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Orbite begins the countdown to space training programs

Orbite clients on zero-G airplane flight
Participants in an astronaut orientation session float during a zero-G airplane flight in France in 2021. (Orbite Photo)

After getting its start in Seattle and testing its business model in France and Florida, a space travel venture called Orbite is ready to start signing up customers for private-sector astronaut training programs.

And although it’ll be a while before those programs begin in earnest, Orbite CEO Jason Andrews says the first 500 people to make a refundable deposit will be in for some astronaut-worthy experiences between now and then.

“What we are announcing today is just the beginning,” he said.

Orbite plans to invite early-stage customers in its Founders Club to attend a series of space-adjacent events, starting with a rocket-launch watch party in Florida next spring and continuing with gatherings that could include an underwater adventure in the Florida Keys and a trip to Antarctica.

Andrews said Founders Club members could spend part of their $5,000 pre-booking deposit on one of those tours, or put all the money toward a training program at Orbite’s Astronaut Training and Spaceflight Gateway Campus in Florida.

That training facility, mapped out by French industrial designer Phillippe Starck, is due to be built at a site that’s yet to be disclosed in the area around Florida’s Space Coast and Orlando. Protracted business negotiations led to delays in the development schedule, but the facility is currently set to open in 2026, Andrews said.

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Co-CEOs take the helm at KinectAir digital travel service

Parked plane with KinectAir livery
KinectAir makes use of private aircraft including this Pilatus PC-12 plane. (KinectAir Photo via Business Wire)

Retired Air Force Col. Katie Buss and tech entrepreneur Ben Howard have taken the helm as co-CEOs of Vancouver, Wash.-based KinectAir, which provides a digital platform for booking on-demand private air travel.

Buss previously served as KinectAir’s chief operating officer. Howard, who co-founded the privately held company in 2019, was chief technology officer before his promotion. Fellow co-founder Jonathan Evans is leaving the CEO post but continues to serve as KinectAir’s board chair.

The new management arrangement aims to facilitate scaled-up operations at KinectAir. As co-CEO for aviation, Buss will focus on the aviation sector and industry relationships as well as safety and regulatory issues. As co-CEO for technology, Howard will advance the company’s AI-powered app and operating system to connect vetted flight operators and passengers nationwide.

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OceanGate’s sub is coming home after Titanic trips

Titanic bow
OceanGate captured an updated view of the Titanic shipwreck’s iconic bow. (OceanGate Photo)

After making a series of successful dives to the wreck of the Titanic in the North Atlantic this summer, OceanGate’s flagship submersible is returning to its homeport in Everett, Wash., where it’ll be spruced up for another round of Titanic trips.

OceanGate Expeditions officially announced that its 2022 Titanic Survey Expedition will run from next May through June, with fresh opportunities for mission specialists to take part in the adventure. (Because OceanGate’s customers contribute to operations at sea, the company doesn’t call them “tourists,” even though they’re paying OceanGate a fee of $250,000.)

The five-person Titan submersible’s dives to the Titanic, more than two miles below the sea surface, are aimed at documenting the condition of the wreck on an annual basis. This summer’s dives confirmed previous findings that the world’s most famous shipwreck is rapidly deteriorating — 109 years after the luxury liner struck an iceberg and sank, causing more than 1,500 deaths.

“Mission specialists helped our crew gather and review terabytes of the highest-resolution still images and video of Titanic and the debris field ever collected,” OceanGate Expeditions’ president, Stockton Rush, said today in a news release.

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Orbite offers a taste of space — and earthly luxury

Brienna Rommes in zero-G
Orbite’s director of astronaut training, Brienna Rommes, enjoys a zero-G airplane flight. (Orbite Photo)

Wanna take a ride to space? There’s a smorgasbord of spaceflight shaping up for paying customers, ranging from the suborbital tours planned by Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin to the orbital trips offered by SpaceX. What will those rides be like, and how will they differ from each other?

Starting in August, a Seattle-based startup called Orbite (pronounced “Or-beet,” French-style) will offer three-day orientation sessions to let customers sample the astronaut experience and find out for themselves.

“We’ll give them a ‘try before you buy’ experience, and educate them on the different offerings that are out there,” Orbite co-founder and CEO Jason Andrews, a veteran of Seattle’s Spaceflight Industries, told GeekWire.

Andrews and Orbite’s other co-founder, French-born tech entrepreneur Nicolas Gaume, have set the schedule for astronaut orientation courses that’ll include virtual-reality simulations, a zero-G flight and a high-G flight — all designed to provide a taste of space without tying the participant down to a particular program.

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Orbite plans to build a space camp for grown-ups

Gaume, Stabile and Andrews
Orbite’s management team includes co-founder Nicolas Gaume, chief financial officer Sophie Stabile and co-founder Jason Andrews. (Orbite Photo)

If the 2010s were the decade when small satellites revolutionized the space industry, the 2020s will be when commercial space odysseys finally go mainstream.

At least that’s the gamble that Jason Andrews, the co-founder and former CEO of Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries, is taking with French-born tech entrepreneur Nicolas Gaume.

Today Andrews and Gaume are taking the wraps off Orbite, a Seattle startup that will focus on getting would-be spacefliers ready for those future odysseys. “You’re going to go to a space camp for the next generation,” Gaume said.

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Passenger air traffic plunges at Sea-Tac

Restaurants at Sea-Tac International Airport are continuing to serve passengers on a grab-to-go or order-to-go basis. (Port of Seattle Photo)

The number of airline passengers taking off from Seattle-Tacoma International Airport has fallen by two-thirds, due to the coronavirus outbreak and its effect on air travel, officials at the Port of Seattle said today.

Sea-Tac typically sees 50,000 people going through its checkpoints daily at this time of year, but that number has fallen to around 16,000 to 17,000, Lance Lyttle, the airport’s managing director, told reporters at a news briefing.

“That does not include the connecting passengers that would be coming through,” he said. “Normally we would probably have over 140,000, 150,000 passengers in the airport as a whole.”

While passenger traffic has dropped sharply, domestic cargo traffic is at higher than usual levels due to increased online ordering, Lyttle said.

A Port of Seattle blog posting lists 10 shops and restaurants that have temporarily closed, primarily due to restrictions on food service. About two dozen other restaurants remain open on a grab-and-go or order-to-go basis.

Lyttle said Sea-Tac will be joining with other airports around the country in seeking a $10 billion aid package from the federal government to help them cope with the outbreak’s financial effects. That would be in addition to an aid package sought by the nation’s airlines, which is said to amount to $50 billion.

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Trump mulls travel bans for U.S. virus hotspots

President Donald Trump discusses the coronavirus outbreak at a White House press briefing. (Global News via YouTube)

In response to the coronavirus outbreak, restrictions on European travel will be extended to Britain and Ireland on March 16 – and President Donald Trump said today that limits on travel from domestic hotspots such as the Seattle area were under consideration as well.

During a White House briefing on the administration’s response to the outbreak, Trump was asked whether he was thinking about domestic travel limitations.

“Specifically from certain areas, yes, we are,” the president replied. “We’re working with the states, and we are considering other restrictions.”

Seattle and the surrounding area in King County have been among the hottest hotspots in the early phases of the U.S. epidemic. As of March 13, King County accounted for about a quarter of the nation’s confirmed coronavirus cases, and nearly two-thirds of deaths.

Tara Lee, communications director for Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, said the topic of domestic travel restrictions hasn’t come up.

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How much do travel bans help in a pandemic?

Drive-through testing
UW Medicine nurses get set to check fellow employees at a coronavirus testing station in a parking garage at University of Washington Medical Center Northwest. (UW Medicine Photo / Katie Chen)

A fresh analysis of the numbers behind the coronavirus outbreak suggests that it’s reached the point where more intensive testing and social distancing will help far more than bans on travel.

Travel restrictions have come to the fore over the past day or so: During an address on March 11, President Donald Trump announced that he was banning most travel by non-U.S. residents coming from 26 European countries, including Germany and France but not including Britain and Ireland.

Today, Trump said he’d also consider banning domestic travel to places like Washington state and California “if an area gets too hot.”

Such strategies led Trevor Bedford, an epidemiologist at Seattle’s Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center, to run the numbers for likely infections from abroad as well as from community transmission of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus.

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OceanGate puts off this year’s Titanic dives

OceanGate Titan sub
OceanGate’s Titan submersible is designed to withstand Titanic pressures. (OceanGate Photo)

Everett, Wash.-based OceanGate has had to postpone this summer’s deep-sea dives to the Titanic shipwreck, just as they were about to start, due to complications relating to the expedition’s intended mothership.

The complications have to do with the status of the Norwegian-flagged MV Havila Harmony under Canadian maritime law, OceanGate CEO Stockton Rush told GeekWire today. The ship’s operators at Reach Subsea feared that the ship might be impounded if the expedition went forward as planned, Rush said.

Rush said that the issue cropped up on June 7, and that the resulting complications couldn’t be resolved in time to do this year’s Titanic Survey Expedition. The first departure from St. John’s, Newfoundland, had been scheduled for June 28.

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Paine Field celebrates first passenger flights

Water cannon arch
Fire trucks shoot out sprays of water to form a celebratory arch for the first Alaska Airlines jet to take off on a scheduled passenger flight from Paine Field in Everett, Wash. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

EVERETT, Wash. — Today marks a “first” for the new passenger airline terminal at Everett’s Paine Field, thanks to Alaska Airlines’ kickoff of daily service. But it’s a “second” for Thomas Paine, the grandnephew of the airport’s namesake.

Paine and another grandnephew, Nicholas Moe, were here in 1955 when the airport dedicated a bust of their granduncle, airmail pilot Topliff Olin Paine, who grew up in Everett. The bust has since disappeared, but to mark today’s terminal opening, dignitaries dedicated a bronze statue of the elder Paine, standing right on the curb where passengers walk in to catch their flights.

Thomas Paine and Moe pulled the veil off the statue, rekindling 64-year-old memories in the process. “Things have changed a lot since then,” Paine said.

When it’s fully up and running, the 30,000-square-foot terminal will offer 24 daily nonstop flights to eight destinations in the western U.S., providing a quicker alternative to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport for northern Puget Sound communities.

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