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Cosmic Tech

GoAERO Prize offers $2M for emergency vehicles that fly

Engineer working on rotorcraft
A scene from the GoAERO Prize introductory video shows an engineer working on a rotorcraft. (GoAERO via YouTube)

A newly announced program called GoAERO is offering more than $2 million in prizes for the development of single-person flying vehicles that are customized for emergency responders — four years after a similar competition ended without awarding its top prize.

The GoAERO Prize program is led by Gwen Lighter, the same woman who was in charge of the earlier GoFly Prize. And as was the case for the GoFly Prize, Boeing is one of the sponsors. Other supporters include NASA, RTX ( the umbrella company for Raytheon, Pratt & Whitney and Collins Aerospace), Iridium and Xwing.

Back in 2017, the GoFly Prize offered $2 million to support the development of personal aerial vehicles — and three years later, the organizers held a fly-off in California to determine the winners.

None of the teams won the $1 million top prize, but a $100,000 prize was awarded to Japan’s teTra Aviation for building a rotor-equipped vehicle that looked like a cross between a motorcycle and an ultralight airplane. At last report, teTra was still developing a commercial version of its vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle, or VTOL.

The GoAERO Prize tightens the focus of the competition to concentrate on VTOL aircraft that are optimized for emergency-response applications — for example, to handle search and rescue, medical emergencies, wildfires, natural disasters or humanitarian crises.

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GeekWire

Zeno Power strikes a deal to recycle radioactive material

Aerial view of Oak Ridge National Laboratory
An aerial view shows the main campus of Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. (ORNL Photo)

Zeno Power says it has gained access to radioactive material destined for its first full-scale radioisotope power systems under the terms of a partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy.

The transfer of the material from Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee benefits Zeno as well as the Department of Energy: Zeno — which has offices in Seattle and Washington, D.C. — gets the strontium-90 fuel that it needs for its next-generation RPS. At the same time, the DOE gets an opportunity to put a decades-old RPS to good use instead of putting it through a costly disposal process.

“This transfer highlights another unique approach our team has taken to accelerate environmental cleanup at Oak Ridge,” Jay Mullis, manager of DOE’s Oak Ridge Office of Environmental Management, said today in a news release. “This is a win-win scenario that’s removing a significant source of radioactivity at a savings to taxpayers, while also supporting nuclear innovation.”

Radioisotope power systems, also known as radioisotope thermoelectric generators or RTGs, have been used for decades to provide off-grid power for space missions and other applications. Such devices convert the heat generated by radioactive decay into electricity. Plutonium-238 is often used for space applications, but Zeno is working on a system that uses strontium-90 as an alternative heat source.

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GeekWire

Zeno and Westinghouse team up on nuclear batteries

Illustration: Cutaway view of Zeno Power's radioisotope power system
An artist’s conception shows a cutaway view of Zeno’s radioisotope power system. (Zeno Power Illustration)

Zeno Power says it has selected Westinghouse Electric Co. to process the radioisotopes for its heat sources — creating a partnership that adds a key puzzle piece to its plan for a new type of radioisotope power system, or RPS.

“Working with Westinghouse, we will build the nuclear hardware for our RPSs to provide reliable power in the most critical domains of the 21st century — from the depths of the oceans to the surface of the moon,” Zeno co-founder and CEO Tyler Bernstein said today in a news release.

Radioisotope power systems that convert heat into electricity for off-grid power have been used for decades — for example, for space missions ranging from the Apollo moonshots to the Curiosity rover mission to Mars and the New Horizons mission to Pluto. Those systems have typically used plutonium-238, but Zeno is working on systems that make use of other radioisotopes such as strontium-90.

Strontium-90, which is created as a byproduct in nuclear fission reactors, can be an abundant fuel for power-generating systems. Existing strontium-based power systems tend to be bulky, however. Zeno’s design could generate more power with less bulk, opening the way for a wider range of applications.

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GeekWire

First Mode downsizes and revises its clean tech plans

First Mode hybrid diesel-electric truck during test drive
First Mode’s hybrid diesel-electric truck takes on its first tests in Centralia, Wash. (First Mode via LinkedIn)

First Mode says it’s cutting back on its workforce as it adjusts to the market demand for heavy trucks that rely less on fossil fuels.

The workforce in the U.S., which currently amounts to about 240 people, is being immediately reduced by about 20%, First Mode CEO Julian Soles said in an email sent to employees today. Most of those employees are in Washington state — for example, at First Mode’s Seattle HQ and at its proving grounds in Centralia, Wash.

About 125 additional employees work in non-U.S. offices. Soles said operations in Australia, Britain and South Africa “may also possibly experience redundancies,” while operations in Chile are “not currently impacted.”

Despite the cutbacks, First Mode is continuing with plans to retrofit mining trucks to reduce their carbon footprint and address the climate challenge. “This is the year that we deliver commercial products to our customer sites. It is also when we finalise our transformation from an engineering services firm to a global decarbonisation product company,” Soles wrote, using British spellings.

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GeekWire

PowerLight looks into beaming power on the moon

Illustration: Power-beaming system on the moon
An artist’s conception shows a beamed-power system operating on the moon. (Illustration via PowerLight)

Kent, Wash.-based PowerLight Technologies says it’s joined a team headed by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture to design a power beaming system that might someday charge up robots on the moon.

The effort is being funded by the Pentagon’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency as part of its LunA-10 program, which supports concepts for future lunar infrastructure projects. DARPA selected 14 industry teams, including Blue Origin’s team, to receive up to $1 million each for studies that are due this spring.

Blue Origin and PowerLight are focusing on a system that could generate power for lunar operations — perhaps using solar cells manufactured on the moon — and then transmit that power to remote locations via laser light.

The DARPA LunA-10 study takes its name from the goal of advancing a lunar architecture for infrastructure over a 10-year time frame. Hardware development isn’t the point of the study. Instead, DARPA is interested in developing ideas that could give rise to future commercial applications on the moon — and perhaps tech spin-offs here on Earth.

PowerLight, which was known as LaserMotive when it was founded in 2007, is developing laser-based power transmission systems for a variety of closer-to-home applications, including over-the-air power beaming systems as well as power over fiber-optic cable for telecom equipment, drones and hard-to-reach installations on land and underwater.

The company made an early splash in 2009 when it won a $900,000 prize in NASA’s Power Beaming Challenge, so its involvement in a space-related project marks something of a return to its roots.

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Cosmic Tech

Super-quiet supersonic jet rolls out for a preview

X-59 on flight apron at Lockheed Martin Skunk Works
NASA's X-59 supersonic research aircraft sits outside Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works facility in California. (Lockheed Martin Photo)

Today’s debut of NASA’s X-59 low-boom supersonic jet brought not even a whisper of a sonic boom — because it stayed on the ground at Lockheed Martin’s Skunk Works facility in Palmdale, Calif.

But later this year, the long, pointy plane is due to test out technologies aimed at reducing the noise that’s associated with supersonic aircraft — and removing obstacles to routine super-high-speed air travel.

At today’s rollout ceremony, NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy said the X-59 is designed to produce a “gentle thump” rather than the thunderous boom created when an aircraft breaks the sound barrier.

“This breakthrough really redefines the feasibility of commercial supersonic travel over land,” she said. “It brings us closer to a future that we can all understand — cutting flight time from New York to Los Angeles in half.”

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Moon lander mission will carry DNA to the final frontier

Astrobotic moon lander prepared for launch
Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander is prepared for placement within its launch vehicle’s fairing. (Astrobotic Photo)

A mission to send a commercial lander to the moon, set for launch in a couple of days, will bring the fruition of projects that have been in the works for years — including projects that aim to put DNA into cold storage on the final frontier.

Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic’s robotic Peregrine lander is scheduled to begin a circuitous 40-day trip to the moon with liftoff from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 2:18 a.m. ET Jan. 8 (11:18 p.m. PT Jan. 7). NASA TV will stream coverage of the countdown.

It’ll mark the first launch for United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket, and the first use of the BE-4 engines built by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture for Vulcan’s first-stage booster — coming nearly 10 years after the partnership between ULA and Blue Origin was announced.

A successful touchdown next month would go into the history books as the first soft landing of a commercially built spacecraft on the lunar surface — in fact, the first soft lunar landing of any U.S.-built spacecraft since Apollo 17 in 1972. Among the payloads placed aboard the lander is the Iris mini-rover, which would become the first U.S.-built vehicle to wheel around the moon since the Apollo era.

Several NASA-supported payloads will take measurements at the landing site, around a region known as the Gruithuisen Domes, during a science mission that’s projected to last a couple of weeks. Other payloads include micro-robots from Mexico, an art project called MoonArk, mementos and bits of cryptocurrency.

And then there’s the DNA. Samples of DNA — either contributed by donors or synthesized to contain coded information — will be riding on the Peregrine lander as well as the Vulcan’s Centaur V upper stage.

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SpaceX launches satellites that cellphones could use

SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket ignition
SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket lights up its engines to send Starlink satellites to space from a California launch pad. (SpaceX via Twitter / X)

The first satellites capable of providing direct-to-cellular service via SpaceX’s Starlink network and T-Mobile’s cellular network have been sent into orbit aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Six of the cell-capable satellites were among a batch of 21 Starlink satellites launched from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California at 7:44 p.m. PT Jan. 2. The satellites were deployed successfully, and the rocket’s first-stage booster made a routine landing on a drone ship in the Pacific Ocean.

SpaceX plans to launch hundreds of the upgraded satellites in the months ahead, with the aim of beginning satellite-enabled texting later this year. 4G LTE satellite connectivity for voice and data via unmodified mobile devices would follow in 2025, pending regulatory approval.

“Today’s launch is a pivotal moment for this groundbreaking alliance with SpaceX and our global partners around the world, as we work to make dead zones a thing of the past,” Mike Katz, president of marketing, strategy and products for Bellevue, Wash.-based T-Mobile, said today in a news release.

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Federally funded lab enlists AI to safeguard security

Portrait of Court Corley, chief scientist for AI at PNNL
Court Corley leads the Center for AI @PNNL. (Pacific Northwest National Laboratory Photo / Andrea Starr)

Bringing artificial intelligence to bear on issues relating to nuclear weapons might sound like the stuff of a scary sci-fi movie — but at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, it’s just one of the items on the to-do list.

One of PNNL’s research priorities is to identify and combat complex threats to national security, and AI can help meet that priority by detecting attempts to acquire nuclear weapons or associated technology.

Nuclear proliferation detection is one of the potential applications that could get an assist from the Center for AI @PNNL, a newly announced effort to coordinate research that makes use of AI tools — including the generative AI tools that have captured the attention of the tech world over the past year or two.

“For decades we’ve been doing artificial intelligence,” center director Court Corley, PNNL’s chief scientist for AI, told me in a recent interview. “What we’re seeing now, though, is an exceptional phase shift in where AI is being used and how it’s being used.”

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Fiction Science Club

How rowing has changed since ‘The Boys in the Boat’

Scene from "The Boys in the Boat" showing rowers in racing shell
"The Boys in the Boats" recounts the saga of the University of Washington's rowing crew in 1936. (Image Copyright © Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer)

Thanks to tectonic shifts in technology and training, Olympic-level rowing has come a long way since the University of Washington’s eight-man crew pulled off the ultimate underdog win at the 1936 Olympics in Nazi Germany — the achievement celebrated in the brand-new movie adaptation of “The Boys in the Boat.”

On paper, the performance of the rowers at the center of the movie — and at the center of the bestselling book on which the movie is based — pales in comparison with current Olympic and world records. Today, the world’s fastest time for a 2,000-meter course is just under 5 minutes and 20 seconds, which is more than a minute faster than the time that won the gold medal for the Boys in the Boat in Berlin.

One of the big reasons for that speedup can be found at Everett, Wash.-based Pocock Racing Shells. The company’s founder, George Pocock, built the Husky Clipper — the boat in which the Boys won their Olympic gold. In the movie, Pocock (as portrayed by Peter Guinness) plays a role similar to Yoda in the Star Wars saga, performing wizardry with wood and dispensing wisdom at just the right moment.

Today, wood just doesn’t cut it for championship-level racing shells. “The boats have no wood,” says John Tytus, the current president of Pocock Racing Shells. “These boats are all built out of advanced composites, mainly carbon fiber — which, for its weight, is the strongest material available.”

Lightweight materials are just part of the equation. Hydrodynamics and computer modeling have helped Tytus and other boatbuilders tweak their designs to an extent that would impress even George Pocock.

Science has also transformed how today’s rowing men and women are being trained to outperform the Boys in the Boat. “As stark as the difference between wood and carbon fiber might be, the training volume that the crews do now, compared to what the Boys did in ’36 — that’s actually a bigger quantum leap,” Tytus says.

In the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast, Tytus explains how innovations have taken athletic performance far beyond what moviegoers see when they watch “The Boys in the Boat.”

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