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Blue Origin puts a lunar spin on its suborbital spaceship

Blue Origin New Shepard booster comes in for a landing
Blue Origin’s reusable New Shepard booster descends to a landing in Texas. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

For the first time, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has put its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship through a couple of minutes’ worth of moon-level gravity.

The uncrewed mission, known as NS-29, sent 30 research payloads on a 10-minute trip from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas. For this trip, the crew capsule was spun up to 11 revolutions per minute, as opposed to the typical half-revolution per minute. The resulting centrifugal force was equivalent to one-sixth of Earth’s gravity, which is what would be felt on the moon.

The point of the exercise was to test how the payloads performed during the conditions they would face during future lunar missions — for example, how well they could process moon dirt to extract oxygen and other resources, or how well they could work to manufacture solar cells for Blue Origin’s Blue Alchemist project.

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Fiction Science Club

Science points out paths to interplanetary adventures

Illustration: Habitable airships floating in Venus' atmosphere
NASA engineers have laid out a concept for a "cloud city" of habitable airships in the atmosphere of Venus. (NASA Illustration)

What would you do for fun on another planet? Go ballooning in Venus’ atmosphere? Explore the caves of Hyperion? Hike all the way around Mercury? Ride a toboggan down the slopes of Pluto’s ice mountains? Or just watch the clouds roll by on Mars?

All those adventures, and more, are offered in a new book titled “Daydreaming in the Solar System.” But the authors don’t stop at daydreaming: York University planetary scientist John E. Moores and astrophysicist Jesse Rogerson also explain why the adventures they describe would be like nothing on Earth.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Moores says the idea behind the book was to tell “a little story that is really, really true to what the science is, and then give the reader an idea of what science there is that actually enables that story to take place.”

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Cosmic Tech

Boom goes supersonic with XB-1 jet’s flight test

Boom's XB-1 demonstrator aircraft in flight
Boom Supersonic's XB-1 demonstrator aircraft has achieved a top speed of Mach 1.1. (Boom Supersonic Photo)

Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 demonstrator aircraft broke the sound barrier during a flight test today, becoming the first civilian jet plane to go supersonic in 22 years.

“Supersonic civil flight is back,” Boom CEO Blake Scholl declared in a posting to X / Twitter.

XB-1 exceeded Mach 1 three times during the 33-minute flight, which was conducted from California’s Mojave Air and Space Port. Boom said the top speed was Mach 1.122, or 750 mph, and the plane reached an altitude of 35,290 feet.

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Cosmic Science

Grand and Egyptian: A tale of two great museums

Ramesses II statue and Tutankhamun golden mask
Left: Ramesses II statue at Grand Egyptian Museum. Right: Tutankhamun golden mask at Egyptian Museum. (Composite by Alan Boyle)

GIZA, Egypt — Twenty years may sound like a long time for building a monument like the Grand Egyptian Museum, but if you visit, all you have to do is look out the window to spot a historical precedent.

The Great Pyramid of Giza, which is a mile and a half away, took about the same amount of time to build 4,500 years ago. Now it’s the only one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that’s still standing.

Will the billion-dollar Grand Egyptian Museum be seen as a wonder as well? Just three months after its soft opening, the GEM has established its status as a must-see jewel for fans of ancient Egypt. But if you want to see the greatest hits of Egyptian archaeology, one museum — even a museum with more than 5 million square feet of floor space and 100,000 artifacts destined for display — still isn’t enough.

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GeekWire

Amazon ships satellites for Kuiper broadband network

Amazon Project Kuiper satellites being prepared for shipping
Project Kuiper satellites are packed inside containers for transport to Florida. (Amazon Photo)

Amazon is providing a sneak peek at the satellites that are being shipped to Florida for the launch of its Project Kuiper broadband network — well, maybe not the satellites, but at least their containers.

“Late last year, we began shipping flight-ready satellites, and even more have been on their way in recent weeks,” the Project Kuiper team said in a posting to LinkedIn.

The first batch of production-level satellites is due for launch sometime in the next few months on a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, lifting off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. That’ll follow up on the successful testing of two prototype satellites that were launched on an Atlas V in October 2023.

Eventually, 3,232 satellites are slated to go into orbit to provide high-speed internet service. Under the terms of Amazon’s license from the Federal Communications Commission, half of those satellites are to be launched by mid-2026.

Project Kuiper would provide added competition for SpaceX’s Starlink network, which currently dominates the market for satellite broadband connectivity with 5 million subscribers. Amazon is planning to start rolling out Project Kuiper services by the end of this year.

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Cosmic Space

Hubble gets a wide-screen view of Andromeda galaxy

Hubble panorama of Andromeda galaxy
It took 10 years to create the Hubble Space Telescope's 2.5-billion-pixel panoramic view of the Andromeda galaxy. Science credit: NASA / ESA / Benjamin F. Williams and Zhuo Chen (Univ. of Washington) / L. Clifton Johnson (Northwestern). Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

Over the course of more than a decade, astronomers used the Hubble Space Telescope to gather up 2.5 billion pixels’ worth of imagery focusing on the Andromeda galaxy — and the results could provide clues to the evolutionary history of our galaxy’s celestial neighbor.

The panoramic mosaic of the Andromeda galaxy was unveiled last week in Maryland at the winter meeting of the American Astronomical Society, and in an accompanying research paper published in The Astrophysical Journal.

It’s not just a pretty picture. Hubble was able to resolve more than 200 million of the galaxy’s stars. “This detailed look at the resolved stars will help us piece together the galaxy’s past merger and interaction history,” University of Washington astronomer Benjamin Williams, principal investigator for the project, said in a news release.

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GeekWire

Investors will back space ventures with million-dollar bets

Fuse Space Program mission patch
Fuse has come up with a mission patch for its program to back early-stage space ventures. (Fuse Graphic)

Seattle-area venture capital firm Fuse wants to light a spark for entrepreneurs focusing on the final frontier, and it’s willing to invest a million dollars to turn a good idea into a great startup.

The Fuse Space Program will focus on the Seattle space ecosystem in particular, said Brendan Wales, founding partner at the Bellevue, Wash.-based firm.

“There’s going to be a huge funnel of people spinning out of Blue Origin and Starlink and SpaceX and Boeing that are going to go build these next-generation companies, and we want to be there for them,” Wales told me. “We want people to know that we’re there to back them at Day Zero.”

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Universe Today

SpaceX loses Starship’s upper stage but catches booster

Starship Super Heavy booster coming in for a launch-tower catch
SpaceX's Starship Super Heavy booster comes in for a launch-tower catch at the Starbase launch site. (SpaceX via X)

SpaceX’s seventh flight test of its massive Starship launch system brought good news as well as not-so-great news.

The good news? The Super Heavy booster successfully flew itself back to the Texas launch site and was caught above the ground by the launch tower’s chopstick-style mechanical arms. That’s only the second “Mechazilla” catch to be done during the Starship test program.

The bad news is that the upper stage, known as Ship 33, was lost during its ascent.

“Starship experienced a rapid unscheduled disassembly during its ascent burn. Teams will continue to review data from today’s flight test to better understand root cause,” SpaceX said in a post-mission posting to X. “With a test like this, success comes from what we learn, and today’s flight will help us improve Starship’s reliability.”

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GeekWire

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket makes its orbital debut

New Glenn rocket rises from launch pad
Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket rises up from its Florida launch pad in January. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

For the first time ever, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has put a payload in orbit, using its heavy-lift New Glenn rocket.

The two-stage rocket lifted off from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:03 a.m. ET Jan. 16 (11:03 p.m. PT tonight). Cheers could be heard coming from Blue Origin employees watching the launch.

After stage separation, New Glenn’s first-stage booster executed an autonomous descent with the aim of landing on a barge stationed hundreds of miles offshore.

The booster, nicknamed “So You’re Telling Me There’s a Chance,” missed the target. “We did in fact lose the booster,” launch commentator Ariane Cornell said. Landing the booster would have been a bonus, but it wasn’t considered a requirement for mission success.

The prime objective of the mission, known as NG-1, was to test the communications and control systems for Blue Ring, a multi-mission space mobility platform that’s under development at Blue Origin.

For Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin, and for Bezos, the mere fact that New Glenn made it to orbit was at least as significant as the Blue Ring Pathfinder test. Although the company has launched smaller New Shepard rockets on suborbital spaceflights for a decade, it had never before put a payload into Earth orbit.

That changed tonight.

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GeekWire

Stoke Space raises $260M for its fully reusable rocket

Stoke Space rocket engine test
Stoke Space’s rocket engine test lights up a vertical test stand in Moses Lake, Wash. (Stoke Space Photo)

Kent, Wash.-based Stoke Space says it’s raised $260 million in a new founding round to finish the development of its fully reusable Nova rocket and complete construction of a launch complex in Florida.

Investors in the Series C funding round include Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, Industrious Ventures, Leitmotif, Point72 Ventures, Seven Seven Six, the University of Michigan, Woven Capital and Y Combinator. The fresh investment brings total funding to $480 million.

“We deeply appreciate the confidence investors have placed in Stoke and our mission,” Andy Lapsa, CEO and co-founder of Stoke Space, said today in a news release. “This new investment validates our progress and enables us to accelerate the development of technologies that will redefine access to and from space.”

The funding round comes just weeks after Stoke’s successful test firing of its first-stage Zenith rocket engine on a test stand at the company’s facility in Moses Lake, Wash. That hot-fire test of the full-flow staged combustion engine marked a significant step in the development of the two-stage Nova rocket, which is slated for its first orbital test flight as early as this year. Stoke tested the technology for its second stage in a brief up-and-down flight in 2023.

Meanwhile, the company is building out its launch facility at Space Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, the place where John Glenn’s milestone orbital flight began in 1962. The new funding round will support that work as well as enhancements to Stoke’s Kent HQ and Moses Lake test facility.

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