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Hearing reveals last words from OceanGate sub’s crew

Tail cone of Titan submersible on ocean floor
An image from a remotely operated vehicle shows the tail cone of OceanGate’s Titan sub on June 22, 2023. (Photo: Pelagic Research Services)

The last words transmitted by the crew on OceanGate’s Titan submersible before they perished in last year’s catastrophic implosion in the North Atlantic came to light today during the opening day of public hearings held by the U.S. Coast Guard.

“This is PH,” veteran explorer P.H. Nargeolet tapped out in a message that sent out during the fatal dive to the Titanic shipwreck on June 18, 2023, and shown at the hearing. “All good here.”

The very last message reported that the crew had dropped two weights from the sub. The sub’s mothership, the Polar Prince, received the final ping from Titan just seconds later. And then, nothing. Investigators say that Nargeolet and Titan’s four other crew members perished when the sub’s hull yielded to the crushing pressure in the ocean’s depths.

The other victims were Stockton Rush, who was the CEO and co-founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate and served as Titan’s pilot; Hamish Harding, a British aviation executive and adventurer; and Pakistani-born businessman Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleman.

Jason Neubauer, chair of the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, began today’s hearing in North Charleston, S.C., with a moment of silence for the crew — and then he introduced a presentation that traced the development and operation of the Titan submersible.

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GeekWire

Hearings open a new act in OceanGate sub tragedy

Coast Guard engineers examine Titan sub debris
Coast Guard engineers examine the aft titanium endcap from OceanGate's Titan submersible in October 2023. (NTSB Photo)

The U.S. Coast Guard is beginning two weeks of public hearings into last year’s loss of OceanGate’s Titan submersible and its crew during a dive to the Titanic shipwreck — but even before the start of the hearings, the official in charge of the hearings made clear that there’s lots more investigation to be done.

“The hearing is the first step in publicly showing the proceedings,” Jason Neubauer, chair of the Coast Guard’s Marine Board of Investigation, told reporters today. “We may hold additional proceedings. There could be additional witnesses interviewed. So, I would say it’s hard to give a projection on the end date for the investigation.”

Public hearings are due to run Sept. 16 through 27 in North Charleston, S.C., with the proceedings livestreamed via YouTube. They’ll delve into the causes of Titan’s implosion, which killed the five people on board — including Stockton Rush, the CEO and co-founder of Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate.

The other crew members were veteran Titanic explorer P.H. Nargeolet and three mission specialists who paid OceanGate to participate in the dive: Hamish Harding, a British aviation executive and adventurer, plus Pakistani-born business executive Shahzada Dawood and his son, Suleiman.

Soon after Titan’s disappearance on June 18, 2023, OceanGate suspended all exploration and commercial operations, and its website literally went dark. These hearings will mark one of the rare occasions when people who were associated with the company will be speaking publicly about OceanGate’s activities.

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Report focuses in on Amazon’s costly satellite project

ULA Atlas V rocket launches Amazon Project Kuiper satellites in October
United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket lifts off with two prototype Amazon satellites in October 2023. (ULA Photo)

A newly published market analysis of Amazon’s Project Kuiper effort to create a global satellite broadband network estimates the cost of getting the project off the ground at $16.5 billion to $20 billion — which is significantly higher than the $10 billion figure cited by the company four years ago.

In its analysis, Florida-based Quilty Space projects that launch costs alone will amount to $10 billion or more. Most of those launches are to be done by United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, which has executed only one space launch to date; and by Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, which is still in development. Other launches will be taken on by ULA’s Atlas V and SpaceX’s Falcon 9 (which are tried and true), plus Arianespace’s Ariane 6 (which had its debut liftoff in July).

Project Kuiper aims to put 3,232 satellites into low Earth orbit to support a high-speed internet network that could serve tens of millions of users around the world — and, not incidentally, provide infrastructure for Amazon Web Services and for other current or future offerings from Amazon. Under the terms of Amazon’s license from the Federal Communications Commission, half of those satellites must be launched by mid-2026.

Two prototype Kuiper satellites were successfully launched on an Atlas V last year, and Amazon says another Atlas V is to send the first operational satellites into orbit by the end of this year. The current schedule calls for broadband services to be offered to customers starting sometime next year.

Amazon is well behind SpaceX and its Starlink satellite broadband network, which has more than 6,000 satellites in orbit. Quilty’s financial analysis says Starlink “will exit 2024 with 3.9M subscribers, revenues of $6.6B, and positive free cash flows.” But Quilty suggests that there’s still room in the market for Project Kuiper.

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Starliner spacecraft wraps up its crewless journey home

Starliner in the dark desert
Boeing’s Starliner space capsule sits in the New Mexico desert after its uncrewed return to Earth in 2024. (Boeing Photo)

It wasn’t perfect, but the propulsion system that NASA worried about did its job today as Boeing’s Starliner space capsule made an uncrewed descent from the International Space Station back down to Earth.

The gumdrop-shaped spacecraft, christened Calypso, floated down to a parachute-assisted, airbag-cushioned touchdown at White Sands Space Harbor in New Mexico. “Starliner is back on Earth,” Boeing commentator Lauren Brennecke said.

Starliner’s first crewed trip to the space station was supposed to last only about a week, but when the capsule made its approach for docking on June 6, five thrusters out of a set of 28 malfunctioned. Four of the thrusters were reactivated, and NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams executed a successful docking. But concerns about the thrusters — and about a string of helium leaks in the propulsion pressurization system — sparked weeks of troubleshooting by NASA and Boeing.

Engineers decided that they could cope with the helium leaks, but the thruster problem was a bigger concern. Tests determined that the propulsion system’s performance was degraded by overheating that exceeded design specifications.

Two weeks ago, NASA said the uncertainties surrounding the system’s performance were too great to risk having Williams and Wilmore ride back to Earth on Starliner. Instead, the astronauts were told to remain on the station for months longer than originally planned.

To accommodate the personnel shift, NASA reduced the size of the next scheduled crew, known as Crew-9, from four to two spacefliers. That crew is due to go into orbit in a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule on Sept. 24. Williams and Wilmore will join Crew-9 and return to Earth in the SpaceX capsule next February.

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Blue Origin and NASA shift New Glenn launch plans

Workers mate sections of New Glenn first stage
Elements of the New Glenn rocket’s first stage are mated at Blue Origin’s factory in Florida. (Blue Origin Photo)

NASA is delaying the launch of its ESCAPADE probes to Mars, which means plans for the debut of Blue Origin’s heavy-lift New Glenn rocket will change as well.

New Glenn was previously due to send the twin ESCAPADE spacecraft to Mars as early as next month, but after a review of launch preparations, NASA rescheduled the launch for next spring at the earliest.

Planning for the mission is complicated because of the tight window for launch, necessitated by the alignment of Earth and Mars. Even a small schedule change can result in a months-long delay for liftoff.

After consulting with Blue Origin, the Federal Aviation Administration and range safety managers at the U.S. Space Force, NASA decided to hold off on fueling up the ESCAPADE probes. “The decision was made to avoid significant cost, schedule and technical challenges associated with potentially removing fuel from the spacecraft in the event of a launch delay, which could be caused by a number of factors,” the space agency said today in a mission update.

ESCAPADE — an acronym that stands for “Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers” — is a mission designed to study interactions between the solar wind and Mars’ magnetosphere.

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Microsoft works with students on Golden Record 2.0

Richard Black holding glass platter
Richard Black, research director for Microsoft’s Project Silica, holds a data storage platter. (Microsoft Photo)

Forty-seven years after NASA sent a “Golden Record” into deep space to document humanity’s view of the world, Microsoft’s Project Silica is teaming up with a citizen-science effort to lay the groundwork — or, more aptly, the glasswork — for doing something similar.

Golden Record 2.0, a project created by students, teachers and researchers affiliated with Avenues: The World School, is also getting an assist from artist Jon Lomberg, who was the design director for Golden Record 1.0.

The original Golden Record project involved preserving imagery and sounds from around the world on gold-plated phonograph records. Copies of the record were placed on NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 probes and launched into space in 1977. The idea was that if space travelers came across the records in the distant future, they could decipher the recorded archive and learn what our world was like in the 20th century.

Golden Record 2.0’s organizers are going after the same idea, even though they’re still looking into how their archive would be packaged and launched.

Project Silica could play a role in the packaging. Richard Black, a manager at Microsoft Research’s Cambridge lab in Britain, has been leading an effort to store data inside thin platters of fused silica glass.

“It does that using ultrashort laser pulses that make a permanent, detectable and yet transparent modification to the glass crystal, so the data ends up as durable as the piece of glass itself,” Black explained in a Microsoft podcast called Collaborators.

Each coaster-sized platter could store several terabytes of data for 10,000 years or more, according to Microsoft. The data can be read out using a microscope, and decoded using machine-learning algorithms.

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Fiction Science Club

AI goes full circle from fiction to science and back again

Illustration: Paz on Mars in a spacesuit with a spider-bot on helmet
A teenager is left in charge of a Mars base in one of "The Year's Top Hard Science Fiction Stories." (Illustration by Maurizio Manzieri / Infinivox)

Artificial intelligence has had an effect on nearly every facet of modern life — ranging from diagnosing diseases, to applying for a job, to deciding which movie to watch. Now it’s reaching back into the realm where our notions about AI were born decades ago: science fiction.

“AI is just becoming more and more prominent in science fiction, which I think is a just a reflection of the times we’re in right now,” says Allan Kaster, who has been editing annual collections of sci-fi stories for 15 years. “It’s getting harder and harder to see a story that doesn’t include some sort of AI.”

Kaster, who heads up a sci-fi publishing house called Infinivox, discusses the connections between real-world science and fiction in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

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RMS Titanic reveals wreck’s decay and makes a new find

View of Titanic's ruined bow
A picture taken by an underwater drone shows the Titanic shipwreck’s iconic bow with a section of its railing missing. (RMS Titanic Photo)

RMS Titanic, the company holding the salvage rights to the wreck of the Titanic, says its latest robotic survey of the shipwreck site revealed the deterioration of the Titanic’s iconic bow, as well as the location of a long-sought statuette.

The 20-day expedition, conducted in July and August, provided the first look at the 112-year-old wreck since last year’s OceanGate tragedy. That dive ended in the catastrophic loss of Everett, Wash.-based Oceangate’s Titan submersible and its five-person crew, including company CEO and co-founder Stockton Rush.

In a news release, RMS Titanic said the findings from this summer’s expedition “showcase a bittersweet mix of preservation and loss.”

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Blue Origin marks a first for NASA space research

Blue Origin New Shepard booster landing
Blue Origin’s New Shepard booster lands after a suborbital space launch. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture today provided a brief dose of spaceflight to six people, including the first researcher to conduct his own experiment on a suborbital space trip with NASA support.

The team for Blue Origin’s eighth crewed New Shepard mission included Rob Ferl, a professor and director of the Astraeus Space Institute at the University of Florida. Ferl studies on how living organisms respond to extreme conditions, including the zero-gravity conditions experienced in spaceflight.

During today’s flight at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas, Ferl activated an experiment that was meant to document how plants respond to the transitions to and from microgravity.

The mission, known as NS-26, proceeded smoothly. New Shepard’s hydrogen-fueled booster rose into cloudy skies at 8:07 a.m. CT (6:07 a.m. PT), sending the crew capsule past the 100-kilometer (62-mile) Karman Line that marks the internationally accepted boundary of space. Crew members could be heard hooting and hollering on today’s webcast as the spaceship blasted through the cloud cover.

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Cosmic Space

How dark is the cosmos? Probe provides a far-out answer

New Horizons probe with galactic disk in background
Artwork shows NASA’s New Horizons probe in deep space. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI / Serge Brunier / Marc Postman / Dan Durda)

We know that deep space is dark, but just how dark is it? Or, put another way, how bright is it? And how much of that brightness comes from galaxies? Astronomers have gotten a clearer answer to those questions, thanks to observations sent back from billions of miles away.

Nine years after its history-making flyby of Pluto, NASA’s New Horizons spacecraft measured the brightness of the distant universe from a vantage point in deep, dark space.

“If you hold up your hand in deep space, how much light does the universe shine on it?” Marc Postman, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, asked today in a news release. “We now have a good idea of just how dark space really is.”

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