Local Motors is working on a 3D-printed car called the LM3D Swim. (Credit: Local Motors)
Airbus Ventures, the European aerospace giant’s Silicon Valley spin-off, says the first investment from its $150 million venture fund is going to Local Motors, a Phoenix-based company that aims to sell 3D-printed cars based on open-source designs.
“Not since the space race has there been a bigger opportunity for aerospace innovation,” Tim Dombrowski, managing general partner of Airbus Ventures, wrote in Friday’s announcement on Medium’s website.
The $150 million fund, Airbus Group Venture Fund I, will take advantage of opportunities to “accelerate innovation in near ground, air and space flight,” Dombrowski wrote.
He acknowledged that Local Motors “may seem like a surprising investment” for Airbus but argued that the deal was a “perfect fit.”
The Ehang 184 drone has been tested in China. (Credit: Ehang)
Look! Up in the air! It’s a drone, it’s a plane, it’s … Super-Quadcopter!
Droves of drones were unveiled this week at the International CES show in Las Vegas, but the one that made the biggest splash was arguably the Chinese-made Ehang 184, a remote-controlled quadcopter that’s so big it can accommodate a 220-pound passenger.
Guangzhou-based Ehang says the electric-powered, 440-pound craft can be charged up in two to four hours and fly for 23 minutes. It’s designed to fly at an altitude of about a quarter-mile at speeds of up to 62 mph, but if you push it, the vehicle can go as high as 11,000 feet. It even has air conditioning and a reading light.
Qualcomm has developed a Snapdragon Flight computing platform for drones. (Qualcomm photo)
China’s largest Internet service portal, Tencent, is teaming up with chipmaker Qualcomm and drone-maker Zerotech to field the Ying drone, a flying robot that’s optimized for online sharing.
“This drone allows you to fly around, capture video and then share it directly with social media sites,” Qualcomm CEO Steven Mollenkopf said today during a sneak peek at the International CES show in Las Vegas.
Ying is built around Qualcomm’s Snapdragon Flight control platform, which can capture and correct video in 1080p or 720p resolution, depending on the perspective. The video can be uploaded or streamed directly to Tencent’s social media platforms, Wexin (a.k.a. WeChat) and QQ, the three companies said in a news release.
Snapdragon Flight is an array of circuitry that’s designed specifically for recreational drones and robotic applications. Qualcomm says the package offers GPS and 4K video as well as robust capabilities for autonomous or smartphone-controlled flight.
The heart-shaped area that’s prominent in this New Horizons picture of Pluto is known as Tombaugh Regio. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)
New Horizons is the name of the Pluto mission that reached its climax in 2015, but the name also provides an apt two-word description for the year’s big news in aviation and space exploration.
You could argue that New Horizons’ revelations about the dwarf planet – including never-before-seen, up-close pictures of ice mountains (and perhaps volcanoes), nitrogen glaciers, weird plains and a bright heart – rate as the year’s biggest story in the cosmos.
Former Google executive Alan Eustace recounts his jump from the stratosphere at the University of Washington, with a photo of his descent in the background. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)
One year after setting the world altitude record for a jump from the stratosphere, former Google executive Alan Eustace says the sky isn’t the limit – and neither is his record.
“There’s no reason you can’t go higher,” Eustace told GeekWire today after a talk at the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen Center for Computer Science and Engineering. The event was part of the UW School of Computer Science and Engineering’s Distinguished Lecturer Series.
The record-setting ride on Oct. 24, 2014, began with Eustace in a custom-made pressure suit, dangling from the end of a high-altitude balloon as it rose up from Roswell, N.M. Over the course of two and a half hours, he went into the stratosphere, up to an altitude of 135,890 feet (25.7 miles, or 41.4 kilometers).
“You can really start to see the beautiful Earth below, see the darkness of space,” he recalled during today’s talk.
Boeing employees and VIPs surround the first 737 MAX jet to roll out in Renton. (Credit: Boeing)
Thousands of Boeing employees turned out today for the rollout of the first Boeing 737 MAX jet, a redesigned version of the long-lived model that’s way more fuel-efficient.
The freshly painted blue-and-white MAX No. 1 had its coming-out party at Boeing’s final assembly factory in Renton, Wash. – sparking a flurry of tweets from attendees:
Boeing commercial jets are lined up at the company’s Seattle Delivery Center. (Boeing photo)
Nearly six months after the Export-Import Bank was shut down due to congressional wrangling, the federal agency has been revived – which is good news for the Boeing Co.
The bank plays a key role in making loans and guaranteeing loans to foreign buyers of U.S. goods. Since 2007, it’s provided support for $135 billion in exports from Washington state, according to U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., one of the backers of the bank’s reauthorization.
Many of those exports were in the form of Boeing airplane sales, to such an extent that some have called the agency “the Bank of Boeing.” Supporters say the agency plays a crucial role in keeping Boeing and other exporters competitive in global markets, while critics say it provides foreigners with market-distorting subsidies funded by American taxpayers.
This year, GOP conservatives blocked reauthorization of the bank, and its authority to make new loans lapsed on June 30. In August, Boeing Chairman Jim McNerney hinted that the company might move key parts of its operation to other countries if the bank didn’t regain its lending authority.
To revive the bank, supporters resorted to a little-used maneuver known as a discharge petition, which allowed reauthorization to be voted on by the full House even though it was against the wishes of the House Financial Services Committee’s leadership. The measure was attached to a $305 billion highway and transit construction bill that won House and Senate approval on Thursday.
President Barack Obama signed the measure into law on Friday.
In a 2013 photo, Jeff Greason inspects XCOR Aerospace’s Lynx rocket engine while Doug Jones looks on. Greason is creating a new venture called Agile Aero, while Jones is staying on with XCOR. (Credit: XCOR Aerospace)
XCOR Aerospace pioneered the rapid development of rocket propulsion systems, and now three of XCOR’s founders are starting up a new venture called Agile Aero to do something similar for advanced aerospace vehicles.
Agile Aero has surfaced just a week after XCOR announced the departure of chief technologist Jeff Greason and chief engineer Dan DeLong. Greason and DeLong are teaming up with Aleta Jackson, another co-founder and aerospace veteran who left XCOR this month.
“It’s the Three Musketeers again,” Greason told GeekWire. XCOR’s fourth co-founder, Doug Jones, is staying on as the company’s chief test engineer.
Amazon shows off a prototype drone that’s just made a test delivery of a shoebox in someone’s backyard. (Credit: Amazon via YouTube)
The hybrid drone design that Amazon unveiled over the weekend may be only one of several under consideration for delivering packages in 30 minutes or less, but it’s a doozy: The beefed-up Prime Air flier pushes the envelope on technical as well as regulatory grounds.
On the technical side, the prototype shown in Amazon’s video uses an array of rotors (eight, according to The Guardian) to take off vertically, then switches on an additional rotor to buzz through the air horizontally at up to 60 mph. The Guardian says it may be the first vertical-horizontal hybrid air vehicle to weigh in at less than 55 pounds, which is the upper limit for commercial delivery drones.
An autonomous sense-and-avoid navigation system keeps the drone from running into other objects on the way to its destination, at an altitude of up to 400 feet. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology showed off a sense-and-avoid system last month, but that one was designed to handle obstacles at a mere 30 mph – half the speed that’s built into Amazon’s specs.
The drone is also apparently designed to home in on a landing pad, perhaps equipped with an RFID tag or transmitter. The idea is that customers would lay out the pad in their backyard or some other open space in preparation for package delivery. (Can you buy a pad like that on Amazon yet? What if it’s raining, or if you’re an apartment dweller?)
Northrop Grumman has been given an Air Force contract to build the Long Range Strike Bomber – a concept that was touted in a Super Bowl ad. (Northrop Grumman photo)
Boeing and Lockheed Martin say they’ve filed a formal protest of last month’s Pentagon decision to award a bomber contract worth as much as $80 billion to a competitor, Northrop Grumman.
The stealthy Long Range Strike Bomber is scheduled for deployment in the 2020s as a replacement for the Air Force’s decades-old B-1 and B-52 bombers. The Boeing-Lockheed team and Northrop Grumman both put in proposals, and both teams saw the contract as crucial for their long-term military business.
The Air Force made its selection using a mostly classified process, and announced the award to Northrop Grumman on Oct. 27. In today’s statement, Boeing and Lockheed Martin said the process was “fundamentally flawed.”
“The cost evaluation performed by the government did not properly reward the contractors’ proposals to break the upward-spiraling historical cost curves of defense acquisitions, or properly evaluate the relative or comparative risk of the competitors’ ability to perform, as required by the solicitation,” the companies said.
