago by Elon Musk, the billionaire CEO of SpaceX and Tesla Motors.

Theoretically, such a system could transport passengers in levitating pods through elevated tubes at near-supersonic speeds, bridging the distance between, say, San Francisco and Los Angeles in a half-hour.

But turning theory into fact will probably require spending billions of dollars, pioneering scores of technologies and negotiating unprecedented regulatory hurdles. Today’s test was meant to demonstrate first-generation Hyperloop technology, and show that Hyperloop One was serious about building hardware and laying track, albeit for scaled-down testing.

Hyperloop One already has raised more than $100 million for its venture, including$80 million in investments that were announced on May 10.

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Boeing delays its astronaut trips to 2018

The hull of a CST-100 Starliner structural test vehicle is assembled inside Boeing’s Commercial Crew and Cargo Processing Facility at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida. (Credit: NASA)

A top Boeing executive said today that the company plans to start sending crews into orbit aboard its CST-100 Starliner space taxi in 2018, which represents a slight delay in NASA’s previous development schedule.

“We’re working toward our first unmanned flight in 2017, followed by a manned astronaut flight in 2018,” Leanne Caret, who is Boeing’s executive vice president as well as president and chief executive officer of Boeing’s defense, space and security division, said at a briefing for investors.

Previously, Boeing said both test flights, uncrewed and crewed, were scheduled for 2017. Just this week, Aviation Week reported that Boeing was sticking to the 2017 schedule, even though it’s been working through challenges related to the mass of the spacecraft and aeroacoustic issues related to integration with its United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 launch vehicle.

In a follow-up to Caret’s comments, Boeing spokeswoman Rebecca Regan told GeekWire that those factors contributed to the schedule slip. In addition, NASA software updates have added more work for developers.

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SpaceX Dragon returns year-in-space samples

SpaceX’s Dragon capsule descends toward the Pacific at the end of its parachutes. (Credit: SpaceX)

A month after delivering an expandable prototype habitat and other goodies to the International Space Station, SpaceX’s Dragon cargo capsule splashed down in the Pacific Ocean today  with tons of equipment and scientific samples.

Among the roughly 3,700 pounds of cargo are freezers containing blood, saliva, urine and stool samples from astronaut Scott Kelly, who served as an experimental subject during a nearly yearlong stint on the station. Those samples will be studied to see how long-term spaceflight affected Kelly’s metabolic functions, including the function of the gut bacteria in his bowels.

The results could affect how NASA plans for even longer journeys to Mars and other deep-space destinations.

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Hyperloop One gets an $80 million boost

Components for a Hyperloop One test track are laid out in North Las Vegas. (Credit: Hyperloop One)

Forget Hyperloop Technologies: Now the company is called Hyperloop One, and it’s backed by $80 million in new investment from heavy hitters including Khosla Ventures, GE Ventures and the French high-speed rail company SNCF.

Today’s unveiling of the new name and new financing, as well as an international array of partners and a tuned-up business plan, is part of a fast-track plan for building high-speed tube transit systems – not only in California, but potentially in Scandinavia and Switzerland as well.

L.A.-based Hyperloop One is due to demonstrate its propulsion system on an open-air test track in North Las Vegas on Wednesday. It’s gearing up for full-scale trials in a 2-mile-long tube by the end of the year. It’s also planning a “Hyperloop One Global Challenge” for folks who want to propose transportation applications for the Hyperloop concept. (Deadline for entries is Sept. 15.)

This week’s revelations pick up the pace in a crowded commercial race, aimed at capitalizing on a rapid-transit concept laid out almost three years ago by Elon Musk, the billionaire entrepreneur behind SpaceX and Tesla Motors.

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Software helps scientists double planet count

A graphic shows the diversity of planets. (Credit: NASA)

The scientists behind NASA’s Kepler mission are using statistics to put their campaign to identify new planets into overdrive: New software that automates the process has verified 1,284 candidates as genuine planets rather than celestial “impostors,” more than doubling its database of confirmed worlds.

“This is the most exoplanets that have ever been announced at one time,” Princeton University researcher Timothy Morton said today during a teleconference revealing the latest counts.

Kepler’s official tally of potentially habitable planets close to Earth’s size took a jump as well, from 12 to 21.

NASA chief scientist Ellen Stofan hailed the rapid progress. “This gives us hope that somewhere out there, around a star much like ours, we can eventually discover another Earth,” she said in a statement.

The dramatic acceleration in the planet hunt is due to a statistical method pioneered by Morton and his colleagues, and described in a paper published in theAstrophysical Journal.

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