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Blue Origin’s chief architect lifts the veil on moon startup

Gary Lai at Museum of Flight
Blue Origin chief architect Gary Lai speaks at the Pathfinder Awards banquet at the Museum of Flight. (Photo by Ted Huetter / Museum of Flight)

Gary Lai’s resume features his status as chief architect and pioneer spaceflier at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture — but when he received a Pathfinder Award this weekend at Seattle’s Museum of Flight, the veteran engineer highlighted a lesser-known job, as co-founder and chief technology officer of a moon-centric startup that’s still in stealth mode.

“We aim to be the first company that harvests natural resources from the moon to use here on Earth,” Lai told an audience of about 400 banquet-goers on Oct. 28. “We’re building a completely novel approach to extract those resources, efficiently, cost-effectively and also responsibly. The goal is really to create a sustainable in-space economy.”

The Tacoma, Wash.-based startup, called Interlune, has actually been around for about three years — but it’s been shrouded in secrecy long enough that Lai can still be considered a co-founder. Lai said the other founders include Rob Meyerson, who was Blue Origin’s president from 2003 to 2018; and Apollo 17 astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt, a geologist who set foot on the moon in 1972 and served in the U.S. Senate from 1977 to 1983.

Lai noted that Interlune recently received a grant from the National Science Foundation. That $246,000 grant supports efforts to develop a system that could sort out moon dirt by particle size.

Neither Lai nor Meyerson, who was in the audience cheering him on, was willing to say much more about Interlune, due to the fact that the venture is still in stealth. But a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission indicates that the venture raised $1.85 million in seed funding last year from five unnamed investors.

The SEC form also names longtime aerospace industry executive Indra Hornsby as an officer of the company, and lists Estes Park, Colo., as Interlune’s headquarters. However, Hornsby’s LinkedIn page says she’s currently an adviser and a former chief operating officer. Other documents indicate that Tacoma, Meyerson’s home base, has become Interlune’s HQ.

Lai said that he would continue to advise Blue Origin on a part-time basis, focusing on advanced concepts that include the Blue Moon lunar landing system. But going forward, Lai plans to give more attention to what humans will be doing on the moon after they land.

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GeekWire

Jeff Bezos and NASA’s chief share a peek at lunar lander

Jeff Bezos and Bill Nelson at Blue Origin Alabama production facility
Jeff Bezos and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson chat in front of a mockup of Blue Origin’s lunar lander. (Blue Origin via Bill Nelson / X / Twitter)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson today provided a look at coming attractions in the form of a social-media glimpse at Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lunar lander, festooned with a golden feather logo.

In a series of posts to X / Twitter and Instagram, Bezos and Nelson showed off a mockup of the nearly three-story-tall Blue Moon MK1 cargo lander, which is taking shape at Blue Origin’s production facility in Huntsville, Ala.

“MK1’s early missions will pave the way and prove technologies for our MK2 lander for @nasa’s Human Landing System,” Bezos said on Instagram. He also recapped a few technical details — noting that the MK1 is designed to deliver up to 3 tons of cargo to anywhere on the moon’s surface, and that it’ll fit in the 7-meter fairing of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket. New Glenn is slated for its first launch next year.

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GeekWire

Zeno Power tests a new type of nuclear heat source

PNNL team removes heat source from transfer port
Team members at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory remove Zeno Power's heat source from a transfer port. (Zeno Power Photo)

Zeno Power says it has successfully completed its first demonstration of a new type of radioisotope heat source that could be used to generate off-grid power in settings ranging from the bottom of the ocean to the surface of the moon.

The demonstration — performed at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Richland, Wash. — took advantage of the energy provided by the radioactive decay of strontium-90. Zeno said its tests confirmed that the company’s technology can increase the specific power of its heat source compared with previously available strontium-90 heat sources.

Zeno uses radioisotope heat sources as the building blocks for its power-generating systems, which are designed to convert constant thermal energy into electricity. Strontium-90, which is typically created as a byproduct of nuclear fission, is an abundant fuel for such systems — but existing strontium-based power systems tend to be bulky. Zeno’s design could generate more power with less bulk, opening the way for a wider range of applications.

The work at PNNL involved radioactive and non-radioactive activities, including chemical processing and fuel fabrication, materials handling and heat source characterization. The test data will support further development of heat sources.

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Fiction Science Club

‘Her Space, Her Time’ reveals hidden figures of physics

Sepia-tone photos of Leavitt, Payne-Gaposchkin, Rubin and Alexander
These are four of the women scientists profiled in "Her Space, Her Time": Henrietta Leavitt, Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, Vera Rubin and Claudia Alexander. (Credits: Wikimedia; Smithsonian Institution; Rubin photo by Mark Godfrey, courtesy of AIP Emilio Segre Visual Archives; NASA)

Quick: Name a woman scientist.

Chances are the name you came up with is Marie Curie, the physicist and chemist who won two Nobel Prizes more than a century ago for the discoveries she and her husband Pierre made about radioactivity.

But who else? In a new book titled “Her Space, Her Time,” quantum physicist Shohini Ghose explains why women astronomers and physicists have been mostly invisible in the past — and profiles 20 researchers who lost out on what should have been Nobel-level fame.

“This issue around having low representation of women in physics is something that’s common all around the world,” Ghose says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “And I’ve certainly faced it in my own experiences as a physicist growing up. I really didn’t know of any woman physicist apart from Marie Curie.”

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GeekWire

AI-savvy writers do a reality check on techno-optimism

Ted Chiang at GeekWire Summit
Science-fiction writer Ted Chiang speaks at the 2023 GeekWire Summit in Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

How will “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen’s paean to economic growth and artificial intelligence, play to a wider audience? The reviews are in from two award-winning writers who are familiar with the impact of generative AI on creative professions.

“I think it’s mostly nonsense,” science-fiction writer Ted Chiang said Oct. 19 at the GeekWire Summit in Seattle.

Chiang, a longtime Seattle-area resident, is best-known as the author of “Story of Your Life,” the novella that was adapted for the Oscar-nominated 2016 movie “Arrival.” But he’s also won acclaim as a commentator on AI’s effects for The New Yorker and other publications. Last month, Time magazine included Chiang among the 100 most influential people in AI.

The other writer on the SIFF Cinema stage was Eric Heisserer, the screenwriter who turned Chiang’s story into the script for “Arrival.” Heisserer witnessed the debate over generative AI and the future of work up close as a member of the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild of America during its recent strike against Hollywood studios.

Both Chiang and Heisserer say AI is too often unjustly portrayed as a high-tech panacea. That claim came through loud and clear in Andreessen’s manifesto, which called AI a “universal problem solver.”

“Technology can solve certain problems, but I think the biggest problems that we face are not problems that have technological solutions,” Chiang said in response. “Climate change probably does not have a technological solution. Wealth inequality does not have a technological solution. Most of these are problems of political will. … And so Marc Andreessen’s manifesto is a prime example of ignoring all of these other realities.”

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GeekWire

Brain-cell atlases point to paths for future research

Brain graphic with magnifying glass
Researchers analyzed the cellular and genetic makeup of the brain. (BRAIN Initiative / HiClipArt Graphic)

In a tour de force for neuroscience, teams of researchers have published a voluminous set of brain-cell atlases for humans and other primates.

The atlases are detailed in 21 research papers appearing in Science, Science Advances and Science Translational Medicine — and could point scientists toward new strategies for addressing mental conditions ranging from Alzheimer’s disease and schizophrenia to epilepsy and ADHD.

“We need to understand the specifics of the human brain if we hope to understand human diseases,” Ed Lein, a senior investigator at Seattle’s Allen Institute, said in comments provided via video.

“Most of disease research tries to create a replicate or a model of a human disease in a species that doesn’t get that disease,” Lein explained. “But if we want to understand why we get it, and what the consequences are, and how one should treat it, we need to have a deep understanding of the human brain itself.”

The studies in the package released today are part of the National Institutes of Health’s BRAIN Initiative Cell Census Network, or BICCN, a program that was launched in 2017. The Allen Institute for Brain Science has played a major role in sharing data produced by the program.

One study analyzed more than a million cells taken from 42 regions of the brain. Another study drew high-quality samples from more than 100 brain regions. Yet another study focused on samples from prenatal brain tissue. The collective efforts of the research teams characterized more than 3,000 human brain cell types.

The researchers didn’t just examine the brain cells themselves. They also ran them through DNA analysis to learn which genes appeared to be linked to the cells’ functions and dysfunctions.

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GeekWire

Coast Guard delivers more debris from Titan sub wreck

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 says it has recovered and transferred the remaining evidence and debris from OceanGate’s Titan submersible to a U.S. port for cataloging and analysis — more than three months after the deep-sea implosion that killed the sub’s five crew members in the North Atlantic.

In an update issued today, the Coast Guard said the transfer was made on Oct. 4. “Additional presumed human remains were carefully recovered from within Titan’s debris and transported for analysis by U.S. medical professionals,” it said.

OceanGate was a startup headquartered in Everett, Wash. — and the company’s founder and CEO, Stockton Rush, was among the casualties. In August, OceanGate said a new CEO with tech industry experience, Gordon Gardiner, would lead the company through the investigation and the closure of operations.

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Universe Today

How far will NASA’s UFO studies go? Stay tuned

Starlink streak in night sky
A video captured by Dutch satellite-watcher Marco Langbroek shows Starlink satellites moving across the sky. (Marco Langbroek via X / Twitter)

BOULDER, Colo. — NASA says it’s going to play a bigger role in studying what’s behind unidentified anomalous phenomena, the newfangled name for what we used to call UFOs. But exactly how should NASA step into that role? The astrophysicist who helped get the ball rolling last year as NASA’s associate administrator for science is suggesting a quick and easy way to get started.

Thomas Zurbuchen, who left NASA at the end of 2022 and is now director of ETH Zurich Space, says his old employer could add unidentified anomalous phenomena, or UAPs, to a list of targeted research topics that’s due to be released in four months or so.

“You basically say, ‘Here’s opportunities,’ and you squeeze them in,” Zurbuchen said Oct. 7 in Boulder at the ScienceWriters 2023 conference. “Generally speaking, I think it’s a lot easier to do that.”

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GeekWire

Atlas V rocket sends Amazon’s first satellites into space

Atlas V rocket launch with Amazon Project Kuiper satellites
United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket launches Amazon’s first Project Kuiper satellites. (ULA via YouTube)

Amazon’s first satellites were launched today on a mission aimed at testing out the hardware and software for the Seattle company’s worldwide Project Kuiper broadband internet constellation.

Two prototype satellites — known as KuiperSat 1 and 2 — rode a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida into space at 2:06 p.m. ET (11:06 a.m. PT).

United Launch Alliance provided updates on what it called the Protoflight mission via its X / Twitter account. In a post-launch statement, ULA declared the mission to be successful and said that the Atlas V “precisely” delivered the satellites to orbit.

The satellites were sent into 311-mile-high (500-kilometer-high) orbits with a 30-degree inclination. In a status update, Amazon said Project Kuiper’s mission operations center in Redmond, Wash., confirmed first contact with both satellites within an hour after launch.

“Five plus years in the making. So much care, persistence, boldness and beauty,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in a posting to Instagram and Threads. “What an amazing endeavor. … Big milestone and much more to come!”

Project Kuiper, an ambitious program that was publicly unveiled in 2019, aims to provide broadband internet access — and satellite-based access to Amazon Web Services — to millions of people who are currently underserved. Amazon plans to use the prototypes — which were built at Project Kuiper’s HQ in Redmond — to test the hardware on the spacecraft, as well as ground operations and customer terminals.

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GeekWire

Neurophos raises $7M to create exotic chips for AI

Neurophos co-founder Andrew Traverso in optics lab
Neurophos co-founder Andrew Traverso works on an optics experiment in the lab. (Neurophos Photo)

A semi-stealthy startup called Neurophos says it’s raised $7 million in seed funding to support the development of a chip that makes use of metamaterials for heavy-duty AI applications. And although the company’s HQ is in Austin, Texas, it has plenty of connections to Seattle-area tech leaders.

Founded in 2020, Neurophos was one of the first companies to receive pre-seed support from MetaVC Partners, a metamaterials-centric venture fund backed by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and former Microsoft executive Nathan Myhrvold. Neurophos’ co-founder and CEO, Patrick Bowen, previously contributed his expertise to Seattle-area metamaterials ventures such as Kymeta and Lumotive.

Tom Driscoll — the founder and chief technology officer of yet another Gates-backed metamaterials venture, Kirkland, Wash.-based Echodyne — is listed on Neurophos’ website as its CTO and co-founder. Kymeta’s former CEO, Nathan Kundtz, is listed as a board member.

The aforementioned ventures all rely on the exotic properties of metamaterials — electronic arrays that are structured to bend light in a variety of wavelengths, in a variety of ways, without the need for moving parts. Bowen told me that such properties could reduce the size and the energy requirements for photonic chips that could be tailor-made for artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT.

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