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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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Microsoft expands its cloud ecosystem in space

Airbus satellite image of Seattle Center
An Airbus satellite image shows Seattle Center. (Pleiades Neo © Airbus DS 2021 / via Microsoft)

One year after Microsoft expanded its Azure cloud domain to the final frontier, the company is taking another giant leap in its campaign to build a digital ecosystem for the space community.

Today, Azure Space is lifting the curtain on a new array of space-centric offerings, including satellite imagery from Airbus, software-based communication links from ST Engineering iDirect and geospatial data analysis from Esri, Blackshark.ai and Orbital Insight.

Microsoft is also unveiling a couple of in-house tools to enhance satellite images.

Taken together, the enhancements should provide more possibilities for solving problems on our home planet, said Stephen Kitay, senior director of Azure Space.

“What we’re focused on is bringing the space community and cloud together,” Kitay told GeekWire. “Our purpose is to innovate faster, to help these companies innovate faster and democratize the benefits of space, because ultimately space is critical to life here on Earth.”

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Are you illiterate about AI? Test your AI IQ

Illustration about learning
Being literate about AI could become as essential as reading, writing and arithmetic. (AI2 Illustration)

Can artificial intelligence write its own programs? Is there AI in your TV remote control? Researchers at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence say that knowing the right answers to such questions is an essential part of being literate in our tech-driven society — and that most of us would get a failing grade.

A national survey, involving 1,547 adult Americans who were given a 20-question quiz about AI’s capabilities, found that only 16% of the test takers scored a passing grade of better than 60% on the quiz.

“The majority of Americans are AI illiterate,” Nicole DeCario and Oren Etzioni report today in a posting to PNW.ai, an information service provided by the institute, also known as AI2. Etzioni is AI2’s CEO, while DeCario leads AI2’s special projects team.

What’s your AI IQ? Take AI2’s quiz

The researchers acknowledge that the extent of AI illiteracy shouldn’t be surprising. “AI is not part of our schools’ curricula, and the main source of information about it today, according to our survey, is YouTube and social media,” they write.

However, they argue that a basic understanding of how AI works is “critical for informing everyday decisions, adopting appropriate economic policies and maintaining national security.”

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Worries about winds delay Blue Origin space trip

Training session at Blue Origin Launch Site One
Spacefliers-to-be Laura Shepard Churchley, Lane Bess and Cameron Bess listen in on a training session. (Blue Origin Photo)

Mercury astronaut Alan Shepard’s daughter will have to wait a little longer to take a ride on the suborbital spaceship that’s named after her father.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has delayed its next New Shepard mission until Dec. 11, due to concerns about forecasted winds on Dec. 9 — the date that was originally set for Laura Shepard Churchley’s launch. Her late father was the first American in space in 1961, and his suborbital spaceflight was the inspiration for New Shepard’s name.

Five other spacefliers will be waiting alongside Churchley for the suborbital trip at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas: Michael Strahan, a co-anchor for ABC’s “Good Morning America”; Bess Ventures founder Lane Bess and Cameron Bess, the first parent-and-child duo to go into space together; and two business executives, Evan Dick and Dylan Taylor. Churchley and Strahan are flying as Blue Origin’s guests, while the others are paying an undisclosed fare.

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Electric Sky wins DARPA funding for power beaming

Swarm of drones
Electric Sky will explore adapting its wireless charging architecture to power a swarm of drones. (Army Research Laboratory Illustration)

A startup called Electric Sky says it’s begun building its first Whisper Beam transmitter for providing tightly focused wireless power to drones in flight, thanks to a $225,000 award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.

Electric Sky will use the six-month Phase I award, granted through DARPA’s Small Business Innovation Research program, to explore ways to adapt its wireless architecture to power a swarm of drones.

The first phase of the project calls for building and testing a lab-bench demonstration system that would operate at short distances. Those experiments are expected to supply data that can be used to upgrade the system for higher power and longer distances.

Electric Sky has offices in the Seattle area as well as in Midland, Texas. Its CEO is Robert Millman, who previously served as general counsel for Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. Former XCOR Aerospace CEO Jeff Greason is the company’s co-founder, chief technologist and the inventor of the Whisper Beam system.

The company’s mission is to pioneer novel electric power and propulsion technologies for aircraft and flight vehicles of all sizes.

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AI makes customer service bots sound more like humans

Training a voice avatar
WellSaid engineer Rhyan Johnson watches over the training of a virtual voice avatar. (WellSaid Labs)

Earlier this year, Seattle-based WellSaid Labs helped create an AI disk jockey with a voice that sounds like it’s coming from a flesh-and-blood DJ. Now WellSaid’s lifelike voice bots could be coming to a customer-service line near you.

California-based Five9 says it will incorporate WellSaid’s voice synthesis technology into its Virtual Voiceover menu of synthetic voices suitable for self-service contact centers. The new capabilities will be provided to users of the Five9 Inference Studio 7 platform at no additional cost, with wide availability planned in early 2022.

WellSaid Labs, a three-year-old startup fostered at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence’s AI2 Incubator, takes advantage of artificial intelligence to produce natural-sounding synthetic voices like the ones that Five9 will give its Intelligent Virtual Agents, or IVAs.

“In our experience, the more lifelike an IVA can sound, the better the reception it will receive from the customer who is speaking with it,” Callan Schebella, Five9’s executive vice president for product management, said today in a news release. “We’re continually looking for the latest and greatest technologies to enhance the Studio platform, and we are excited to partner with WellSaid to bring this new innovation to our customers.”

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Quantum-style computing is getting real-world tests

Krysta Svore at AAAS conference in Seattle
Microsoft's Krysta Svore explains how quantum computing works at a 2020 science conference. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Microsoft and KPMG are getting set to test Azure Quantum’s capabilities on the sorts of real-world problems that should give quantum computing an edge over traditional approaches.

Such problems have to do with optimizing systems and networks, such as where best to place cellular phone towers or how to allocate investments to match a client’s priorities relating to risks vs. rewards.

“Optimization problems are found in many industries and are often difficult to solve using traditional methods which can accelerate optimization,” Krysta Svore, general manager of Microsoft Quantum, explained today in a blog post. “Emulating these quantum effects on classical computers has led to the development of quantum-inspired optimization (QIO) algorithms that run on classical hardware.”

Such algorithms reflect the quantum perspective, in which information doesn’t necessarily take the form of rigid ones and zeroes but can instead reflect a range of values simultaneously during processing. The beauty of QIO algorithms is that they don’t need to run on honest-to-goodness quantum processors, which are still in their infancy.

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Blue Origin wins NASA support for a new space station

Orbital Reef concept
An artist's conception shows the Orbital Reef space station. (Orbital Reef Illustration)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and its partners have won a $130 million award to jump-start the design of their Orbital Reef commercial space station, which could take shape during the waning years of the International Space Station.

Two other teams also won NASA funding for their design efforts: Houston-based Nanoracks will get $160 million for its Starlab concept, while Northrop Grumman will get $125.6 million for its proposal.

Blue Origin — which is headquartered in Kent, Wash. — is partnering with Sierra Space as well as Boeing, Redwire Space, Genesis Engineering Solutions and Arizona State University on Orbital Reef.

The project is envisioned as an expandable business park, with Boeing’s Starliner space taxi and Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser space plane transporting passengers to and from low Earth orbit for tourism, research, in-space manufacturing projects and more. NASA could presumably use Orbital Reef or the other commercial space platforms as a way station and training facility for missions beyond Earth orbit.

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How experts turned down the noise at the Space Needle

Space Needle renovation
Acoustical considerations had to be factored into the Space Needle renovation. (Olson Kundig Photo)

Back in 2017, architects laid out their dream design for the Space Needle’s $100 million renovation project, featuring a sleek, modernistic interior, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, glass benches and a glass floor that would make a complete turn around the needle’s axis every 45 minutes.

But for Daniel Bruck, the president of Seattle-based BRC Acoustics & Audiovisual Design, there was a chance that the dream could turn into a noisy nightmare.

“That was a very interesting challenge for us,” he said today at a news conference during the Acoustical Society of America’s Seattle meeting.

Out went the sound-deadening carpet and plush furniture in the restaurant of the 605-foot-tall Seattle landmark — a holdover from the 1962 World’s Fair attended by millions of visitors, including Elvis Presley. In came sound-reflecting floors, ceilings and walls that had the potential to raise the decibel level to rockabilly proportions.

And as if that wasn’t enough cause for worry, the steel-on-steel gearwork that set the floor revolving could have introduced a whole new source of mechanical noise.

Bruck acknowledged that the renovated space has a “clean and elegant” look. “But from an acoustical standpoint, it didn’t give us a whole lot to work with,” he said.

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Kymeta and OneWeb move ahead with satellite terminals

Kymeta-OneWeb antenna test
Engineers test Kymeta’s u8 antenna system with OneWeb’s satellite service in France. (OneWeb via YouTube)

Kymeta Corp., the antenna venture backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, has signed onto a joint development agreement with OneWeb to develop a flat-panel user terminal for OneWeb’s global satellite internet network.

The plan calls for modifying Kymeta’s u8 antenna system for fixed-terminal applications on land, with an eye toward supporting additional applications including mobile service in land-based and maritime settings.

Today’s announcement comes just weeks after Redmond, Wash.-based Kymeta and OneWeb reported a successful test of Kymeta’s u8 technology, which takes advantage of an exotic category of electronics known as metamaterials. The technology makes it possible to “steer” an antenna electronically rather than physically moving it.

OneWeb is one of several ventures that is creating satellite constellations in low Earth orbit, or LEO, to broaden access to broadband internet service. SpaceX’s Starlink service is furthest along, but OneWeb is planning to begin limited service in the Arctic within the next few months. The plan calls for Kymeta’s terminals to enter the market as an option by the third quarter of 2022.

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