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Blue Origin makes plans to test Blue Ring tech in orbit

Illustration: Blue Ring logistics vehicle in orbit
An artist’s conception shows the Blue Ring logistics vehicle in orbit. (Blue Origin Illustration)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says that technology for its Blue Ring orbital platform will be put to the test during an upcoming mission sponsored by the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit.

Blue Ring is a multi-mission, multi-orbit vehicle that’s being developed to facilitate logistical services in orbit. The Pentagon-backed mission, known as DarkSky-1, will demonstrate Blue Origin’s flight system, including space-based data processing and storage capabilities, ground-based radiometric tracking and Blue Ring’s telemetry, tracking and command hardware, also known as TT&C.

“The lessons learned from this DS-1 mission will provide a leap forward for Blue Ring and its ability to provide greater access to multiple orbits, bringing us closer to our vision of millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth,” Paul Ebertz, senior vice president of Blue Origin’s In-Space Systems business unit, said today in a news release.

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Universe Today

Starship goes orbital on third test flight, with fiery ending

Starship rising into skies over Texas
SpaceX's Starship super-rocket rises into the skies over Texas. (SpaceX Photo)

After falling short in its first two attempts, SpaceX got its Starship super-rocket to an orbital altitude today during the launch system’s third integrated flight test. Now it just has to work on the landing.

Today’s test marked a major milestone in SpaceX’s effort to develop Starship as the equivalent of a gigantic Swiss Army knife for spaceflight, with potential applications ranging from the deployment of hundreds of Starlink broadband satellites at a time to crewed odysseys to the moon, Mars and beyond.

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GeekWire

Interlune lays out its plan to harvest helium-3 on the moon

Illustration: Interlune robotic harvester on the moon
An artist’s conception shows Interlune’s robotic harvester on the moon. (Interlune Illustration)

Seattle-based Interlune officially lifted the curtain today on its plans to build a robotic harvester that could extract helium-3 from moon dirt and send it back to Earth for applications ranging from quantum computing to fusion power.

Rob Meyerson, a co-founder of the startup and former president of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, told me that an initial prospecting mission could be launched as early as 2026, with commercial operations beginning in the 2030s.

“For the first time in history, harvesting natural resources from the moon is technologically and economically feasible,” Meyerson said today in a news release. “With our uniquely experienced and qualified team, Interlune is creating the core technologies to extract and process lunar resources responsibly to serve a wide range of customers.”

Today’s announcement confirmed previous reports that Interlune has raised $18 million in seed capital, including angel investments as well as more than $15 million in funding that was reported in a regulatory filing last month.

That funding round was led by Seven Seven Six, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, with participation by other investors including Aurelia Foundry Fund, Gaingels, Liquid 2 Ventures, Shasta Ventures and alumni from the University of Michigan (where Meyerson went to school).

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GeekWire

Lumen Orbit raises $2.4M to put data centers in space

Illustration: Lumen Orbit satellite in space
An artist’s conception shows Lumen Orbit’s satellite in space. (Lumen Orbit Illustration)

Bellevue, Wash.-based Lumen Orbit, a startup that’s only about three months old, says that it’s closed a $2.4 million pre-seed investment round to launch its plan to put hundreds of satellites in orbit, with the goal of processing data in space before it’s downloaded to customers on Earth.

The investors include Nebular, Caffeinated Capital, Plug & Play, Everywhere Ventures, Tiny.vc, Sterling Road, Pareto Holdings and Foreword Ventures. There are also more than 20 angel investors, including four Sequoia Scouts investing through the Sequoia Scout Fund. “The round was 3x oversubscribed,” Lumen CEO and co-founder Philip Johnston told GeekWire in an email.

Johnston is a former associate at McKinsey & Co. who also co-founded an e-commerce venture called Opontia. Lumen’s other co-founders are chief technology officer Ezra Feilden, whose resume includes engineering experience at Oxford Space Systems and Airbus Defense and Space; and chief engineer Adi Oltean, who worked as a software engineer at SpaceX’s Starlink facility in Redmond, Wash.

“We started Lumen with the mission of launching a constellation of orbital data centers for in-space edge processing,” Oltean explained in an email. “Essentially, other satellites will send our constellation the raw data they collect. Using our on-board GPUs, we will run AI models of their choosing to extract insights, which we will then downlink for them. This will save bandwidth downlinking large amounts of raw data and associated cost and latency.”

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GeekWire

Stratolaunch’s prototype rocket plane goes supersonic

Stratolaunch carrier airplane deploys TA-1 test vehicle for air launch
Stratolaunch’s carrier airplane releases the TA-1 test vehicle for launch. (Stratolaunch via Vimeo)

Chalk up another milestone for Stratolaunch, the air-launch venture created by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen: The company’s mammoth airplane deployed a winged test vehicle for its first rocket-powered flight.

Stratolaunch’s single-use TA-1 test vehicle blazed a trail for future reusable hypersonic test vehicles that are expected to help the U.S. military catch up on one of the frontiers of aerial combat. TA-1 went supersonic, according to Zachary Krevor, Stratolaunch’s president and CEO — but based on his comments, it may not have quite hit the hypersonic standard of five times the speed of sound.

“While I can’t share the specific altitude and speed TA-1 reached due to proprietary agreements with our customers, we are pleased to share that in addition to meeting all primary and customer objectives of the flight, we reached high supersonic speeds approaching Mach 5 and collected a great amount of data at an incredible value to our customers,” Krevor said today in a news release.

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Universe Today

Pentagon rules out UFO cover-up, but the debate goes on

F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter on exhibit
References to an F-117A Nighthawk stealth fighter, shown here on display at the National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, were apparently misconstrued as a discussion about an encounter with alien technology, according to a newly released Pentagon report. (NMUSAF Photo)

The Pentagon office in charge of investigating UFO reports — now known officially as unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs — today provided its most detailed explanation for what it said were false or misconstrued claims of alien visitations over the decades.

The first volume of a historical record report released by the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, or AARO, in response to a congressional mandate did include a fresh disclosure: During the 2010s, U.S. government officials considered a proposed program code-named “Kona Blue” that would have looked into the possibility that extraterrestrial technology could be reverse-engineered. But the Department of Homeland Security rejected the idea because it lacked merit, the report said.

“It is critical to note that no extraterrestrial craft or bodies were ever collected — this material was only assumed to exist by Kona Blue advocates and its anticipated contract performers,” according to the report. The same assumptions were made by outside investigators who delved into UAP reports as part of an earlier Pentagon-funded program, AARO said.

One of the investigators involved in that program — which was known as the Advanced Aerospace Weapons System Application Program or the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AAWSAP/AATIP) — made clear that he’d continue trying to keep the alien angle in the public eye.

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GeekWire

Scientists back AI principles for biomolecular design

Visualization of protein molecule
AI technologies now allow scientists to generate biomolecules unlike any seen in nature. (Illustration by Ian C. Haydon / UW IPD)

More than 90 researchers — including a Nobel laureate — have signed on to a call for the scientific community to follow a set of safety and security standards when using artificial intelligence to design synthetic proteins.

The community statement on the responsible development of AI for protein design is being unveiled today in Boston at Winter RosettaCon 2024, a conference focusing on biomolecular engineering. The statement follows up on an AI safety summit that was convened last October by the Institute for Protein Design at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“I view this as a crucial step for the scientific community,” the institute’s director, David Baker, said in a news release. “The responsible use of AI for protein design will unlock new vaccines, medicines and sustainable materials that benefit the world. As scientists, we must ensure this happens while also minimizing the chance that our tools could ever be misused to cause harm.”

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Cosmic Tech

XPRIZE contest offers $5 million for quantum applications

Cryostat at IBM quantum computing exhibit
Components for IBM’s quantum computer are on display at a conference in Switzerland. (Credit: Alan Boyle)

Twenty years after staging its first competition for technological innovations, XPRIZE is offering $5 million to expand one of today’s hottest tech frontiers: quantum computing.

The XPRIZE Quantum Applications competition is aimed at stimulating the development of quantum algorithms that can outdo classical computers when it comes to solving real-world challenges.

It’s a field that’s facing its own set of challenges — for example, the hardware systems that would make use of such algorithms are still under development. And that’s not the only uncertainty factor: Unlike the first XPRIZE, which set up clear guidelines for awarding a $10 million prize for private-sector spaceflight, the goals for the quantum competition have the trademark fuzziness of quantum mechanics.

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GeekWire

Blue Origin targets 2025 for its first moon landing

Illustration: Blue Moon lander on lunar surface, with Earth in background
An artist’s conception shows Blue Origin’s Blue Moon Mark 1 lander on the moon. (Blue Origin Illustration)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is aiming to send an uncrewed lander to the surface of the moon in the next 12 to 16 months, according to the executive in charge of the development program.

John Couluris, senior vice president for lunar permanence at Blue Origin, provided an update on the company’s moon lander program on CBS’ “60 Minutes” news program on March 3.

“We’re expecting to land on the moon between 12 and 16 months from today,” Couluris said. “I understand I’m saying that publicly, but that’s what our team is aiming towards.”

Couluris was referring to a pathfinder version of Blue Origin’s nearly three-story-tall Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander, which is taking shape at Blue Origin’s production facility in Huntsville, Ala. The Pathfinder Mission would demonstrate the MK1’s capabilities — including its hydrogen-fueled BE-7 engine, its precision landing system and its ability to deliver up to 3 tons of payload anywhere on the moon.

Blue Origin envisions building multiple cargo landers, as well as a crewed version of the Blue Moon lander that could transport NASA astronauts to and from the lunar surface.

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Fiction Science Club

How startups could blaze a trail for cities on Mars

Illustration: 3D-printed Mars habitats
An artist's conception shows 3D-printed habitats in a Mars settlement. (Credit: Team SEArch+/Apis Cor via NASA)

If future explorers manage to set up communities on Mars, how will they pay their way? What’s likely to be the Red Planet’s primary export? Will it be Martian deuterium, sent back to Earth for fusion fuel? Raw materials harvested by Mars-based asteroid miners, as depicted in the “For All Mankind” TV series? Or will future Martians be totally dependent on earthly subsidies?

In a new book titled “The New World on Mars,” Robert Zubrin — the president of the Mars Society and a tireless advocate for space settlement — says Mars’ most valuable product will be inventions.

“We’re talking about creating a new and potentially extremely inventive branch of human civilization, which will benefit humanity as a whole enormously,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “But moreover, we’ll play from that strength to make money.”

Zubrin isn’t waiting until humans step foot on Mars to get started.

“We are in the process of drawing up business plans for two major initiatives — one in the artificial intelligence area and the other in the synthetic food production area,” he says. “And the idea is, fairly soon we’re going to be presenting these business plans to investors, with the idea of starting companies devoted to these two different technological ideas that we have put together.”

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