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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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GeekWire

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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GeekWire

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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Pacific Northwest National Lab creates a new AI center

PNNL team monitoring electrical grid activity
Keeping the electrical grid humming is one focus of AI research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. (PNNL Photo / Andrea Starr)

The Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory is shining a brighter spotlight on artificial intelligence by creating the Center for AI @PNNL, but don’t expect the lab’s researchers to build a better chatbot.

Instead, the center is meant to advance AI applications that boost PNNL’s capabilities in its traditional focus areas, including scientific discovery, national security and energy resilience.

“The creation of the Center for AI @PNNL will leverage and amplify these capabilities for even greater impact in service of our nation,” PNNL Director Steven Ashby said today in a news release.

Today’s announcement coincides with the annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS, which is taking place this week in New Orleans. The center’s creation serves as further evidence that AI tools are rapidly transforming a wide range of scientific and technical fields.

“The time is right for PNNL to focus its AI-related efforts,” said Court Corley, PNNL’s chief scientist for AI and director of the new center. “The field is moving at light speed, and we need to move quickly to keep PNNL at the frontier.”

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IonQ and Amazon upgrade quantum cloud services

Illustration: IonQ Forte Enterprise servers
An artist’s conception shows a data center powered by IonQ’s Forte Enterprise servers. (IonQ Illustration)

IonQ has opened up its most advanced quantum computing platform for public availability through Amazon’s cloud-based Braket Direct Program, even as the Maryland-based company gears up to produce even more advanced hardware at a Seattle-area manufacturing facility.

IonQ Forte joins two earlier generations of the company’s processing hardware, Harmony and Aria, as options for Amazon Web Service’s Braket quantum computing service. Forte has been commercially available as a standalone system for months, but offering access via the cloud is expected to widen the platform’s use.

“Braket Direct provides all customers reaching the computational limits of classical computers with access to quantum technologies needed to build expertise, and expand their research and development horizon,” Richard Moulds, general manager of Amazon Braket, said in a news release. “IonQ Forte’s addition to Braket Direct furthers the collaboration between our two companies, and paves the way for exploring new quantum applications in areas like materials research, computer vision, machine learning, pharmaceuticals and more.”

Peter Chapman, the former Amazon executive who became IonQ’s CEO in 2019, said access to Forte “is imperative for users looking to optimize algorithms for trapped ions and help expand existing applications to new problem spaces.”

“We’re pleased to continue our work with AWS as we collectively work toward making quantum accessible to all,” Chapman said.

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This self-confessed nerd is pioneering electric aviation

MagniX’s chief technology officer, Riona Armesmith, at the company's HQ in Everett, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

When Riona Armesmith moved from Britain to the Seattle area two and a half years ago to become chief technology officer for magniX, a company that’s pioneering electric aviation, she had to take a leap of faith.

Armesmith was leaving one of the world’s best-known manufacturing companies, Rolls-Royce, where she was head of programs for aviation futures. She would be joining a privately held company that builds electric propulsion systems for aircraft that won’t go into commercial service until the mid-2020s. And she’d be bringing her family along for an adventure in a whole new world.

“To move halfway across the world, for me, it was easy,” she says. “For my family, it was harder.”

MagniX and its technical team are facing daunting challenges, ranging from working around the limitations of battery technology to running a gauntlet of regulatory requirements. But Armesmith is unfazed. It’s a technological frontier that’s tailor-made for uncommon thinkers.

“There are many of us that moved here for this job because of the technology, because of what magniX is doing, and because we’ve flown five different aircraft in three years,” she says. “The opportunity to see what you’re doing fly in such a short amount of time — that opportunity is so rare in this industry.”

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AI influencers are worried about AI’s influence

Emily Bender and Ted Chiang
Linguist Emily Bender and science-fiction writer Ted Chiang share the stage at Town Hall Seattle. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

What do you get when you put two of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people on artificial intelligence together in the same lecture hall? If the two influencers happen to be science-fiction writer Ted Chiang and Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, you get a lot of skepticism about the future of generative AI tools such as ChatGPT.

“I don’t use it, and I won’t use it, and I don’t want to read what other people do using it,” Bender said Nov. 10 at a Town Hall Seattle forum presented by Clarion West

Chiang, who writes essays about AI and works intelligent machines into some of his fictional tales, said it’s becoming too easy to think that AI agents are thinking.

“I feel confident that they’re not thinking,” he said. “They’re not understanding anything, but we need another way to make sense of what they’re doing.”

What’s the harm? One of Chiang’s foremost fears is that the thinking, breathing humans who wield AI will use it as a means to control other humans. In a recent Vanity Fair interview, he compared our increasingly AI-driven economy to “a giant treadmill that we can’t get off” — and during Friday’s forum, Chiang worried that the seeming humanness of AI assistants could play a role in keeping us on the treadmill.

“If people start thinking that Alexa, or something like that, deserves any kind of respect, that works to Amazon’s advantage,” he said. “That’s something that Amazon would try and amplify. Any corporation, they’re going to try and make you think that a product is a person, because you are going to interact with a person in a certain way, and they benefit from that. So, this is a vulnerability in human psychology which corporations are really trying to exploit.”

AI tools including ChatGPT and DALL-E typically produce text or imagery by breaking down huge databases of existing works, and putting the elements together into products that look as if they were created by humans. The artificial genuineness is the biggest reason why Bender stays as far away from generative AI as she can.

“The papier-mâché language that comes out of these systems isn’t representing the experience of any entity, any person. And so I don’t think it can be creative writing,” she said. “I do think there’s a risk that it is going to be harder to make a living as a writer, as corporations try to say, ‘Well, we can get the copy…’ or similarly in art, ‘We can get the illustrations done much cheaper by taking the output of the system that was built with stolen art, visual or linguistic, and just repurposing that.’”

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