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High hopes are riding on space telescope’s risky launch

Ariane 5 rocket on pad
An Ariane 5 rocket is set to launch NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope. (NASA Photo / Bill Ingalls)

The launch of NASA’s $10 billion James Webb Space Telescope from French Guiana could mark a triumph in a tale that thousands of astronomers have been following for a generation. Or it could result in the deepest tragedy.

Either way, the climax is due to unfold beginning on Christmas morning — making for a plot worthy of a holiday movie.

“I’ve been waiting 23 years for this telescope to launch,” University of Washington astronomer Eric Agol told GeekWire.

Agol has been waiting so long that the focus of his research changed completely during the wait. Back in 1998, when the Next-Generation Space Telescope was still on the drawing boards, he was studying gravitationally lensed quasars.

“I was doing some science at the time with ground-based telescopes and, and specifically the Keck Telescope up in Hawaii,” Agol said. “We were spending half a night looking at distant quasars, and then we calculated that with the James Webb Space Telescope, it would take a few milliseconds to do the same observation.”

Now he’s studying planets beyond our own solar system — with an intense focus on TRAPPIST-1, a potentially habitable planetary system 39 light-years from Earth. It’s a testament to the telescope’s versatility that it promises to have just as dramatic effect on that project.

“James Webb is just going to give phenomenal data on this system of transiting planets,” Agol said. “Each of the transits will yield spectral information if there are any signs of atmospheres in these planets. This is the first time where we have a really good chance of probing atmospheres on potentially Earthlike planets.”

But first, the telescope has to get settled at its location in deep space, a million miles from Earth, at a gravitational balance point known as Sun-Earth L2.

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Crypto whiz bid $28M for space seat (and is buying more)

Digital rendering: Justin Sun in spacesuit
A digital rendering shows crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun in a spacesuit. (Justin Sun via X / Twitter in 2021)

The winner of June’s $28 million auction for a seat on Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceship revealed himself today — and is buying tickets for five more people to fly with him a year from now.

It would be hard to come up with a quirkier résumé than the one put together by Justin Sun, the 31-year-old crypto pioneer who put in the winning bid.

He’s a Chinese-born entrepreneur who founded the Tron cryptocurrency platform and serves as the CEO of Rainberry Inc., the file-sharing company formerly known as BitTorrent Inc.

Sun, a protégé of Chinese billionaire Jack Ma, recently became a citizen of the Caribbean island nation of Grenada. Last week he was named Grenada’s ambassador to the World Trade Organization in Geneva.

Although his net worth is currently estimated at a mere $200 million, he’s no stranger to high-stakes bidding. In 2019, he bid $4.6 million just to have lunch with billionaire Warren Buffett.

Sun said he was drawn to Blue Origin’s vision of sharing the spaceflight experience with the wider public.

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First Mode’s chief scientist spans the spectrum

Elizabeth Frank with meteorite
First Mode’s chief scientist, Elizabeth Frank, holds her favorite type of meteorite, a pallasite. (First Mode Photo)

Lots of tech startups have a chief executive officer and a chief technology officer, and some have a chief operating officer and a chief financial officer as well. But how many have a chief scientist?

First Mode, for one. The Seattle-based creative engineering company recently named its first chief scientist (and its first COO). Both were internal promotions, with co-founder Rhae Adams becoming chief operating officer and planetary scientist Elizabeth Frank becoming chief scientist.

Many of the projects First Mode has worked on over the three years of its existence have to do with planetary exploration. For example, the company’s engineers have provided support for NASA’s Perseverance rover, which landed on Mars in February; and for the Psyche probe that’s due for launch to a metal-rich asteroid next year.

But other projects are much closer to home: First Mode is building a hydrogen-fueled power system for the massive trucks that Anglo American uses to haul ore out of its mines, and it’s designing a power module for the world’s first zero-emission race truck in Mexico’s Baja 1000 endurance race.

Those Earth-based engineering challenges represent a brave new world for Frank, who was part of the science team for NASA’s Messenger mission to Mercury and came to the Seattle area in 2016 to work at Planetary Resources, the asteroid mining company that fizzled out just as First Mode was forming.

First Mode has grown rapidly, despite the COVID pandemic. Two years ago, just before the virus took hold in the U.S., the company had 28 full-time employees. Today it has more than 150 employees, including more than two dozen at its Australian facility in Perth. First Mode is planning to add 170 more jobs in 2022.

Some of those jobs will be on the chief scientist’s team in Seattle. But Frank’s duties extend far beyond the Emerald City. She’s also the chair of the Commercial Advisory Board for NASA’s Lunar Exploration Analysis Group, and the co-author of a white paper for the National Academy of Science’s decadal survey that delved into the role of commercial space ventures in planetary exploration.

“I would like to see NASA have smaller missions, so that it’s OK for some number of those missions to fail in a way that allows technology to move forward,” she said.

The way Frank sees it, failure should be more of an option.

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Amazon shows how satellites can fill broadband gaps

Rajeev Badyal at Project Kuiper's Redmond facility
Rajeev Badyal, VP of technology for Project Kuiper, speaks at the project’s Redmond facility. (Amazon via YouTube)

Amazon’s Project Kuiper hasn’t yet launched a single satellite, but in a video released this week, it’s talking up what its broadband internet constellation will be able to do for rural connectivity.

The video focuses on unmet broadband needs in Cle Elum (pop. 2,037), a town nestled in the Cascade Mountains of Washington state.

“Quite a few people move out to this area because it’s gorgeous, but people are reluctant to open small businesses due to the lack of reliable internet,” Audrey Malek, founding partner of Basecamp Outfitters, says on camera.

The solution — at least according to MiMi Aung, senior manager at Project Kuiper — is the 3,236-satellite constellation that her team is planning to start testing in orbit as early as next year.

“Even just right here in our backyard, right outside Redmond, there are areas where there is no internet connection, or extraordinarily poor connection, and we can make a huge impact right away,” said Aung, who came to Amazon from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where she headed up the team behind the Ingenuity helicopter on Mars.

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Maritime Blue wins $500,000 in clean tech challenge

Fast Foil Ferry
An artist’s concept shows the Fast Foil Ferry being designed by Bieker Boats and Glosten. (Image via Maritime Blue)

Maritime Blue, a Washington state public-private coalition focusing on environmentally friendly technologies for the maritime industry, has been awarded $500,000 in the first stage of a clean-tech challenge funded by the federal government.

Sixty finalists were selected nationwide to go on to the next stage of the Build Back Better Regional Challenge, backed by the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Economic Development Administration. Maritime Blue is the only Washington state finalist.

Maritime Blue will use its $500,000 award to help integrate Washington state’s blue-economy cluster and commercialize new technologies aimed at decarbonizing heavy-duty transportation and reducing carbon emissions.

Examples of such technologies include an electric-powered hydrofoil passenger ferry that’s being designed by Glosten and Bieker Boats for Kitsap Transit; and a system to distribute, store and use hydrogen that relies on renewable energy instead of fossil fuels.

In the next phase of the regional challenge, Maritime Blue will prepare a final proposal for submission to the Economic Development Administration by next March. That proposal, and others submitted by the finalists in the challenge, will be considered for up to $100 million in implementation funding.

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Breakthrough Energy makes a big bet on reusable rockets

Rocket thruster test
Stoke Space puts its “three-pack” of thrust chambers through a hot-fire test. (Stoke Space Photo)

Breakthrough Energy Ventures, the multibillion-dollar clean-tech initiative created by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, is leading a $65 million funding round to back Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space’s effort to create a new breed of fully reusable rockets — and believe it or not, there’s a climate change angle.

“There is no better way to see the Earth and the severity of its climate challenges than looking at the entire globe from space,” Carmichael Roberts, co-leader of Breakthrough Energy Ventures’ investment committee, said today in a news release.

“Imagine being able to detect wildfires in any country within minutes, identifying oil and gas methane emissions in real time for remediation, or verifying carbon stocks globally to enable large-scale carbon offset markets,” Roberts said. “These are just a few of the far-reaching opportunities that greater access to space can provide through advanced satellite technology.”

Roberts said rocket reusability could overcome two of the barriers to such applications. “Stoke’s unique vehicle design and operational capabilities provide a path to achieving ultra-low-cost, fast-turnaround launch for dedicated orbital delivery,” he said.

The rocket business isn’t known as an environmentally friendly industry — especially when toxic chemicals like hypergolics and perchlorates come into play, and when thousands of pieces of space junk litter the sky. But Stoke Space’s co-founder and CEO, Andy Lapsa, told me that his company wants to change all that.

“There are a lot of unsustainable rocket practices that have been done through history,” Lapsa said. “I think we’re in general getting smarter about that, and a reusable second stage is a big, important part of that. We can’t be dumping rockets in the ocean as we start flying hundreds or thousands of times per year.”

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RBC Signals and Inmarsat boost the Internet of Things

Illustration of satellites and Earth
An artist’s conception shows Inmarsat’s Global Xpress network in action. (Inmarsat via YouTube)

Redmond-based RBC Signals has made a strategic agreement with one of the world’s biggest satellite operators, Inmarsat, to put more networking firepower into its range of Internet of Things applications for enterprise customers.

The agreement, announced today in conjunction with the World Satellite Business Week conference in Paris, pairs Inmarsat’s worldwide ELERA and Global Xpress satellite networks with RBC Signals’ ground-based infrastructure for applications that include oil and gas, maritime traffic management, agriculture and utilities.

RBC Signals will be able to scale its use of Inmarsat’s connectivity dynamically to match shifting needs for spectrum, power levels and geographical reach. Internet of Things applications, and particularly industrial IoT applications, are a “significant growth area for RBC Signals,” company founder and CEO Christopher Richins said in a news release.

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BlackSky picks up the pace for updating satellite imagery

BlackSky satellite images
BlackSky's satellite images document maritime traffic at Fremantle Harbour in Perth, Australia. (BlackSky Images)

BlackSky says it has set a new standard for refreshing its satellite views of spots on Earth after adding six spacecraft to its Earth observation constellation in a month.

The company, which has offices in Seattle as well as in Herndon, Va., reported reaching a peak of 15 hourly picture-taking sessions per day over certain locations. BlackSky said that represents the highest satellite revisit rate in the world.

“This is an incredible achievement for BlackSky and the industry,” BlackSky CEO Brian O’Toole said today in a news release. “Our ability to rapidly launch, deploy, and commission on-orbit capacity provides customers with confidence that they will have access to the insights they need to support critical operations.”

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Marking another first, Blue Origin launches six spacefliers

New Shepard liftoff
Blue Origin's New Shepard suborbital spaceship lifts off in West Texas. (Blue Origin via Instagram)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture guided another suborbital space trip into the record books today — a trip that also marked a giant leap toward making space tourism routine.

When Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship lifted off from Launch Site One near Van Horn, Texas, every one of the crew capsule’s six seats was filled for the first time ever. During the reusable craft’s previous two crewed missions, in July and October, only four spacefliers were on board.

The sextet included Laura Shepard Churchley, the eldest daughter of the late NASA astronaut Alan Shepard. His suborbital mission made him the first American in space in 1961, and inspired the name of the spaceship flying today.

“We did it, yay!” Churchley could be heard exclaiming just before touchdown.

Afterward, Churchley said her spaceflight was probably unlike what her father experienced. “I thought about Daddy when I was coming down,” she told Bezos. “I thought, gosh, he didn’t enjoy any of what I’m getting to enjoy. He was working!”

Blue Origin’s other special guest for the flight was Michael Strahan, who became the first American TV anchor (and football commentator) by virtue of his status at ABC’s “Good Morning America” (and Fox Sports). “I think it is safe to say that the word ‘touchdown’ has a new meaning for Michael Strahan today,” launch commentator Jacki Cortese said as the mission ended.

Back on the ground, Strahan said he was struck by the transition from the blue skies of Earth to the black sky of space. “It’s unreal,” he told Bezos. Strahan also mentioned the effect of high-G acceleration: “It’s not a facelift, it’s a face drop.”

Among the spacefliers paying an undisclosed fare were Bess Ventures founder Lane Bess and Cameron Bess, the first parent-and-child duo to go into space together. There’s a Seattle-area tech connection for Cameron, who uses he/she/they pronouns: They are a Twitch streamer (and a furry) who live in Redmond, Wash.

Rounding out the crew were Dylan Taylor, who is the chairman and CEO of Voyager Space and the founder of a nonprofit group called Space for Humanity; and Evan Dick, an engineer, investor and managing member of Dick Holdings LLC.

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Blue Origin explores the final frontier of merchandising

Michael Strahan and Jeff Bezos
Future spaceflier Michael Strahan and Jeff Bezos chat on Thursday Night Football. (Jeff Bezos via Twitter)

Jeff Bezos’ privately held Blue Origin space venture is starting to look more like the other company he founded: Amazon.

During the run-up to Dec. 11’s scheduled launch of the venture’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship, you could order a limited-edition Blue Origin sweatshirt created for spaceflier Michael Strahan’s brand, watch Strahan and Bezos mix it up on Thursday Night Football — and look forward to “Shatner in Space,” an Amazon Prime documentary about Star Trek captain William Shatner’s flight in October.

For now, the revenue from merchandising and media projects is certain to pale in comparison with the fares that Blue Origin’s suborbital spaceflight customers are paying, and with the multimillion-dollar awards that Blue Origin is getting from NASA for other space projects.

Nevertheless, the crossovers illustrate how one of Bezos’ big businesses could leverage marketing expertise from the other.

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