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NASA backs dozens of projects on the space frontier

Illustration: Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 2 lander on lunar surface
An artist’s conception shows the Blue Moon Mark 2 lander on the lunar surface. (Blue Origin Illustration)

NASA has selected proposals from 37 companies, including several with Seattle-area connections, to further its plans to establish a long-term presence on the moon and enable human exploration of Mars.

The companies applied to partner with NASA under the terms of an Announcement of Collaboration Opportunity, or ACO. The selected proposals aim to develop technologies for space transportation, planetary surface operations and lunar surface infrastructure.

“We are empowering American industry to become active partners in NASA’s missions to the moon, Mars and beyond,” Greg Stover, director of the Advanced Research and Technology Division in NASA’s Research and Technology Mission Directorate, said today in a news release. “By tapping into commercial industry, NASA can rapidly develop key capabilities to support its most ambitious missions while fostering the nation’s robust space economy.”

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GeekWire

Founders on the tech frontier show off their gadgets

Carbon Robotics CEO Paul Mikesell talks about the LaserWeeder system with a satellite in the foreground. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)
Carbon Robotics CEO Paul Mikesell talks about the LaserWeeder system with a satellite in the foreground. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Four founders of companies on the tech frontier got together this week at a Seattle conference for a show-and-tell about the hardware at the heart of their businesses. And like any good show-and-tell, their talks touched on strategy as well as gadgetry.

For example, consider the laser-powered weed zapper pioneered by Seattle-based Carbon Robotics. The LaserWeeder system takes advantage of optical sensors and artificial intelligence to identify and target the weeds among the crops as the robotic rig is pulled through a field. Carbon Robotics’ founder and CEO, Paul Mikesell, held up one of the LaserWeeder’s scanners during Monday’s DeepTech session at the downtown office of K&L Gates.

“We have it set up so this camera can see exactly what the laser shooting this way is going to hit, and every time we turn on that laser, the same pixel area in the camera is going to explode and blow up,” he said. “This device reminds me of a lot of science and technology that we had to tackle, but also, there’s a lot of pain that went into this thing.”

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GeekWire

PowerLight uses a laser beam to keep military drone aloft

Powerlight laser system on left, laser-powered drone on the right
PowerLight's laser system (at left) beamed power to the military drone shown at right. (PowerLight Photos)

Kent, Wash.-based PowerLight Technologies says its laser power beaming system has been used successfully to keep a military-grade, fixed-wing drone in the air for hours during a series of tests for the Department of Defense.

The flight demonstrations concluded this month at the Poinsett Electronic Combat Range at Shaw Air Force Base, S.C. The tests were conducted in partnership with Kraus Hamdani Aerospace, sponsored by U.S. Central Command and the Pentagon’s Operational Energy – Innovation Directorate.

PowerLight’s system was installed on a KHA K1000ULE drone, which operates under a $270 million deployment contract from the AFCENT Battle Lab. The tests demonstrated end-to-end operation of a kilowatt-class wireless power system, from target acquisition and precision tracking through beam delivery and safety management.

During the tests, the beaming system acquired and tracked the drone at altitudes up to 5,000 feet, delivering power while steering and focusing the infrared laser beam in real time.

PowerLight, formerly known as LaserMotive, started out more than 15 years ago with power-beaming systems capable of keeping small quadcopters in the air continuously. The latest tests marked the first demonstration of a wireless system capable of sustained, autonomous power delivery at operationally relevant ranges and power levels for a large, fixed-wing military drone.

Currently, such drones must land to refuel or recharge once their onboard power source is depleted. Continuous wireless power could theoretically keep them airborne indefinitely.

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GeekWire

Quantum computing gets its day in the spotlight

Facade of IonQ's quantum computer factory in Bothell, Wash.
Washington state funding will support the expansion of IonQ's quantum computer factory in Bothell, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Leaders of the Pacific Northwest’s computing community gathered in downtown Seattle today to mark World Quantum Day — and Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson gave them one more reason to celebrate. Or rather, 500,000 reasons.

Ferguson took the occasion to announce that $500,000 would be directed from the Governor’s Economic Development Strategic Reserve Fund to support the expansion of IonQ’s quantum computer manufacturing facility in Bothell, Wash. The 100,000-square-foot factory opened in 2024 and is ramping up production.

Over the next 18 months, Maryland-based IonQ plans to add about 100 engineering positions in Bothell, paying an average salary of $177,000. Over the next five years, the expansion is projected to generate between 1,200 and 2,000 regional jobs.

The Strategic Reserve Fund makes use of unclaimed lottery prize money for investments that deliver significant job creation and capital investment in Washington state. The newly announced award will go to the Economic Alliance of Snohomish County for building upgrades, workforce expenses and other expansion costs.

The state’s funding is coming on top of more than $14 million in private investment. “Quantum is the future, and it’s being built here,” Ferguson said in a news release.

The news was greeted with applause at Northwest Quantum Day, an all-day conference presented by Northwest Quantum Nexus and co-hosted by K&L Gates.

April 14 is marked as World Quantum Day for a geeky reason: The date (4/14) commemorates one of the foundational numbers of quantum mechanics, Planck’s constant (4.14 X 10-15 eV ⋅ s).

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GeekWire

AWS offers cloud computing credits to federal agencies

Illustration: Overhead view of hands on keyboard with ships floating on a sea of Matrix-like numbers in foreground
Cloud computing and AI can come into play in advanced manufacturing and shipbuilding for the U.S. military. (NIWC Pacific Illustration)

Amazon Web Services has launched two credit programs worth up to $100 million to help federal agencies use cloud services and AI for applications ranging from battle management to quantum computing.

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Cosmic Space

Elon Musk lays out a new vision as SpaceX acquires xAI

Illustration: Starship deploying satellite with Earth in background
An artist's conception shows a Starship upper stage deploying a satellite in orbit. (SpaceX Illustration)

SpaceX CEO Elon Musk says he’s making space-based artificial intelligence the “immediate focus” of a newly expanded company that not only builds rockets and satellites, but also controls xAI’s generative-AI software and the X social-media platform.

That’s the upshot of today’s announcement that SpaceX has acquired xAI. The Information quoted unnamed sources as saying that xAI was valued at $250 billion, while SpaceX’s value was set at a trillion dollars. That would make SpaceX the most valuable private company in the world — but because Musk held a controlling interest in both companies, those valuations may be somewhat subjective.

Ross Gerber, an investment adviser who tracks Musk’s business dealings, quipped on X that the world’s richest person decided to go ahead with the acquisition after “a short negotiation with himself.”

Musk said the combination of SpaceX and xAI would facilitate the creation of a new constellation of orbital data centers. SpaceX is already seeking approval from the Federal Communications Commission to put up to a million satellites in low Earth orbit for such a constellation.

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GeekWire

Outbound Aerospace hits the end of its financial runway

Outbound's Jake Armenta wheels prototype aircraft down a runway
Outbound Aerospace's Jake Armenta wheels a prototype aircraft along a runway during a flight test earlier this year. (Outbound via YouTube)

Only a few months ago, Outbound Aerospace was on its way up — literally — after raising more than $1 million in pre-seed funding and flying a prototype meant to pave the way for a blended-wing passenger jet. But now the Seattle startup’s fortunes have fallen back to earth.

Outbound’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Jake Armenta, announced on LinkedIn last week that the company was shutting down. He joked that the news would be greeted with celebration by “competitors such as Boeing, who have been rightly terrified of us.”

During an interview, Armenta took a more serious tone as he discussed why Outbound fell short: “The simplest answer is that we ran out of money, and hadn’t really secured customer commitments that were strong enough to secure the next stage of investment,” he told me.

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Lumotive goes global with optical 3D sensor chips

Lumotive 3D sensor module with golf ball shown to give a sense of scale
Lumotive’s LM10 LCM module, shown here next to a golf ball for scale, serves as a 3D sensor. (Lumotive Photo)

Months after raising $59 million in venture capital to commercialize its miniaturized 3D sensors, Redmond, Wash.-based Lumotive is going global.

The company says it has opened offices in Oman and Taiwan to help bring its products to market — and has added two senior tech industry leaders to its management team.

“These milestones mark a pivotal moment for Lumotive as we move from innovation to large-scale commercialization,” Lumotive CEO Sam Heidari said today in a news release.

Founded in 2017, Lumotive is one of several startups that were spun off from Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures to take advantage of an innovation known as metamaterials. The technology makes it possible for signals to be “steered” electronically without moving parts.

Lumotive’s Light Control Metasurface platform, also known as LCM, can steer laser light to capture a 3D rendering of its surroundings, using a device that’s smaller than a credit card. Such laser-based location sensing is known generically as lidar (an acronym that stands for “light detection and ranging”)

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Amazon gears up for beta test of satellite internet service

Worker installing satellite antenna on building roof
A worker installs an Amazon Leo antenna at a Hunt Energy facility. (Amazon Photo)

Amazon Leo — the satellite internet service provider formerly known as Project Kuiper — says it has started shipping its top-of-the-line terminals to select customers for testing.

Today’s announcement serves as further evidence that Amazon is closing in on providing space-based, high-speed access to the internet to customers around the world after years of preparation. Amazon Leo is still far behind SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, but the Seattle-based tech giant has lined up a wide array of partners to help get its network off the ground.

The top tier of Amazon Leo’s global broadband service, known as Leo Ultra, will offer download speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second and upload speeds of up to 400 megabits per second, Amazon said today in a blog post. That’s the first time Amazon has shared details about uplink performance.

During an enterprise preview, some of Amazon’s business customers will begin testing the network using production-grade hardware and software. Amazon said the preview will give its Leo teams “an opportunity to collect more customer feedback and tailor solutions for specific industries ahead of a broader rollout.”

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Universe Today

Super-quiet X-59 supersonic jet makes first test flight

X-59 aircraft flying over Mojave Desert with mountains in background
The X-59 low-boom supersonic aircraft flies over California's Mojave Desert. (Credit: Lockheed Martin)

In partnership with NASA, Lockheed Martin Skunk Works has executed the first test flight of the X-59 quiet supersonic aircraft. This week’s first flight was subsonic, but eventually the plane will demonstrate technologies aimed at reducing sonic booms to gentle thumps.

“We are thrilled to achieve the first flight of the X-59,” OJ Sanchez, Skunk Works’ vice president and general manager, said in a news release. “This aircraft is a testament to the innovation and expertise of our joint team, and we are proud to be at the forefront of quiet supersonic technology development.”

Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy called the X-59 “a symbol of American ingenuity.”

“The American spirit knows no bounds. It’s part of our DNA – the desire to go farther, faster and even quieter than anyone has ever gone before,” he said. “This work sustains America’s place as the leader in aviation and has the potential to change the way the public flies.”

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