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Amazon says its Kuiper satellites aced orbital tests

Flight director at Amazon Project Kuiper mission operations center
A flight director watches over Project Kuiper’s mission operations center in Redmond, Wash. (Amazon Photo)

Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite network streamed its first video and facilitated its first online sale during a monthlong series of orbital tests that the company says achieved a “100% success rate.”

The performance of the two prototype satellites, known as KuiperSat 1 and 2, validated Amazon’s satellite design and will open the way for mass production to begin in earnest next month at a factory in Kirkland, Wash., said Rajeev Badyal, vice president of technology for Project Kuiper.

“It’s been an incredible success for the team, for Kuiper, and partly because everything we did went like clockwork,” Badyal said. “There were no fires to fight, so to speak. In some ways, the team made it look very easy. As you know very well, these things are extremely difficult to do. But everything we built, all the designs are working as designed, and the results we’re getting are nominal or better.”

The prototype satellites were launched into low Earth orbit from Florida on Oct. 6 atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, and after testing the satellites’ maneuverability, Amazon verified end-to-end network functionality last week. Further tests will be conducted in the months ahead while satellite production ramps up, Amazon said.

Project Kuiper is designed to provide affordable broadband internet access from above for tens of millions of people around the world who are underserved.

It’s been only four years since Kuiper came into the public spotlight — and Amazon is far behind SpaceX’s rival Starlink satellite network, which already has more than 2 million subscribers. But Project Kuiper aims to take advantage of synergies with Amazon’s other business lines, ranging from online retail sales to Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Web Services.

The tests conducted over the past month served as a demonstration of those synergies as well as confirmation that Project Kuiper’s hardware, software and ground-based infrastructure are on the right track.

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Orbite begins the countdown to space training programs

Orbite clients on zero-G airplane flight
Participants in an astronaut orientation session float during a zero-G airplane flight in France in 2021. (Orbite Photo)

After getting its start in Seattle and testing its business model in France and Florida, a space travel venture called Orbite is ready to start signing up customers for private-sector astronaut training programs.

And although it’ll be a while before those programs begin in earnest, Orbite CEO Jason Andrews says the first 500 people to make a refundable deposit will be in for some astronaut-worthy experiences between now and then.

“What we are announcing today is just the beginning,” he said.

Orbite plans to invite early-stage customers in its Founders Club to attend a series of space-adjacent events, starting with a rocket-launch watch party in Florida next spring and continuing with gatherings that could include an underwater adventure in the Florida Keys and a trip to Antarctica.

Andrews said Founders Club members could spend part of their $5,000 pre-booking deposit on one of those tours, or put all the money toward a training program at Orbite’s Astronaut Training and Spaceflight Gateway Campus in Florida.

That training facility, mapped out by French industrial designer Phillippe Starck, is due to be built at a site that’s yet to be disclosed in the area around Florida’s Space Coast and Orlando. Protracted business negotiations led to delays in the development schedule, but the facility is currently set to open in 2026, Andrews said.

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AI influencers are worried about AI’s influence

Emily Bender and Ted Chiang
Linguist Emily Bender and science-fiction writer Ted Chiang share the stage at Town Hall Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

What do you get when you put two of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people on artificial intelligence together in the same lecture hall? If the two influencers happen to be science-fiction writer Ted Chiang and Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, you get a lot of skepticism about the future of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.

“I don’t use it, and I won’t use it, and I don’t want to read what other people do using it,” Bender said Nov. 10 at a Town Hall Seattle forum presented by Clarion West

Chiang, who writes essays about AI and works intelligent machines into some of his fictional tales, said it’s becoming too easy to think that AI agents are thinking.

“I feel confident that they’re not thinking,” he said. “They’re not understanding anything, but we need another way to make sense of what they’re doing.”

What’s the harm? One of Chiang’s foremost fears is that the thinking, breathing humans who wield AI will use it as a means to control other humans. In a recent Vanity Fair interview, he compared our increasingly AI-driven economy to “a giant treadmill that we can’t get off” — and during Friday’s forum, Chiang worried that the seeming humanness of AI assistants could play a role in keeping us on the treadmill.

“If people start thinking that Alexa, or something like that, deserves any kind of respect, that works to Amazon’s advantage,” he said. “That’s something that Amazon would try and amplify. Any corporation, they’re going to try and make you think that a product is a person, because you are going to interact with a person in a certain way, and they benefit from that. So, this is a vulnerability in human psychology which corporations are really trying to exploit.”

AI tools including ChatGPT and DALL-E typically produce text or imagery by breaking down huge databases of existing works, and putting the elements together into products that look as if they were created by humans. The artificial genuineness is the biggest reason why Bender stays as far away from generative AI as she can.

“The papier-mâché language that comes out of these systems isn’t representing the experience of any entity, any person. And so I don’t think it can be creative writing,” she said. “I do think there’s a risk that it is going to be harder to make a living as a writer, as corporations try to say, ‘Well, we can get the copy…’ or similarly in art, ‘We can get the illustrations done much cheaper by taking the output of the system that was built with stolen art, visual or linguistic, and just repurposing that.’”

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Starfish Space scrubs plan for satellite rendezvous

Illustration: Otter Pup spacecraft in orbit
An artist’s conception shows Starfish Space’s Otter Pup spacecraft in orbit. (Starfish Space Illustration)

Five months after a tilt-a-whirl spin spoiled the debut of Starfish Space’s first spacecraft, the Tukwila, Wash.- based startup has halted efforts to put its Otter Pup back on track to demonstrate an on-orbit satellite rendezvous.

Starfish had to abandon its plan to regroup and attempt a rendezvous when the Otter Pup satellite’s electric propulsion thruster suffered an anomaly and could no longer function. “We determined that we just pushed it a little bit too far,” Starfish co-founder Austin Link told me.

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Amazon says Kuiper satellites pass maneuvering tests

Amazon Project Kuiper Hall-effect thruster during test firing
Amazon’s Hall-effect thruster fires up with a krypton glow during testing. (Amazon Photo)

A month after the launch of its first prototype Project Kuiper satellites, Amazon reports that the spacecraft have demonstrated controlled maneuvering in orbit using their custom-built electric propulsion systems.

“A recent series of test firings provided critical on-orbit data to further validate our satellite design, with each test returning nominal results consistent with our design requirements,” Amazon said today in an online status report.

Today’s report suggest that Amazon’s Project Kuiper team — which is headquartered in Redmond, Wash. — is on track in its multibillion-dollar effort to create a 3,236-satellite constellation that would eventually provide broadband internet access for millions of people around the globe.

The two prototypes, known as KuiperSat 1 and 2, were sent into orbit atop a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket on Oct. 6. They’re designed to test the hardware as well as the software, ground-based facilities and procedures that will be used for the full constellation. Amazon says that the first operational satellites are due to be launched early next year, and that beta service to selected enterprise customers could begin by the end of 2024.

At least half of the 3,236 satellites will have to be placed in orbit by mid-2026 to satisfy the requirements of Amazon’s license from the Federal Communications Commission. Mass production is due to begin by the end of the year at Amazon’s factory in Kirkland, Wash., at a rate that Amazon says will eventually ramp up to as many as four satellites per day. So, it’s in Amazon’s interest to make sure the design is fine-tuned as soon as possible.

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Allen Frontiers Group awards $10M for neuroimmunology

Immune cells in spinal cord region
Immune cells (yellow and purple) fill a sinus (teal) in the outer layer of the meninges, the tissue that surrounds the brain and spinal cord. (Credit: Justin Rustenhoven / Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis)

The Paul G. Allen Frontiers Group, a division of the Seattle-based Allen Institute, is launching a research center in New York to focus on interactions between the nervous system and the immune system.

The Allen Discovery Center for Neuroimmune Interactions, headquartered at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, will receive $10 million over the course of four years from the Paul G. Allen Family Foundation, with a total potential for $20 million over eight years.

The award is the result of an open call for research proposals exploring fundamental questions at the intersection of neuroscience and immunology. It’s the latest open-science initiative celebrating the legacy of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, who died five years ago at the age of 65 from complications of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.

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Fiction Science Club

Get a reality check on plans to build cities in space

A scene from "For All Mankind" shows a fictional Martian city from above. (Credit: Sony Pictures / Apple TV+)

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos may harbor multibillion-dollar dreams of sending millions of people to live on Mars, on the moon and inside free-flying space habitats — but a newly published book provides a prudent piece of advice: Don’t go too boldly.

It’s advice that Kelly and Zach Weinersmith didn’t expect they’d be giving when they began to work on their book, titled “A City on Mars.” They thought they’d be writing a guide to the golden age of space settlement that Musk and Bezos were promising.

“We ended up doing a ton of research on space settlements from just every angle you can imagine,” Zach Weinersmith says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “This was a four-year research project. And about two and a half years in, we went from being fairly optimistic about it as a desirable, near-term likely possibility [to] probably unlikely in the near term, and possibly undesirable in the near term. So it was quite a change. Slightly traumatic, I would say.”

The Weinersmiths found that there was precious little research into the potential long-term health effects of living on the moon or Mars — and zero research into the potential effects on human reproduction and development. Moreover, the legal uncertainties surrounding property rights in space seemed likely to lead to disputes that would tie diplomats and military planners in knots.

“In our effort to create Mars settlements to make a Plan B, to make ourselves safer as a species, are we actually lowering existential risk?” Zach says. “I think it’s absolutely unclear — and there’s a good argument that we might even increase it.”

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Co-CEOs take the helm at KinectAir digital travel service

Parked plane with KinectAir livery
KinectAir makes use of private aircraft including this Pilatus PC-12 plane. (KinectAir Photo via Business Wire)

Retired Air Force Col. Katie Buss and tech entrepreneur Ben Howard have taken the helm as co-CEOs of Vancouver, Wash.-based KinectAir, which provides a digital platform for booking on-demand private air travel.

Buss previously served as KinectAir’s chief operating officer. Howard, who co-founded the privately held company in 2019, was chief technology officer before his promotion. Fellow co-founder Jonathan Evans is leaving the CEO post but continues to serve as KinectAir’s board chair.

The new management arrangement aims to facilitate scaled-up operations at KinectAir. As co-CEO for aviation, Buss will focus on the aviation sector and industry relationships as well as safety and regulatory issues. As co-CEO for technology, Howard will advance the company’s AI-powered app and operating system to connect vetted flight operators and passengers nationwide.

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Helijet plans to buy electric air taxis for B.C. flights

Illustration: Helijet eVTOL with Vancouver skyline in background
Helijet is due to operate Beta Technologies’ Alia aircraft in British Columbia in the late 2020s. (Helijet Illustration)

Vancouver, B.C.-based Helijet International has placed firm orders with Vermont-based Beta Technologies for a fleet of electric-powered vertical-takeoff-and-landing aircraft, or eVTOLs.

The aircraft, popularly known as flying taxis, are currently slated to undergo commercial regulatory certification in 2026 and would be available for commercial service shortly thereafter, Helijet said in a news release.

Beta Technologies’ Alia eVTOLs are built to carry a pilot and up to five passengers. The aircraft would be integrated into Helijet’s existing helicopter flight network, focusing on scheduled service between Vancouver, Victoria and Nanaimo. They’d also be used for emergency response, air ambulance and organ transfer services in British Columbia’s Lower Mainland, plus charter services for rural and remote communities.

The Alia orders were announced today at Helijet’s Victoria Harbour Heliport, with B.C. Premier David Eby in attendance.

“We are committed to introducing and integrating zero-emission, vertical-lift technologies and related ground/building infrastructure in the communities we serve, and look forward to transforming our current heliport infrastructure to meet future urban air mobility vertiport standards,” said Danny Sitnam, Helijet’s president and CEO.

Eby said Helijet’s move into the eVTOL market is consistent with British Columbia’s commitment to promoting sustainable aviation technology and infrastructure development.

“This provincial government recognizes the potential of advanced air mobility to decarbonize the aviation sector, improve regional connectivity, improve emergency response times and introduce new manufacturing opportunities in our province,” Eby said.

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Zeno wins $7.5M contract for underwater nuclear power

Illustration: Radioisotope power system on seafloor
An artist’s conception shows Zeno’s radioisotope power system on the seafloor. (Zeno Power Illustration)

Zeno Power says it’s been awarded a $7.5 million contract from the Department of Defense to build and demonstrate a radioisotope power system that can provide distributed power on the seabed.

The program, funded through the Pentagon’s Operational Energy Innovation Office and the Office of Naval Research, calls for the demonstration to take place by 2025.

Zeno maintains offices in Seattle as well as Washington, D.C., and one of its partners in the program is Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, which is headquartered in Kent, Wash.

The objective of the program — known as Distributed Energy Provided Throughout the Seas, or DEPTHS — is to develop decentralized nodes for energy generation and distribution on the seabed. Such a system could open the way for long-endurance seafloor sensor systems and charging stations for autonomous undersea vehicles.

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