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Rubin Observatory throws a party to reveal first pictures

Long-exposure image of Rubin Observatory against night sky filled with star trails
A long-exposure image shows the Rubin Observatory beneath star trails. (Credit: Hernan Stockebrand via Rubin Observatory)

After more than 20 years of planning and construction, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory is ready for its grand opening, and the world is invited.

The observatory in the foothills of the Chilean Andes features a monster of a telescope, with an 8.4-meter-wide (28-foot-wide) mirror, coupled with what’s said to be the world’s largest digital camera.

It will survey the night sky every night for at least 10 years, producing about 20 trillion bytes of data every 24 hours. It would take you more than three years of watching Netflix, or over 50 years of listening to Spotify, to use that amount of data, according to the Rubin team.

The first images and videos are due to be unveiled on June 23, during a “First Look” webcast that will be shared online and at more than 300 in-person watch parties across the globe.

What will the images look like? Mario Juric knows, but he isn’t telling.

“I cannot tell you what’s on them, but I can tell you we just finished them, and they look amazing,” Juric, a member of the Rubin team and the director of the University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute, says on the Fiction Science podcast. “I did not spend a day doing what I was supposed to be doing, because I just spent it browsing through the images. … I could teach an entire class by just zooming in on different parts of this image and explaining what this object is.”

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Bill Shatner and Neil deGrasse Tyson riff on the cosmos

William Shatner and Neil deGrasse Tyson on stage in Seattle
Astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson laughs as “Star Trek” captain William Shatner tells a tale. (Mat Hayward Photo / Future of Space)

William Shatner set a record as the oldest human in space at the age of 90 — but at the age of 94, he’s not that interested in taking another record-setting space trip.

“You know, I had such a meaningful experience,” he told me. “Maybe I tend to think of it like a love affair. You want to go back to that love affair? Maybe not. It was such a great moment.”

The original captain from “Star Trek” revisited that emotional moment from his Blue Origin suborbital spaceflight during a rollicking chat with celebrity astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson at McCaw Hall in Seattle on June 18.

This week’s performance grew out of a meetup that the astronomer and the actor had last year during a space-themed Antarctic cruise. The two had such a good time that they worked with producers to organize an onstage follow-up.

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AeroTEC joins project to test hybrid-electric aircraft

Illustration: Hybrid-electric aircraft in flight
An artist’s conception shows the RTX hybrid-electric demonstrator in flight. (RTX Illustration)

Seattle-based AeroTEC says it’s been selected by Pratt & Whitney Canada to lead the modification and flight test of an experimental hybrid-electric demonstrator aircraft at its Flight Test Center in Moses Lake, Wash.

The RTX demonstrator is a De Havilland Canada Dash 8-100 aircraft that will be modified to use a thermal engine built by Pratt & Whitney Canada and a 1-megawatt electric motor developed by Collins Aerospace. Both Pratt & Whitney and Collins are RTX businesses.

Pratt & Whitney and its partners have also developed a mobile charging unit for the plane. The 200-kilowatt-hour batteries will be supplied by H55, a Swiss spin-off from the Solar Impulse venture that sent a solar-powered airplane around the world in 2015-2016. H55 is supported by RTX Ventures, the venture capital arm of RTX.

The RTX hybrid-electric demonstrator program is targeting up to 30% improved fuel efficiency compared to today’s regional turboprops. In-flight demonstrations could help open the way for the propulsion system to be used on multiple platforms in the future. A date for the first flight test hasn’t been set.

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Portal Space puts its spacecraft factory near home base

Portal Space Systems CEO Jeff Thornburg with flags on the wall behind him
Portal CEO Jeff Thornburg says the company is expanding its footprint in Bothell, Wash. (Portal Space Systems Photo)

Portal Space Systems says it’s decided to set up its 50,000-square-foot spacecraft manufacturing facility just 3 miles away from its existing design and testing hub in Bothell, Wash.

By the end of 2026, the factory should be ready to start producing Portal’s Supernova space vehicles, which are being designed to use an innovative solar thermal propulsion system to maneuver payloads between orbital locations.

“With growing demand from both our commercial and defense partners, this new facility marks the next strategic step in Portal’s evolution,” Portal CEO Jeff Thornburg said today, in a news release that was issued in conjunction with the Paris Air Show. “By expanding our footprint in Bothell, we’re doubling down on local talent, proximity to core operations, and a growing aerospace ecosystem supported by state leadership.”

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Inside Zeno Power’s ‘test kitchen’ for nuclear batteries

Zeno Power executives standing in front of a mural in Seattle offices
The reception area for Zeno Power’s lab features a Seattle-centric mural by Tam Riley. From left: Zeno CEO Tyler Bernstein, chief operating officer Jonathan Segal, chief product officer Lindsey Boles and chief commercialization officer Harsh S. Desai. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Researchers are fine-tuning a recipe at Zeno Power’s office-lab complex in Seattle’s South Lake Union district — but it’s not the kind of recipe you can taste-test. Instead, this recipe specifies the ingredients for a new kind of nuclear battery, and Zeno is hoping it’ll get a glowing review.

“Our vision for Zeno is to be building dozens, and eventually hundreds of these power systems every year,” Zeno CEO and co-founder Tyler Bernstein told me during a recent tour of the 15,000-square-foot facility. “So, we want to make sure that from the early days, as we’re developing the process for how we build these heat sources, we’re doing it in a way that we can scale very quickly to meet the demand that we’re seeing from government and commercial customers.”

Zeno Power plans to demonstrate its first full-scale radioisotope power system in 2026, and deliver its first commercially built nuclear batteries by 2027. The potential applications range from powering infrastructure on the bottom of the ocean, to keeping machines operational in the Arctic, to charging up rovers on the moon.

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Two documentaries revisit the OceanGate sub tragedy

OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush peering through viewport
OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush is the central figure in two shows about the Titan sub's fatal dive in 2023. (Netflix Photo / Becky Kagan Schott)

Nearly two years after OceanGate’s Titan submersible imploded during a dive to the Titanic, killing all five people aboard, two documentaries are bringing fresh perspectives to the disaster. But they also make clear that it’s too early to close the book on the tragedy and its aftermath.

To call the failings of the Everett, Wash.-based venture a tragedy is particularly fitting, because both documentaries focus on the hubris of the tale’s central character, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush. It was Rush who piloted the sub during its final journey — and who died alongside veteran Titanic explorer Paul-Henri Nargeolet, billionaire adventurer Hamish Harding, and Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his 19-year-old son, Suleman Dawood.

The basic facts of the case are laid out similarly in “Implosion,” now streaming on Discovery+ and HBO Max; and in “Titan,” which made its debut on Netflix today. But if you’re intrigued by the OceanGate saga, there are enough differences between the two shows to make it worth watching them both.

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Space Force enlists Integrate for mission management

Person in military fatigues using Integrate software on a laptop
Integrate is supporting the modernization of program execution across space missions. (Integrate Photo)

Seattle-based Integrate has been awarded a $25 million contract from the U.S. Space Force to support the deployment of its multiplayer project management software for government teams — and for the commercial space contractors they’re working with.

The award marks a new chapter for the startup. It’s also a new chapter for the Space Force, which is keen to upgrade its tools for keeping track of high-stakes space initiatives such as the National Security Space Launch program.

Integrate CEO and co-founder John Conafay said his company’s software is analogous to “Google Docs for project management.” However, the mission gets more complicated when the software has to work in the secure environment required for national security projects.

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Xplore shares hyperspectral images from its first satellite

Hyperspectral satellite image of Salt River in Arizona
An image from the XCUBE-1 satellite shows the Salt River in Arizona. ©2025 Xplore Inc. All rights reserved.

Bellevue, Wash.-based Xplore has released the first hyperspectral images from its XCUBE-1 satellite, six months after the shoebox-sized spacecraft was sent into orbit.

The pictures, captured with a resolution of 5 meters (16 feet) per pixel, show a river in Arizona, rugged terrain in Saudi Arabia, farmland in Uzbekistan and a settlement in Inner Mongolia. Each image is color-coded to reflect wavelengths that go beyond what the eye can see.

Such images can be used to assess agricultural crop health, moisture levels and other characteristics of a given terrain. Thermal infrared imagery could be used to track the spectral signatures of seagoing vessels or overland shipments as part of a campaign to crack down on illegal trafficking. For military applications, hyperspectral images could point to newly laid minefields or see through camouflage. And for space applications, Xplore’s multi-sensor imaging system could be turned spaceward to track other satellites.

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How the Trump-Musk feud could foul up the final frontier

Elon Musk and Donald Trump in the Oval Office
Elon Musk and Donald Trump during happier times in the Oval Office. (White House Photo / Molly Riley)

The rapidly escalating spat between President Donald Trump and Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, definitely adds to the challenges facing NASA and America’s space effort — but what does it mean for the commercial rivals of SpaceX, the space company that Musk founded?

It’s way too early to gauge the impact precisely, but today’s market swings provide a hint: Two of the companies that are competing with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite broadband network, EchoStar and AST SpaceMobile, saw their shares rise 16% and 8% respectively.

It’s also way too early to say whether the Trump-Musk bromance is irrevocably broken. The sanest outcome would be for them to patch up their relationship, especially considering that billions of dollars in SpaceX contracts are at stake. The U.S. government currently depends on SpaceX to get NASA’s astronauts to and from the International Space Station as well as to launch robotic spacecraft ranging from spy satellites to interplanetary probes.

Today’s outbursts, delivered primarily via Musk’s X social-media platform and Trump’s Truth Social platform, suggest that making up might be hard to do. Musk tore into Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill,” calling it the “Big Ugly Spending Bill.” Trump said the easiest way to save billions of dollars of federal spending would be to “terminate Elon’s Governmental Subsidies and Contracts.” And Musk said that, in light of that crack, SpaceX would “begin decommissioning its Dragon spacecraft immediately” — even though those spacecraft are essential to ISS operations. (Musk later backed off on that threat.)

Alternatives to SpaceX’s Dragon aren’t immediately available, unless you count Russia’s Soyuz and Progress spacecraft. Today’s threats and counterthreats illustrate why it may be unwise for America’s space effort to rely so much on one commercial provider, even if that provider is as innovative as SpaceX has been.

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Software predicts a bonanza of solar system discoveries

Visualization of Rubin Observatory's solar system observations
A computer visualization maps small bodies in the solar system that are expected to be observed by the Rubin Observatory during its 10-year sky survey. Red indicates near-Earth objects, gold indicates main-belt asteroids, light purple indicates Jupiter Trojan asteroids, and deep blue indicates trans-Neptunian objects. The left image looks down from above the ecliptic plane, and the right image provides a side view. (Credit: Kurlander et al. / Sorcha.space / Univ. of Washington)

A new type of computer simulation predicts that the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile will discover millions of previously undetected objects in the solar system over the course of the coming decade.

The discovery campaign, which is due to begin in earnest later this year, should expand the known small-body populations in the solar system by a factor of four to nine, said University of Washington astronomer Mario Juric, a member of the research team behind the open-source Sorcha simulation software.

“With this data, we’ll be able to update the textbooks of solar system formation and vastly improve our ability to spot — and potentially deflect — the asteroids that could threaten Earth,” Juric said today in a news release.

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