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Was interstellar object an alien sail? Not so fast

'Oumuamua
An artist’s conception shows what the interstellar asteroid ‘Oumuamua might look like. (ESO Illustration / M. Kornmesser)

‘Oumuamua is long gone from the inner solar system, but the mystery surrounding the interstellar interloper has been rekindled, thanks to a research paper written by two Harvard astronomers.

The paper, suggesting that the cigar-shaped object could have been an alien light sail, sparked headlines as well as skepticism from colleagues claiming that the astronomers were jumping to conclusions.

Among the skeptics is Doug Vakoch, who heads up METI, a San Francisco-based organization devoted to the study of alien contact. (The acronym stands for “Messaging Extraterrestrial Intelligence.”)

“I’d love to think that ‘Oumuamua is an extraterrestrial spacecraft that whipped past Earth, propelled by a stream of photons hitting its solar sail. But we need to be wary of conjuring up an explanation that fits the data gathered at one point in time, when we have no opportunity for follow-up observations,” Vakoch told me in an email.

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Russian computer crash in space? Nyet problem!

Space station telemetry
A black-and-white view of the International Space Station is overlaid with telemetry data in an image from an approaching Soyuz craft in 2014. (NASA TV)

One of the three computers on the Russian side of the International Space Station has crashed, but orbital operations are unaffected because the two other systems are in working order, Russia’s space agency reported today.

“To restore the computer to work, it is necessary to restart it,” Roscosmos said in a status report. That will happen on Nov. 8.

Roscosmos said the two other computer systems are sufficient for safe operation of the station indefinitely, but it wants the third one back online “to ensure the reliability” of next week’s scheduled docking with an uncrewed Russian Progress cargo spacecraft.

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Stratolaunch fires up its rocket engine preburner

Preburner test firing
A full-scale fuel preburner for Stratolaunch’s PGA rocket engine undergoes a test firing at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi. (Stratolaunch Photo)

Stratolaunch Systems, the space venture founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, says it has successfully completed the first hot-fire test of a key component for its hydrogen-fueled PGA rocket engine.

The full-scale hydrogen preburner was fired up last Friday at NASA’s Stennis Space Center in Mississippi, less than a year after design work started.

“This is the first step in proving the performance and highly efficient design of the PGA engine. The hot-fire test is an incredible milestone for both the propulsion team and Stratolaunch,” Jeff Thornburg, vice president of propulsion at Stratolaunch, said today in a news release.

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Battleground shifts in fight over fake news

National Guard at work
Staff Sgt. Wiggin Bernadotte, a cyber warfare operator in the Washington Air National Guard’s 262nd Cyberspace Operations Squadron, works with Capt. Benjamin Kolar, a cyberspace operations officer in the 262nd, on an electrical substation simulator. The exercise is part of the Air National Guard’s effort to help secure and protect voting systems on Election Day. (JBLM / DVIDS / DOD Photo / Paul Rider)

Facebook and Twitter have been cracking down on political disinformation during the current election cycle, but there are signs that the fight against fake news has spread to new battlefields, ranging from LinkedIn to text messages.

In Washington state, the Air National Guard has called out its cyberspace operations unit to protect the voting system. And the battle won’t end when the votes are tallied.

“Be aware of the ‘voter fraud’ debate that will inevitably follow the election — no matter the results,” University of Washington information scientist Jevin West, one of the instructors for a “Calling B.S.” class that went viral, told GeekWire in an Election Day email.

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3-D printer and recycler is set for space delivery

Refabricator testing
Payload development engineer Marko Baricevic of Tethers Unlimited Inc. conducts flight certification tests at Marshall Space Flight Center. (NASA Photo / Emmett Givens)

There’s nothing new about having a 3-D printer in space, but how about a 3-D printer that also recycles plastic to turn old stuff into new? Just such a gizmo is due to be delivered to the International Space Station next week.

Bothell, Wash.-based Tethers Unlimited built the device, which is about the size of a mini fridge and is known as the Refabricator, in cooperation with NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama. After months of testing, the Refabricator is on the payload manifest for Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus cargo resupply flight, scheduled for liftoff from Virginia’s Wallops Flight Facility on Nov. 15.

If all proceeds according to schedule, the uncrewed Cygnus craft should arrive at the station a couple of days after launch. Once the cargo is unloaded, the Refabricator will be installed and put through a series of test prints.

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HyperSciences blasts past $3M in funding campaign

HyperSciences test
HyperSciences CEO Mark Russell, at right, grins for the camera while a teammate prepares for a projectile test firing. (HyperSciences Photo)

HyperSciences’ hypersonic blaster technology can be used to send projectiles up into the air, or down into rock — either way, the Spokane, Wash.-based startup says things are looking up.

The company’s unorthodox SeedInvest securities offering has raised more than $3 million so far. “We are actually on our way toward the full $10 million,” HyperScience CEO and founder Mark Russell told GeekWire. The SeedInvest effort builds on $3 million in previous investments, including support from the Washington Research Foundation, Kick-Start II, Cowles Company and The Toolbox.

Thanks to the fresh funding, about 10 employees are being added in Spokane as well as in Austin, Texas.

Why set up an HQ2 in Austin? It’s near the site where HyperSciences is getting ready for a rock-blasting demonstration of its HyperDrill device. “It looks like a reasonable site for us,” said Russell, who’s a veteran of the Seattle startup scene as well as Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

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SpaceShipOne turns blue to salute Paul Allen

SpaceShipOne
The SpaceShipOne rocket plane is illuminated in blue light at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum in Washington, D.C. The Saturday night lighting served as a tribute to Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who backed the prize-winning SpaceShipOne project. (NASM / Steven VanRoekel Photo)

It wasn’t just Seattle’s skyline that turned blue on the night of Nov. 3: Back east in the nation’s capital, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum cast a blue spotlight on the history-making SpaceShipOne rocket plane in honor of the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who provided the money that helped it fly to space.

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Mars maverick touts low-cost plan for moon bases

Robert Zubrin
Mars Society President Robert Zubrin provides a guided tour of future space missions during a talk at the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

For decades, rocket scientist Robert Zubrin has been a voice crying in the Martian wilderness. But now the president of the Mars Society is pleading the case for a cause that’s much closer than the Red Planet: low-cost lunar exploration and settlement.

Zubrin’s lays out his latest plan, known as “Moon Direct,” this week in a tech journal called The New Atlantis, and he’s in Seattle today to talk about it in conjunction with the Museum of Flight’s SpaceExpo 2018.

The expo also features demonstrations of a virtual reality project highlighting one of Zubrin’s longest-running projects, the Mars Desert Research Station, a testing ground for space settlement that was built in Utah back in 2001.

If Zubrin gets his way, such outposts could be built on the moon and on Mars as well, on time scales far sooner and at costs far lower than NASA projects.

The problem is, Zubrin doesn’t always get his way. Since the 1990s, he’s advocated for a mission architecture known as Mars Direct that would first send uncrewed rockets to Mars and follow up with later crewed missions. Each mission would make use of on-site materials to produce the fuel for the return trips.

The Mars Direct plan didn’t get much traction, and Zubrin says that’s NASA’s fault. “The manned space science program has been adrift in this period,” he said during a Friday night presentation at the University of Washington.

Now NASA is turning its attention to missions to the moon — but Zubrin is worried that, once again, NASA is taking the wrong approach.

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Wanted: A million genomes for precision medicine

Eric Dishman
Eric Dishman, director of the All of Us Research Program at the National Institutes of Health, meets the press at the University of Washington. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Eric Dishman is a living, breathing advertisement for the ambitious experiment he’s in charge of, the National Institutes of Health’s “All of Us” drive to collect and analyze the genomes of a million Americans.

If it weren’t for the fact that he had his genome sequenced seven years ago, he probably would not be living and breathing.

Back then, he was struggling with a rare form of kidney cancer that had put him through decades’ worth of chemotherapy, radiation and misery. And the end was near.

“I was probably going to die, and I was literally on my last business trip to both Boston and San Diego, where a lot of the early genomics work was being done,” Dishman, a former Intel executive, recalled today during a sit-down with journalists at the University of Washington.

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NASA and FAA get set for giant leap in air mobility

Urban air mobility vision
An artist’s conception shows an urban air mobility environment, trafficked by air vehicles with a variety of missions and with or without pilots. (NASA Illustration / Lillian Gipson)

The rise of air mobility options ranging from delivery drones to air taxis and flying cars is shaping up as the biggest thing to hit aviation since the introduction of jet engines, NASA’s top official on aeronautics says.

“I happen to believe that this is a revolution coming in aviation,” Jaiwon Shin, NASA’s associate administrator for aeronautics, told a Seattle audience this week. “But if we do not methodically practice our best practices and all the know-how in the aviation field, this could become a total disaster.”

To avoid that total disaster, NASA and the Federal Aviation Administration have set up a process called the Urban Air Mobility Grand Challenges, modeled in part on the DARPA Grand Challenges that set the stage for autonomous ground vehicles more than a decade ago.

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