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Air Force backs three new kinds of rockets

Jeff Bezos and New Glenn
Jeff Bezos shows off the concept for the New Glenn orbital rocket during a Florida news conference in 2015. (Blue Origin Photo)

The U.S. Air Force says Blue Origin, Northrop Grumman and United Launch Alliance have won its go-ahead for the development of new rockets that could be used for national security launches — a boost that could eventually add up to billions of dollars.

Blue Origin, the Kent, Wash.-based space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, was awarded a launch service agreement for its New Glenn rocket, which is due to be launched from Florida starting in 2021. The agreement provides for as much as $500 million through 2024, but Blue Origin is expected to contribute to a cost-sharing arrangement.

Through its recently acquired Orbital ATK subsidiary, Northrop Grumman won a $791.6 million agreement with similar terms for its OmegA launch system. ULA, meanwhile, won a $967 million agreement for its Vulcan Centaur rocket. The Vulcan is currently set for first launch in 2020, with two Blue Origin BE-4 rocket engines powering its first-stage booster. OmegA is to enter service in 2021.

Each of the companies will be getting $109 million in funds from fiscal year 2018.

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NASA watchdogs document rocket missteps

SLS test intertank on barge
A structural test version of the intertank for NASA’s new deep-space rocket, the Space Launch System, arrives at NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in March for testing aboard the barge Pegasus. The intertank is the second piece of structural hardware for the massive SLS core stage. (NASA Photo)

NASA’s Space Launch System, the rocket that’s being designed to send astronauts to the moon and Mars, seems likely to miss the schedule for its first test launch in 2020 due to poor management by Boeing and its overseers, the space agency’s auditors say.

A report released today by the NASA Office of Inspector General projects that the delivery of the first Boeing-built core stage for the heavy-lift SLS rocket may slip beyond its currently scheduled date of December 2019. What’s more, the cost of SLS development is on track to amount to at least $8.9 billion, which is twice what was originally budgeted, the auditors say.

“Boeing’s cost and schedule challenges are likely to worsen, given that the SLS has yet to undergo its ‘Green Run Test’ — a major milestone that integrates and tests the Core Stage components,” NASA said in a summary of the report.

To meet the schedule for an uncrewed test flight around the moon by 2020, followed by a crewed flight in 2022 and the development of a new upper-stage booster for flights after that, the SLS program will have to be given a “major increase in funding” and renegotiate NASA’s contract with Boeing, the report says.

Much of the blame was laid on mismanagement at Boeing.

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Blue Origin resets schedule for space milestones

Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith
Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith shows a video of a BE-4 rocket engine firing during the Aerospace Futures Alliance Summit. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

LYNNWOOD, Wash. — Blue Origin, the space venture founded by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, is now planning to send its first crew on a suborbital space trip during the first half of 2019, and launch its first orbital-class New Glenn rocket in 2021.

That’s the word from Bob Smith, CEO of the Kent, Wash.-based company, who spoke here today at the Aerospace Futures Alliance Summit.

The schedule represents a slight shift to the right for Blue Origin’s development plan, which had been targeting this year for the first crewed flight of its New Shepard suborbital spaceship and 2020 for New Glenn’s first flight. That’s not totally unexpected, considering the challenges involved.

Even that schedule is ambitious. “We’ve got a lot of work on our hands,” Smith told the audience.

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Boeing invests in electric space propulsion

Thruster chips on satellite
An artist’s conception shows Accion Systems’ electrospray thruster chips (in gold) arranged in a propulsion array on a satellite. (Accion Systems Illustration / Zina Deretsky)

Boeing’s venture capital fund is leading a $3 million investment round for Accion Systems, a Boston-based startup whose electric propulsion system for satellites could get its next in-space test early as next month.

Joining Boeing HorizonX Ventures in the Series B round is GettyLab, a Bay Area venture fund focusing on innovations in science and technology.

Accion’s propulsion system is certainly innovative, and in line with the increased emphasis at Boeing and elsewhere on electric propulsion for space applications.

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Amazon’s got a brand new bag for delivery items

Hot-and-cold bag
Amazon’s newly patented concept for a convertible delivery bag has internal insulated panels that can be adjusted to accommodate hot and cold items for a single delivery. There’s even a drink holder, indicated as item 128. (Amazon Illustration via USPTO)

Insulated bags for pizza deliveries and cooler bags for ice-cold drinks are nothing new. But how about if you put them together? Amazon’s inventors thought the idea was novel enough to apply for a patent, and now they’ve gotten it.

The patent application, titled “Convertible Food Delivery Bag With an Adjustable Divider,” describes a delivery bag that has a system of magnetic strips, Velcro-style strips or sliders on the bag’s interior.

Panels of insulating material can be moved around inside the bag to create compartments of adjustable sizes, to secure a cold drink snugly or provide enough room for the hot bucket of chicken nestled in the bag compartment next to it. The patent application even provides for built-in drink holders.

The idea is to scale up the pizza-bag concept for bigger deliveries, combining hot and cold items and thus addressing a need that the inventors say is currently going unmet.

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How tech titans pick who they invest in

Startup Week panel
Nick Ellingson of the Washington Technology Industry Association moderates a Startup Week Seattle panel with Lisa Nelson, managing director of Microsoft’s M12 corporate venture fund; Rodrigo Prudencio, an investment director at Amazon’s Alexa Fund; and Beckett Jackson, investment portfolio director and strategist for Boeing HorizonX. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

When big companies like Amazon, Boeing and Microsoft invest in startups, is it all about the startup? Or is it all about what the startup can do for the big company?

The truth lies somewhere in the middle, representatives of the three companies’ venture groups said today during a Techstars Startup Week Seattle panel discussion.

On one hand, there’s no way Amazon’s Alexa Fund is going to back a venture creating voice-command software that doesn’t work with the Alexa voice assistant.

On the other hand, Microsoft’s M12 corporate venture fund isn’t going require the ventures that it backs to use Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

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Gyro failure holds up Hubble; Plan B pending

Hubble Space Telescope
The Hubble Space Telescope gets its final close-up after a shuttle servicing mission in 2009. (NASA Photo)

The 28-year-old Hubble Space Telescope is temporarily out of service, due to the failure of one of its gyroscopic pointing devices, but scientists say they’re working on a Plan B.

Today NASA confirmed reports that Hubble scientists such as deputy mission head Rachel Osten were passing along over the weekend: One of the telescope’s three active gyros had failed on Oct. 5, which hampered the telescope’s ability to point at astronomical targets for long periods.

NASA said that Hubble’s instruments were still fully operational, and that mission managers were working to address the gyro issue.

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SpaceX puts on a sonic-boom UFO show

SpaceX Falcon 9 contrail
Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti tweeted out this picture of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket’s contrail, glowing in Southern California’s skies after sunset. “Nope, definitely not aliens,” Garcetti wrote. (@MayorOfLA via Twitter)

SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket executed its first on-land touchdown on the West Coast tonight after sending Argentina’s SAOCOM 1A satellite into orbit, putting on a show punctuated by a sonic boom for Southern California.

After a trouble-free countdown, the two-stage rocket blasted off right on time at 7:21 p.m. PT from California’s Vandenberg Air Force Base, leaving a post-sunset contrail glowing in the cloudless skies above.

Minutes after launch, the rocket’s second stage separated from the first-stage booster and continued rising spaceward. The booster, meanwhile, relit its engines to maneuver itself for the return trip to SpaceX’s landing zone, not far from the launch pad. The retro firings slowed the rocket down from supersonic speeds, setting off a sonic boom that could be heard in some areas (but not others).

Cheers went up from SpaceX’s headquarters in Hawthorne, Calif., as webcams showed the first stage setting itself down on Landing Zone 4. (The other landing zones are in Florida for East Coast launches.)

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Boeing and SpaceX reset space taxi tests for 2019

Dragon and Starliner
SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner are being developed to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station for NASA. (SpaceX / Boeing Illustrations)

NASA says we’ll have to wait until 2019 to see the first orbital tests of the space taxis that are being built by SpaceX and Boeing for trips to the International Space Station.

The schedule shift was laid out Oct. 4 in an online update.

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Gender expert thought ‘genius grant’ was a prank

Kristina Olson
University of Washington psychology professor Kristina Olson is among this year’s 25 winners of MacArthur “genius” grants. (UW Photo / Dennis Wise)Ps

When University of Washington psychology professor Kristina Olson got the call telling her she’d be receiving one of the MacArthur Foundation’s “genius grants,” she had to ask if they had the right number.

“For a few days after, I continued to think it was an elaborate prank,” Olson said in a news release.

But there’s no denying it now: On Oct. 4, Olson was listed among this year’s MacArthur Fellows, which earns her a no-strings-attached $625,000 stipend that’s spread out over five years. Other fellows include writers, artists, musicians, activists, scholars and even an investigative journalist (Ken Ward Jr. of the Charleston Gazette-Mail in West Virginia).

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