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Ultra Safe Nuclear heads for bankruptcy and sale

Illustration: Cutaway view of USNC's MMR nuclear reactor design
An artist’s conception shows a cutaway view of a Micro Modular Reactor system. (USNC Illustration)

Seattle-based Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp. says it has filed a Chapter 11 bankruptcy petition as part of a court-supervised process that will lead to its purchase through a public auction.

The process also involves what’s known as a stalking-horse bid for USNC’s assets, amounting to $28 million from Standard Nuclear Inc. The purchase agreement with Standard Nuclear is meant to set a floor for the bidding.

The bankruptcy filing covers USNC as well as its subsidiaries, USNC-Tech, USNC-Power and Global First Power. USNC says it has asked the federal bankruptcy court in Delaware for approval to complete the transaction in December.

USNC’s primary projects focus on the development of microencapsulated nuclear fuel and advanced modular reactors that would be smaller and more efficient than traditional nuclear power plants. The company has also been working on radioisotope batteries and other nuclear technologies for NASA and the Pentagon. One of its projects, aimed at developing designs for space-based nuclear thermal propulsion systems, was set up in collaboration with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and other partners.

Debtor-in-possession financing will keep USNC running during the sale process, the company said.

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Starfish Space will lend a hand to spy satellite agency

Illustration: Starfish's Otter spacecraft in orbit
Artwork shows the Otter spacecraft in orbit near another satellite. (Starfish Space Illustration)

Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space and two other companies have won contracts from the National Reconnaissance Office, America’s spy satellite agency, to evaluate advanced technologies for space operations.

Starfish’s work for the NRO will focus on potential applications for the startup’s Otter spacecraft, which is designed to inspect and hook up with other satellites in orbit, either for servicing or for safe disposal.

“This collaboration offers a valuable opportunity to assess how Otter can enhance our national space-based intelligence infrastructure,” Starfish Space said today in a posting to X / Twitter.

The contracts were awarded under terms laid out by the NRO’s Office of Space Launch for a program known as Broad Agency Announcements for Agile Launch Innovation and Strategic Technology Advancement, or BALISTA. Eric Zarybnisky, the director of the Office of Space Launch, said in a statement that the BALISTA effort will help NRO “advance emerging technologies across launch, on-orbit support, and command and control.”

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Stealthy startup builds ‘Antibody Cages’ to fight diseases

Archon co-founders James Lazarovits and George Ueda
Archon Biosciences’ co-founders, James Lazarovits and George Ueda, lead a tour through their Seattle lab. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Three weeks after University of Washington biochemist David Baker won a Nobel Prize, the latest venture to spin out from his lab — Archon Biosciences — has emerged from stealth mode with $20 million in financing for a technology that uses computationally designed protein structures to treat cancer and other diseases.

The seed funding round was led by Madrona Ventures, with participation from DUMAC Inc., Sahsen Ventures, WRF Capital, Pack Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments and Cornucopian Capital.

Archon’s proprietary protein structures, known as Antibody Cages or AbCs, have been years in the making. Archon’s CEO and co-founder, James Lazarovits, said the Nobel Prize that Baker won for his pioneering work in the field of protein design confirms his view that the newly unveiled startup is on the right track.

“It’s reaffirmed our conviction for why we’re in this place to begin with,” Lazarovits told me during a tour of Archon’s Seattle lab. “It’s doing things that were not possible before. … You could not do anything that we’re doing unless there was the convergence of all these different fields at this moment in time.”

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A tangled web surrounds Boeing and Blue Origin

View of Boeing Starliner craft docked to International Space Station
An image captured through the window of a SpaceX capsule shows Boeing’s Starliner capsule at the International Space Station. (NASA Photo)

Is Boeing thinking about unloading some of its space projects? Is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture a potential buyer? And in light of former President Donald Trump’s increasingly close relationship with SpaceX founder Elon Musk, how are Bezos and Blue Origin reaching out to the GOP candidate?

Such speculation is fueled by several reports about space-related (and Bezos-related) developments over just the past couple of days.

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New New Shepard space capsule launched for test run

Blue Origin New Shepard launch
Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship rises from its Texas launch pad. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture successfully sent a brand-new New Shepard rocket ship on an uncrewed shakedown cruise today, with the aim of increasing the company’s capacity to take people on suborbital space trips.

The capsule, dubbed RSS Karman Line, carried payloads instead of people when it lifted off from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 10:27 a.m. CT (8:27 a.m. PT). But if all the data collected during the 10-minute certification flight checks out, it won’t be long before crews climb aboard for similar flights.

“Hopefully very soon we’ll see astronauts on board this vehicle,” launch commentator Joel Eby said after the capsule’s touchdown. “I want to say ‘welcome to the fleet’ for this brand-new vehicle.”

New Shepard spacecraft have now flown 27 times since 2015, with this mission designated NS-27. Eight of those missions have carried a total of 43 crew members in a human-rated capsule called RSS First Step. (RSS stands for “reusable spaceship.”) RSS Karman Line, which is named after the internationally accepted 100-kilometer boundary of outer space, should open the way for Blue Origin to pick up the pace of crewed flights going forward.

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Fiction Science Club

How to track untrue tales in the disinformation war

Illustration: A stream of words relating to disinformation superimposed on a hand holding a mobile device
Online tools fuel an arms race between purveyors of disinformation and those who defend against it. (Credit: Skorzewiak / Bigstock.com)

Artificial intelligence is fueling an arms race between the purveyors of disinformation and those who are fighting it in this year’s high-stakes political campaign, but the best tool to defend against fake news is honest-to-goodness human intelligence.

That’s how two expert observers size up the escalating information war in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

“As a longtime AI researcher, I’ve become a huge fan of human intelligence,” says Oren Etzioni, the founder of Seattle-based TrueMedia.org, which uses AI to distinguish between genuine and faked photos and videos. “So, the first, second and third defense has to be media literacy and appropriate skepticism about what you see.”

Annalee Newitz, the author of “Stories Are Weapons: Psychological Warfare and the American Mind,” agrees that humans are “the most important part of the loop” in the fight against disinformation..

“We need technical tools. We need things like TrueMedia. We need access to APIs for social media platforms so that researchers can provide tools like TrueMedia for text and for posts that are mostly text-based,” Newitz says. “But ultimately, it is about people being wary of what they read that’s passed to them by any platform that they’re on, even if it’s something they hear from their neighbors.”

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Scientists turn to the cloud for computational chemistry

Illustration: Fanciful view of cloud containing molecular structures, circuitry and test tubes
Researchers are finding ways to speed up computational chemistry through cloud computing. (Illustration by Nathan Johnson / PNNL)

A team led by researchers from the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is finding new ways to accelerate the pace of computational chemistry, by making tools for quantum computing and AI-assisted data analysis available via the cloud.

Their effort to make supercomputer-scale resources more widely available through cloud computing could aid in the search for methods to break down toxic “forever chemicals” that are currently hard to get rid of. And that’s just one example.

The researchers describe their progress on the project — known as Transferring Exascale Computational Chemistry to Cloud Computing Environment and Emerging Hardware Technologies, or TEC4 — in a study published today in the Journal of Chemical Physics.

“This is an entirely new paradigm for scientific computing,” PNNL computational chemist Karol Kowalski, who led the cross-disciplinary effort, said in a news release. “We have shown that it’s possible to bundle software as a service with cloud computing resources. The initial proof of concept shows that cloud computing can provide a menu of options to complement and supplement high-performance computing for solving complex scientific problems.”

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Affordable housing: The final frontier for space industry?

Participants in a panel at a Bellevue Chamber luncheon focusing on the Seattle area’s space industry included, from left, U.S. Rep. Adam Smith; moderator Mike Fong, director of the Washington State Department of Commerce; Kelly Maloney, co-founder of Space Northwest; and Brian Huseman, vice president for public policy and community engagement at Amazon. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

BELLEVUE, Wash. — The biggest applause line at a Bellevue Chamber event focusing on the Seattle area’s space industry came when attention was paid to a down-to-earth topic: housing affordability for the industry’s workers.

“They don’t just come here to work,” U.S. Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., told the audience at today’s luncheon. “They come here to live.”

The space industry is definitely on the rise in the Seattle area — particularly in a cluster of suburbs extending from Bellevue to Redmond and Kirkland to the north, and to Kent and Tukwila in the south. Mike Fong, who is the director of the Washington State Department of Commerce and served as the event’s moderator, said the state’s commercial space ventures account for $4.6 billion in economic activity and more than 13,000 jobs.

That figure has continued to grow in the two years since the economic impact report that Fong cited first came out. Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is said to have about 11,000 employees spread across the country, with many of them working at the company’s HQ in Kent. Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite network — which is ramping up facilities in Redmond, Kirkland and Everett — has built up its workforce to about 2,000 employees.

When you include the workers at SpaceX’s satellite factory in Redmond, Aerojet Rocketdyne in Redmond, LeoStella in Tukwila and a host of space startups, it all adds up to more pressure on the region’s housing market. That pressure is already sky-high. For example, the median selling price for a home in Bellevue is more than $1.5 million, based on figures from the Northwest Multiple Listing Service.

“Not everybody who works in these companies is going to be issued 200 grand a year in stock options,” Smith told the audience, which included business leaders as well as elected officials. “How are you going to afford a place to live? You’ve got to be better at building housing, building it affordably.”

The region’s communities and employers have been trying to address the affordability crisis, but Smith said more needs to be done.

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Scientists identify a potential haven for Martian life

Dusty ice deposits in Martian gullies, as seen in orbital imagery
The white areas on the edges of these gullies in the Martian region of Terra Sirenium, shown in an image from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are thought to be areas of dusty ice similar to those identified as potential havens for microbes. (NASA / JPL-Caltech / Univ. of Arizona)

Could microbes endure just beneath the surface of Mars, in layers of dusty ice exposed to just the right amount of sunlight? A newly published study suggests those might be among the most accessible places to search for signs of life on the Red Planet.

The study, published today in Nature Communications Earth & Environment, is based on models developed using impure ice from Greenland. “We did not find any direct evidence for any microbes on Mars,” study lead author Aditya Khuller told me in an email. “We do find that the depths where the radiation (solar and UV) conditions are favorable for photosynthesis within dusty Martian ice intersect with the depths where dusty ice can melt on Mars.”

Khuller is a researcher at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who’s due to join the University of Washington’s Applied Physics Laboratory at the end of the month. The paper’s co-authors include one of Khuller’s mentors, UW professor emeritus Steve Warren, whom Khuller says is “the world’s expert in how radiation interacts with snow and ice.”

Modern-day Mars is a cold, dry world, bombarded with life-killing levels of ultraviolet radiation. But scientists say that the planet would have been far more hospitable to life in ancient times. They suggest there’s a chance that hardy organisms could still be hanging on deep down in subsurface havens.

How deep? And how much of a chance? Those are questions that Khuller, Warren and their colleagues sought to answer by modeling the composition of Mars’ ice.

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Blue Origin donates space artifacts to the Smithsonian

Illustration: New Shepard capsule on display at Smithsonian
An artist’s conception shows Blue Origin’s New Shepard capsule on display at the National Air and Space Museum. (Smithsonian Illustration)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has donated a New Shepard rocket booster, plus a New Shepard capsule, to the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum.

The history-making hardware will go on display at the museum’s main building on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in renovated galleries due to open in 2026. “There is no better final landing pad for New Shepard than the Smithsonian,” Bezos said in a statement. “We are honored and grateful.”

The reusable booster, known as Propulsion Module 4-2, was employed for five uncrewed flights — ranging from the New Shepard program’s first successful booster landing in 2015 to an escape system test that could have destroyed the propulsion module in 2016.

Before that final outing for the booster, Bezos said it would be put on display if it survived. “We’d really like to retire it after this test and put it in a museum,” he said at the time. “Sadly, that’s not likely. This test will probably destroy the booster.”

Fortunately for the Smithsonian, Bezos’ prediction was wrong.

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