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Portal unveils a new breed of maneuverable spacecraft

Illustration: Starburst spacecraft in orbit with Supernova vehicle in background
Artwork shows Portal’s Starburst spacecraft in the foreground with its Supernova vehicle in the background. (Portal Space Systems Illustration)

Bothell, Wash.-based Portal Space Systems has added another spacecraft to its product line: a rapid-maneuverability vehicle called Starburst, which takes advantage of technologies that are being developed for its more powerful Supernova satellite platform.

Starburst-1 is due to star in Portal’s first free-flying space mission with live payloads a year from now, starting with a launch on SpaceX’s Transporter-18 satellite rideshare mission. Portal says the mission will demonstrate rendezvous and proximity operations, rapid retasking and rapid orbital change for national security and commercial applications.

Starburst is designed to bring maneuverability to missions that rely on constellations of small satellites, an approach known as proliferated space architecture. Such an approach is already being used for commercial constellations including SpaceX’s Starlink and Amazon’s Project Kuiper, and the concept is also gaining traction for national security applications.

Portal says Starburst and the larger Supernova platform will share many manufacturing processes and core systems, including the thrusters being developed for Supernova’s reaction control system. Like Supernova, Starburst will use heated ammonia as a propellant.

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Radical flies full-size prototype for stratospheric drone

Radical prototype plane in flight
A prototype for Radical’s Evenstar stratospheric solar-powered airplane flies over its Oregon test range. (Radical Photo)

Seattle-based Radical says it has put a full-size prototype for a solar-powered drone through its first flight, marking one low-altitude step in the startup’s campaign to send robo-planes into the stratosphere for long-duration military and commercial missions.

“It’s a 120-foot-wingspan aircraft that only weighs 240 pounds,” Radical CEO James Thomas told me. “We’re talking about something that has a wingspan just a bit bigger than a Boeing 737, but it only weighs a little bit more than a person. So, it’s a pretty extreme piece of engineering, and we’re really proud of what our team has achieved so far.”

Last month’s flight test was conducted at the Tillamook UAS Test Range in Oregon, which is one of the sites designated by the Federal Aviation Administration for testing uncrewed aerial systems. Thomas declined to delve into the details about the flight’s duration or maximum altitude, other than to say that it was a low-altitude flight.

“We take off from the top of a car, and takeoff speeds are very low, so it flies just over 15 miles an hour on the ground or at low altitudes,” he said. (Thomas later added that the car was a Subaru, a choice he called “a Pacific Northwest move, I guess.”)

The prototype ran on battery power alone, but future flights will make use of solar arrays mounted on the plane’s wings to keep it in the air at altitudes as high as 65,000 feet for months at a time. For last month’s test, engineers added ballast to the prototype to match the weight of the solar panels and batteries required for stratospheric flight. Thomas said he expects high-altitude tests to begin next year.

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Tech pundits get snarky over the coming AI bubble

Cory Doctorow, Whitney Beltran and Ed Zitron at Seattle Public Library presentation
Cory Doctorow, author of “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It,” makes a point at a presentation at the Seattle Central Library while moderator Whitney Beltrán and commentator Ed Zitron look on. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

How will the companies that have invested tens of billions of dollars in the infrastructure for artificial intelligence fare when the enshittification hits the fan? That question came in for a lot of attention — and snark — when tech pundits Cory Doctorow and Ed Zitron sat down in Seattle to muse about what’s happening in the world of AI.

Both men know a thing or two about enshittification, the process by which tech offerings gradually turn to crap due to the hunger for profits. Doctorow’s Seattle stopover was part of a publicity tour for his newly published book on the subject, “Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It.”

For this week’s appearance at the Seattle Public Library, he was paired with Zitron, a public relations specialist, podcaster and writer who surveys the tech scene with a critical eye.

The way they see it, the bursting of the AI investment bubble is a given. And that’s not by any means a contrarian view. Even Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos have acknowledged that the AI tech sector seems likely to go through some retrenchment, while insisting it will be followed by a resurgence that will bring huge benefits to society.

That’s where Doctorow and Zitron part ways with Nadella and Bezos.

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Seattle Space Week provides a peek at hypersonic blaster

Wave Motion founders show off Jet Gun in back of truck
Wave Motion co-founders James Penna and Finn van Donkelaar show off their Jet Gun in the back of a truck. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Most weeklong tech events have opportunities for entrepreneurs to make contacts and trade tips, serious sessions where CEOs and public officials share their visions, and happy hours where future deals are made. But how many “tech weeks” include a show-and-tell featuring a military-grade Jet Gun?

That was one of the bonus attractions during Seattle Space Week, a smorgasbord of events served up by Space Northwest and its partners.

Just as attendees were sitting down for Monday’s opening session at the Pioneer Building in the heart of Pioneer Square, team members from Wave Motion Launch Corp. parked a box truck just outside the building and opened up the back to reveal the prototype jet blaster they’re testing for the U.S. Army.

Two of the Everett, Wash.-based startup’s co-founders, CEO Finn van Donkelaar and chief operating officer James Penna, stood in the truck and explained their project to a crowd that gathered around on the sidewalk.

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It’s official! Stoke Space raises $510M for its Nova rocket

Illustration: Stoke Space second stage in orbit
An artist’s conception shows Stoke Space’s reusable second stage in orbit. (Stoke Space Illustration)

Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space Technologies today revealed that it has raised $510 million in fresh funding to accelerate development of its fully reusable medium-lift Nova rocket.

The Series D funding round, let by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund, comes in conjunction with a $100 million debt facility led by Silicon Valley Bank. Stoke said the new financing has more than doubled its total capital raised, bringing the figure to $990 million.

“This funding gives us the runway to complete development and demonstrate Nova through its first flights,” Stoke co-founder and CEO Andy Lapsa said in a news release. If all goes according to plan, the first Nova rocket is expected to lift off next year from Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

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Stoke Space is reportedly raising sky-high funding

Stoke Space hotfire test of booster engine
Stoke Space’s Zenith booster engine blazes during a hot-fire test in 2024. (Stoke Space Photo)

Update: Stoke Space has raised $510 million in Series D funding to accelerate development of its fully reusable medium-lift rocket. Check out the full story.

Previously: Stoke Space, one of the Seattle area’s up-and-coming space startups, is said to be raising hundreds of millions of dollars in a funding round that it hasn’t yet publicly acknowledged. A report about the round, based on two unidentified sources, was published today by The Information.

The Information quoted its sources as saying that the funding round could total as much as $500 million, and would value Stoke at nearly $2 billion. That figure would be roughly twice as much as the $944 million valuation that was cited by Pitchbook as of January. The round’s lead investor is said to be Thomas Tull’s United States Innovative Technology Fund.

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Scientists enlist AI to map regions of the brain in detail

Illustration: Color-coded cutaway view of mouse brain
An AI-produced rendering shows a map of mouse brain regions, overlaid with network motifs. (UCSF Illustration)

Scientists say an artificial intelligence program that they compare to ChatGPT has helped them create one of the most detailed maps of the mouse brain to date, with 1,300 regions and subregions marked on the map.

Some of those subregions have never been charted before — and the researchers say there’s more to come. “I think there are already indications that we can go beyond what we see now,” said Bosiljka Tasic, director of molecular genetics at Seattle’s Allen Institute for Brain Science.

The mapping effort, led by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco and the Allen Institute, is detailed in a study published today in the journal Nature Communications.

“Our model is built on the same powerful technology as AI tools like ChatGPT,” senior author Reza Abbasi-Asl, a neuroscientist at UCSF, said in a news release. “Both are built on a ‘transformer’ network which excels at understanding context.”

That context could be important for treating neurological ailments, Tasic told me. “Location is everything in the brain,” she said. “Defining the geography of the brain, and then defining all these regions and their functions, not only leads to better understanding, but also better ability to treat.”

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Jeff Bezos sees orbital data centers as ‘next step’ in space

Jeff Bezos at Italian Tech Week 2025
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and Blue Origin, speaks at Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin. (Italian Tech Week via YouTube)

What’s the next killer app for the final frontier? According to Jeff Bezos, it’s a future fleet of gigawatt data centers, flying in orbit and powered by sunlight.

Bezos — who founded the Amazon retail giant as well as his privately held Blue Origin space venture — pointed to the prospects for orbital data centers on Oct. 3 during a fireside chat at Italian Tech Week 2025 in Turin. He cast the technology as the most cost-efficient way to satisfy the tech industry’s need for more power to fuel advances in artificial intelligence.

But don’t expect cloud computing to leave Earth behind immediately. Bezos estimated that the transition from Earth-based to space-based data processing would take more than 10 years.

“I bet it’s not more than 20 years,” he said. “We’re going to start building these giant gigawatt data centers in space. So, these giant training clusters, those will be better built in space, because we have solar power there, 24/7.”

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Blue Origin and Luxembourg will map moon resources

Illustration: Oasis-1 satellite in lunar orbit
An artist’s conception shows the Oasis-1 satellite mapping water ice deposits on the moon. (Blue Origin Illustration)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it’s working with partners in Luxembourg on a campaign called Project Oasis, which aims to identify and take advantage of valuable resources on the moon.

The project’s first mission, known as Oasis-1, will send a small satellite into lunar orbit to map reserves of water ice, helium-3, radionuclides, rare earth elements, precious metals and other materials that could be used by space settlers or sent back to Earth.

“Once we know what’s really there and how to access it, everything changes,” Pat Remias, vice president for advanced concepts and enterprise engineering at Blue Origin, said today in a news release. “Project Oasis creates the foundation for a thriving space economy that benefits everyone, including the billions of individuals on Earth who will benefit from space-based resources.”

Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin has already been working on a project called Blue Alchemist, which focuses on technologies that can process moon dirt to produce the components for solar cells and transmission wires. Another promising avenue involves turning deposits of water ice into drinkable water — and turning that H2O into hydrogen and oxygen for rocket propellant.

Such technologies could be applied broadly to in-situ resource utilization, or ISRU, on the moon as well as on Mars and in asteroid mining operations.

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Sunlight-powered propulsion system passes a big test

Thruster glows as it undergoes testing in vacuum chamber
Portal’s heat exchanger thruster, known as Flare, fires up during a test in a vacuum chamber. (Portal Space Systems Photo)

Bothell, Wash.-based Portal Space Systems says it has successfully tested its solar thermal propulsion system at operational temperatures inside a vacuum chamber, marking a first for the commercial space industry.

The test marks a key step in the development of Portal’s 3D-printed heat exchanger thruster, known as Flare. The thruster is part of a propulsion system that converts concentrated sunlight into heat. That heat would warm up an ammonia-based propellant to produce thrust and send Portal’s Supernova satellite platform where it needs to go.

Supernova is designed to maneuver payloads quickly between orbital locations — for example, to head off close encounters between a growing number of commercial satellites, or to respond to space-based threats from rivals such as China and Russia.

NASA and the U.S. Air Force have experimented with solar thermal propulsion since the 1960s, but Portal is the first commercial venture to capitalize on the concept. Solar thermal propulsion would make Supernova more maneuverable than traditional spacecraft — with the ability to change orbits within hours or days, rather than weeks or months.

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