Tag: Commercial Spaceflight

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Planet lands in Seattle to work on satellite data

Karthik Govindhasamy
Karthik Govindhasamy, Planet’s chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering, shows off a mural that depicts Dove satellites being deployed from the International Space Station. The mural graces the reception area of Planet’s Bellevue office. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – Planet has landed … in the Seattle area.

The upstart satellite imaging company formerly known as Planet Labs has moved into a 3,000-square-foot office in Bellevue’s Northup North Office Park, and plans to have 10 software engineers working there by the end of the year.

Two engineers were hired for the office as of this week, when GeekWire paid a visit. That’s not counting Karthik Govindhasamy, a former Microsoft and Nokia engineer who is now Planet’s chief technology officer and executive vice president of engineering.

Govindhasamy is in charge of the Bellevue office, and he’s happy to be part of the Seattle area’s growing space community.

“We wanted to be close to the ecosystem,” Govindhasamy said. “SpaceX is nearby. Microsoft is in the neighborhood.”

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Jeff Bezos previews his Florida rocket factory

Blue Origin site
The steel structure for Blue Origin’s factory rises from a Florida site. (Blue Origin Photo via Jeff Bezos)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos is showing off the “extraordinary progress” being made on the Florida factory where Blue Origin’s New Glenn orbital launch vehicle will be built.

“As you can see here, the first steel is now going up,” he wrote today in an email update, accompanied by a picture showing a lattice of girders rising from the construction site near NASA’s Kennedy Space Center.

The 750,000-square-foot facility is due to open by the end of 2017 and produce New Glenn rockets for Blue Origin’s orbital missions. Test flights are expected to begin by the end of the decade, lifting off from Launch Complex 36 under the terms of a lease from Space Florida.

Meanwhile, Bezos’ Blue Origin venture is also proceeding with its New Shepard suborbital space program. The first full-fledged New Shepard rocket ship was retired after making five successful test flights to the edge of outer space and back.

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Second SpaceShipTwo flies free for first time

SpaceShipTwo in flight
Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity glides through its first free-flying flight. (Virgin Galactic Photo)

Virgin Galactic’s second SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, dubbed VSS Unity, successfully glided through its first free-flying test run today. The flight comes more than two years after the first SpaceShipTwo broke up during a rocket-powered test.

The hybrid rocket engine wasn’t switched on for today’s trial in the skies above California’s Mojave Desert. Instead, VSS Unity was set loose by its WhiteKnightTwo carrier airplane at a height of tens of thousands of feet, and winged its way back to the Mojave Air and Space Port.

Test pilot Mark “Forger” Stucky and Virgin Galactic’s chief pilot, Dave Mackay, were at the controls in Unity’s cockpit. Mike Masucci and Todd Ericson piloted WhiteKnightTwo, with Dustin Mosher as flight engineer. Virgin Galactic reported that the crew was “safe and sound” after “a successful first glide test flight.”

Parabolic Arc’s Douglas Messier reported that Virgin Galactic founder Richard Branson was on hand to watch the flight.

“It’s a happy day to be here,” Branson said in a video captured by Messier before WhiteKnightTwo took off. “We’ve got an exciting year ahead, and this is just the start of it.”

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Japanese space tourism effort gets a boost

PD Aerospace space plane
PD AeroSpace has teamed up with H.I.S. and ANA Holdings. (PD AeroSpace Ltd. / Koike Terumasa Design and Aerospace)

PD Aerospace, a Japanese company that’s similar to Virgin Galactic in its commercial spaceflight aspirations, has picked up two high-profile investors: ANA Holdings and the H.I.S. travel agency.

In a joint statement issued on Dec. 1, the three Japanese companies said that they agreed in October to work together on space commercialization efforts, including space travel.

H.I.S. is investing about $264,000 (30 million yen) for a 10.3 percent share of the venture. ANA Holdings, the umbrella company for the ANA (All Nippon Airways) airline, is putting in about $180,000 (20.4 million yen) for a 7 percent share.

The combined amount of investment wouldn’t be enough to buy two tickets on Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo rocket plane, which is currently undergoing flight tests at California’s Mojave Air and Space Port.

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‘Shark tank’ keeps aerospace dreams afloat

MatterFab 3-D printer
Seattle-based MatterFab is working on a 3-D printer that looks like a walk-in freezer but can use laser microwelding to make metal components out of powder. (Credit: MatterFab)

Some aerospace ventures came to Starburst Accelerator’s shark tank in Seattle today to find investors. Others were looking for customers. But unlike the TV version of “Shark Tank,” none of them was sent away in defeat.

“There are no winners or losers,” Van Espahbodi, Starburst’s co-founder and chief operating officer, told GeekWire at the end of the all-day pitch session.

Instead, a dozen entrepreneurs got the chance to pitch their ideas at the Museum of Flight, in front of venture capitalists, aerospace executives and other industry types (plus a couple of journalists).

Today’s gathering marked the first Starburst event conducted in Seattle, which has been gaining more visibility as an aerospace industry hub – thanks to the likes of such stalwarts as the Boeing Co. as well as more recent entrants such as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. Both of those companies had representatives in the audience today.

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Starburst raises $200M for aerospace startups

SpaceX launch
Starburst Ventures aims to back startups that can follow in SpaceX’s footsteps. (SpaceX Photo)

On the eve of its first event in Seattle, Starburst Accelerator says it has set up a $200 million venture fund to invest in aviation and aerospace startups over the next three years.

Starburst Venture, formed in collaboration with Singapore-based Leonie Hill Capital, will focus on early and growth-stage companies, with the first investments due to be made in the first quarter of 2017, the fund’s founders said today in a news release.

The investment team will be mainly based in San Francisco, but will also leverage Starburst Accelerator’s existing operations in Los Angeles, Paris, Munich and Singapore.

Starburst Accelerator was founded in 2012 by Francois Chopard, a former Airbus engineer and aerospace strategy consultant. Since then, it has teamed up with more than 100 companies to provide a boost for business development.

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How Donald Trump could affect space ventures

Image: Donald Trump in Space
Bobbleheads.com used a high-altitude balloon to send a Donald Trump figurine into the stratosphere in May. Click on the image for more about the “Trump in Space” project. (Bobbleheads.com via YouTube)

President-elect Donald Trump’s advisers say they want to rely more on commercial ventures to pioneer the space frontier – but some of those ventures’ high-profile backers aren’t exactly in line with other parts of Trump’s policy agenda.

For example, SpaceX’s billionaire CEO, Elon Musk, sees climate change as the biggest challenge facing humanity on Earth and has said a tax on carbon emissions is as necessary as garbage collection fees.

In contrast, Trump has said concerns about climate change are a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese, and has vowed to “cancel” U.S. participation in the recently established Paris climate pact. (The Chinese say they’re trying to set Trump straight on that point.)

Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, who founded Blue Origin to send passengers and payloads into space, is also the owner of The Washington Post. The Post, Amazon and Bezos were all caught up in Trump’s ire during the campaign.

On the flip side of the issue, there’s at least one space billionaire who can hardly wait for Trump to get into office: Robert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace.

“Christmas arrived early this year!” Bigelow declared at the Space Commerce Conference in Houston on Thursday. “For the United States – and as I do believe will be eventually proven, for NASA – Christmas arrived on November the 8th.”

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Jeff Bezos geeks out over rocket drill machine

Image: EDM drill
Blue Origin’s EDM drilling machine works on a nozzle for the BE-4 rocket engine, currently under development at the company’s production facility in Kent, Wash. “Only 1,000 holes to go,” Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos writes. (Blue Origin Photo)

Building a rocket ship may sound romantic, but there are a lot of nitty-gritty details behind the work – and that’s what Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos is celebrating in his latest email about Blue Origin’s BE-4 rocket engine.

Blue Origin, the space venture that Bezos founded back in 2000, is building the engine for use on United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan rocket as well as Blue Origin’s own New Glenn rocket. The plan is to start testing the engine early next year, and start flying the rockets by 2019.

There’s a bit of competitive pressure involved: United Launch Alliance has Aerojet Rocketdyne’s AR-1 engine waiting in the wings, just in case Blue Origin and the BE-4 don’t hit their marks.

The BE-4 engine will be fueled by liquid natural gas, unlike the hydrogen-fueled BE-3 engine that Blue Origin is using on the suborbital New Shepard rocket ship that it’s testing in West Texas. It’s designed to produce 550,000 pounds of thrust, as opposed to 110,000 pounds of thrust for the BE-3.

That means new technologies have to be employed to build the BE-4 – and today, Bezos called attention to one of those technologies: the automated electrical discharge machining drill, or EDM.

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BlackSky satellite delivers its first pictures

Image: Chinese mountain
An image from Spaceflight Industries’ BlackSky Pathfinder-1 satellite shows farms and industrial sites around Beijing. Click on the image for a larger version. (Credit: Spaceflight Industries / BlackSky)

Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries is sharing some of the first pictures of Earth ever taken by its low-cost, high-resolution BlackSky Pathfinder-1 satellite – and they’re spectacular.

The roughly 100-pound (50-kilogram) Pathfinder-1 spacecraft was launched from India’s Satish Dhawan Space Center on Sept. 26 as a ride-share payload on a PSLV-C35 rocket. Spaceflight Industries says the satellite cost $10 million to build and launch, which is relatively cheap for orbital imaging capability.

The Pathfinder-1 images released today confirm that the BlackSky concept works. The pictures provide breathtaking views of farms and industrial sites near Beijing, the suburbs surrounding Tokyo, and mountain ranges in China and Afghanistan.

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In Seattle, space sisterhood is powerful

SpaceFest panel
SpaceX’s Aarti Matthews, Blue Origin’s Erika Wagner and Vulcan Aerospace’s Cassie Lee field questions at the Museum of Flight’s SpaceFest. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

The billionaires who run Blue Origin and SpaceX – Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk – may be locked in an outer-space rivalry, but the engineers who get the job done say they’re rooting for each other.

Erika Wagner, Blue Origin’s business development manager, says engineers at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash., cheer every time they see SpaceX launch and land a rocket. And Aarti Matthews, a mission manager at SpaceX in the Los Angeles area, says the feeling is mutual.

“We’re really excited for each other, because we’re changing the industry together,” Matthews said last weekend at the Museum of Flight’s annual SpaceFest gathering in Seattle.

One of those changes is the growing prominence of women in the commercial space industry. That was reflected in the title of this year’s SpaceFest: “Ladies Who Launch.”

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