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Bigelow aims to sell space station rides for $52M

Kate Rubins in Bigelow's BEAM
NASA astronaut Kate Rubins conducts tests and replaces parts inside the International Space Station’s Bigelow Expandable Activity Module in 2016. (NASA Photo)

Just days after NASA laid out its ground rules for commercial travel to the International Space Station, Nevada-based Bigelow Space Operations says it’s targeting a fare of roughly $52 million a seat for rides that will make use of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon capsule.

Bigelow Space Operations is the service subsidiary of Bigelow Aerospace, the space venture founded by Nevada real-estate development magnate Robert Bigelow. Three years ago, Bigelow Aerospace had one of its expandable modules attached to the space station for testing, and it’s still being used.

Following up on NASA’s June 7 announcement, Bigelow said his company has put down substantial deposits and reservation fees for up to four SpaceX launches to the space station. Each launch would be capable of sending up to four people into orbit for a stay of up to one or two months, in accordance with the space agency’s ground rules.

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Archives will be going to the moon and beyond

Xcraft
Artwork shows Xcraft, the spacecraft being developed for interplanetary missions. (Xplore Illustration)

Seattle-based Xplore and the Arch Mission Foundation are teaming up on what sounds like “Mission: Impossible”: a plan to send the foundation’s Arch Libraries on space odysseys to the moon, Mars, Venus and near-Earth asteroids starting in 2021.

The micro-miniaturized compendiums of human knowledge, laser-etched on nickel to preserve the equivalent of 30 million pages of information, are to be attached as payloads to Xplore’s Xcraft spacecraft and sent into deep space on rockets to be named later.

“Our civilization’s knowledge is precious. Helping distribute Arch Libraries in space is an important way to secure this valuable data,” Xplore CEO Jeff Rich said in a news release. “The Xplore team is proud to host the Lunar Library payload on our missions.”

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A new search for more planets at Alpha Centauri

NEAR instrument at VLT
The NEAR instrument, shown here mounted on one of the telescopes at the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope facility, came into use with ESO’s VISIR imager and spectrometer on May 21. (ESO / NEAR Collaboration Photo)

The European Southern Observatory and the billionaire-backed Breakthrough Watch program say they have achieved first light with a new observing instrument designed to spot super-Earths in Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system to our own.

The NEAR instrument, which takes its name from the acronym for “Near Earths in the AlphaCen Region,” has been installed on an 8-meter (26.2-foot) telescope that’s part of ESO’s Very Large Telescope facility in Chile’s Atacama Desert.

NEAR takes advantage of a thermal-infrared coronagraph to block out most of the light coming from the stars in the Alpha Centauri system, a little more than 4 light-years away – including the sunlike stars Alpha Centauri A and B, plus a red dwarf called Proxima Centauri.

Cutting down on that glare makes it easier for an infrared imaging spectrometer known as VISIR to pick up the warm glow of planets orbiting the stars. The upgraded instrumentation, which took three years to develop, should be capable of detecting worlds down to twice the size of Earth.

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‘Photo Wake-Up’ makes stills come eerily alive

Moonwalk GIF
Photo Wake-Up can turn a photo of an Apollo moonwalker into an animation that has the astronaut walking out of the frame. (UW / NASA Image)

What would it be like to see pictures of moonwalkers, comic-book characters and painted portraits get up and walk right out of their frames? It’s an eerie thought – but Photo Wake-Up, a software application developed by computer scientists at the University of Washington and Facebook, gives you an idea how it would look.

And someday, the app could come to an augmented-reality headset near you.

The project has been in the works for months. It won a share of the spotlight last November at UW’s annual Madrona Prize competition, and made another media splash a month later when the team put out a preprint paper.

Next week, the researchers will be presenting their results at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition in Long Beach, Calif.

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How AWS Ground Station is moving the needle

Capella Space satellite
An artist’s conception shows Capella Space’s radar satellite in orbit. (Capella Space Illustration)

LAS VEGAS – Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos says his company has gotten so big that it has to branch out into business lines that “move the needle,” like the recently revealed Project Kuiper broadband satellite constellation.

But Project Kuiper isn’t Amazon’s only potentially needle-moving satellite venture: Amazon Web Services’ effort to create a network of ground stations and an easy-to-use satellite control interface is a similarly big bet for the Seattle-based company.

At least that’s how Shayn Hawthorne, general manager for AWS Ground Station, sees the situation.

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5 big ideas from sci-fi author Neal Stephenson

Science-fiction author Neal Stephenson discusses hsi latest book, “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell,” at Town Hall Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Seattle author Neal Stephenson’s works of fiction often play off the potential for future facts — for example, the virtual world described in “Snow Crash,” the nanotechnology at the heart of “The Diamond Age” and the millennium-scale thinking that’s embodied in “Anathem” (and in the real-life 10,000 Year Clock bankrolled by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos).

His latest novel, “Fall; or, Dodge in Hell,” kicks it up a notch with ruminations about what it would take to create an artificial afterlife, powered by computerized replicas of human consciousness.

Stephenson acknowledges that his vision in the afterlife in “Fall” plays loosely with the facts of neuroscience. But his books touch on other technological themes that are closer to reality, and he discussed several of those themes this week during a talk at Town Hall Seattle. Here’s a roundup of five ideas well worth thinking about — with recommendations for further reading.

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A tweet from Trump stirs tumult over moon plan

Donald Trump signs NASA bill
President Donald Trump shows off a flight jacket he was given after signing a NASA authorization bill into law in 2017. (NASA Photo / Bill Ingalls)

President Donald Trump put the space community on edge today with a tweet that downplayed NASA’s plans to send astronauts to the moon by 2024 as the first step toward a sustainable lunar presence.

Instead, Trump framed the moon program — unveiled by Vice President Mike Pence amid much fanfare less than three months ago — as being merely part of a bigger push to Mars.

At least that’s what he meant to say. The way the tweet was phrased left itself open to all sorts of interpretations, including an obviously misintended claim that the moon was part of the Red Planet.

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NASA lays out space station commercialization plan

"For Sale" sign in space
As a joke, NASA spacewalker Dale Gardner holds up a “For Sale” sign during a shuttle mission in 1984, in an era when the space shuttle fleet took on commercial satellite servicing tasks. (NASA Photo)

NASA today laid out its initial batch of ground rules for future commercial activitieson the International Space Station, including provisions for having private-sector astronauts spend up to 30 days in orbit.

But it doesn’t sound as if those private astronauts will be spending all their time just looking out the window: The ventures that organize the space trips will have to file a work plan explaining the proposed mission and what orbital resources will be required. And the ventures will have to reimburse NASA for the use of those resources to the tune of $35,000 or so per day, on top of a launch cost likely to exceed $50 million.

NASA chief financial officer Jeff DeWit said the new policies, including some yet to be announced, should mark a paradigm shift for the space agency as it focuses on moving beyond Earth orbit and putting astronauts on the moon by as early as 2024. NASA’s new directive clears the space agency to participate in marketing and manufacturing activities, for a price.

“This will open space to new companies to unleash American corporate innovation and ingenuity in new markets, all driving a lower cost to U.S. taxpayers,” he said.

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Jeff Bezos explains Amazon’s big bet on satellites

Jenny Freshwater and Jeff Bezos
Amazon’s Jenny Freshwater engages Jeff Bezos in a fireside chat at the re:MARS conference in Las Vegas. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

LAS VEGAS — For the first time in public, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explained the rationale for his risky Project Kuiper satellite broadband venture, during a fireside chat that was interrupted when an animal rights activist jumped on stage.

Today’s half-hour discussion was one of the headliner events for Amazon’s inaugural re:MARS conference, held here in Las Vegas to throw a spotlight on the frontiers of Machine learning, Automation, Robotics and Space. It’s modeled after the invitation-only MARS meeting that Amazon has been organizing annually since 2016.

Bezos and his partner in the fireside chat — Jenny Freshwater, leader of forecasting and capacity planning at Amazon — broadened the focus of the conversation to touch on some of the Amazon CEO’s favorite topics, including his management philosophy and his advice for entrepreneurs.

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Alexa is learning to juggle multiple AI skills

Rohit Prasad
Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s vice president and head scientist for Alexa, explains how the virtual assistant can plan different activities for a night out. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

LAS VEGAS — Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant will soon get savvier about juggling its thousands of skills — starting with arranging all the elements for a night out.

Cross-skill action prediction is one of the upgrades for Alexa announced here today at Amazon’s re:MARS conference.

Rohit Prasad, Amazon’s vice president and head scientist for Alexa, laid out a scenario where a user of Echo Show could engage in a seamless dialogue to choose a showing of “Dark Phoenix,” reserve seats through Atom Tickets, find a nice Chinese restaurant nearby, make a dinner reservation through Open Table, set up an Uber ride and watch a movie trailer.

“We’ll be bringing this experience to our customers soon,” Prasad said during today’s morning keynote.

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