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Highest skydiver looks beyond his record

Image: Alan Eustace
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.

Eustace, a longtime airplane pilot whoretired from his post as Google’s senior vice president for knowledge in March, took on the self-financed “StratEx” skydiving mission to follow through on his passion for adventure and spaceflight. (He declined to tell how much the adventure cost him, other than to say “it was more than it should have cost.”)

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.

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One small step for Moon Express lunar launch

Image: Moon Express in space
An artist’s conception shows Moon Express’ lander on the way to the lunar surface. (Credit: Moon Express)

Moon Express, the lunar exploration venture co-founded by Seattle entrepreneur Naveen Jain, has gotten the “all systems go” signal for its bid to put a robotic lander to the moon and win the Google Lunar XPRIZE.

The thumbs-up comes in the form of XPRIZE’s certification of Moon Express’ launch contract with Los Angeles-based Rocket Lab USA. If all goes according to schedule, Rocket Lab’s Electron launch vehicle will blast off from a pad in New Zealand or the U.S. in 2017, sending Moon Express’ MX-1E lander to the lunar surface.

Next year, Rocket Lab is due to begin Electron test launches from a site on New Zealand’s Mahia Peninsula. The company is also working with Alaska Aerospace Corp., which owns and operates the Pacific Spaceport Complex Alaska on Kodiak Island. In October, Rocket Lab won a $6.95 million NASA contract to launch a payload to low Earth orbit in the 2016-2017 time frame.

The Google Lunar XPRIZE flight would have to go much farther: The rules call for a privately funded lander to touch down on the moon, transport itself at least 500 meters (546 yards) and send video back to Earth. The first team to do all that within the rules wins $20 million. Another $10 million has been set aside for other prizes.

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Atlas 5 rocket sends cargo ship to space station

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A United Launch Alliance Atlas 5 rocket rises from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station in Florida on Sunday, sending an uncrewed Orbital ATK Cygnus commercial cargo capsule to the International Space Station. Two Microsoft HoloLens headsets were aboard. (Credit: NASA TV)

After waiting out Florida’s weather for three days, United Launch Alliance’s Atlas 5 rocket lofted supplies to the International Space Station today for the first time ever.

The Atlas rose from its launch pad at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station at 4:44 p.m. ET (1:44 p.m. PT), sending Orbital ATK’s uncrewed Cygnus crew capsule into orbit. The space station’s commander, NASA astronaut Scott Kelly, watched the launch from orbit.

Among the record-setting 7,700 pounds’ worth of supplies, experiments and hardware on board are two of Microsoft’s HoloLens augmented-reality headsets. Once they arrive, the station’s astronauts will try them out as wearable aids for in-space operations.

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NASA probe delivers Pluto’s closest close-up

Image: Pluto heart
A heart-shaped patch of nitrogen-rich ice (outlined in red) lies next to a mountain range on Pluto, as seen in a picture from NASA’s New Horizons probe. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI with heartification by Vicknesh Selvamani / @Vicknesh96)

If you heart Pluto, you’ll love the sharpest, closest close-up of the dwarf planet, just sent back by NASA’s New Horizons probe.

The images, captured from a distance of 10,000 miles during the July 14 flyby, include a heart-shaped block of nitrogen-rich ice right on the edge of the big heart-shaped region known informally as Tombaugh Regio.

You can also see the craggy blocks of water ice that form the al-Idrisi mountains, bull’s-eye impact craters on Sputnik Planum, and ripples and layers in Pluto’s icy crust. The pictures have a maximum resolution of 250 feet per pixel, which is less than the length of a football field.

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British astronaut gets set to run space marathon

Image: Tim Peake
British astronaut Tim Peake, shown here at the European Astronaut Center in Cologne, Germany, says he’ll run a marathon distance on the International Space Station’s T2 treadmill while thousands of others run the London Marathon on April 24. (Credit: ESA)

British astronaut Tim Peake says he’ll follow in the footsteps of NASA’s Sunita Williams by running a marathon in orbit on the International Space Station.

Peake is due to ride a Russian Soyuz craft to the station for a six-month stint on Dec. 15, which should give him plenty of zero-G training time for the London Marathon on April 24. While more than 30,000 runners make their way through the course’s 26 miles and 385 yards on Earth, Peake will run the same distance on the station’s treadmill, held down by a harness to keep him on track.

He’s running the race to raise awareness for the Prince’s Trust, a youth charity co-founded by Britain’s Prince Charles.

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Watch Blue Origin’s rocket scientists get happy

“Touchdown” means something different to rocket scientists and to football fans, but the cheering, hugs and high fives are the same – as revealed today in a Blue Origin video.

The video shows how the Nov. 23 landing of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spacecraft played out, as seen from four perspectives. Two views showed how the autonomous landing went down at the company’s test range in West Texas. The other two views showed the reaction of Blue Origin employees who gathered at the company’s headquarters in Kent, Wash.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Blue Origin as well as the better-known Amazon online commerce venture, touted the video in the third tweet he’s ever posted.

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Virgin Galactic will use jet as rocket mothership

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An artist’s conception shows a 747 jet carrying a LauncherOne rocket. (Credit: Virgin Galactic)

Virgin Galactic showed off its latest mothership today: a Boeing 747-400 jet that it acquired from its corporate cousins at Virgin Atlantic to serve as the platform for its LauncherOne rocket.

LauncherOne is designed to be launched from a high-flying carrier airplane and send small-scale satellites into orbit. It will use a liquid-fueled engine called Newton, which is still under development. The launch system is expected to be in operation by 2018, and it’s already been tapped by OneWeb to help put a global Internet constellation into orbit.

It was previously thought that LauncherOne would use Virgin Galactic’s WhiteKnightTwo carrier plane. That’s the mothership being used for SpaceShipTwo, Virgin Galactic’s rocket-powered passenger space plane. But Virgin Galactic said the 747 was more suited for LauncherOne’s upgraded payload capacity and flight rate.

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LISA Pathfinder blazes trail to test relativity

Image: LISA Pathfinder liftoff
The LISA Pathfinder probe lifts off from French Guiana. (ESA photo)

The LISA Pathfinder probe is heading for a vantage point a million miles from Earth to help look for gravitational waves and add a missing piece to the evidence for general relativity.

The European Space Agency said an Italian-built Vega rocket sent the spacecraft into low Earth orbit from ESA’s spaceport on the South American coast, at Kourou in French Guiana, at 04:04 GMT today (8:04 p.m. PT Wednesday).

Over the next two weeks, LISA Pathfinder will go through a series of maneuvers to set a course for L1, a gravitational balance point between Earth and the sun. The spacecraft is due to reach L1 in mid-February and begin its scientific mission in March.

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Season’s readings: 12 gift books for geeks

Image: Story Time From Space
NASA astronaut Michael Hopkins reads a book titled “Max Goes to the Space Station” in 2014 during a space station outreach activity called Story Time From Space. (Credit: NASA / STFS)

In this age of e-readers, there are still occasions when it’s nice to have a book printed on actual paper – like holiday giving, for instance. But which book works best as a gift for a science geek?

In honor of the 12 days of Christmas, here are a dozen recently published science books that have been well-received and are well-suited for gift wrapping. And if you still want to save a tree, some of them work just fine as e-books as well.

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XCOR co-founders launch Agile Aero startup

Image: XCOR text
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.

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