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Comedian Pete Davidson gets his space trip confirmed

Blue Origin NS-20 crew
Comedian Pete Davidson will be among a crew of six for Blue Origin's May 23 suborbital space mission. (Photos via Blue Origin)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has confirmed that “Saturday Night Live” comedian Pete Davidson will be going to space next week, less than a year after he portrayed a hapless Mars astronaut on NBC’s late-night sketch show.

Bezos won’t be accompanying Davidson, even though that was the impression given by some of last week’s gossip about the flight. Instead, five paying passengers will be riding alongside the 28-year-old actor, who co-wrote and starred in a semi-autobiographical movie titled “The King of Staten Island” in 2020.

The other five spacefliers listed in today’s announcement are:

  • Marty Allen, an angel investor and the former CEO of Party America and California Closet Company, among other ventures.
  • Marc Hagle, the president and CEO of Tricor International, a residential and commercial property development corporation.
  • Sharon Hagle, the founder of SpaceKids Global, a nonprofit organization focusing on STEAM+ education, with a special emphasis on empowering girls. SpaceKids participates in the Postcards to Space program led by the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s educational foundation. Marc and Sharon Hagle are husband and wife.
  • Jim Kitchen, a teacher, entrepreneur and explorer who has served on the faculty of the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School since 2010.
  • George Nield, a former associate administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration’s Office of Commercial Space Transportation who is now the president of Commercial Space Technologies.

Blue Origin said Davidson would be getting a free flight as the company’s guest. The company declined to say how much the other fliers would be paying for their trips.

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Researchers may have to pay $6.5M in trade secrets case

Images of field emitter structures
Scanning electron microscopy images show a variety of silicon carbide emitter structures. (M-G. Kang, H. Lezec, F. Sharifi / NIST)

An arbitrator has awarded Intellectual Ventures more than $6.5 million in attorney’s fees and other costs in a case involving two of the company’s former researchers who were accused of improperly sharing trade secrets.

The ruling by the arbitrator, George Finkle, was issued last month and included in documents filed last week in King County Superior Court by Intellectual Ventures’ attorneys. They’re asking the court to affirm the award and direct entry of judgment. Meanwhile, attorneys for the researchers say they’ll contest Finkle’s award.

Finkle ruled that the two researchers, Fred Sharifi and Rachel Cannara, improperly used confidential information they had developed while working for Intellectual Ventures’ Advanced Physics Lab in Bellevue, Wash.

The information focused on a technology known as cold electron field emission. According to the National Institute of Standards and Technology, where the pair had worked before joining Intellectual Ventures, the technology could be used to create higher-efficiency electron sources for applications ranging from microwave communications and radar systems to X-ray imaging systems.

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Fiction Science Club

Get a way-out reality check on dreams of leaving Earth

Multigenerational starship
An artist's conception shows a starship on a 5,000-year trip. (Jörgen Engdahl / Courtesy of Discovery+)

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos wants to have millions of people living and working in space — that’s why he founded his Blue Origin space venture more than two decades ago. But what if living in space turns out to be like holing up in an Amazon warehouse?

“The reality of going to another planet in our current environment, I think … the best analogy is an Amazon fulfillment center,” Taylor Genovese, an anthropologist at Arizona State University, says in “Last Exit: Space,” a new documentary about space settlement narrated by famed filmmaker Werner Herzog.

“You won’t be able to actually see where you are,” Genovese explains. “You’re going to be inside of a factory, and you’re not going to experience what you think you’re going to be experiencing — that is, the kind of awe of being on another planet and experiencing being off Earth. No, you’re going to be working inside of a cubicle.”

That’s a perspective you won’t often hear in the wave of space documentaries flowing through streaming-video outlets, including “Countdown” and “Return to Space” on Netflix, and “Secrets of the Universe” on Curiosity Stream.

But Rudolph Herzog — Werner’s son and the director of “Last Exit: Space,” now playing on Discovery+ — wasn’t that interested in doing a conventional documentary about the final frontier.

“I just like the edgy, quirky stories,” the younger Herzog, who’s built up his own portfolio of film projects, explains in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “I think everybody knows about Elon Musk, and everybody knows what Jeff Bezos is up to. … I just wanted to show the incredible lengths people will go to, to live this dream of going to space.”

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GeekWire

TerraPower wins $8.5 million for nuclear fuel recycling

TerraPower lab
A panoramic view shows TerraPower’s laboratory in Bellevue, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

BELLEVUE, Wash. — TerraPower, the Bellevue-based nuclear power venture co-founded by Bill Gates, has won an $8.55 million grant from the U.S. Department of Energy to work on safer methods to recover uranium from used nuclear fuel.

TerraPower’s recycling process is among 11 projects that will receive a total of $36 million in federal funding from the department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy, or ARPA-E. The grants are aimed at supporting technologies that would limit the amount of waste produced by advanced nuclear reactors.

““Developing novel approaches to safely manage nuclear waste will enable us to power even more homes and businesses in America with carbon-free nuclear energy,” Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm said today in a news release. “ARPA-E is doing just that by supporting companies and universities that are working on next-generation technologies to modernize advanced reactors and strengthen the nation’s clean energy enterprise.”

TerraPower’s grant is the largest of the 11 announced today for ARPA-E’s ONWARDS program. The acronym stands for “Optimizing Nuclear Waste and Advanced Reactor Disposal Systems.”

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Cosmic Science

Antarctic team finds iconic wreck of the Endurance

Endurance stern
The wreck of the Endurance was found in the Weddell Sea. (Image © Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust / National Geographic)

One of the world’s most celebrated shipwrecks — the hulk of the sailing ship Endurance — has been found at a depth of nearly 10,000 feet in Antarctica’s Weddell Sea, 107 years after it sank.

The wooden ship carried British explorer Ernest Shackleton and his crew to the Southern Ocean in 1915 — but was trapped in pack ice just one day out from their planned landing point. Shackleton’s expedition was marooned, and the ship slowly slipped beneath the ice.

The saga of how Shackleton and his stranded crew set up camp and organized an 800-mile journey in a lifeboat to seek out rescue stands as a heroic example of overcoming Antarctic adversity. All 28 members of Shackleton’s party survived the 497-day ordeal.

More than a century later, the Falklands Maritime Heritage Trust organized the Endurance22 expedition to seek out and survey the sunken ship. The team set out last month from Cape Town, South Africa, aboard the icebreaker S.A. Agulhas II for a 35-day mission.

Today the expedition’s organizers announced that they found the ship on March 5 using state-of-the-art autonomous underwater vehicles. It’s sitting on the seafloor about four miles south of the position recorded in 1915 by the Endurance’s captain, Frank Worsley.

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Cosmic Science

Hail to the Kraken: Sea monster gets a presidential name

Fossil octopus
An artist's conception shows Syllipsimopodi bideni as it might have looked 330 million years ago. (Credit: K. Whalen/Christopher Whalen)

What do you call a 328 million-year-old fossil octopus with 10 arms? A decapus? A kraken? The researchers who analyzed the fossilized monster from Montana went in a different direction — and came up with a name that pays tribute to President Joe Biden.

The scientific label for the sea monster from the days before the dinosaurs, Syllipsimopodi bideni, isn’t intended as a comment on the 79-year-old politician’s age. “Bideni” merely recognizes the fact that the paper describing the species was submitted to the journal Nature Communications not long after Biden’s inauguration in January 2021.

“I wanted to somehow acknowledge the moment in a way that was more positive and forward-looking,” study lead author Christopher Whalen, a researcher at the American Museum of Natural History and Yale University, said in a news release. “I was encouraged by the plans President Biden put forward to counter anthropogenic climate change, and his general sentiment that politicians should listen to scientists.”

“Syllipsimopodi” is the more scientifically meaningful part of the name: That genus designation comes from the Greek words for “prehensile foot,” and the researchers say Syllipsimopodi bideni is the oldest-known cephalopod to develop suckers on its 10 sinuous arms.

The specimen also appears to clear up some evolutionary questions about the common ancestor of present-day squids and octopuses.

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GeekWire

‘SNL’ comedian is reportedly up for a space ride

Pete Davidson on SNL
Pete Davidson portrays a slacker astronaut in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch. (NBC / SNL via YouTube)

Comedian Pete Davidson co-starred with SpaceX CEO Elon Musk last year in a “Saturday Night Live” sketch about a slacker astronaut named Chad, but it sounds as if Davidson could soon go into space for real — courtesy of Musk’s rival space billionaire, Jeff Bezos.

According to the New York Post’s Page Six gossip column, Davidson is close to signing up for a suborbital space trip on the New Shepard rocket ship built by Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

“Pete is excited,” according to an unnamed Page Six source said to be familiar with Davidson’s plans. “They haven’t signed a contract yet, but it looks like it’s going to happen. The details are being finalized.”

Blue Origin, which is based in Kent, Wash., launched three crewed suborbital space missions from its West Texas spaceport last year and is reportedly keen to pick up the pace this year. Page Six quoted its source as saying the timing for Davidson’s flight is still up in the air.

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Radio astronomy director cuts through the static

SpaceX Starlink launch
A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket sends 47 Starlink satellites into orbit from Kennedy Space Center. (SpaceX Photo)

There are plenty of astronomers who worry that the thousands of satellites that are being launched into low Earth orbit for global broadband internet access will cast a pall over their scientific observations. But Tony Beasley, director of the National Radio Astronomy Observatory, says the future looks bright.

And he means that in a good way.

It’s not just that he’s confident astronomers will deal with the challenges posed by potential interference from all those satellites — including the latest batch of 47 Starlink satellites, which were built at SpaceX’s factory in Redmond, Wash., and sent into orbit today from Florida atop a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

“We will find a solution,” Beasley told GeekWire. “We’re not going to be the ones that cause all of the concerns here for SpaceX. It could be that our optical [astronomy] friends will do that, but that’s OK.”

Beasley, an Australia native who’s headed the National Science Foundation’s leading center for radio astronomy for the past decade, is also optimistic about the prospects for the NRAO’s next giant leap: the Next Generation Very Large Array.

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Cosmic Space

‘Martian Flower’ blooms in a Red Planet menagerie

Martian flower
A weirdly shaped mineral deposit has been dubbed the "Martian Flower." (NASA / JPL-Caltech / MSSS / Kevin M. Gill)

A weird shape spotted on the surface of Mars may look like an agave plant, a starfish, fossilized coral or even an infant Demogorgon, but experts say there’s a perfectly natural explanation for the object that’s been dubbed a “Martian Flower.”

The tiny multi-branched shape was captured in images from the ChemCam and Mars Hand Lens Imager on NASA’s Curiosity rover, which has been operating for nearly 10 years in Gale Crater on Mars.

It’s the latest in a succession of weird bits of stuff that have turned up amid the thousands of pictures sent back to Earth by robotic Red Planet probes. Other examples include a skull-shaped rock, an alien footprint (actually, a wheelprint), the Mermaid on Mars, the Mars rat, Martian macaroni (a.k.a. rover rotini) Curiosity’s plastic shred, Phoenix’s sprung spring and Opportunity’s bunny ears.

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Stratolaunch flexes mammoth plane’s landing gear

Stratolaunch Roc airplane in flight
Stratolaunch’s Roc airplane files over the Mojave Desert. (NASASpaceflight.com / Stratolaunch via YouTube)

Stratolaunch, the air-launch venture created by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen a decade ago, successfully conducted a full test of the landing gear on its mammoth Roc carrier aircraft today.

Today’s outing at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port was the fourth test flight for the plane, which is named after a mythical giant bird and ranks as the world’s largest aircraft by wingspan. Its 385-foot spread is more than half again as wide as the wings of a Boeing 747.

Allen never got to see Roc take to the air: He died in 2018 at the age of 65, just months before the plane’s first flight. But under new ownership, Stratolaunch is following through on Allen’s efforts to develop the plane as a flying launch pad.

A month ago, Stratolaunch’s test pilots retracted and extended the plane’s left mid-main landing gear. Today’s follow-up test validated full landing gear operations, including door functionality and alternate gear extension. Pilots also evaluated Roc’s general performance during a flight that reached an altitude of 16,000 feet and lasted for an hour and 43 minutes.

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