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Amazon CEO’s letter gives a lift to Kuiper satellite network

United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket sends two prototype Project Kuiper satellites into orbit for Amazon in October 2023. (ULA Photo)

In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company’s Project Kuiper satellite venture will be “a very large revenue opportunity” in the future — but he’s hedging his bets as to exactly when that future will be.

Eventually, Project Kuiper aims to provide satellite broadband service to hundreds of millions of people around the world who are currently underserved when it comes to connectivity. Such a service would compete with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, which already has more than 2.6 million customers.

Amazon is investing more than $10 billion to get Kuiper off the ground. The plan calls for sending 3,232 satellites (down slightly from the originally planned 3,236) into low Earth orbit by 2029. Under the terms of the Federal Communications Commission’s license, half of that total would have to be deployed by mid-2026.

When Project Kuiper’s first two prototype satellites were launched last October for testing, Amazon said that its first production-grade satellites were on track for launch in the first half of 2024, and that it expected broadband service to be in beta testing with selected customers by the end of the year.

Today, Jassy put a slightly different spin on that schedule. “We’re on track to launch our first production satellites in 2024,” he wrote in his letter. “We’ve still got a long way to go, but are encouraged by our progress.”

Jassy amplified on those remarks in an interview with CNBC. “The first big production pieces will be the second half of ’24, and we expect to have the service up in the next year or so,” he said.

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GeekWire

Eclipse chasers take three different routes to totality

A diamond-ring effect is visible just before the beginning of a total solar eclipse, as seen from Arkansas. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

NASHVILLE, Ind. — There’s nothing like a total solar eclipse to remind you of the unstoppability of nature — and the tenuousness of technology.

Not that we need much of a reminder: The challenges of climate change, ranging from floods to wildfires, and the problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic amply show the limits of humanity’s control over nature.

But chasing totality is a more benign example showing just how hard it is to predict which paths Mother Nature will take, and how technology may or may not catch up.

It was tricky to pinpoint the best place to see today’s total eclipse, because totality was visible only along a narrow track stretching from Mexico to Newfoundland, for no more than four and a half minutes over any location. If clouds roll in at 3:04 p.m., and totality begins at 3:05, there’s nothing OpenAI or SpaceX can do about it.

Based on historical precedent, a stretch of Texas around Austin was supposed to have the best chance of clear skies. Here in Nashville, a well-known tourist destination south of Indianapolis, the cloud-cover predictions varied from totally sunny to as much as 60% clouded over. Meanwhile, some air travelers hoped to catch sight of the blacked-out sun as they flew above the clouds. How did it all turn out? Check out three tales from GeekWire’s eclipse team.

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GeekWire

Your (nearly) last-minute guide to the solar eclipse

Eclipse watchers at Kerry Park in Seattle’s Queen Anne neighborhood in 2017. (GeekWire File Photo / Kurt Schlosser)

It’s prime time for eclipse-chasers: A total solar eclipse will trace a line from coast to coast on Monday, and the anticipation is at its peak. So are the travel costs.

Hard-core eclipse fans made their travel arrangements long ago. That was also the case back in 2017, when a similar all-American solar eclipse turned central Oregon into one of the nation’s hottest hotspots (made even hotter by that summer’s wildfires). Witnessing a total solar eclipse in person is something everyone ought to do at least once in their life, and if you want to get in on the experience this time around, it’s still possible.

I should know: That’s exactly what I’m doing.

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GeekWire

Black flier gets a second chance to make space history

Air Force Capt. Ed Dwight missed out on space in the 1960s. (Courtesy of Ed Dwight via National Geographic)

If the fates decided differently, Air Force test pilot Ed Dwight could have become NASA’s first Black astronaut in the 1960s — but he lost out, amid racial controversy. Now he’s in line to travel to the final frontier with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

Blue Origin listed the 90-year-old Dwight among six people who’ll be on its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship when it resumes crewed flights, on a date yet to be announced. Crewed flights were suspended after an uncrewed research mission went awry in 2022, but a repeat of that uncrewed mission went off without a hitch last December.

Dwight, who became a sculptor after resigning from the Air Force as a captain in 1966, will have his flight sponsored by Space for Humanity and by the Jaison and Jamie Robinson Foundation, which was created by the founders of Seattle-based Dream Variation Ventures.

Dwight’s life story is featured in a National Geographic documentary titled “The Space Race.” In 1961, he was chosen to enter an Air Force flight training program that was regarded as a pathway to NASA’s astronaut corps, and went on to win an Air Force recommendation to join NASA. But Dwight was passed over — and he later said that racism was to blame.

“My hope was just getting into space in any kind of way,” Dwight said in the documentary, “but they were not going to let that happen.”

It would be another two decades before Guion Bluford Jr. became the first Black American in space in 1983.

This isn’t the first time Blue Origin has put a would-be pioneer astronaut on its crew list. The quartet for the company’s first crewed flight in 2021 included Wally Funk, a member of the “Mercury 13” group of women fliers who missed out on joining NASA’s early astronaut corps.

Dwight could be in line to attain a different kind of distinction in space history: As of now, the oldest person to reach space, albeit on a suborbital trip, is William Shatner, the star of the first set of “Star Trek” TV shows and movies. His age was 90 years and 205 days at the time of his flight in October 2021. Dwight is currently 90 years and 208 days old. He could thus wrest away Shatner’s space title. (Blue Origin said “the flight date will be announced soon.”)

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Universe Today

NASA picks three teams to work on lunar terrain vehicle

An artist's conception shows NASA's generic concept for the Lunar Terrain Vehicle. (NASA Illustration)

Some of the biggest names in aerospace — and the automotive industry — will play roles in putting NASA astronauts in the driver’s seat for roving around on the moon.

The space agency today selected three teams to develop the capabilities for a lunar terrain vehicle, or LTV, which astronauts could use during Artemis missions to the moon starting with Artemis 5. That mission is currently scheduled for 2029, three years after the projected date for Artemis’ first crewed lunar landing.

The teams’ leading companies may not yet be household names outside the space community: Intuitive Machines, Lunar Outpost and Venturi Astrolab. But each of those ventures has more established companies as their teammates.

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GeekWire

How to turn down the noise in quantum computing

Scientists make adjustments to a beam-line array used to deliver laser pulses in quantum computers. (Quantinuum Photo)

Microsoft and Quantinuum say they’ve demonstrated a quantum computing system that can reduce the error rate for data processing by a factor of 800.

“Today signifies a major achievement for the entire quantum ecosystem,” Jason Zander, Microsoft’s executive vice president for strategic missions and technologies, said in a blog posting about the achievement.

Quantum computing could solve certain types of problems — ranging from data encryption and system optimization to the development of new synthetic materials — on a time scale that would be unachievable using classical computers. “Scaled quantum computers would offer the ability to simulate the interactions of molecules and atoms at the quantum level beyond the reach of classical computers, unlocking solutions that can be a catalyst for positive change in our world,” Zander said.

The secret to success lies in quantum bits, or qubits, that can represent multiple values until the results of a computation are read out. Qubits typically make use of exotic materials, such as superconducting circuits, diamonds with defects or laser-cooled ions.

One big challenge is that qubits tend to be “noisy” — that is susceptible to perturbations that introduce errors. For years, researchers have been hunting for ways to maintain the fidelity of qubits and correct any errors that arise. Such strategies typically involve linking up multiple physical qubits to represent a single “logical qubit.”

Just a couple of years ago, Microsoft researchers were saying that a quantum computer would need at least a million physical qubits in order to demonstrate an advantage over classical computers. But that’s because it was thought that thousands of physical qubits would be required to produce a single logical qubit. If fewer physical qubits are required for error correction, that would make it easier to build useful quantum computers.

The newly reported demonstration addresses that challenge: Microsoft and Quantinuum said they created four highly reliable logical qubits from just 30 physical qubits. “With this system, we ran more than 14,000 individual experiments without an error,” Zander said.

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GeekWire

Radian Aerospace updates design for orbital space plane

An artist's conception shows the Radian One space plane in orbit. (Radian Aerospace Illustration)

A Seattle-area startup called Radian Aerospace is fine-tuning the design of its orbital space plane, with an eye toward building a subscale prototype as early as this year.

The company is also in the midst of a fresh round of fundraising, following up on $27.5 million in investment that was announced in 2022, according to Livingston Holder, Radian’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “That round will be larger,” Holder told me.

Over the past two years, Radian has made progress on an ambitious plan to create a reusable winged space plane that would be launched toward low Earth orbit by a rocket-propelled sled and its own rocket engines. The single-stage-to-orbit concept, or SSTO, has been called a “holy grail” for cheap access to space.

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Universe Today

Scientists map magnetism around our galaxy’s black hole

An image from the Event Horizon Telescope shows lines of polarization around the Milky Way's central black hole. (Credit: EHT Collaboration)

Fresh imagery from the Event Horizon Telescope traces the lines of powerful magnetic fields spiraling out from the edge of the supermassive black hole at the center of our Milky Way galaxy, and suggests that strong magnetism may be common to all supermassive black holes.

The newly released image showing the surroundings of the black hole known as Sagittarius A* — which is about 27,000 light-years from Earth — is the subject of two studies published today in The Astrophysical Journal Letters. This picture follows up on an initial picture issued in 2022. Both pictures rely on radio-wave observations from the Event Horizon Telescope’s network of observatories around the world.

Sagittarius A* wasn’t the first black hole whose shadow was imaged by the EHT. Back in 2019, astronomers showed off a similar picture of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy M87, which is more than a thousand times bigger and farther away than the Milky Way’s black hole.

In 2021, the EHT team charted the magnetic field lines around M87’s black hole by taking a close look at the black hole in polarized light, which reflects the patterns of particles whirling around magnetic field lines. Researchers used the same technique to determine the magnetic signature of Sagittarius A*, or Sgr A* for short.

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GeekWire

Totally cool! Three options for seeing the solar eclipse

Skywatchers track the progress of 2017's solar eclipse at Seattle's Gas Works Park. (GeekWire Photo)

After a seven-year gap, a total solar eclipse is once again due to make a coast-to-coast run across North America, boosting popular interest (and airfares) to astronomical proportions.

The track of totality for the April 8 eclipse doesn’t come anywhere close to the Pacific Northwest. That’s in contrast to the 2017 total solar eclipse, when the moon’s shadow crossed the Oregon coast to begin its continent-spanning sweep.

You can still get in on the thrill of the event. It’s not too late to book a last-minute trip to someplace within driving distance of the total eclipse’s path, which stretches from Mexico up through Texas and the Midwest to the northeastern U.S. and Atlantic Canada. It’s just going to cost you.

Outside the track of totality, a partial solar eclipse will be visible throughout Canada, Mexico and the Lower 48 states. That’s assuming skies are clear, which is nowhere near a sure thing for the Pacific Northwest in April. Even if the sun is visible, you’ll want to make sure you see the eclipse safely.

There’s one almost surefire way to catch totality, and that’s to watch it online. It’s no substitute for experiencing darkness at midday in person, but it’s a no-muss, no-fuss, low-cost way to get in on the action. And it might well whet your appetite for the next eclipse opportunity.

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Cosmic Tech

Boom Supersonic gives its test plane a subsonic debut

Boom's XB-1 demonstrator jet takes off for the first time. (Credit: Boom Supersonic)

After a decade of development, Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 demonstrator jet took to the air today for the first in a series of test flights that will eventually lead beyond the sound barrier.

The flight at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port achieved a top altitude of 7,120 feet and a top speed of 238 knots (273 mph), Boom said in a news release. That’s nowhere near the speed of sound, but going supersonic wasn’t the goal. Instead, the aim was to start gathering data on the XB-1’s performance from takeoff to landing.

“Today, XB-1 took flight in the same hallowed airspace where the Bell X-1 first broke the sound barrier in 1947,” said Boom’s CEO and founder, Blake Scholl. “I’ve been looking forward to this flight since founding Boom in 2014, and it marks the most significant milestone yet on our path to bring supersonic travel to passengers worldwide.”

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