Tag: Politics

Categories
GeekWire

Moon Express wins U.S. green light for moonshot

Image: Moon Express lander
An artist’s conception shows the Moon Express MX-1 lander in lunar orbit. (Credit: Moon Express)

BELLEVUE, Wash. – Moon Express says it has received preliminary clearance for the robotic lander that it plans to send to the moon next year, after a voluntary payload review involving the Federal Aviation Administration and other federal agencies.

The clearance doesn’t represent final regulatory approval for the mission, although some reports may be giving that impression. The FAA will still have to grant a launch license before Moon Express can blast off.

Nevertheless, Moon Express’ executives hailed the successful payload review as a significant step toward what could be the first commercial mission to another celestial body. Moon Express CEO Bob Richards called it a “landmark decision.”

“We are now free to set sail as explorers to Earth’s eighth continent, the moon, seeking new knowledge and resources to expand Earth’s economic sphere for the benefit of all humanity,” Richards said in a statement issued today.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Policymakers need to address automation and AI

Image: Robonaut 2
Robonaut 2 is at work aboard the International Space Station. (Credit: NASA)

Presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both promising to bring good-paying jobs back to America, but analysts say neither of them has addressed one of the biggest challenges looming ahead: the impact of automation and the rise of artificial intelligence.

Some argue that the challenge will soon become impossible to ignore.

“Job losses due to automation and robotics are often overlooked in discussions about the unexpected rise of outside political candidates like Trump and Bernie Sanders,” Moshe Vardi, an expert on artificial intelligence at Rice University, said before this month’s conventions.

Vardi pointed out that manufacturing employment has been falling for more than 30 years, and yet U.S. manufacturing output is near its all-time high.

“U.S. factories are not disappearing: They simply aren’t employing human workers,” Vardi said.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

‘I believe in science’: Hillary Clinton wows geeks

Hillary Clinton declared her belief in science. (Credit: DNC / YouTube / Imgflip)
Hillary Clinton declared her belief in science. (Credit: DNC / YouTube / Imgflip)

Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention tonight may not have been rated as highly as President Barack Obama’s address the night before, but there was at least one line that got the attention of the geekerati: “I believe in science.”

The applause line came in the context of climate change policy, one of the issues that distinguishes Clinton from her GOP foe, Donald Trump. He didn’t address the subject in his own acceptance speech, but he’s definitely in the climate skeptic camp.

“Obama’s talking about all of this with the global warming and … a lot of it’s a hoax,”he said last December. “It’s a hoax. I mean, it’s a money-making industry, OK? It’s a hoax, a lot of it.”

In contrast, Clinton embraced the mainstream view that greenhouse-gas emissions are having an effect on climate patterns, and those effects could get dramatically worse unless policymakers take action.

“I believe in science,” she said, chuckling as she let that sink in with the crowd. “I believe climate change is real, and that we can save our planet while creating millions of good-paying, clean-energy jobs.”

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

The promise and politics of the Internet of things

When U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene and a Republican colleague set up a congressional caucus focusing on the Internet of Things, also known as IoT, some of her colleagues were puzzled.

Suzan DelBene
U.S. Rep. Suzan DelBene

“We got many responses back to our office saying, ‘What’s the ‘Eye-Ott’ project?’” the Washington state Democrat recalled today during a Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce roundtable about “Eye-Ott” … that is, IoT.

Even now, a year after the IoT caucus was formed, a lot of policymakers aren’t up to speed about the implications of having everything from airplanes and refrigerators to the assembly lines where they’re made connected to the internet.

“Technology is moving quickly,” DelBene said. “Policy is not moving as quickly.”

You could say that about a lot of technological issues, of course, but the Internet of Things is a particularly tricky and fast-moving concept. The engineers at Kymeta – a venture that has its headquarters in Redmond, Wash., and has the backing of Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates – are finding more and more things that can be connected to the Internet of Things. Some experts estimate that as many as 38 billion devices around the world could be part of the IoT by 2020.

“IoT is a moving target,” Cate van Oppen, Kymeta’s business development manager, told GeekWire.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Britain’s EU exit vote throws techies into a tizzy

Image: London and Microsoft Lumia phone
The “Let’s Go” message on a Microsoft Lumia phone takes on an ironic meaning in the wake of Britain’s vote to exit the European Union. (Credit: MIcrosoft Lumia Conversations UK)

Just a couple of days ago, longtime Seattle tech entrepreneur Marcelo Calbucci wasexcited about moving his family to London. But now that Britain has voted to leave the European Union, he’s feeling a different emotion.

“I would use a ‘disappointed’ emoji,” Calbucci told GeekWire today.

He’s still going ahead with the move. His wife will be starting a job at Microsoft in London, and his kids (aged 7 and 10) are ready to go as well. But Calbucci has no idea what “Brexit” will do to the tech environment he was so looking forward to jumping into.

“People were moving to London to build these startups – now they might think twice,” he said.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Iranian reports hint at huge Boeing jet deal

Image: Boeing 787
A 787 jet takes shape at Boeing’s plant in Everett, Wash. (GeekWire photo by Alan Boyle)

Reports from Tehran suggest that Iran’s flag carrier airline has struck a deal to purchase jetliners from the Boeing Co., which would mark a milestone in U.S. commercial relations with the Islamic Republic.

“In coming days, details of the deal with this company will be announced,” the semi-official Mehr news agency quoted Abbas Akhoundi, Iran’s minister of roads and urban development, as saying today.

The Reuters news agency quoted unnamed sources as saying the deal calls for Iran Air to acquire more than 100 Boeing jets, from the company directly and from leasing companies. Iran Air operates under the umbrella of Akhoundi’s ministry.

Such an arrangement would match Iran Air’s provisional agreement to purchase 118 Airbus jets worth as much as $27 billion. Reuters said that the Airbus agreement, announced in January, still requires export licenses from the United States due to the use of significant U.S. technology.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Trump blasts Bezos and his newspaper (again)

Image: Jeff Bezos
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos at a U.S.-China Internet Industry Forum in Seattle in September 2015.

Billionaire presidential candidate Donald Trump took aim once again at Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos as he revoked the campaign credentials for the newspaper Bezos owns, The Washington Post.

Today the presumptive GOP nominee added the Post to a list of banned media outlets that also includes BuzzFeed, The Daily Beast, The Des Moines Register, The Huffington Post, the New Hampshire Union Leader, The Huffington Post, Politico, Univision and others. Reporters from banned outlets have been denied credentials to cover Trump’s campaign events.

The reason for today’s ban was the headline on a Post story reporting Trump’s criticism of President Barack Obama over his response to this weekend’s mass shooting at a nightclub in Orlando, Fla.

The original headline read “Donald Trump Suggests President Obama Was Involved With Orlando shooting.” That headline was changed to “Donald Trump Seems to Connect President Obama to Orlando Shooting,” but not before Trump lowered the boom on Facebook.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Moon or Mars: Which will next president pick?

Image: Moon Village
An artist’s conception shows a permanent lunar base that’s part of the European Space Agency’s “Moon Village” vision. (Credit: ESA)

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. – Over the past eight years, the focus of NASA’s space vision has shifted from the moon, to a near-Earth asteroid, to the journey to Mars. The European Space Agency’s director-general, meanwhile, has been talking up the prospect of building a Moon Village. And one of the latest buzzwords for commercial space ventures is “cislunar” – that is, space operations in the vicinity of the moon.

What’s a future president to do?

Space policy ranks among the least prominent issues on the campaign agenda: GOP presidential hopeful Donald Trump, for example, says he loves space exploration but thinks it’s more important to fix potholes on Earth. Nevertheless, leaders of the space industry say the next president will play a key role in determining the world’s future course on the final frontier.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

New director for Washington’s aerospace office

Image: 787 jet flies over Mount Rainier
A Boeing 787 jet flies over Mount Rainier. (Credit: Boeing)

Longtime engineering executive John Thornquist has been chosen to head up Washington state’s Office of Aerospace, just as the state’s $70 billion-plus industry sector is heading into a time of transition.

Washington Gov. Jay Inslee announced the selection today, and Thornquist takes over the director’s reins on Tuesday.

Thornquist was managing director, CEO and co-founder of Carbon Aerospace, an Everett-based consulting firm specializing in carbon composite structures. Before his time at Carbon, he was a co-founder of Global Aerosystems in Everett, which later became Kaman Engineering Services.

Under Thornquist’s leadership, Kaman earnedBoeing supplier of the year honors in 2013.

Get the full story on GeekWire.

Categories
GeekWire

Elon Musk turns the talk from Trump to Mars

Image: Elon Musk and Barack Obama
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk shows President Barack Obama around the company’s Cape Canaveral rocket processing site in 2010. (Credit: Bill Ingalls / NASA)

SpaceX’s billionaire founder, Elon Musk, has had to bat down all sorts of reports about political associations over the past couple of weeks – and the strategy that seems to work the best is to get people talking about sending humans to Mars. Maybe including the politicians.

The political angle cropped up in February when the Center for Responsive Politics listed SpaceX as one of the donors to GOP presidential front-runner Donald Trump. It turned out that the listing was an error, later corrected, but Musk found himself having to deny the Trump contributions via Twitter.

Get the full story on GeekWire.