Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg speaks with reporters after meeting with Donald Trump. (Worldwide Trends via YouTube)
After meeting with President-elect Donald Trump at his Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida, Boeing CEO Dennis Muilenburg says he’s making a “personal commitment” to keep the cost of the next two Air Force One jets below $4 billion.
“We’re going to get it done for less than that, and we’re committed to working together to make sure that happens,” Muilenburg told reporters on Dec. 21.
Trump threatened in a Dec. 6 tweet to have the Air Force One deal canceled because “costs are out of control, more than $4 billion.” But since then, Muilenburg and other executives have smoothed over the dispute. Wednesday’s meeting in Palm Beach appeared to cement the rapprochement with Trump.
A visualization shows gravitational waves produced by orbiting black holes. (NASA Graphic / C. Henze)
The biggest science story of 2016 was a century in the making, and will surely earn someone a Nobel Prize. The first detection of gravitational waves from the crash of two black holes is important not only for the physics of the past and present, but for the physics of the future as well.
The discovery – made by the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO – serves as powerful confirmation for Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity, which was published in 1916. It also points the way for scientists to study black holes and other exotic phenomena that can’t be observed using the traditional tools of astronomy.
“What’s really exciting is what comes next,” David Reitze, executive director of the LIGO Laboratory, said when the discovery was announced in February. “I think we’re opening a window on the universe – a window of gravitational wave astronomy.”
Echodyne CEO Eben Frankenberg holds one of the company’s radar units at Echodyne’s headquarters in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Echodyne’s drone-sized radar system has received a vote of confidence – and a $118,721 award – from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The award, made through the department’s Silicon Valley Innovation Program, is designed to help the U.S. Border Patrol enhance its ability to monitor activities at the nation’s borders. The potential applications range from tracking down bad guys to search-and-rescue operations.
An award of a little more than $100,000 may not sound like a huge deal in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a welcome boost for Echodyne – a startup headquartered in Bellevue, Wash., that counts Microsoft co-founders Bill Gates and Paul Allen among its investors.
“The great thing is we get the opportunity to take the commercial product we’re developing, do a few modifications and have them test it,” Echodyne CEO Eben Frankenberg told GeekWire today.
The starship Avalon approaches Arcturus in a scene from “Passengers.” (Sony Pictures via YouTube)
The science is under the hood in “Passengers,” a love story set on a giant starship – and screenwriter Jon Spaihts is the guy who put it there.
Chances are most movie fans are going to the movie to see Hollywood stars Jennifer Lawrence (“The Hunger Games,” etc.) and Chris Pratt (“Guardians of the Galaxy,” etc.) rather than to get a tutorial on the physics of the Coriolis effect on a rotating spacecraft. But just in case there are some space geeks in the audience, Spaihts made sure the math works out.
For “Passengers,” Spaihts created a setting that is both expansive and claustrophobic. All of the action takes place on a starship traveling across light-years of emptiness to a colony world.
But what a starship! “The ship is a character unto itself,” the film’s director, Morten Tyldum, told GeekWire.
President Barack Obama sits for a 3-D portrait being produced by the Smithsonian Institution. (White House Photo / Pete Souza)
Dealing with the coming revolution in artificial intelligence is likely to require modernizing America’s social safety net, White House experts said today, in what may well be the Obama administration’s last official word on the subject.
Today’s report focuses on the potential economic impacts of AI, and draws upon analyses from the Council of Economic Advisers, the Domestic Policy Council, the National Economic Council, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Office of Science and Technology Policy.
The opportunities offered by AI are likely to be a key driver for future productivity and wage growth, said Jason Furman, chairman of the Council of Economic Advisers.
“As we look at AI, our biggest economic concern is that we won’t have enough of it,” he told reporters during a teleconference.
Japan’s Team Hakuto is testing two small rovers known as Tetris (left foreground) and Moonraker (right background). The rovers would ride along with Team Indus’ spacecraft. (Team Hakuto Photo)
The rocketeers on Japan’s Team Hakuto say they’ve gotten the Google Lunar XPRIZE’s seal of approval on its plans for a mission to the moon.
The XPRIZE verification of Team Hakuto’s launch agreement with India’s Team Indus boosts the number of approved competitors to five. That includes Team Indus as well as Moon Express, Synergy Moon and SpaceIL.
“The Google Lunar XPRIZE has always pushed us beyond our limits” Takeshi Hakamada, Team Hakuto’s leader, said in today’s news release. “We will continue to challenge ourselves next year and choose an optimal path to reach the moon.”
Team Hakuto is run by a Tokyo-based startup called ispace, and draws upon expertise from faculty and students at Tohoku University.
Flirtey’s drone makes a delivery for 7-Eleven. (Flirtey Photo)
In the race to make routine commercial deliveries via drone, Flirtey is going where Amazon hasn’t yet ventured: the United States.
Today, the three-year-old Nevada-based startup reported that its autonomous drones made regular weekend deliveries of food and other convenience-store products for a 7-Eleven store during November.
The pilot project involved a dozen customers in Reno – which happens to be the headquarters for Flirty and for the Nevada Institute for Autonomous Systems’ drone test range at Reno-Stead Airport.
Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence star in the movie “Passengers,” which tells the tale of a space journey far beyond Mars. (Columbia Pictures / Sony Pictures)
A just-for-fun survey suggests that three out of every 10 Americans have thought about going to Mars, and almost half of them have thought about it more seriously after the presidential election.
The breakdown suggests that men give more thought to Mars trips than women, and that Millennials are more on board with the idea than baby boomers. Overall, 44 percent of the 1,024 survey respondents said they’re more likely to want to travel to Mars in the wake of last month’s election.
So who would they want to leave behind? Actually, President-elect Donald Trump was the most popular candidate on the survey’s list: He was chosen by 46 percent of those surveyed, with Kanye West, Kim Kardashian and Hillary Clinton close behind. (To be fair, the respondents could select more than one celebrity to drop off.)
There was also a list of potential traveling companions. Actress Jennifer Lawrence, who stars as a space traveler in the newly released movie “Passengers,” scored the highest overall.
Protesters gather at the state Capitol in Olympia to urge Electoral College members across the nation to break ranks. (Wash. Secretary of State Photo)
Only seven members of the Electoral College proved “faithless” to their pledged presidential candidates today, and four of them are in Washington state. The tally in Olympia was eight for Democrat Hillary Clinton, who won the state – plus three for retired Gen. Colin Powell and one for Native American activist Faith Spotted Eagle.
One of the four, Bret Chiafalo, was a leader in the “Hamilton Electors” movement, which sought to derail President-elect Donald Trump’s move to the White House by denying him the 270 electoral votes required for a win.
If the Hamilton Electors had swayed 37 of the electors pledged to the GOP candidate, the presidential election would have been gone to the House, to be decided in an arcane procedure that hasn’t been used since 1824.
In the end, just two Trump electors were swayed. Texas elector Chris Suprun had been saying for weeks that he’d vote for Republican Ohio Gov. John Kasich when given the chance. In an op-ed published today by The Hill, Suprun said he was “gravely concerned” about claims that Russian President Vladimir Putin helped Trump win.
Thirty-six of Texas’ electoral votes went to Trump. One vote went to Kasich, and another went to Ron Paul, a libertarian Republican from Texas.
Texas’ vote put Trump over the top in the Electoral College, formalizing his presidential victory with 304 electoral votes.
Later today, an elector who was pledged to Clinton in Hawaii voted instead for independent-minded Democrat Bernie Sanders.
An artist’s conception shows a constellation of satellites in orbit. (Credit: OneWeb)
The OneWeb internet satellite venture says it has secured another $1.2 billion in investment, including a billion dollars from SoftBank Group.
OneWeb said the new infusion of capital will support the construction of a high-volume satellite production facility in Exploration Park, Fla., capable of producing 15 satellites a week. Production is to begin in 2018, with an eye toward having OneWeb’s network operating by as early as 2019.
The operation is expected to create nearly 3,000 new jobs in the U.S. over the next four years, including jobs in engineering and manufacturing, OneWeb said.
