The Department of Defense has put Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin in the running for a share of up to $5.6 billion in national security space launch contracts, marking a first for Jeff Bezos’ space venture.

The decision means Blue Origin’s orbital-class New Glenn rocket is now eligible to be selected for the Pentagon’s most sensitive launches, joining rockets offered by SpaceX and United Launch Alliance.

The ordering period for what’s known as the Phase 3 Lane 1 procurement process runs through mid-2029, with an optional five-year extension. “This award is the result of a competitive acquisition, and seven offers were received,” the Department of Defense said in today’s contract award announcement.

“We’re honored by the opportunity to compete for these National Security Space Launch Phase 3 Lane 1 missions with New Glenn,” a Blue Origin spokesperson told GeekWire in an email.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket, named after the late NASA astronaut John Glenn, is still under development at the company’s facilities in Florida. New Glenn’s first launch is currently set for no earlier than September. It’s expected to send a pair of robotic probes to study Mars’ magnetosphere for NASA’s EscaPADE mission.

The amounts going to each of the three launch providers in the Phase 3 Lane 1 program will be determined by the task orders that go out for specific launches over the next five years. In a news release, the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command said it was releasing requests for proposals relating to two task orders so far — one that would cover seven launches for the Space Development Agency, and another for the National Reconnaissance Office.

“Any launch provider on the base IDIQ [indefinite-delivery, indefinite-quantity] contract can bid for launch service task orders provided they have completed a successful orbital launch prior to the proposal due date,” the Space Systems Command said.

The Phase 3 program also sets aside funding for each of the providers to conduct an initial capabilities assessment and explain how they’ll approach the Pentagon’s requirements for mission assurance. As a new provider, Blue Origin will receive $5 million, while SpaceX and ULA — which have already been conducting national security launches — will receive $1.5 million each.

Blue Origin has long sought to take part in the multibillion-dollar national security launch program. It lost out in the competition to participate in Phase 2 in 2020.

As part of the Pentagon’s effort to widen competition for national security launches, Phase 3 has been structured to offer contract opportunities in two “lanes.”

“Today marks the beginning of this innovative, dual-lane approach to launch service acquisition, whereby Lane 1 serves our commercial-like missions that can accept more risk and Lane 2 provides our traditional, full mission assurance for the most stressing heavy-lift launches of our most risk-averse missions,” said Frank Calvelli, assistant secretary of the Air Force for space acquisition and integration.

At least 30 Lane 1 missions are expected to be completed over the five-year ordering period, the Space Systems Command said. More providers may be added to the Lane 1 list as their launch capabilities mature. Details about the Lane 2 process — including eligible providers — are to be announced this fall.

Will intelligent AI agents take on the job of capsule communicator in future missions to the moon, Mars and other space destinations?

It could happen, says James Burk, the executive director of the Mars Society.

“One of our advisers did a really deep dive on how the Apollo astronauts interacted with each other and with the CapCom back on Earth, and he came to the insight that the Apollo 17 astronauts were using CapCom almost like an AI bot — because the CapCom knew everything,” Burk said during a panel discussion focusing on the intersection of artificial intelligence and space ventures.

“You can imagine having an AI edge device which could be like a rover following the crew around, walking around the moon or Mars,” he said. “It’s watching them and taking stock of how everyone’s doing.”

Tuesday’s panel was a crossover session presented at Madrona Venture Labs by the Washington Technology Industry Association for Seattle AI Week, and by Space Northwest for Seattle Space Week. “When you think about the kinds of megatrends of our time, two of the big ones are space and AI,” said Mike Doyle, Space Northwest’s president and co-founder.

Putting AI into space adventures isn’t exactly a new idea: The best-known sci-fi example is HAL, the AI who goes psycho in “2001: A Space Odyssey.” There’s also the no-nonsense computer voice in the Star Trek saga, or Marvin the Paranoid Android in “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.”

But the real world isn’t science fiction. Yet.

Dealing with data

“I don’t think we’re going to see a ‘HAL’ business,” said Keith Rosema, a partner at Madrona Venture Labs who has previously worked at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and the late Paul Allen’s Vulcan Inc.

Instead, AI is helping humans make sense of the flood of imagery and other data coming down from Earth orbit. Kelsey Doerksen, a Ph.D. student at the University of Oxford who’s affiliated with JPL, said one of her jobs is to “make space scientists’ life easier” — specifically when it comes to doing atmospheric science.

“When we’re trying to run physics-based models, with hundreds if not thousands of different parameters and various tweaks of how you could initialize your parameters and these physics models, it takes hours, days, weeks to run these types of models to get results out,” she said. “Whereas with the AI pipeline that we’re building at JPL, we can do things in a matter of hours.”

Hanna Steplewska, the president of Seattle-based Cognitive Space, said AI-driven software tools are making headway in the commercial space industry. For example, a search engine called Danti is optimized to sift through Earth observation data.

Multiple companies — including BlackSky, which has deep roots in Seattle — employ AI to help government and commercial customers make sense out of a variety of geospatial data, ranging from satellite views to social media. Microsoft and the Allen Institute for AI have also gotten into geospatial data analysis.

Training for space

Steplewska’s company is focused on applying AI tools to the thorny problem of tracking thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit.

“Cognitive Space has a very clear 10-year goal,” she said. “We want to orchestrate a million intelligent machines across a multiplanetary system. So, everything that we’re learning about how to fly constellations effectively applies to constellations of things that are on Earth, on the moon’s surface, in orbit around the moon, in orbit around Mars, on Mars’ surface and beyond.”

What about generative AI, which has quickly revolutionized so many tech sectors? When it comes to space operations, one of the big technical hurdles has to do with the fact that large language models really don’t know that much about the final frontier. Burk recalled a test case that the Mars Society ran, in which ChatGPT was asked to design a valve for a zero-pressure, high-altitude balloon.

“The answer it came back with was factual … but it was totally wrong,” he said.

Doerksen said satellite constellations could provide “the perfect use case” for training better AI models and automating space operations. “If you’ve had the same satellite launched in 2015, and a similar generation in 2022, you can use that historical data to train a model to still be used in the future,” she said.

The AI revolution isn’t just affecting space operations on Earth: The Seattle area’s biggest players in AI and cloud services — Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure — are working with partners to expand edge computing to the edge of space. This year, a Seattle-area startup called Lumen Orbit came out of stealth with a plan to send hundreds of data-center satellites into orbit. The idea is to run data through AI models in space, and then downlink only the most valuable bits.

“You know, there was a Super Bowl commercial for Salesforce recently that said something like, ‘If AI is the Wild West, isn’t big data the new gold?'” Burk said. “I think our approach to get ready for AI at the Mars Society, with our scientific research, is to really be thoughtful about how we’re collecting data, to have standards where they don’t exist.”

Power tool? Space pal? Or HAL?

In the years to come, maybe AI will just blend into the woodwork — or more accurately, the silicon and steel — of space infrastructure.

“I will hold back from saying [that] in 10 years we’ll have an AI overlord,” Rosema said. “In all seriousness, I actually think this might be more boring. Right now, AI is very much in our face. And if I look at other historical technical trends — internet, mobile phones — originally, those things were all very much in our face. I hope that AI does the same thing: It just melts into the background and becomes another power tool for us.”

But maybe space-based AI will become more than a power tool. During NASA’s uncrewed Artemis 1 mission, which circled the moon in 2022, Amazon teamed up with Lockheed Martin and Cisco to put an Alexa-type voice assistant inside the Orion capsule. During future missions to deep space, a smarter version of the assistant could keep a spacecraft’s crew up to date on what’s happening around them — and, in the words of an Amazon executive, provide “some form of companionship.”

Hmm … Burk’s AI CapCom might not be such a flight of fancy after all. Let’s just hope it doesn’t end up turning into HAL.

Other highlights from Seattle Space Week:

• Recruiting talent for space projects can be a challenge. “As a VC-backed startup competing with Google for data scientists, talent is really hard,” Steplewska said. But Burk said “it’s been really easy for me to recruit talent, because there’s a lot of tech people who are interested in space.” AI projects are among the top priorities for the Mars Technology Institute that the Mars Society is setting up, potentially in the Seattle area.
• During a Monday session in Redmond, Wash., a panel of entrepreneurs weighed in on other challenges related to sustaining a startup in the aerospace industry. Bill Bruner, co-founder and CEO of New Frontier Aerospace, said he was counting on Congress to pass a bipartisan bill providing additional tax relief for research and development. “This is really an existential issue for startup companies,” he said.
• Seattle Space Week continues tonight with a Space Happy Hour at the Doubletree Southcenter. The invitees include participants in this week’s State of the Space Industrial Base workshop at Seattle’s Museum of Flight. Check the event’s registration page for additional information.
• Space Happy Hour is organizing a night at the ballpark for Thursday’s game between the Seattle Mariners and the Chicago White Sox at T-Mobile Park. Check out the “Spaceball” webpage for ticket information.

The dream of having people live and work in space didn’t start with billionaire Jeff Bezos, or even with rocket pioneer Wernher von Braun. Instead, you’d have to look back at least as far as 1869 — a full century before humans walked on the moon.

That’s just one of the fun facts you’ll learn from the Museum of Flight’s new exhibition, “Home Beyond Earth,” which opens today.

Geoff Nunn, the museum’s adjunct curator for space history, said this exhibit is meant to provide fun as well as education in the subjects of science, technology, engineering and math, or STEM.

“One of our goals was to go beyond the STEM of it, and really look at the underlying cultural connection and human fascination with living and working in space,” Nunn said. “Ultimately, we want everyone who comes through this exhibit, whether or not they’re interested in science and engineering, to think about how the space community is changing.”

The 1869 version of the space station dream serves as an example. Back then, Edward Everett Hale wrote “The Brick Moon,” a serialized novella about an artificial satellite that was built from bricks. The Museum of Flight’s team adapted an illustration from the story to create a 3D-printed model of the masonry moon, complete with tiny figures and palm trees sticking up from the top of the globe.

Other displays trace the evolution of the space station concept through the 1950s, when Walt Disney turned von Braun’s vision of a rotating space station into a TV show … the 1960s, when “2001: A Space Odyssey” picked up on the idea … the 1970s, when the Soviets and the Americans put up their first space stations … the 1980s and ’90s, when Russia’s Mir space station helped bridge the Cold War divide … leading all the way up to the present-day era of the International Space Station.

The centerpiece of the exhibition is a 3D-printed model of the ISS — but not just any model. This one is hooked up to a stream of telemetry from the real-life space station. Computer-controlled mechanisms turn the model’s solar arrays and other components ever so slowly to mimic what’s happening in orbit.

“That is a Boeing creation,” Nunn said. “There’s a team at Boeing in Houston, and I ran into them at ISSRDC when it was here in Seattle and got to talking to them. I thought that the mimic idea was really, really cool.”

Engineering students from the University of Washington’s WOOF 3D club created the museum’s replica space station and hooked it up for the exhibition. Peder Nelson, the museum’s digital engagement manager, said there’s one component on the real ISS that isn’t on the ISS Mimic model. “We’re going to let the experts find that,” he said. “That’s the one piece that would get knocked out of the way by the solar arrays, the way the 3D print turned out.”

3D-printed plastic modules are spread across the table next to the ISS Mimic display, to give kids (and even retired astronauts) an opportunity to put together their own model space station.

Touchscreen monitors are scattered throughout the exhibition space in the museum’s Red Barn wing. The first one is programmed to let you pick your favorite space station, real or fictional. Other screens ask you to choose the kind of environment you’d like to live in and pick out the job you’d like to do.

A digital-token system keeps track of your space lifestyle choices. At the last interactive station, you can see which choices were the most popular among the exhibition’s virtual space station residents. (When I checked the stats, no one had signed up to become a journalist.)

Ariel Ekblaw, co-founder and CEO of the Aurelia Institute, was tickled to see how the exhibition turned out.

“It’s incredibly meaningful for us, because our mission at Aurelia is to democratize access to space, and show more people around the world that there is a life in space worth living for them,” said Ekblaw, who provided some of the flight hardware that’s on display.

The exhibition’s open-access perspective on living in space resonated with a trio of spacefliers who were given a sneak peek at “Home Beyond Earth.” Chris Sembroski — who rode a SpaceX Crew Dragon into orbit in 2021 and now works as an avionics testing engineer at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture in Kent, Wash. — said the exhibition is designed for museumgoers who are “curious, but not space-curious for the most part.”

“It’s all about inspiring people to think about themselves in space,” he said. “Space is supposed to be open for all, and that’s what all these new space companies are working on creating.”

3D-printed materials are much in evidence in the exhibit space. One of the artifacts on display is a replica of the Refabricator, a device built by Bothell, Wash.-based Tethers Unlimited that tested techniques for recycling 3D-printer plastic on the International Space Station.

Retired NASA astronaut Dottie Metcalf-Lindenburger, who flew to the ISS on the shuttle Discovery in 2010 and now focuses on STEM advocacy and education, said the emphasis on 3D printing was fitting for an exhibit about homes beyond Earth. In the future, space station crews probably won’t need to have so much of their equipment shipped up from Earth. “You could make your own tools, and then recycle them and make something else,” she said.

“And then there’s the other piece, too. I was working with fifth-graders last week, and one kid was like, ‘I’m really into 3D printing, but I didn’t know there would be jobs [in space] for me in the future. And I was like, ‘Yes!’… It was really a cute moment,” Metcalf-Lindenburger said.

Soyeon Yi became the first South Korean citizen in space when she flew to the ISS for an 11-day stay in 2008. Now she’s an educator and business executive who’s based in the Seattle area, but she still yearns to return to orbit.

“I always want to go back if I have a chance, because whatever you’ve done before, you always have a small little thing you want to do,” she explained. “Sometimes I doubt myself: Did I really go there? Because the girl who had an interview is the younger me. It’s not myself anymore … It’s already 15 years.”

Yi probably won’t have 15 more years to return to the ISS. If NASA follows through on its long-range plan, the space station will be deorbited by 2031. But NASA’s plan also calls for commercial space stations to take the place of the ISS. The final gallery in the “Home Beyond Earth” exhibition shows off the concepts for future orbital outposts that are being developed by commercial ventures including Axiom Space and Orbital Reef.

Because Yi’s résumé combines spaceflight and business development, I had to ask whether she’s been contacted by any of those ventures. “Not yet,” she said. “But if I can have a chance, I would love to work with that.”

“Home Beyond Earth” is a temporary exhibit housed in the Museum of Flight’s William E. Boeing Red Barn. The exhibit is free with museum membership, and included with general admission. Check out the Museum of Flight’s website for today’s schedule of opening-day events.

Here’s a bonus selection of pictures from the exhibition:

Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, who snapped the iconic “Earthrise” photo of our planet as seen from lunar orbit, died today in a plane crash in waters off the San Juan Islands.

The 90-year-old spaceflier’s son, Greg Anders, confirmed his father’s death in an interview with The Associated Press and said the family was “devastated.”

“He was a great pilot, and we will miss him terribly,” he told AP.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson paid tribute to Anders in a posting to the X social-media platform. “In 1968, during Apollo 8, Bill Anders offered to humanity among the deepest of gifts an astronaut can give,” Nelson wrote. “He traveled to the threshold of the moon and helped all of us see something else: ourselves. He embodied the lessons and the purpose of exploration. We will miss him.”

Anders is best-known around the globe as the lunar module pilot who wielded the camera during Apollo 8’s mission. But decades after that round-the-moon trip, he remained active on the Pacific Northwest aviation scene as the founder of the Heritage Flight Museum in Burlington, Wash. He and his family moved to Orcas Island in the San Juans in 1993 — and later took up residence in Anacortes, Wash.

The San Juan County Sheriff’s Office said a report came in at around 11:40 a.m. PT today that an older-model airplane plunged into the water off the coast of Jones Island as it flew from north to south. Seattle-area resident Phillip Person captured video of the crash.

San Juan County Sheriff Eric Peter said a search was conducted in cooperation with the U.S. Coast Guard, the Washington Department of Fish & Wildlife and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. The Coast Guard reported that a Fish & Wildlife dive team recovered Anders’ body after more than four hours of searching.

Based on an incident report from the Federal Aviation Administration, Anders was the pilot and sole occupant of the Beechcraft T-34 Mentor aircraft. The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board will investigate the incident.

Anders, the son of a U.S. naval officer, was born in Hong Kong in 1933, spent much of his childhood in San Diego and earned his wings as an Air Force pilot in 1956. He was selected to join NASA’s astronaut corps in 1963. Although he was assigned to the backup crew for Gemini 11, Apollo 8 was his first and his last spaceflight.

For years, there was a bit of controversy over who actually took the famous picture of Earth rising above the moon’s horizon as the Apollo 8 command module emerged from the lunar far side. Historians now agree that it was Anders.

The picture became an icon for environmental awareness. It helped give rise to a phenomenon known as the “Overview Effect” — a deep feeling of connectedness and planetary protectiveness sparked by seeing our blue planet against the blackness of space.

“We came all this way to explore the moon, and the most important thing is that we discovered the Earth,” Anders said after the mission.

Anders took a backup role for Apollo 11 in 1969, which marked humanity’s first moon landing, and served in administrative roles at NASA for several years afterward. He left NASA to join the Atomic Energy Commission, and in 1975 he became the first chairman of the reorganized Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Anders also served as an ambassador to Norway, and later took on several executive roles in the nuclear industry and the aerospace industry.

After retiring to the Pacific Northwest, Anders and his wife, Valerie, established the Anders Foundation to support educational and environmental concerns. The Heritage Flight Museum continues, with Anders’ children in charge.

Anders’ legacy endures beyond Earth as well: To mark the 50th anniversary of Apollo 8 in 2018, the International Astronomical Union gave a new name to one of the craters seen in the photo he took: “Anders’ Earthrise.”

Previously: How engineers and astronauts made ‘Earthrise’ possible

Boeing’s Starliner capsule and its two-person NASA crew arrived at the International Space Station today after mission managers coped with some post-launch glitches involving the spacecraft’s propulsion system.

“Today’s docking, I think, was challenging,” Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, told reporters after Starliner’s arrival. “We had a few things we had to work through as a team.”

One of the glitches had to do with the thrusters that are used to maneuver the gumdrop-shaped capsule in orbit. Five of the 28 thrusters initially malfunctioned — which forced NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams to put their final approach to the station on hold for more than an hour.

Four of the balky thrusters were successfully reactivated, clearing the way for the docking procedure to resume.

Other glitches cropped up in Starliner’s helium pressurization system: Even before Wednesday’s milestone launch — which set the first crewed Starliner flight in motion — engineers at NASA and Boeing knew there was a helium leak in the propulsion system and decided to live with it. But after launch, three more leaks were detected.

The mission team determined that there would still be enough reserves to carry on safely. “Just at the top level, we should have absolutely plenty of margin,” Stich said.

Wilmore and Williams have both been to the station twice before, but this was the first time anyone ever arrived on a Starliner capsule.

“Nice to be attached to the big city in the sky,” Wilmore said when docking was complete. “We’re looking forward to staying here for a couple of weeks, and getting all the things done on Starliner that we need to get done — and also on station.”

After all the leak checks, Starliner’s spacefliers floated through the hatch to meet up with the space station’s crew and exchange a round of enthusiastic hugs.

“We are very happy,” Russian cosmonaut Oleg Kononenko, the station’s current commander, told the new arrivals.

“We are thrilled as well,” replied Wilmore, the Starliner test mission’s commander. “We’re ready to go to work for the international partners here. Whatever it is you’ve got for us to do, we’re ready.”

During their orbital stay, Wilmore and Williams will help out with the delivery of about 800 pounds of cargo, including a replacement pump for the station’s urine-recycling system. They’ll also continue checkouts of Starliner’s systems. The earliest scheduled date for their return to Earth is June 14. (Update: NASA is extending Starliner’s stay at the space station to June 25 at the earliest, to provide more time for troubleshooting the thruster malfunctions and the helium leaks.)

After the mission’s end, NASA and Boeing will assess issues of concern — no doubt including the propulsion system glitches — and determine what else needs to be done to certify Starliner for regular crewed trips to the space station.

Boeing has already encountered years of delays and roughly $1.5 billion in cost overruns due to technical setbacks in the Starliner program. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon was certified to carry astronauts back in 2020 and has become NASA’s mainstay for crew transportation, but NASA says it’s important to have more than one commercial provider.

Two NASA astronauts were sent into space today to begin the first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft, making a shakedown cruise to the International Space Station and back after years of costly setbacks and two scrubbed countdowns.

United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 10:52 a.m. ET (7:52 a.m. PT), sending Starliner and its crew — NASA’s Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams — to the International Space Station.

“Let’s get going,” Wilmore told Mission Control just before launch. “Let’s put some fire in this rocket.”

The Atlas V rose smoothly into a mostly sunny sky, and within minutes, the gumdrop-shaped capsule separated from the rocket’s Centaur upper stage to continue its rise to orbit.

“Two bold NASA astronauts are well on their way on this historic first test flight of a brand-new spacecraft,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a post-launch statement. “Boeing’s Starliner marks a new chapter of American exploration. Human spaceflight is a daring task – but that’s why it’s worth doing. It’s an exciting time for NASA, our commercial partners and the future of exploration.”

Boeing’s effort to get Starliner ready to carry astronauts has suffered through a string of delays and roughly $1.5 billion in cost overruns (which Boeing has had to cover under the terms of its decade-old $4.2 billion fixed-price contract with NASA).

Two earlier attempts over the past month to launch this Crew Flight Test, or CFT, were due to problems with the Atlas V launch system rather than with Starliner. The first attempt was called off on May 6, two hours before liftoff, due to concerns about a valve on the Atlas V’s Centaur upper stage. The second try was scrubbed on June 1, with less than four minutes left in the countdown, when an alarm was triggered due to a faulty power supply in one of the launch control computers.

United Launch Alliance’s team replaced the hardware and verified that the system was “good to go,” in the words of the company’s CEO, Tory Bruno. ULA, Boeing and NASA then gave the go-ahead for today’s countdown. “As you might imagine, there’s lots of pressure to just go,” Bruno said in a posting to the X social-media platform. “But that’s not what we’re here for.”

Starliner had previously been through two uncrewed flight tests — an initial test that fell short of full success in 2019, and a do-over that reached the space station and met its objectives in 2022. This is the first time Starliner has carried actual astronauts rather than test dummies. This was also the first time an Atlas V launched a spacecraft with a crew.

CFT’s main objective is to have the crew verify that all of Starliner’s systems work as expected. They’ll run through tests during the 25-hour cruise to the International Space Station, and during what’s envisioned as an eight-day stay aboard the station.

“They’re going to test this thing from izzard to gizzard,” Nelson said at a briefing.

Wilmore and Williams will also deliver about 800 pounds of mementos, supplies and equipment, including a replacement pump for the station’s urine-recycling system.

At the end of their orbital stay, Wilmore and Williams will climb back into their reusable Starliner capsule — which has been christened Calypso, in honor of the ship used by the late ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau. Then they’ll descend to a parachute-aided, airbag-cushioned touchdown in the western U.S., with the precise landing site to be determined by the timing of their departure.

When CFT is finished, NASA and its partners will evaluate Starliner’s performance and make adjustments in the design or procedures as necessary. In the months ahead, NASA is aiming to have Starliner certified so that it can take its place alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon as a commercial “space taxi” for ferrying astronauts and supplies to and from orbit on a regular basis.

“I’m really looking forward to seeing two U.S. vehicles at the International Space Station,” Ken Bowersox, NASA’s associate administrator for space operations, said at today’s post-launch briefing. “I know Butch and Suni will probably get a kick out of that, if they get a chance to look out the windows and see a Dragon there, see a Starliner there. It’s something that I think all of us should be proud of.”

For the second time in a month, the first crewed launch of Boeing’s Starliner space capsule to the International Space Station was called off while the crew members were in their seats, waiting for liftoff.

The hold was automatically triggered by the launch-pad computer system that manages the final minutes of the countdown for Starliner’s launch vehicle, an Atlas V rocket provided by United Launch Alliance.

The ground launch sequencer forced an end to today’s launch attempt at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida with just three minutes and 50 seconds remaining in the countdown. Mission managers started investigating what triggered the alarm even as the launch pad team began the process of helping NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams out of the capsule.

United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno said the automated launch sequencer triggered an alarm because a circuit card on one of three redundant computer racks came up about six seconds more slowly than the other two. That particular card controls activities that free up the rocket for liftoff.

“For that system, we do require all three systems to be running. … Two came up normally. The third one came up, but it was slow to come up,” Bruno said at a news briefing. “That tripped a red line that created an automatic hold.”

The NASA-ULA-Boeing team said it would pass up a launch opportunity on Sunday to give engineers more time to assess the situation. The computer problem could be due to faulty hardware, which would be relatively simple to swap out, or it could be a more complex issue involving network connections between the computers. Update: Engineers identified and replaced a faulty ground power supply. Details at the end of this report.

Mission managers had to deal with other issues during today’s countdown: A data glitch caused problems for the valves that are used to top off the propellant tanks on the Atlas V rocket’s Centaur upper stage. That glitch was resolved by switching over to a backup system. About 15 minutes before the scheduled launch time, the air-circulating fans in the astronauts’ spacesuits malfunctioned. Resetting the fans fixed the problem.

The next opportunity for liftoff will come on Wednesday.

Starliner is due to transport Wilmore and Williams on a shakedown cruise to the International Space Station — a trip that’s also meant to deliver supplies and a replacement pump for the station’s urine-recycling system. The gumdrop-shaped capsule has been through two uncrewed test flights, but this mission will mark the first time Starliner carries astronauts to orbit.

Today’s scrub marked the latest setback for a development and testing effort that has already been through years of delays — and more than $1 billion in cost overruns that Boeing has had to cover.

Starliner’s first uncrewed flight test fell short of full success in 2019, forcing a second uncrewed test that met its objectives in 2022.

A fresh set of problems cropped up during the first attempt to launch the crewed flight test on May 6. Mission managers called off that countdown two hours before launch, due to a balky oxygen relief valve on the rocket’s Centaur upper stage. In the course of resolving that issue, engineers detected a small helium leak that was traced to a flange on one of the Starliner service module’s thrusters.

NASA and Boeing spent days assessing the leak’s potential impact, and the team decided the safest course of action was to live with the leak and work around it.

Engineers also learned of a potential design vulnerability in Starliner’s propulsion system — an issue that could hamper the capsule’s ability to execute a deorbit burn if two of the four thruster units known as “doghouses” were to fail at the same time.

The mission team developed a work-around for the crewed flight test. After that mission is complete, NASA and Boeing will take a closer look at the propulsion system design, and at the leaky helium pressurization system.

Yet another concern came to light at the end of a crewed suborbital space mission that was conducted by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture on May 19. When the New Shepard crew capsule descended toward touchdown, one of its three parachutes failed to open completely. Starliner’s parachute system uses a similar design, so NASA and Boeing worked with Blue Origin to make sure the problem wouldn’t crop up during the orbital test mission.

Steve Stich, program manager for NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said Blue Origin traced the parachute problem to a reefing line that’s designed to keep the parachute from opening prematurely. There’s a mechanism that’s supposed to cut the line at the proper moment, but Stich said “the cutters, for some reason, did not cut that line.”

“We use a very similar cutter to what Blue Origin uses, so it was important for us to look at that data,” Stich said. “We went back and looked at all of our test data.” Stich said the Starliner system’s cutters had been successfully tested 160 times, which reassured the team that the parachutes were good to go.

NASA made a last-minute switch in the payloads for Starliner’s flight test: The pump for the space station’s urine-recycling system failed unexpectedly, forcing the crew to store their urine in bags and tanks. NASA decided to provide some relief, so to speak, by sending up a 150-pound replacement tank in Boeing’s capsule.

To keep Starliner’s mass distribution in balance, two suitcases containing clothing and personal hygiene items for Wilmore and Williams were removed from the payload manifest. “They’ll just use our generic supplies that we have on board,” said Dana Weigel, who manages NASA’s International Space Station Program. “The reason why we have them there is for cases like this.”

If everything goes according to plan, Wilmore and Williams will spend about eight days on the space station. At the end of their space station stay, the duo will ride Starliner back down for a parachute-aided, airbag-cushioned landing in the western U.S., at a site to be determined based on the weather and the timing of the return.

Boeing will use the data gathered during the test flight to fine-tune its spacecraft design. Those refinements should clear the way for Starliner to take its place alongside SpaceX’s Crew Dragon as a commercial “space taxi” that’s capable of ferrying astronauts to and from orbit.

Mission managers said they were disappointed that today’s launch had to be scrubbed in the final minutes of the countdown, but they shifted their focus to the next launch attempt. Mark Nappi, vice president and program manager of Boeing’s Commercial Crew Program, compared the situation to a baseball game.

“When you’re playing a game, and you get a bad call, you’re a little irritated at first, a little frustrated at first. But you immediately focus on the next pitch, and that’s what our teams do. They’re focused on the next pitch,” Nappi said. “The team’s professional. They just work to the next play.”

Update for 5 p.m. PT June 2: In a mission update, NASA said United Launch Alliance’s technicians and engineers identified an issue with a single ground power supply that provides power to a subset of computer cards in one of the three control racks. The power unit was replaced, and all hardware is performing normally, NASA said. The next launch attempt is now set for 10:52 a.m. ET (7:52 a.m. PT) on Wednesday.

After a series of successful tests, Amazon says it has begun the monthslong process of bringing two prototype satellites for its Project Kuiper broadband internet constellation down from orbit.

“The last milestone in our Protoflight mission is deorbiting Kuipersat-1 and Kuipersat-2,” Amazon said today in an online update.

Project Kuiper is Amazon’s $10 billion initiative to provide global high-speed internet service from low Earth orbit. The project has lagged behind SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, which already has more than 3 million customers and is partnering with T-Mobile, But Amazon has enlisted its own high-profile set of partners, including Verizon and Vodafone, and Project Kuiper’s pace has picked up over the past year.

The Kuipersat prototypes were launched in October to test the hardware and software systems that will be used for the full 3,232-satellite network. During a series of short-duration tests, they were used to transmit data for a streaming video, an Amazon purchase, a two-way video call and other applications. Amazon also tested a laser communication system for beaming data between satellites.

Project Kuiper’s orbital debris mitigation plan calls for deorbiting each satellite in its network within a year after its mission ends — which is why the controlled descent and safe disposal of the Kuipersats serve as an important final test. “This final phase in the Protoflight mission will allow us to collect data on the deorbit process as we gradually lower satellites from their initial target altitude,” Amazon said.

The Kuipersats were deployed into 311-mile-high (500-kilometer-high) orbits last October. Deorbiting operations began in late April, and the satellites’ current altitude is in the range of 285 to 292 miles (460 to 470 kilometers). Over the next four to six months, the satellites will continue firing their solar electric propulsion systems for a series of orbit-lowering maneuvers. Ground controllers will track the process, share their data with other satellite operators and take active measures if necessary to reduce the risk of collisions.

“Combined with natural drag from the Earth’s atmosphere, those maneuvers will gradually lower satellites to an altitude of around 217 miles (350 kilometers), at which point atmospheric demise will follow,” Amazon said.

Amazon is ramping up operations at a 172,000-square-foot factory in Kirkland, Wash., to build production-grade satellites for the full constellation. The first production satellites are being readied for launch sometime in the next few months, and Amazon says it expects to have enough satellites deployed by the end of 2024 to begin offering demonstrations to early enterprise customers.

Project Kuiper is expected to turn out up to five satellites a day once its facilities in Kirkland and Redmond, Wash., reach full capacity. Under the terms of its license from the Federal Communications Commission, Amazon is required to deploy half of the network’s 3,232 satellites by mid-2026, with the rest to be deployed by 2029.

Update: Mission managers say they are evaluating plans for the first crewed flight test of Boeing’s Starliner space taxi and are working toward a launch opportunity on June 1.

An initial attempt to send the gumdrop-shaped capsule and two NASA astronauts to the International Space Station had to be scrubbed on May 6 due to concerns about a fluttery pressure regulation valve on the United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket’s upper-stage oxygen tank.

Starliner and the rocket were rolled back to the Vertical Integration Facility at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 41 in Florida. The valve was replaced on May 11 and passed a round of tests — but along the way, engineers detected a small helium leak that was traced to a flange on one of the Starliner service module’s thrusters.

The launch teams at Boeing and NASA determined that the leak was stable. Now they are working on a follow-on assessment of the propulsion system to understand the potential impacts of the helium system on some of the return scenarios for Starliner. That assessment will be evaluated during a flight test readiness review that hasn’t yet been scheduled.

The earliest opportunity for a second launch attempt is now 12:25 p.m. ET (9:25 a.m. PT) on June 1, with additional opportunities on June 2, 5 and 6. The launch teams had previously targeted May 21 and May 25 for liftoff.

Steve Stich, manager of NASA’s Commercial Crew Program, said in today’s update that it was important for the launch teams to “take our time to understand all the complexities of each issue, including the redundant capabilities of the Starliner propulsion system and any implications to our Interim Human Rating Certification.”

NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams are continuing their preparations to take Starliner on a weeklong shakedown cruise to the International Space Station and back. “We will launch Butch and Suni on this test mission after the entire community has reviewed the teams’ progress and flight rationale” at the readiness review, Stich said.

If the flight test goes according to plan, Boeing’s Starliner would join SpaceX’s Crew Dragon in the rotation for crew flights to and from the space station.

A series of technical snags has led to years of delays and more than $1 billion in cost overruns for the Starliner program. Under the terms of NASA’s fixed-price contract for Starliner development, Boeing has had to cover the extra expense.

This report, first published May 14, has been updated with the revised launch plan.

The U.S. Space Force says a Pentagon partnership with Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space will result in a “first-of-its-kind docking mission” aimed at adding to the maneuverability of national security assets on orbit.

Starfish Space’s $37.5 million contract for a demonstration of the startup’s Otter satellite docking spacecraft was awarded two weeks ago, but the Space Force’s Space Systems Command released further details about the project today.

The Space Systems Command said its Assured Access to Space program will be working in partnership with Starfish Space as well as the Air Force Research Laboratory’s SpaceWERX program, Space Safari and the SSC Commercial Space Office to improve the responsiveness, resilience and strategic flexibility of America’s space assets.

“This project is another step forward in delivering what our warfighters require in sustained space maneuver,” said Col. Joyce Bulson, director of servicing, mobility and logistics in the Assured Access to Space program.

Starfish Space recently tested a small-scale version of its Otter system, known as Otter Pup, after overcoming a string of technical setbacks. The Otter Pup team used the spacecraft’s sensing and guidance system to orchestrate a rendezvous with another satellite in orbit.

The full-scale Otter would be capable of docking with other satellites, either to refuel them or to help them change course in orbit — a capability that the Space Force calls “augmented maneuver.”

“There is a wide range of applications for Starfish Space’s Otter in addition to augmented maneuver, such as station-keeping or life extension, orbital transfer and ultimately orbital disposal, which assures access to key orbital slots while demonstrating responsible norms in space,” Bulson said.

The contract was awarded through the Department of the Air Force’s Strategic Funding Increase program, or STRATFI. Such contracts are structured to leverage private capital investment as a matching source of funds, spread over performance periods of up to four years.

The Otter project will draw upon the $37.5 million in funding from the Space Force as well as $30 million in past and future venture capital investment, Starfish said. The aim of the demonstration mission will be to send an Otter spacecraft to geostationary Earth orbit, or GEO, to dock with and maneuver national security assets. The specific assets to be maneuvered and the detailed plan for operations have not yet been made public.

Starfish will own and operate the Otter vehicle, providing on-orbit services on a commercial basis. Launch could take place by as early as 2026, followed by two years of operation under the terms of the STRATFI contract.

“Starfish looks forward to collaborating with the Space Force to build the capabilities required to enable dynamic space Operations,” Starfish co-founder Trevor Bennett said in a statement emailed to GeekWire. “Through this program, we are in a position to deliver a real on-orbit capability on a relevant timeframe.”

Starfish was founded in 2019 by Bennett and Austin Link, both of whom are alumni of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. The startup has received multiple awards from the Space Force and NASA to support the development of its satellite docking system, and last year it raised $14 million in a Series A funding round.

Decades before the current debates over gender and sexuality, the late Seattle science-fiction writer Vonda N. McIntyre flipped the script on those subjects.

“In many of her stories, there are characters that, by the end of the book, you go, ‘You know, I don’t think it was ever established whether they were male, or female, or something in between,'” fellow science-fiction author Una McCormack says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast. “And it’s done with such a light touch that you would never notice.”

Five years after McIntyre died of cancer at the age of 70, McCormack is playing a lead role in shining a spotlight of her legacy for a new generation. She helped arrange for the publication of “Little Sisters and Other Stories,” an anthology that includes McIntyre’s first published short story (from 1970), her last piece of published fiction (from 2015) and eight more tales from the decades in between.

McIntyre made her mark on science fiction in several ways: She wrote three novelizations of Star Trek movies (II, III and IV), plus two original Star Trek novels. She founded Seattle’s Clarion West Writers Workshop, which will be celebrating McIntyre and the new anthology with a virtual panel presentation next month.

Perhaps most significantly, McIntyre was part of a movement that brought feminist perspectives to science fiction — and often put women characters at the center of the action. (Another noted Pacific Northwest author, Ursula K. LeGuin, was also part of the movement and frequently collaborated with her.)

McCormack argues that McIntyre’s writings weren’t just about feminism. “She was extremely ahead of the curve in the representation of disability, or ‘other-bodied-ness,'” McCormack says. “In ‘The Exile Waiting’ [McIntyre’s first novel], we see a huge diversity of shape and form that humanity can take. So I think she’s ahead of the curve on a lot of things.”

McIntyre turned to science-fiction writing after studying biology and genetics at the University of Washington — and her interest in those subjects shows through in some of the stories included in “Little Sisters.” (“Elfleda,” for example, is told from the point of view of a genetically engineered centaur who has been created to cater to the whims of tourists.)

McCormack, whose 11th Star Trek novel is due to come out in November, says she got a kick out of how McIntyre wrote about humpback whales in her novelization of “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home.”

“The material with Spock meeting the whales, and the whole whale encounter with the alien probe — it’s all wonderful, and radically decenters the humans in the story,” McCormack says. “It’s like they’re not relevant to this.”

The bottom line? Even when McIntyre wasn’t writing about Star Trek, her stories reflected the philosophy that Mister Spock lived by: infinite diversity in infinite combinations.

“What I draw from this is a robust statement of the reality of human diversity,” McCormack says. “We make the case that it’s a good thing — but it’s also a true thing. Humans are diverse. We are diverse in terms of how our bodies move and operate, how they change, in our sexualities, in how we were in the past, how we were in the future. She states this robustly as fact. She doesn’t get into the arguments. It’s the basis on which her stories operate.”

“Little Sisters and Other Stories” by Vonda N. McIntyre is set for release on May 21. Clarion West is presenting “The Roots and Future of Feminist Science Fiction,” a free virtual panel discussion focusing on McIntyre’s work and other major influences on the genre, at 11 a.m. PT on Saturday, June 8. In addition to McCormack, the panelists include Nicola Griffith, SJ Groenewegen and Nisi Shawl. Advance registration is recommended.

The lead illustration is based on a photograph of McIntyre from the Science Fiction Writers of America, which was converted into a watercolor-style artwork by Media.io, and then augmented with images of a “futuristic neon Seattle skyline with the Space Needle” generated by Microsoft Copilot.

Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts and Podchaser. My co-host for the Fiction Science podcast is Dominica Phetteplace, an award-winning writer who is a graduate of the Clarion West Writers Workshop and currently lives in San Francisco. To learn more about Phetteplace, visit her website, DominicaPhetteplace.com.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture today resumed sending people on suborbital space trips after a 21-month gap, and made a Black aerospace pioneer’s 60-year-old dream come true in the process.

“Man, it feels good to be flying again,” launch commentator Ariane Cornell said.

The six spacefliers on Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket ship included Ed Dwight, a retired military test pilot who missed his chance to become NASA’s first Black astronaut in the 1960s. Today’s flight made Dwight, 90, the oldest person to go into space, albeit on a suborbital rather than an orbital trip.

Dwight took part in an Air Force training program that was meant to prepare participants for astronaut duty — but he was passed over. Whether that was because of racial politics or because he was too short to meet NASA’s standards has been a topic of debate. In any case, it would be another two decades before Guion Bluford Jr. became the first Black American in space in 1983.

Dwight went on to become a sculptor but held onto his dream of spaceflight. His Blue Origin trip was sponsored by a nonprofit group called Space for Humanity, with an assist from the Seattle-based Jaison and Jamie Robinson Foundation.

When he stepped out of the capsule today, Dwight told well-wishers said that his space experience was “a long time coming” and that he was “overwhelmed.”

“It’s a life-changing experience. Everybody needs to do this,” he said. “I thought I didn’t need it in my life … but I lied.”

This isn’t the first time Blue Origin has taken a page from space history: In 2021, one of the participants in the company’s first crewed spaceflight was Wally Funk, a member of the “Mercury 13” group of women who went through astronaut training in the 1960s but never got to space. That mission made Funk the world’s oldest spaceflier at the age of 82. Funk’s record was broken by Star Trek actor William Shatner during another Blue Origin flight later that year — and now Dwight has surpassed Shatner’s record by a month and a half.

Dwight’s crewmates on today’s flight were venture capitalist Mason Angel, French brewery founder Sylvain Chiron, software engineer Kenneth L. Hess, retired CPA and adventure traveler Carol Schaller, and airplane pilot and entrepreneur Gopi Thotakura. They are presumed to have paid their own way, but Blue Origin isn’t saying how much they paid.

Today’s mission, known as NS-25, was the 25th flight of the suborbital New Shepard program. Seven of those flights have been crewed, with a total of 37 people taking trips from Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas.

NS-25 followed the typical model for a New Shepard flight. The spaceship’s hydrogen-fueled booster lifted off into clear skies, sending the crew capsule to a maximum height of about 107 kilometers (66 miles) — well beyond the 100-kilometer (62-mile) Karman Line that serves as the internationally accepted boundary of outer space.

After the capsule’s separation from the booster, the spacefliers experienced a few minutes of zero-gravity and gazed out through New Shepard’s giant windows. Then they strapped themselves back into their seats for a parachute-assisted, airbag-cushioned landing amid the Texas rangeland.

One of the capsule’s three parachutes failed to inflate fully during the descent, but Cornell said that was “perfectly OK for this system.” Blue Origin is likely to review the data and address any concerns about the parachute system.

Meanwhile, the booster made its own autonomous landing on a pad not far from where it took off. The mission lasted 9 minutes and 53 seconds from launch to the capsule’s touchdown.

In addition to carrying people, NS-25 carried postcards submitted by students as part of a program offered by the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s educational nonprofit foundation. The spacefliers brought along their own set of postcards.

This was the first crewed New Shepard flight since August 2022. A month after that flight, a different New Shepard craft experienced a launch anomaly during an uncrewed research mission — and that forced a yearlong suspension of Blue Origin’s launches. Blue Origin followed up on the investigation by taking more than 20 corrective actions, including a redesign of the BE-3 rocket engine’s nozzle. Last December, a successful uncrewed flight set the stage for today’s trip.

In addition to the suborbital New Shepard program, Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin is developing an orbital-class New Glenn rocket that could have its first launch from Florida later this year. The company is also working on a lunar lander for NASA’s use, a multi-mission orbital platform known as Blue Ring, a commercial space station project called Orbital Reef, and other advanced programs including a system for producing solar cells from lunar materials and beaming power between lunar installations using laser light.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has set the date for the long-delayed start of its next chapter in the history of spaceflight.

Six spacefliers are scheduled to take a trip on the company’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship, lifting off from Launch Site One in West Texas on Sunday, Blue Origin announced today. Sunday’s launch window will open at 8:30 a.m. CT (6:30 a.m. PT), and launch coverage will be streamed via BlueOrigin.com starting at T-minus-40 minutes.

As first reported last month, the crew will include retired military test pilot Ed Dwight, who lost out on a chance to become America’s first Black astronaut in the early 1960s. Dwight is now 90 years old, and the Blue Origin flight plan would put him in line to become the oldest person to take a suborbital space trip. If the launch occurs as scheduled, he would exceed the record that Star Trek actor William Shatner set in 2021 by about a month and a half.

Dwight’s flight is sponsored by two nonprofit organizations: Space for Humanity and the Seattle-based Jaison and Jamie Robinson Foundation. (Jaison Robinson, co-founder of Dream Variation Ventures, flew on a New Shepard mission in 2022.)

The other spacefliers for the NS-25 mission — the New Shepard program’s 25th flight — include venture capitalist Mason Angel, French brewery founder Sylvain Chiron, software engineer Kenneth L. Hess, retired CPA and adventure traveler Carol Schaller, and airplane pilot and entrepreneur Gopi Thotakura.

Blue Origin said the newly unveiled patch for NS-25 reflects the crew’s interests:

The mission is expected to follow the standard New Shepard flight plan, which starts with liftoff of the reusable, hydrogen-fueled booster and continues with crew capsule separation. The spacefliers would experience a few minutes of zero-gravity and gaze out the capsule’s picture windows — and then strap themselves back into their seats for a parachute-aided, airbag-cushioned landing. Meanwhile, the booster would land itself autonomously. The flight typically lasts about 10 minutes.

This will be Blue Origin’s first crewed mission since August 2022. New Shepard flights had to be suspended a month after that space trip due to a launch anomaly that occurred during an uncrewed research mission. After taking corrective actions — including a redesign of the booster’s engine and nozzle — Blue Origin returned New Shepard to service for an uncrewed mission last December. The success of that mission cleared the way for the resumption of crewed flights.

Blue Origin’s flight arrangements are made privately, and the company hasn’t disclosed how much its spaceflight customers are paying. Just after the first crewed flight in 2021, Jeff Bezos said the Kent, Wash.-based company was “approaching $100 million in private sales already, and demand is very, very high.”

Amazon says it’s establishing a logistics facility in Everett, Wash., and partnering with a technical college in Kirkland, Wash., to boost the supply chain and workforce pipeline for its Project Kuiper satellite broadband network.

Project Kuiper is Amazon’s $10 billion effort to build and launch more than 3,000 satellites that will offer high-speed internet access to tens of millions of people around the world. The project already employs more than 2,000 people at Puget Sound locations, including a 172,000-square-foot satellite factory in Kirkland and a 219,000-square-foot research and development facility in Redmond, Wash.

Amazon’s partnership with Lake Washington Institute of Technology in Kirkland — which is less than a 10-minute drive from the satellite factory — takes the form of a satellite technician certificate program that will prepare students for careers in aerospace assembly and manufacturing.

Brian Huseman, Amazon’s vice president of public policy and community engagement, said in a news release that the partnership “will help create a pipeline of future satellite technicians to meet the evolving needs of this area’s thriving space and satellite sectors, and give more people the opportunity to take part in Project Kuiper’s important mission.”

Some of those technicians may find themselves working at the newly announced 184,000-square-foot receiving and logistics facility in Everett, which is a half-hour drive north of Kirkland. Amazon said the hub is due to come fully online by next month, and will bring about 200 skilled technician jobs to the Everett area.

“Our new Everett facility will be the single point of delivery for all externally procured materials and goods for Project Kuiper, and the entry point into the internal Kuiper supply chain,” an Amazon spokesperson told GeekWire via email. “It will enable the Kuiper team to support full-rate satellite production.”

Everett Mayor Cassie Franklin said she was “thrilled to welcome Amazon’s new Project Kuiper facility to Everett.”

“This investment not only strengthens our region’s reputation as a hub for aerospace innovation, but also creates valuable job opportunities for our residents,” Franklin said.

Project Kuiper is far behind SpaceX’s Starlink network when it comes to providing high-speed internet access from low Earth orbit. Over the past five years, more than 5,000 Starlink satellites have been built at SpaceX’s facilities in Redmond and launched into space to serve an estimated 2.7 million subscribers in more than 70 countries.

Amazon’s plans call for setting up a 3,232-satellite Project Kuiper constellation. Under the terms of Project Kuiper’s license from the Federal Communications Commission, at least half of those satellites have to be launched by mid-2026, with the remainder reaching orbit by 2029.

Two prototype satellites were launched and tested last year, but Amazon hasn’t yet announced the precise timing and detailed plans for launching the first production-grade satellites. Once the Kirkland production line ramps up to full capacity, Amazon expects to build up to five satellites per day.

“We’re making good progress, and expect to launch our first production satellites in the coming months,” a spokesperson said via email. “We expect to have enough satellites deployed by the end of 2024 to begin offering demonstrations to our earliest enterprise customers.”

Ramping up Lake Washington’s technician training program will also take a while. The program offers two 16-credit certification tracks — for Aerospace Assembly Specialist and Aerospace Manufacturing — that can be completed in two semesters total. Classes start in July.

The coursework will focus on safety protocols, aerospace assembly skills, materials handling, electrical systems, emerging technologies and industry-standard practices.

Amazon said members of the Project Kuiper team helped develop the program and coursework. Project Kuiper also donated 150 tools for use in the classroom and will provide regular guest lecturers for classes. The program will be run at least twice a year, with each program’s cohort capped at 25 students, Amazon said.

Amazon said it will include the two satellite certification tracks in its Career Choice program, which offers prepaid education and skills training programs for hourly warehouse employees.

“Industry partnerships like this collaboration with Amazon’s Project Kuiper are what makes our students so successful,” said Amy Morrison, president of Lake Washington Institute of Technology. “Together, we are providing real-world training for satellite technicians to work in the rapidly growing space industry.”

In other satellite broadband news:

• Amazon is asking the FCC to authorize an extension of Project Kuiper service to mobile vehicles, including cars, ships and airplanes. SpaceX won similar FCC clearance for mobile Starlink services in 2022.
• PCMag.com reports that SpaceX will raise the monthly service price for some residential Starlink users from $90 to $120 after reclassifying their service areas as having “limited capacity” instead of “excess capacity.”

NASA has selected four proposals for climate science missions, including an effort led by a University of Washington researcher, to go forward for further study with millions of dollars in funding.

STRIVE, which has UW atmospheric scientist Lyatt Jaeglé as its principal investigator, would focus on interactions between the stratosphere and the troposphere.

“STRIVE would allow us to see the composition and temperature of the atmosphere with much finer detail than previously possible from space,” Jaeglé told GeekWire in an email. “It would enable us to observe how smoke from fires and volcanoes affect the ozone layer. It would give us needed information to understand how the troposphere and stratosphere interact, and how these interactions influence weather, climate and air quality.”

Jaeglé said “the entire STRIVE team is very excited at the prospect of moving forward in this next step to prepare the concept study.”

The three other studies winning support from NASA’s new Earth System Explorers Program are ODYSEA, EDGE and Carbon-I. Each of the science teams for the four selected proposals will receive $5 million to conduct a one-year concept study.

After the study period, NASA will choose two of the proposals to go forward to launch, with readiness dates expected in 2030 and 2032. For each chosen investigation, the mission cost will be capped at $310 million. That figure doesn’t include launch costs, which will be covered by NASA.

NASA’s Earth System Explorers Program focuses on Earth science questions relating to topics such as greenhouse gases, the ozone layer, ocean surface currents and changes in ice and glaciers around the world.

““The proposals represent another example of NASA’s holistic approach to studying our home planet,” Nicky Fox, NASA’s associate administrator for science, said today in a news release. “As we continue to confront our changing climate, and its impacts on humans and our environment, the need for data and scientific research could not be greater. These proposals will help us better prepare for the challenges we face today, and tomorrow.”

Here are further details about each of the proposals:

• STRIVE (Stratosphere Troposphere Response Using Infrared Vertically-Resolved Light Explorer): This mission would provide daily, near-global, high-resolution measurements of temperature, a variety of atmospheric elements and aerosol properties from the upper troposphere to the mesosphere. It would also measure vertical profiles of ozone and trace gases needed to monitor and understand the recovery of the ozone layer. The science team includes researchers from UW, NorthWest Research Associates, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and other institutions in the U.S. and Canada. Mission partners also include NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center and Northrop Grumman, BAE Systems and Leidos.
• ODYSEA (Ocean Dynamics and Surface Exchange With the Atmosphere): This satellite would measure ocean surface currents and winds to improve our understanding of air-sea interactions and surface current processes that impact weather, climate, marine ecosystems and human well-being. The proposal is led by Sarah Gille at the University of California in San Diego.
• EDGE (Earth Dynamics Geodetic Explorer): This mission would observe the three-dimensional structure of terrestrial ecosystems and the surface topography of glaciers, ice sheets and sea ice as they are changing in response to climate and human activity. The mission would provide a continuation of measurements that are currently made from space by ICESat-2 and GEDI. The proposal is led by UCSD’s Helen Amanda Fricker.
• Carbon-I (The Carbon Investigation): This investigation would enable simultaneous, multi-species measurements of critical greenhouse gases and potential quantification of ethane – which could help study processes that drive natural and human-caused emissions. The proposal is led by Caltech’s Christian Frankenberg.

We’ve updated this report with comments from UW’s Lyatt Jaeglé.

Months after Starfish Space said it was giving up on its plan to test its satellite docking system in orbit, due to a thruster failure, the Tukwila, Wash.-based startup managed to coax one last rendezvous out of its first space mission.

And this week brought more good news for Starfish Space, in the form of a $37.5 million contract from the U.S. Space Force for further work on its in-space rendezvous and docking technology.

Last month’s close encounter involving Starfish’s Otter Pup spacecraft and D-Orbit’s ION SCV006 satellite wasn’t as close as the original test plan called for, and it was up to ION to do all of the orbital maneuvering. Nevertheless, Starfish Space co-founder Trevor Bennett said the exercise brought Otter Pup’s troubled mission to a successful close.

““Executing this rendezvous means we absolutely maximized the value we could get out of Otter Pup, in spite of the numerous challenges we faced, from emergency deployment to thruster failure,” Bennett said today in a news release.

Otter Pup was sent into orbit last June as a rideshare payload on SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket. Starfish planned to use Otter Pup to demonstrate its Cetacean computer vision system and Cephalopod trajectory planning software by having it back away from the orbital tug was attached to — and then having it return for a docking.

Unfortunately, Launcher’s orbital tug went into a rapid spin soon after it was deployed from the Falcon 9’s upper stage. Mission managers made the emergency decision to deploy Otter Pup even though it had the same dizzying rate of spin. It took weeks for Starfish to get its tumbling spacecraft under control, and after all those weeks of jostling, Otter Pup’s thruster was no longer able to provide thrust.

“The thruster failure ruled out Otter Pup attempting a docking mission,” Starfish co-founder Austin Link said in comments that were emailed to GeekWire.

Despite that setback, Starfish’s engineers continued to look for ways to run whatever tests they could. In January, they started collaborating with D-Orbit on a bold plan in which the ION satellite played a key role.

“Starfish worked with D-Orbit to execute the rendezvous with ION by directing ION to fire its thrusters, while Otter Pup pointed its cameras to capture images of ION during the rendezvous attempts,” Link said.

Starfish calculated the plans for ION’s maneuvers, and then passed the plans along to D-Orbit for uploading. “The Starfish team collaborated closely with D-Orbit throughout the mission, sharing telemetry and specific instructions to ensure ION was maneuvered successfully for the mission,” Link explained. “The telemetry used to analyze and execute the rendezvous attempts came from both spacecraft, in addition to LeoLabs for third-party confirmation.”

Thanks to the joint effort, Otter Pup was able to come within a kilometer (0.6 mile) of ION during a series of maneuvers in mid-April. “One kilometer was a close enough distance for Starfish to get significant value out of this mission without taking orbital safety risks,” Link said.

Even though there was no opportunity for a docking, Bennett said last month’s maneuvers provided “invaluable data” to guide further development of Starfish’s guidance, navigation and control software.

“Continuing to operate Otter Pup gave us a lot of value; it allowed us to increase our satellite operations experience, and to test and validate software and hardware on-orbit, including the camera system that was used to capture these images,” he said.

Does Otter Pup have any more tricks up its sleeve?

“This will be the last major milestone in the Otter Pup mission (for real this time!). Otter Pup’s orbit will naturally decay over time, and it is expected to self-dispose within a few years,” Link wrote in his email.

Link said Starfish Space is already “actively working toward the launch of a second Otter Pup mission,” and there are even bigger Otters in the offing. Full-scale Otter spacecraft could be used for satellite servicing, satellite maneuvering and in-space refueling, or for the disposal of defunct satellites and other space debris.

The newly announced $37.5 million Space Force contract will support the development of an Otter demonstration spacecraft over the course of the next four years. In its announcement of the fixed-price contract — which was awarded through the Strategic Funding Increase program, or STRATFI — the Department of Defense said the project’s goal is to “improve maneuverability on-orbit and enable dynamic space operations docking and maneuvering of Department of Defense assets on-orbit.”

The first crewed flight of Boeing’s Starliner space taxi was postponed today due to concerns about a valve on the upper stage of United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket. It was the latest in a years-long string of delays for what’s expected to be a milestone mission for Boeing and commercial spaceflight.

Liftoff had been set for 10:34 p.m. ET (7:34 p.m. PT) today from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Space Launch Complex 41 in Florida. But launch managers called a hold with a little more than 2 hours left in the countdown, after NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sunita Williams had already climbed into the capsule.

“The team has had some observations on an oxygen relief valve on our Centaur second stage, and the team is just not comfortable with the signatures that they’re seeing, the response out of that valve,” United Launch Alliance’s Dillon Rice said. “So, out of an abundance of caution, we are not going to continue with our launch operations today.”

The astronauts climbed out of the capsule and headed back to their quarters. Meanwhile, ULA engineers checked into the balky valve, which didn’t stay closed properly during preparations for launch and made a buzzing noise. The ULA team decided to replace the valve, which led mission managers to schedule the next launch attempt for no earlier than May 17.

When liftoff occurs, it will be the first crewed launch on an Atlas rocket since the Mercury missions of the 1960s. But this mission will be nothing like anything NASA might have planned in the ’60s. Wilmore and Williams plan to go to the International Space Station for what’s basically a shakedown cruise in the gumdrop-shaped Starliner spacecraft.

“We have a lot to do — test it out, make sure it’s ready to go and make sure we can bring it back so more people can fly on it in the future,” Williams said in a pre-launch video clip from NASA.

NASA chose Boeing and SpaceX to transport astronauts to and from the space station a decade ago, in the wake of the space shuttle fleet’s retirement in 2011. The companies’ development costs were covered by fixed-price contracts worth $4.2 billion for Boeing and $2.6 billion for SpaceX.

Both companies encountered challenges as they built and tested their spacecraft. SpaceX’s Crew Dragon entered service first. Crew Dragon Endeavour carried its first astronauts to the space station in 2020, and since then, Dragons have flown eight crews for NASA without a hitch. Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner, however, met with a series of failures during an uncrewed test mission in 2019. It took years to resolve all the glitches and safety lapses.

A re-do of the uncrewed flight test in 2022 set the stage for the crewed flight test, but NASA’s contract terms required Boeing to cover $1.5 billion in extra expenses.

Wilmore and Williams plan to spend about a week on the International Space Station doing orbital checkouts of the reusable Starliner craft — which has been christened Calypso in honor of the late ocean explorer Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s famous research ship.

At the end of the mission, they’ll ride Calypso back down to a parachute-assisted, airbag-cushioned touchdown in New Mexico or elsewhere in the western U.S., with the exact timing and location to be determined based on weather.

Assuming all goes well during the demonstration mission, Boeing’s Starliner will join the rotation with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon for ferrying astronauts to the space station every six months or so. Although just two astronauts are on board for this test mission, Starliner is designed to carry up to seven spacefliers.

Having two types of commercial space taxis, plus Russia’s Soyuz spacecraft, will significantly boost the ability to get to the space station and back. “Multiple providers provide you redundancy,” Wilmore explained.

And it’s not just about the International Space Station, which is due to go out of service in the early 2030s. Boeing and its Starliner space taxis are part of the team working on Orbital Reef, a commercial space station project that’s led by Sierra Space and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. Boeing also partnered with Space Adventures years ago on a plan to send customers into orbit on a commercial basis.

This report has been updated multiple times to reflect news developments, including the decision on May 7 to postpone the next launch attempt until May 17 at the earliest.

The first Friday in May is National Space Day, which makes today a fitting time to announce a contest that will give eight students an opportunity to tour Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket factory in Florida.

The National SpaceKids Press Squad Competition is being organized by SpaceKids Global, a Florida-based nonprofit organization dedicated to getting elementary-school students interested in science, technology, engineering, art and mathematics, also known as STEAM.

Entries are limited to students aged from 8 to 12, and must be submitted via SpaceKids Global’s Press Squad webpage by June 14. Twenty-four students will be randomly selected as semifinalists. Those students will be asked to submit 60-second videos explaining why they want to see a rocket launch. Judges will then choose the eight winners — who will include a member of an active-duty military family, a member of a first-responder family, a member of a Boys & Girls Club, and five other students chosen to reflect geographical diversity.

The winners (and an accompanying parent or guardian for each student) will be brought to Florida for a tour of Blue Origin’s Rocket Park manufacturing facility, a visit to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex and press training by a professional news reporter.

The SpaceKids Press Squad will get a chance to interview employees at the Blue Origin factory. And if the timing is right, they’ll be able to watch a live webcast of a Blue Origin New Shepard rocket launch in Texas and interview spacefliers remotely. Check out the Press Squad webpage for details.

SpaceKIds Global’s founder, Sharon Hagle, took a suborbital space trip on New Shepard in March 2022. The Press Squad contest is being done in collaboration with the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s nonprofit educational foundation.

“Our mission at SpaceKids is to reach children at a young age and get them excited about all of the careers available in the space industry,” Hagle said today in a news release. “We are bringing the possibility of space to kids everywhere with opportunities like the SpaceKids Press Squad. My flight to space alongside my husband, Marc, was life-changing, and we can’t wait for these eight lucky kids to experience an out-of-this-world adventure, too! We hope to inspire a new generation of space explorers and future leaders to pursue STEAM careers.”

There are other ways to celebrate space odysseys in the Seattle area this weekend:

• The city of Kent, Wash. — where Blue Origin is headquartered — is partnering with the Kent Community Foundation and the Kent School District to present an outdoor movie night on Friday and a “Space for All” STEM festival on Saturday. Friday’s space-themed movie, “A Million Miles Away,” will be shown at 7:30 p.m. at Kent’s Kherson Park. Saturday’s festival starts at 11 a.m. at the Accesso Showare Center. Jose Hernandez, the NASA astronaut whose life story inspired “A Million Miles Away,” will do a keynote presentation at 2 p.m. Register online for free tickets to the festival.
• Seattle’s Museum of Flight is celebrating Star Wars Day on Saturday (May the Fourth). The day’s offerings include lightsaber shows and training by the Saber Guild, music by the 8-Bit Brass Band, a presentation by Star Wars artist Kevin Graham, exhibits of Star Wars collectibles and appearances by roaming Star Wars cosplayers. Check out the museum’s website for details.

A team of asteroid hunters that includes researchers at the University of Washington says it has identified 27,500 new, high-confidence asteroid discovery candidates — not by making fresh observations of the night sky, but by sifting through archives of astronomical data.

The weeks-long database search was conducted by the Asteroid Institute, a program of the nonprofit B612 Foundation, in partnership with UW’s DiRAC Institute and Google Cloud.

The two institutes developed a program called THOR, which stands for “Tracklet-less Heliocentric Orbit Recovery.” THOR runs on a cloud-based, open-source platform known as ADAM (“Asteroid Discovery Analysis and Mapping”). The program can analyze the positions of millions of moving points of light observed in the sky over a given period of time, and link those points together in ways that are consistent with orbital paths.

Google Cloud’s Office of the CTO collaborated with the Asteroid Institute to fine-tune its algorithms for Google Cloud. The project analyzed 5.4 billion observations drawn from the NOIRLab Source Catalog Data Release 2.

“What is exciting is that we are using electrons in data centers, in addition to the usual photons in telescopes, to make astronomical discoveries,” Ed Lu, executive director of the Asteroid Institute, said in a news release.

Most of the 27,500 asteroid discovery candidates are in the main belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. But the candidates also include more than 100 apparent near-Earth asteroids.

The Asteroid Institute’s long-term goal is to create an observational system that can flag potentially threatening near-Earth objects long before they approach our planet. Confirming the detections can be a laborious task, but the institute is exploring the use of Google’s artificial-intelligence tools to streamline the process.

Astronomers are expecting the flow of data to turn into a flood once the Vera C. Rubin Observatory begins science operations in Chile in 2025.

“Asteroid Institute results are more than exciting for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory: They may help us re-optimize our observing strategy and obtain gains for some science programs, such as cosmologically important supernovae explosions, equivalent to cloning another Rubin Observatory,” said UW astronomer Zeljko Ivezic, who serves as the observatory’s construction project director.

A Seattle-area startup called Portal Space Systems is emerging from stealth to share its vision for a type of satellite that’s apparently never been put into space before: a spacecraft that uses the heat of the sun to spark its thrusters.

The technology, known as solar thermal propulsion, could be put to its first in-space test as early as next year.

“I’m not aware of anybody that has flown any system with solar thermal propulsion, in the U.S., or foreign for that matter,” Portal co-founder and CEO Jeff Thornburg told GeekWire. “I mean, it could have happened, but maybe no one’s aware of it.”

Bothell, Wash.-based Portal says it has already been awarded more than $3 million by the Defense Department and the U.S. Space Force to support the development of its Supernova satellite bus. In space industry parlance, a bus is the basic spacecraft infrastructure that supports a satellite’s payloads.

Supernova-based satellites would be equipped with a solar concentrator apparatus that focuses the sun’s rays on a heat exchanger. “It’s a very simple system,” Thornburg said. “You pass your monopropellant through a hot heat exchanger, and out comes thrust.”

The technology has the potential to give satellites much more mobility in orbit — which could smooth the way for applications ranging from rounding up orbital debris to responding to international crises.

“We have high performance and high thrust, which means we can get places faster than spacecraft with electric propulsion solutions, which are predominantly the propulsion system of choice,” Thornburg said.

The spark of an idea

Portal’s solar thermal propulsion system is only the latest in a string of innovations that Thornburg has worked on.

He played a pivotal role in the development of the methane-fueled Raptor rocket engine that powers SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket. At Stratolaunch, the space company founded by the late Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, Thornburg worked on a 3D-printed rocket engine known as the PGA (which were Paul G. Allen’s initials). He served as the director of mechanical engineering and manufacturing for Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite development effort in 2020-2021, and then took on lead engineering roles at Agility Robotics and Commonwealth Fusion Systems.

Thornburg’s interest in nuclear propulsion led him to consider solar thermal propulsion, which had been the subject of research at NASA and at the Defense Department as far back as three decades ago.

“I think the future of propulsion is nuclear thermal propulsion, in my lifetime anyway. But I can’t go to Lowe’s and buy me a fission reactor yet,” Thornburg said. “So I was like, ‘What would be close? Or what would be a step in that direction?'”

Thornburg said he went looking for propulsion technologies “that the U.S. government has already put a ton of money into, that are sitting on the shelf with the Ark of the Covenant, that I could innovate around and bring some solutions faster as a small company.”

Solar thermal propulsion looked like the best option. “It’s taken me back to my SpaceX Raptor days, where we can move fast and break things, and iterate more quickly,” he said. “And we had a good scientific foundational base to justify our performance estimates, because of all the work that the government had done 30-plus years ago.”

Portal isn’t the only space venture looking into solar thermal: Arizona-based Howe Industries is also working on the technology, but for pint-sized nanosatellites that would turn water into steam to power their thrusters. Portal’s system would kick solar thermal propulsion up to a much higher level.

Small steps and giant leaps

Solar thermal’s ability to deliver high-performance propulsion for in-space mobility is a huge selling point. The Supernova satellite bus, which has a mass of about 500 kilograms (1,100 pounds), is designed to provide up to 6 kilometers per second of delta-v. (Delta-v is a measure of how much a spacecraft can change its velocity.)

“A lot of systems are lucky if they have 200 meters per second of delta-v when they launch. Certainly most have 500 meters per second or less,” Thornburg said. “So, we’re talking about 10X the capability of existing systems. And then when you add refueling on top of that, now you’ve really got a game-changer, with multiple of these spacecraft in particular orbits servicing certain needs.”

What happens when the satellite goes where the sun doesn’t shine — for example, when it’s flying over Earth’s night side? “We’re actually working on another aspect of design where we can operate the thruster independent of where the sun is,” Thornburg said. “You can think of it as having a thermal battery.”

The Pentagon is interested in solar thermal because it fits into its “Tactically Responsive Space” strategy, the idea that space assets will have to be rapidly deployed to respond to global threats. Portal was one of 18 companies selected to receive $1.7 million contracts to work on technologies that could “propel the U.S. Space Force toward future responsive and dynamic space operations” by 2026.

Thornburg said Portal is on track to meet the Pentagon’s schedule.

“We have a relatively high TRL [technology readiness level] across Supernova even before we’ve flown our first demonstration,” he said. “But our first demonstration, when we fly it in late ’25, will really be validating the integration of all those systems, plus our proprietary heat exchanger designs that we’re bringing to the party.”

The Supernova satellite bus can be used for commercial applications as well. The mobility that comes with solar thermal propulsion could be attractive for companies that want to redeploy their satellites in different orbits, or rendezvous with other spacecraft for refueling or debris removal. But Thornburg doesn’t want to get too specific about what Supernova could be used for.

“When we looked at the market, there are some companies that say, ‘We’re going to be an orbital debris company, or we’re going to go map the debris and monetize that.’ I didn’t think there’s enough real revenue long-term in any one of those distinct areas to build a business around,” he said. “But I did think that all of those businesses want more delta-v than they have capable. So, we market it as a satellite bus structure, because we can offer so many different opportunities to allow folks that are focused on their unique payload application.”

The road ahead

If Portal is successful, the company will add to the Seattle area’s already-formidable array of satellite manufacturing operations. SpaceX’s Starlink satellite development and manufacturing facility is in Redmond, and Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite operation is based in Redmond and Kirkland. Redmond is also where Xplore is working on its Xcraft satellite platform, while LeoStella builds satellites in Tukwila. Starfish Space (in Tukwila) and Lumen Orbit (in Bellevue) are also part of the mix.

Seattle’s status as Satellite City is a factor in the choice to put Portal’s headquarters in Bothell, but not the only factor. “My wife and I came out here during the pandemic and have no intention to ever leave,” Thornburg said. “So, I needed to build the business here in Seattle for a lot of different reasons, more than just business ones.”

Thornburg said that about 25 people currently work at Portal’s offices, and that the company is aiming to put its Supernova production facility at a location somewhere in the Bothell-Marysville-Arlington area. “We’re pretty excited about that,” he said. “I see us growing from where we are with 25 to probably 100 in the next year, and looking at probably growth up to 150 or 200 people over the next 24 months or so.”

Portal’s other co-founders also have previous connections to the Seattle area’s space industry. Chief operating officer Ian Vorbach, an aerospace engineer who has gravitated toward early-stage startups, briefly worked for Stratolaunch when it was headquartered in Seattle. Prashaanth Ravindran, who is Portal’s vice president of engineering, previously worked at Stratolaunch as well as at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture in Kent, Wash.

Some things about Portal are still up in the air: For example, the company hasn’t yet announced its plan for launching next year’s demonstration mission. “We have a few different options that we’re chasing — some that we would be taking on, on our own, and some that potentially would be in partnership with the U.S. government,” Thornburg said. “Those conversations are happening in real time right now.”

Thornburg is also keeping mum about the identity of Portal’s strategic investors, and about how much money they’re investing — other than to say that Portal has “the right amount of funding” to conduct the demonstration mission.

“Too many people now think that the measure of a company’s success is based on how much money it’s raised,” Thornburg said when those questions were asked. “That is the wrong metric. … I am so personally fatigued by that being the measure of success out there that I want to show people that that is not the most important factor in whether a space company is going to be successful or not.”

So, what’s the right metric? Thornburg pointed to the trust and financial support that Portal has received from the Space Force. “I’m looking forward to making them more successful — and giving the country that capability it wants to have,” he said.

Marysville, Wash.-based Gravitics says it will work with Rocket Lab USA and other partners to adapt its space station architecture for the U.S. Space Force under the terms of a $1.7 million contract.

The contract was awarded through the 2023 SpaceWERX Tactically Responsive Space Challenge, a competition that was conducted in partnership with Space Safari. Gravitics was among 18 companies that were fast-tracked for Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contracts.

Gravitics provided further details about the project today in a news release. The company said it plans to leverage its commercial space station product architecture to develop orbital platforms that will enable rapid response options for the U.S. Space Force.

“We are looking at all options to meet the mission on tactically relevant timelines. The Gravitics space station module offers an unconventional and potentially game-changing solution for TacRS [Tactically Responsive Space],” said Lt. Col. Jason Altenhofen, Space Safari’s director of operations. “As we look into the future, the innovative use of commercial technologies will be an important aspect to solving some of our toughest challenges.”

Gravitics CEO Colin Doughan said the company would stay focused on commercial applications for its modules, which are being developed at a 42,000-square-foot facility in Marysville and could become available for delivery as early as 2026.

“Developing and manufacturing commercial space station modules will continue to be at the core of our company mission,” Doughan said. “Gravitics is thrilled to have the opportunity to offer these commercial capabilities to the Department of Defense.”

In addition to Rocket Lab USA, Gravitics’ partners on the project include True Anomaly, Space Exploration Engineering, and Eta Space. Those partners will assist Gravitics in refining mission architecture, developing use-case specific outfitting, and developing flight hardware.

Two Washington state aerospace companies — Tukwila-based New Frontier Aerospace and Spanaway-based HyBird Space Systems — are among 95 ventures that have won project development funding from NASA through its Small Business Innovation Research program.

The Phase II SBIR grants are valued at up to $850,000 each. These grants follow up on earlier Phase I funding for the projects, and will be distributed over a 24-month contract period.

Each small business was also eligible to apply for up to $50,000 in funding from NASA’s Technical and Business Assistance program to help the companies identify new market opportunities and work on their commercialization strategies.

The total outlay for 107 projects comes to $93.5 million, NASA said.

“We are thrilled to support this diverse set of companies as they work diligently to bring their technologies to market,” Jenn Gustetic, director of Early Stage Innovation and Partnerships at NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, said today in a news release. “Inclusive innovation is integral to mission success at NASA, and we’re excited to see that 29% of the awardees are from underrepresented groups, including 11% women-owned businesses.”

NASA’s SBIR grants focus on technologies that could advance the agency’s initiatives in space and aeronautics. New Frontier, for example, is working on a variety of rocket-powered aircraft and spacecraft. The newly announced Phase II grant will support the development of Bifröst, an orbital transfer spacecraft designed to be powered by the company’s 3D-printed Mjölnir rocket engine.

New Frontier says Bifröst would be capable of transferring a 400-pound payload from low Earth orbit to geostationary Earth orbit, or sending 110 pounds of payload on a course to Mars or Venus. The technology could also be adapted for use in a lunar lander. For what it’s worth, Bifröst takes its name from the Rainbow Bridge of Norse mythology, and Mjölnir’s name is a nod to Thor’s hammer.

HyBird is developing a retrobraking propulsion system known as the RT-5X that could be used to bring inactive spacecraft down from low Earth orbit. The system would take advantage of “green” propellants.

NASA also awarded Phase II SBIR grants to two ventures headquartered in Oregon: The Innovation Laboratory, a Portland-based company that’s working on an AI-based system for advanced air traffic management; and Wilsonville-based IRPI, which is developing tools for handling and analyzing scientific samples in low-gravity environments.

In his annual letter to shareholders, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company’s Project Kuiper satellite venture will be “a very large revenue opportunity” in the future — but he’s hedging his bets as to exactly when that future will be.

Eventually, Project Kuiper aims to provide satellite broadband service to hundreds of millions of people around the world who are currently underserved when it comes to connectivity. Such a service would compete with SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, which already has more than 2.6 million customers.

Amazon is investing more than $10 billion to get Kuiper off the ground. The plan calls for sending 3,232 satellites (down slightly from the originally planned 3,236) into low Earth orbit by 2029. Under the terms of the Federal Communications Commission’s license, half of that total would have to be deployed by mid-2026.

When Project Kuiper’s first two prototype satellites were launched last October for testing, Amazon said that its first production-grade satellites were on track for launch in the first half of 2024, and that it expected broadband service to be in beta testing with selected customers by the end of the year.

Today, Jassy put a slightly different spin on that schedule. “We’re on track to launch our first production satellites in 2024,” he wrote in his letter. “We’ve still got a long way to go, but are encouraged by our progress.”

Jassy amplified on those remarks in an interview with CNBC. “The first big production pieces will be the second half of ’24, and we expect to have the service up in the next year or so,” he said.

Amazon has reserved dozens of launches with Blue Origin (Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ privately funded space venture), plus United Launch Alliance (which sent up the prototype satellites on its Atlas V rocket) and the Europe-based Arianespace consortium (which is gearing up for the first launch of its Ariane 6 rocket). The company also struck a deal with SpaceX for three Falcon 9 launches.

Rajeev Badyal, vice president of technology at Project Kuiper, told GeekWire last November that his team had already identified the launch vehicles for the first production-grade satellites. “In the near future, we’ll start disclosing our launch plans — who we’re launching with, which rockets,” he said. “We have a couple of options to start off with, but we’ve narrowed it for our first year, what we want to do. And we’ll share that information in the days to come.”

Though it seems likely that United Launch Alliance will handle the next launch, no formal announcement has yet been made. An Amazon spokesperson told GeekWire today that there were no updates on the timing of the launch.

When Project Kuiper is up and running, the first users are likely to be the organizations with which Amazon is partnering on network development. Those organizations include telecommunications companies (Verizon, Vodafone and Vodacom, NTT and Sky Perfect JSAT) as well as NASA, DARPA and the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit.

In his letter, Jassy noted that Project Kuiper’s applications wouldn’t be limited to at-home customers. He said broadband services would also be offered to “governments and enterprises seeking better connectivity and performance in more remote areas.”

Amazon plans to integrate satellite broadband into its other product lines, most likely starting with Amazon Web Services. Back in November, AWS CEO Adam Selipsky said “the possibilities for consumers are enormous, but so are the benefits to companies and governments.”

“With Project Kuiper’s enterprise-ready private connectivity services, you will be able to move data from virtually anywhere over private, secure connections, and use these connections to reach your data in the AWS cloud,” Selipsky said at the AWS re:Invent conference.

It’s not hard to imagine synergies with Prime Video as well. In his letter, Jassy said “we have increasing conviction that Prime Video can be a large and profitable business on its own.” Bundling Project Kuiper’s broadband service with Prime Video’s content could make both opportunities for profit loom even larger.

NASHVILLE, Ind. — There’s nothing like a total solar eclipse to remind you of the unstoppability of nature — and the tenuousness of technology.

Not that we need much of a reminder: The challenges of climate change, ranging from floods to wildfires, and the problems caused by the coronavirus pandemic amply show the limits of humanity’s control over nature.

But chasing totality is a more benign example showing just how hard it is to predict which paths Mother Nature will take, and how technology may or may not catch up.

It was tricky to pinpoint the best place to see today’s total eclipse, because totality was visible only along a narrow track stretching from Mexico to Newfoundland, for no more than four and a half minutes over any location. If clouds roll in at 3:04 p.m., and totality begins at 3:05, there’s nothing OpenAI or SpaceX can do about it.

Based on historical precedent, a stretch of Texas around Austin was supposed to have the best chance of clear skies. Here in Nashville, a well-known tourist destination south of Indianapolis, the cloud-cover predictions varied from totally sunny to as much as 60% clouded over. Meanwhile, some air travelers hoped to catch sight of the blacked-out sun as they flew above the clouds.

How did it all turn out? Here are three tales from GeekWire’s eclipse team:

Goodbye, Texas — hello, Arkansas

The encouraging weather reports convinced photographer Kevin Lisota that Austin was the place to go. After his arrival on Friday, Lisota thought better of his decision.

“Each day, the forecast in Central Texas got worse and worse, with more potential cloud cover,” Lisota wrote in his dispatch. “After obsessing about the forecast, we decided to drive overnight on Sunday from Austin to Arkansas. We landed at Cossatot River State Park, a beautiful natural area, with an optimistic cloud forecast.”

The morning started well, with clear skies. Then low clouds began to roll in.

“The beginning part of the eclipse gave us occasional glimpses of the partial eclipse through the clouds, but we were worried. Then, about 15 minutes before totality, pockets of clear skies opened up, revealing an awesome total eclipse,” Lisota said.

During the total phase of the eclipse, Lisota could dispense with his solar filters. “There were still some high cirrus clouds obscuring the sun, but it put on quite a show, with one blazingly bright prominence that was easily visible with the naked eye,” he said.

Dark skies above the clouds

GeekWire reporter Kurt Schlosser was 35,000 feet above Buffalo, N.Y., during totality, on a cross-country flight from Seattle to New York City.

From his window seat on the left side of the aircraft, Schlosser witnessed the sky darken for about four minutes, starting at about 3:15 p.m. ET. Passengers on the right side of the plane had a better view of the actual sun.

The captain of the Delta flight warned passengers not to stare at the sun. “There were no cheers from the packed flight during the eclipse, and a large number of passengers couldn’t even be bothered to open their window shades or divert their attention from seatback screens,” Schlosser said in his dispatch.

Taking a chance in Indiana

As I sat in my $300-a-night yurt in the woods near Nashville, bundled up in my sleeping bag, I reflected on how things have changed — or haven’t — since ancient humans marveled over total solar eclipses.

There was no signal for my phone. I couldn’t get the hour-by-hour weather updates that I’d been checking ever since I decided to cancel my two-week road trip to Texas and instead make last-minute plans to fly to the Midwest. My brother Dave put me up at his home in the Cincinnati area for a couple of days, and then we headed over to Indiana — where he had reserved a hotel room months ago, and where I reserved a glorified tent.

Unlike ancient humans, I knew exactly when the sun would go dark: 3:05 p.m. ET. But when I went to sleep, without my internet, I couldn’t be sure whether the skies would be cloud-free. The waves of rain showers that passed through during the night dampened my outlook.

As it turned out, I needn’t have worried. The only clouds in the sky were high and thin — barely dimming the sun. Dave picked me up at my yurt and we drove to the Brown County Inn, where Dave and his partner, Nancy, were staying. At the appointed time, we set up our folding chairs just south of the inn’s miniature-golf course and shuffleboard court.

Next to where I was screwing my dinky Nikon camera onto a tripod, Steve Dubovich was adjusting his more impressive-looking camera with a giant lens. He said that he and his wife, Deb, had planned the trip just a couple of weeks earlier and were looking forward to a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience.

“I’m hoping I get my settings right,” Dubovich, who hails from Hebron, Ind., told me. “I’m trying different settings on the camera, just to get that nice halo on a total eclipse.”

Across the street, Jim Hutchinson — a retired astronomer from Atlanta — was setting up a spotting scope at the town’s Hoosier Fest celebration. He used the small telescope to project images of the partial eclipse onto a sheet of cardboard.

“It’s a lot safer to do it this way,” he explained.

Hutchinson said he’s particularly concerned about eye safety because a childhood accident blinded him in one eye. “I have only one eye, so I don’t want to take the chance of looking at the sun through the glasses — although they’re probably perfectly safe.”

Sam Bracken brought his “Celtic Pig” food truck to Hoosier Fest, and was waiting for business to pick up as totality approached. He planned to get out of the truck by 3:05 p.m. and take a look at the blacked-out sun for himself. “Nobody’s going to be ordering food when the eclipse starts,” Bracken said.

So what was he looking forward to the most? “Making money today, to be honest,” he replied. “I wouldn’t have traveled to see this if it wasn’t for the opportunity to make some money.”

There wasn’t exactly an overflow crowd of onlookers for the countdown to totality, but as the sun’s disk turned into a crescent — and then into a bright fingernail — the hubbub grew. At T-minus-2 minutes, the light faded rapidly to twilight. And then, in a flash, the sun turned black. Stars were visible in a night-like sky, and the hubbub turned into hoots of joy. Some of those hoots were mine.

After four minutes of looking and hooting, the light returned. I reviewed the photos I took. Frankly, they were embarrassing. But I had resolved to look on the bright side, and Steve Dubovich did as well.

“I’d say I’m pretty happy,” Dubovich told me. “Hey, we could have had clouds out there and all kinds of stuff.”

Kevin Lisota, Kurt Schlosser and I all witnessed something that would have struck ancient humans as terrible magic. Maybe all of our best-laid plans went somewhat astray, but that’s what you have to expect from Mother Nature — and from human nature as well.

It’s prime time for eclipse-chasers: A total solar eclipse will trace a line from coast to coast on Monday, and the anticipation is at its peak. So are the travel costs.

Hard-core eclipse fans made their travel arrangements long ago. That was also the case back in 2017, when a similar all-American solar eclipse turned central Oregon into one of the nation’s hottest hotspots (made even hotter by that summer’s wildfires). Witnessing a total solar eclipse in person is something everyone ought to do at least once in their life, and if you want to get in on the experience this time around, it’s still possible.

I should know: That’s exactly what I’m doing.

Last week, I caught a cold at exactly the wrong time to go ahead with my meticulously planned, 14-day road trip to a viewing spot near Austin, Texas. I was resigned to passing up totality. Then, on Thursday, I received a text from my brother in the Cincinnati area, inviting me to join him for an eclipse expedition to Indiana.

Why not, I thought. After a couple of hours of online searching, I snagged the last room available at a resort near Nashville, Ind., at $300 for Sunday night — and I reserved a $1,030 flight from Seattle to Cincinnati, with my brother picking me up. If I needed a rental car, that would have been another $500 or so.

I’m bracing myself for the hordes of visitors, the horrors of eclipse-day traffic and the hang-ups in wireless internet service that you have to expect in the zone of totality. And I’m reminding myself that the experience of seeing day turn to night for a few minutes, with a black sun hanging over a cheering crowd, should be as magical as it was when I saw my first total solar eclipse 45 years ago.

Even if you don’t think it’s worth making an expensive dash to the zone of totality, there are ways to get in on the fun online — or see the eclipse’s partial phase in skies closer to home, provided you have the right equipment.

Seeing the partial eclipse

If you’re in the Pacific Northwest, you probably won’t even notice Monday’s eclipse unless you know in advance and have the proper viewing equipment at the ready. For example, in the skies over Seattle, only 20% of the sun’s disk will be obscured, which barely makes a difference to the naked eye.

The partial eclipse begins at 10:38 a.m. PT and ends at 12:21 p.m., with maximum eclipse at 11:29 a.m. Speaking of the naked eye, don’t try to gaze directly at the sun during that time. The partially eclipsed sun is way too bright, and you can damage your eyes if you look too long.

To stay safe, you can use eclipse glasses, which can still be ordered online with a chance of pre-eclipse delivery (but make sure the vendor is reputable). You can construct a pinhole camera over the weekend, following NASA’s instructions. Or you can use a colander or your knitted-together fingers to try projecting crescent-shaped patterns onto a sidewalk.

To witness a partial eclipse, the sun has to be visible in the sky — which can be a problem for Seattleites in April. And sure enough, the forecast calls for mostly cloudy skies on Monday.

Where can you go? The New York Times provides an interactive cloud-forecast map that reflects the outlook for the entire country on eclipse day. You can also go to the National Weather Service’s graphical forecast map, advance the time frame to April 8, and check the regional sky cover percentages.

Based on current forecasts, your best bet in Washington state would be the Tri-Cities region. It may not be worth making the drive from Seattle for the eclipse alone, but I’ll just note that the area abounds with wineries.

Taking in totality online

Watching a total eclipse on a computer screen is nothing like experiencing it in person, but it might be the best you can do if you’re stuck beneath Seattle’s clouds. Fortunately, NASA is planning a big show from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. PT on Monday, with live shots potentially coming from more than a dozen locations along the track of totality. There’ll also be a telescope-only video feed tracking the eclipse.

San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum is planning its own array of live webcasts from locales in Texas and Mexico. Other webcasts will be available from TimeAndDate.com and the University of Maine. And just in case you prefer to get your video from television rather than the internet, TV networks are planning live coverage at midday Monday.

If you’re looking for an online-only twist to Monday’s eclipse coverage, check out Twitch.tv/esportnealive from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. PT. Twitch has teamed up with NASA, Epic Games/Microsoft and the National Esports Association to create eclipse-themed versions of Fortnite and Minecraft, and a livestream of the gameplay by a handful of streamers will appear alongside live eclipse footage from NASA.

Eclipse coverage has come a long way since 1979, when I saw my first total solar eclipse at the Goldendale Observatory, near the banks of the Columbia River. I can only imagine what it’ll be like when America’s heartland has its next rendezvous with totality in 2045. If I’m lucky, I’ll be around to see it — perhaps via telepresence, or maybe as I’m riding in my autonomously guided flying car.

Next week, check back for recaps of the GeekWire team’s experiences in Nashville, Ind., and other locales in the eclipse zone.

If the fates decided differently, Air Force test pilot Ed Dwight could have become NASA’s first Black astronaut in the 1960s — but he lost out, amid racial controversy. Now he’s in line to travel to space with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

Blue Origin listed the 90-year-old Dwight among six people who’ll be on its New Shepard suborbital rocket ship when it resumes crewed flights, on a date yet to be announced. Crewed flights were suspended after an uncrewed research mission went awry in 2022, but a repeat of that uncrewed mission went off without a hitch last December.

Dwight, who became a sculptor after resigning from the Air Force as a captain in 1966, will have his flight sponsored by Space for Humanity and by the Jaison and Jamie Robinson Foundation, which was created by the founders of Seattle-based Dream Variation Ventures.

Dwight’s life story is featured in a National Geographic documentary titled “The Space Race.” In 1961, he was chosen to enter an Air Force flight training program that was regarded as a pathway to NASA’s astronaut corps, and went on to win an Air Force recommendation to join NASA. But Dwight was passed over — and he later said that racism was to blame.

“My hope was just getting into space in any kind of way,” Dwight said in the documentary, “but they were not going to let that happen.”

It would be another two decades before Guion Bluford Jr. became the first Black American in space in 1983.

This isn’t the first time Blue Origin has put a would-be pioneer astronaut on its crew list. The quartet for the company’s first crewed flight in 2021 included Wally Funk, a member of the “Mercury 13” group of women fliers who missed out on joining NASA’s early astronaut corps.

Dwight could be in line to attain a different kind of distinction in space history: As of now, the oldest person to reach space, albeit on a suborbital trip, is William Shatner, the star of the first set of “Star Trek” TV shows and movies. His age was 90 years and 205 days at the time of his flight in October 2021. Dwight is currently 90 years and 208 days old. He could thus wrest away Shatner’s space title. (Blue Origin said “the flight date will be announced soon.”)

The other five people on the list for New Shepard’s next crewed flight are:

• Mason Angel, the founder of Industrious Ventures, a Denver-based venture capital fund supporting early-stage companies that enable or progress new industrial revolutions.
• Sylvain Chiron, the founder of Brasserie du Mont Blanc, one of the largest craft breweries in France.
• Kenneth L. Hess, a software engineer and entrepreneur who developed the Family Tree Maker product line in the 1990s. The genealogy tech company was acquired by Ancestry.com in 2003. In 2001, Hess founded Science Buddies, a K-12 nonprofit that’s based in California and focuses on STEM literacy.
• Carol Schaller, a retired CPA and adventure traveler who lives on a farm in Lumberville, Pa., with her husband of 40 years.
• Gopi Thotakura, co-founder of Preserve Life Corp., a global center for holistic wellness and applied health located near Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. In addition to flying jets commercially, Thotakura pilots bush planes, aerobatic planes and seaplanes, as well as gliders and hot air balloons, and has served as an international medical jet pilot.

Blue Origin said each spaceflier will carry a postcard to space on behalf of the company’s Club for the Future. The nonprofit effort aims to get students involved in Blue Origin’s space program through educational activities, including an all-digital method to create and send postcards that are loaded onto a hard drive for New Shepard missions. After each mission, students are emailed instructions for accessing their cards. (The Club for the Future also accepts on-paper postcards.)

The next mission will mark the 25th New Shepard flight — a tally that takes in six previous crewed missions and 18 uncrewed missions since 2015. Thirty-one spacefliers have taken rides in New Shepard’s space capsule to heights beyond the 100-kilometer (62-mile) Karman Line that currently serves as the internationally accepted boundary for spaceflight. (U.S. agencies use a 50-mile standard instead.)

Blue Origin’s flight arrangements are made privately, and it hasn’t disclosed how much its spaceflight customers are paying. Just after the first crewed flight in 2021, Jeff Bezos said the Kent, Wash.-based company was “approaching $100 million in private sales already, and demand is very, very high.”

Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, has said that she intends to lead an all-female New Shepard crew on a suborbital flight that she hopes will take place this year. In an interview published by Vogue last December, Sanchez said the fliers would be remarkable people who are “paving the way for women,” but few other details about her plans have come to light.

Clarification for 4 p.m. PT April 4: In an earlier version of this report, I referred to Guion Bluford Jr. as NASA’s first Black astronaut. NASA considers Robert Lawrence (1935-1967) to be the first African-American astronaut, although he was never able to join the space agency’s astronaut corps.

Lawrence was selected by the Air Force to join the Manned Orbiting Laboratory program in 1967, but died in a plane crash later that year. NASA said “it is virtually certain” that Lawrence would have been transferred to NASA had he lived, and today he’s typically included in lists of U.S. astronauts.

I’ve also added a few days to Ed Dwight’s age, based on his Wikipedia entry.

A Seattle-area startup called Radian Aerospace is fine-tuning the design of its orbital space plane, with an eye toward building a subscale prototype as early as this year.

The company is also in the midst of a fresh round of fundraising, following up on $27.5 million in investment that was announced in 2022, according to Livingston Holder, Radian’s co-founder and chief technology officer. “That round will be larger,” Holder told GeekWire.

Over the past two years, Radian has made progress on an ambitious plan to create a reusable winged space plane that would be launched toward low Earth orbit by a rocket-propelled sled and its own rocket engines. The single-stage-to-orbit concept, or SSTO, has been called a “holy grail” for cheap access to space.

Holder knows the challenges well: In the 1990s, he was part of the Boeing team that was involved in an SSTO project for NASA called the X-33 — a project that was terminated in 2001. For more than a decade, Holder hung onto his hopes for the holy grail, and got his chance to renew the quest when he and other aerospace industry veterans founded Radian in 2016.

“Materials have improved significantly on the composite side,” he said. “There’s been a lot of learning. I’ve been around for a long time, but the learning is accelerating as we have more tools for analysis, and smarter people to do the analysis.”

The company’s space plane, dubbed Radian One, will be built out of carbon matrix composites and beefed up with a thermal protection system that’s already begun to undergo testing in partnership with NASA’s Glenn Research Center in Ohio. Radian One is designed to carry up to five crew members to low Earth orbit, with as much as 5,000 pounds of payload going up and 10,000 pounds going down.

The plans for Radian One’s propulsion system have been revised to go with methane and liquid oxygen as propellants, instead of the LOX-kerosene mix that had been previously planned. The earlier design had three rocket engines on the space plane, but the newly released design provides for five engines. Holder declined to specify how powerful those engines would be, except to say that they’d pack more than the 200,000 pounds of thrust specified in the earlier design. The engines are to be built in partnership with a company yet to be named publicly.

Three additional rocket engines on Radian One’s sled launcher would provide an initial push lasting roughly 20 seconds. When engines on the space plane near the end of their operating life, they could be swapped out for use on the sled. “We don’t have to have the tip-top performance of going all the way to orbit,” Holder explained. “It gives us a good way to use the older engines for that sled system.”

Radian’s first-generation rocket engines were tested at a facility in Bremerton, Wash., and Holder said that facility could be used for next-generation testing as well. Other Pacific Northwest connections have to do with carbon-composite construction: Holder said a prototype propellant tank was built using a robotic system at the University of Washington’s Advanced Composites Center, in partnership with Janicki Industries and Electroimpact.

Technically speaking, Radian considers Renton, Wash., to be its current base of operations — but its workforce is widely distributed. Holder said the company’s staff has risen to about two dozen, “and when we start looking at the subcontracts team and folks we’re leveraging, the headcount would go up to about 50 FTE [full-time-equivalent employees].”

Once Radian completes its next fundraising round, it’s likely to expand its footprint in the Seattle area. “We’re looking for a design experience center, where we’ll bring some of our larger hardware pieces together and start integrating that hardware,” Holder said.

Holder hinted that Radian’s work may not remain behind closed doors for long. “Something that will pop up on the horizon, probably a little bit later this year, is a prototype vehicle that we’re going to fly,” he said. “It’s a subscale unit. It’ll have the correct shape of our vehicle and will give us our first insight to the true flight characteristics of this system. It’s subsonic. It’s not going to be too fancy. But it’s a good learning opportunity for us.”

The company aims to put the full-scale Radian One through its first flight by 2030, which is prime time for NASA’s transition from the International Space Station to a new generation of commercial space stations. Those orbital outposts could include Axiom Station and Starlab — as well as Orbital Reef, a project planned by Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, Sierra Space, Boeing and other partners. (For what it’s worth, one of the early investors in Radian was Dylan Taylor, chairman and CEO of Voyager Space, which is one of the partners in the Starlab space station project.)

Holder said Radian One could also play a part in Defense Department missions relating to intelligence, surveillance, reconnaissance and space domain awareness. The space plane concept is meant to support on-demand launch within 90 minutes, the capability to land on any runway that’s long enough, and a 48-hour mission turnaround time.

“It helps us quickly get a system in orbit that can observe something that may have just popped up on the world stage right away,” Holder explained.

Of course, Radian isn’t the only private venture going after the market for orbital transport. Better-known companies — such as SpaceX, Boeing and Lockheed Martin — are widely thought to have the inside track. But Holder argued that Radian Aerospace could still find a profitable niche in the future orbital ecosystem.

He pointed to the evolution of terrestrial transportation systems as a precedent. “When you build a building, you have big 18-wheelers that bring up large pieces, panel vans that bring up the sheetrock, and pickup trucks and automobiles that bring the workforce. All of these different elements are needed in the future space transportation architecture, because they each have a specific role to play,” he said.

“I think we’re more of a system that brings fewer workers and a little bit of the cargo, as opposed to the big infrastructure,” Holder said. “Once you get that big infrastructure up, you’re going to need folks to service it. So, you’re not going to drive an 18-wheeler to bring the work crew. You’ll bring us.”

After a seven-year gap, a total solar eclipse is once again due to make a coast-to-coast run across North America, boosting popular interest (and airfares) to astronomical proportions.

The track of totality for the April 8 eclipse doesn’t come anywhere close to the Pacific Northwest. That’s in contrast to the 2017 total solar eclipse, when the moon’s shadow crossed the Oregon coast to begin its continent-spanning sweep.

You can still get in on the thrill of the event. It’s not too late to book a last-minute trip to someplace within driving distance of the total eclipse’s path, which stretches from Mexico up through Texas and the Midwest to the northeastern U.S. and Atlantic Canada. It’s just going to cost you.

Outside the track of totality, a partial solar eclipse will be visible throughout Canada, Mexico and the Lower 48 states. That’s assuming skies are clear, which is nowhere near a sure thing for the Pacific Northwest in April. Even if the sun is visible, you’ll want to make sure you see the eclipse safely.

There’s one almost surefire way to catch totality, and that’s to watch it online. It’s no substitute for experiencing darkness at midday in person, but it’s a no-muss, no-fuss, low-cost way to get in on the action. And it might well whet your appetite for the next eclipse opportunity.

Here are further details about the three main options:

Hit the road

Hardcore eclipse fans started making their travel reservations years ago — and whether you’re heading for Austin, Texas, or Rochester, N.Y., you’re likely to find that prices are sky-high.

Total solar eclipses occur when the sun, moon and Earth are lined up so precisely that the moon blots out the entire disk of the sun, creating a spot-shaped shadow that measures roughly 115 miles wide and races eastward as the sun moves westward in the sky.

Thousands of eclipse-watchers will be flocking to that relatively narrow band of real estate for the big day, driving up the price of travel. Take Dallas, for example: The lowest fare for a SEA-DFW round-trip flight bracketing April 8, with no more than one intermediate stop each way, is more than $1,000. Nonstops are more than $2,000. In comparison, your typical SEA-DFW nonstop could be less than $500 a week later.

Hotel rates are going up as well: Last week, Amadeus reported a 76% rise in Dallas’ nightly rates for the eclipse time frame — and noted a rise of more than 300% in places that are farther from the beaten track, such as Poplar Bluff, Mo.; and Burlington, Vt.

Rental cars are becoming harder to come by in the eclipse zone — and getting around is sure to become harder as well. Eclipse cartographer Michael Zeiler projects that roughly 1 million to 4 million people will be traveling from outside the track of totality to inside the line, and as many as a million of those visitors are expected to target Texas.

Even NASA is concerned about the traffic tie-ups. “We want to make sure that we’re looking out for the pedestrians,” Jim Free, the agency’s associate administrator, said today during an eclipse preview. “Please don’t just stop on the side of the road. It’s really important to make sure that we stay focused on everyone around us. People are probably going to be stopped, and so be careful.”

Just look up

Staying put at home is one way to beat the eclipse traffic, and dodge the travel costs as well. The downside is that you’ll miss out on experiencing totality in the flesh — and if the weather doesn’t cooperate, you could miss out on the whole event.

The weather forecast for the Seattle area doesn’t offer a lot of hope on that score. According to the Weather Channel, skies will be partly cloudy on April 8, with a chance of rain.

That forecast could change, perhaps for the better, as we get closer to the big day — so it’s prudent to have your eclipse glasses at the ready. Gazing at the sun during a partial eclipse can cause lasting eye damage unless you take protective measures.

It’s still possible to order eclipse glasses online for delivery by next week, but make sure you get them from a certified supplier rather than a scammer. For guidance, check out the American Astronomical Society’s website.

Branches of the Seattle Public Library have been distributing free eclipse glasses on a first-come, first-served basis to patrons who ask for them. Before you head out to your local branch, call ahead to make sure the glasses are still available.

You can also observe the partial eclipse indirectly by making a pinhole camera or just folding your fingers together.

Whatever you do, don’t expect a life-changing spectacle. As seen from Seattle, the partial solar eclipse will last from 10:39 a.m. to 12:21 p.m. PT on April 8, and at its peak, the moon’s disk will cover less than a third of the sun’s disk. It’ll look as if someone has taken a bite out of the sun — but not that big of a bite. If you didn’t know the eclipse was happening, you probably wouldn’t notice.

Watch it online

NASA has taken notice: The space agency is going wall-to-wall with online eclipse coverage from more than a dozen locales along the track of totality, running from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. PT.

“We will have telescope feeds as well as experts talking about the science of the eclipse and other science that NASA does with the sun,” Kelly Korreck, NASA program manager for the solar eclipse, told GeekWire. “We will be located in 13 different ‘sunspots.’ A sunspot on the sun is a place of intense magnetic activity, and so we’re going to have some intense activity around eclipses in the sunspots along the path.”

In addition to the online festivities, there’ll be live events at the “sunspot” sites — ranging from Kerrville, Texas, to Houlton, Maine, with the Cotton Bowl and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway in between. Check out NASA’s news release for the full schedule and video links.

San Francisco’s Exploratorium museum is getting in on the action as well, with livestreams from Texas and Mexico starting at 10 a.m. PT. Other webcasts will be available from TimeAndDate.com and the University of Maine.

If you totally miss out on the total eclipse, don’t fret: There’ll be other opportunities to embrace the darkness — that is, if you’re willing to travel. The next total solar eclipse will trace a path from the Arctic across the Atlantic to northern Spain in 2026. And the next opportunity to see totality across a coast-to-coast swath of the U.S. will come in 2045.

Scientists have verified that a method to look for cellular life on Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter, just might work. The technique could be put to the test in the 2030s, when NASA’s Europa Clipper probe is due to make multiple flybys over the Jovian moon.

The technique involves analyzing grains of ice that scientists expect one of the instruments on Europa Clipper — known as the Surface Dust Analyzer, or SUDA — to pick up as it flies through plumes of frozen water rising up from Europa’s surface.

“It’s astonishing how the analysis of these tiny ice grains may tell us whether or not there is life on an icy moon. At least we now know that SUDA has these capabilities,” University of Washington planetary scientist Fabian Klenner told GeekWire in an email. Klenner is the lead author of a research paper about the process, published today in the open-access journal Science Advances.

SUDA will be capable of analyzing the chemical content of material that hits its detector, using a process called impact ionization mass spectrometry. The key feature of the process described by Klenner and his colleagues is that the analysis would be done on single ice grains, rather than on a blizzard of ice particles. That way, scientists can focus on individual grains that might hold a high concentration of the ingredients of a single cell.

Several moons of Jupiter and Saturn — including Europa, Callisto, Ganymede and Enceladus — are thought to harbor reservoirs of liquid water covered by ice. Observations made during NASA’s Cassini mission to Saturn indicated that the plumes of ice grains emanating from Enceladus’ hidden seas through its icy surface contain a diverse complement of organic compounds. That has led scientists to suspect that something similar might be found on Europa.

“There are many ice grains around Europa because interplanetary meteoroids impact on Europa’s surface and produce a tenuous cloud of ice grains around the moon — a paradise for an instrument like SUDA,” Klenner said.

The idea of seeking out chemical traces of life in the stuff coming up from Europa goes at least as far back as the 1990s, when physicist Freeman Dyson suggested looking for “freeze-dried fish in the ring of space debris orbiting Jupiter.” Freeze-dried fish might be too much to ask, but bits of Europan ice could conceivable contain cellular life, or at least fragments of cells.

To test SUDA’s capabilities, Klenner and his colleagues conducted simulations using similar equipment in their lab. They sent a spray of water droplets containing bacteria and bacterial fragments through their laser-equipped lab device, in such a way that individual droplets could be analyzed.

The experimental equipment was able to make out the chemical signature of the bacteria in the droplets that contained cellular material. The signature of the cells was clearer in the smaller droplets, but it was also detectable in droplets that were at the high end of what the scientists expect to see when SUDA is on the case.

One mode of operation, focusing on positively charged ions, was better-suited for detecting amino acids. The other mode, which looked for negatively charged ions, worked better for identifying fatty acids.

The newly published findings will be fed into the preparations for the Europa Clipper mission. The spacecraft is due for launch in October — and should go into orbit around Jupiter in 2030 to begin four years of scientific observations. One of the co-authors of the Science Advances study, Sascha Kempf, is the principal investigator for the SUDA instrument.

“Our results certainly affect the way we will interpret data returned by SUDA and similar instruments,” Klenner said. “I am personally very curious about the anion measurements [relating to negatively charged ions] because fatty acids, which are contained in bacterial lipids, like to form anions. And our results show that fatty acid patterns can tell us whether or not they came from a bacterial cell.”

A different study published earlier this week by Science Advances determined that Europa’s icy shell is probably more than 20 kilometers (12 miles) thick — so thick that layers of ice could be turning over continually. Klenner noted that the authors of that study say “there are regions in the conductive lid layer, so-called melt pools, which may cause exchange from the surface with the ocean.”

“If Europa Clipper confirms that there are indeed ice-ocean exchange processes, then this moon has a mechanism to transport material from the ocean to the surface, and the instruments on board Europa Clipper could analyze material that once came from the ocean — maybe even cellular material, if present at all,” he said.

SUDA isn’t the only instrument that’s likely to be capable of identifying cellular material in a grain of ice. Klenner and his colleagues note that impact ionization mass spectrometers with similar capabilities are being considered for future missions to Enceladus, as well as for NASA’s Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe and Japan’s DESTINY+ mission to the asteroid Phaeton.

In addition to Klenner and Kempf, co-authors of the study published by Science Advances, “How to Identify Cell Material in a Single Ice Grain Emitted From Enceladus or Europa,” include Janine Bönigk, Maryse Napoleoni, Jon Hillier, Nozair Khawaja, Karen Olsson-Francis, Morgan Cable, Michael Malaska, Bernd Abel and Frank Postberg.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says that technology for its Blue Ring orbital platform will be put to the test during an upcoming mission sponsored by the Pentagon’s Defense Innovation Unit.

Blue Ring is a multi-mission, multi-orbit vehicle that’s being developed to facilitate logistical services in orbit. The Pentagon-backed mission, known as DarkSky-1, will demonstrate Blue Origin’s flight system, including space-based data processing and storage capabilities, ground-based radiometric tracking and Blue Ring’s telemetry, tracking and command hardware, also known as TT&C.

“The lessons learned from this DS-1 mission will provide a leap forward for Blue Ring and its ability to provide greater access to multiple orbits, bringing us closer to our vision of millions of people living and working in space for the benefit of Earth,” Paul Ebertz, senior vice president of Blue Origin’s In-Space Systems business unit, said today in a news release.

Blue Origin said the DarkSky-1 system is expected to be launched as a payload on a future national-security space launch manifested by the U.S. Space Force. It said the launch service provider and the specific time frame for launch have not been disclosed; however, a license application filed with the Federal Communications Commission says the launch is expected to occur in the fourth quarter of 2024.

The application says that the payload will remain attached to the launch vehicle’s upper stage and trace an elliptical orbit ranging in altitude between 2,500 and 21,000 kilometers (1,550 to 13,000 miles). Mission duration would be no more than 12 hours, Blue Origin says in the application.

Although Blue Origin didn’t specify the cost of the mission, contract filings show that the Defense Department has awarded the company $4.9 million for the development of multi-orbit logistics vehicles.

We’ve reached out to Blue Origin for further information and will update this report with any response.

Seattle-based Interlune officially lifted the curtain today on its plans to build a robotic harvester that could extract helium-3 from moon dirt and send it back to Earth for applications ranging from quantum computing to fusion power.

Rob Meyerson, a co-founder of the startup and former president of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, told GeekWire that an initial prospecting mission could be launched as early as 2026, with commercial operations beginning in the 2030s.

“For the first time in history, harvesting natural resources from the moon is technologically and economically feasible,” Meyerson said today in a news release. “With our uniquely experienced and qualified team, Interlune is creating the core technologies to extract and process lunar resources responsibly to serve a wide range of customers.”

Today’s announcement confirmed previous reports that Interlune has raised $18 million in seed capital, including angel investments as well as more than $15 million in funding that was reported in a regulatory filing last month.

That funding round was led by Seven Seven Six, Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian’s venture firm, with participation by other investors including Aurelia Foundry Fund, Gaingels, Liquid 2 Ventures, Shasta Ventures and alumni from the University of Michigan (where Meyerson went to school).

“We invested in Interlune because access to the ample cache of helium-3 and other precious natural resources on the moon and beyond will unlock or accelerate technological advancements currently hindered by lack of supply,” Ohanian said.

Katelin Holloway, a founding partner of Seven Seven Six, will join Interlune’s board of directors. “What captivates me most [about Interlune] is their unique position to transform decades of technological advancements into near-term reality, giving hope that my grandmother and young sons might soon witness history in their shared lifetime,” Holloway said.

In addition to Meyerson, Interlune’s founding team includes Gary Lai, who served as Blue Origin’s chief architect and is now chief technology officer at Interlune; executive chairman Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon as an Apollo 17 astronaut and served a term in the U.S. Senate; chief operating officer Indra Hornsby, an aerospace executive with previous experience at Rocket Lab and BlackSky; and head of product James Antifaev, a tech executive whose resume includes stints at Spaceflight Inc., Alphabet’s Loon venture and Maxar Technologies.

‘This is a big vision’

The first outlines of Interlune’s business plan came to light last October, but today Meyerson delved more deeply into the company’s vision for bringing valuable lunar resources back to Earth. “This is a big vision, but we’re closer than you think,” he told GeekWire. “We’re just at the very beginning, and we’re going to see a ramp-up of operational missions to the moon here in the coming years.”

Interlune aims to take advantage of other companies’ commercial services for delivering payloads to the moon — and eventually bringing lunar materials back to Earth as well. The business plan would also leverage existing efforts to develop lunar rovers — including NASA’s Lunar Terrain Vehicle, or LTV.

Meyerson said the company’s key technologies have to do with excavating, extracting and separating out helium-3 from lunar soil. “The methods we’ve created for that use an order of magnitude less power than the common technologies that NASA has been promoting,” he said. Last year, Interlune won a $246,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work on its soil-sorting technology.

Helium-3 — a stable isotope that’s lighter than the much more common helium-4 that fills up party balloons — has been talked up in recent years as a coolant for quantum computers. It also has national-security applications for detecting nuclear material, and medical applications for lung imaging.

Perhaps the best-known potential use of helium-3 is as a fuel for commercial fusion reactors. For example, Everett, Wash.-based Helion Energy and Princeton Fusion Systems plan to use helium-3 and deuterium in their reactors.

The problem is that helium-3 is extremely rare and expensive on Earth. The price has fluctuated dramatically in recent years. In 2020, the price jumped to more than $2,750 per liter, which would be more than $500,000 an ounce.

That’s why Interlune is looking toward the moon: Helium-3 is more abundant on the lunar surface, thanks to accumulations deposited by the solar wind. Interlune’s robotic harvester would churn through huge volumes of lunar rocks and soil, also known as regolith, to extract the helium-3.

“We process many tons of regolith, and we expect to bring back a few kilograms of gaseous helium-3 back to Earth at a time,” Meyerson said. (For what it’s worth, lunar helium-3 mining was featured in the 2009 sci-fi film “Moon.”)

Meyerson emphasized that Interlune would take a “sustainable and responsible” approach to excavation and extraction. “This area that we’re harvesting will look like a tilled field rather than a strip mine,” he said.

Bottles of helium-3 could be transported from the moon to Earth via reusable space vehicles such as SpaceX’s lunar Starship lander or Blue Origin’s Blue Moon lander. “We’ll rely on landers being developed by other companies under the Artemis program and CLPS [Commercial Lunar Payload Services] program, depending on the mission,” Meyerson said.

Looking ahead to the 2030s

Meyerson said Interlune’s development plan calls for sending a small-scale prospecting payload to the moon by as early as late 2026 on a commercial lander. That mission would “measure the helium-3 in the lunar soil and demonstrate that we can extract that helium-3, but not bring anything back to Earth,” he said.

A follow-up mission in 2028 would set up a pilot plant to test Interlune’s robotic harvester and demonstrate the ability to send helium-3 back to Earth. “In 2030, we want to deploy our operational plan to do all that at scale, and start to sell to customers in the 2030s,” Meyerson said.

He said the current trends in prices for helium-3 boost his confidence that “we can go to the moon and bring back small amounts of helium-3 to sell to the market, and do it at a positive gross margin, based on our design and our assumptions about our mission architecture.”

Interlune plans to go after other lunar resources as well.

“Over the long term, we’ll use the head start that we created by going after helium-3 to create an in-space economy by selling water, rocket propellants, industrial materials and construction materials to companies doing business in space,” Meyerson said. “I believe in a long-term space economy, and believe strongly that this go-to-market approach, starting with helium-3, is the right way to get there.”

Meyerson says Interlune’s vision meshes with the space vision being pursued by his former employer.

“Blue Origin is going to be a very important partner for what we’re doing,” Meyerson said. “The Blue Alchemist program is focused on producing solar arrays and oxygen. For Blue Moon, they’re going to need hydrogen. They’re going to need other things, and they’re also going to need customers. Interlune can be one of those customers, and we can also be a complementary partner. We look forward to finding ways to work together. We certainly know the company well.”

Bellevue, Wash.-based Lumen Orbit, a startup that’s only about three months old, says that it’s closed a $2.4 million pre-seed investment round to launch its plan to put hundreds of satellites in orbit, with the goal of processing data in space before it’s downlinked to customers on Earth.

The investors include Nebular, Caffeinated Capital, Plug & Play, Everywhere Ventures, Tiny.vc, Sterling Road, Pareto Holdings and Foreword Ventures. There are also more than 20 angel investors, including four Sequoia Scouts investing through the Sequoia Scout Fund. “The round was 3x oversubscribed,” Lumen CEO and co-founder Philip Johnston told GeekWire in an email.

Johnston is a former associate at McKinsey & Co. who also co-founded an e-commerce venture called Opontia. Lumen’s other co-founders are chief technology officer Ezra Feilden, whose resume includes engineering experience at Oxford Space Systems and Airbus Defense and Space; and chief engineer Adi Oltean, who worked as a principal software engineer at SpaceX’s Starlink facility in Redmond, Wash.

“We started Lumen with the mission of launching a constellation of orbital data centers for in-space edge processing,” Oltean explained in an email. “Essentially, other satellites will send our constellation the raw data they collect. Using our on-board GPUs, we will run AI models of their choosing to extract insights, which we will then downlink for them. This will save bandwidth downlinking large amounts of raw data and associated cost and latency.”

Lumen’s business plan calls for deploying about 300 satellites in very low Earth orbit, at an altitude of about 315 kilometers (195 miles). The first satellite would be a 60-kilogram (132-pound) demonstrator that’s due for launch in May 2025 as a rideshare payload on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.

Johnston said Lumen is partnering with Ansys and Solidworks on satellite design and development, and is in the process of filing applications with the Federal Communications Commission and the International Telecommunication Union.

What about customers? “We have several MOUs [memorandums of understanding] for more than $30 million, and we have a paying customer flying with us on our first demonstrator,” Johnston said. He said the $2.4 million investment round “gets us a launched, revenue-generating prototype in 16 months.”

“At the end of 2025 we will launch a full-scale prototype,” Johnston said. “Six months after that, we will launch the first orbital plane of eight [satellites], and six to 12 months after that, we will launch the first five orbital rings.”

Lumen Space’s founders aren’t the only ones aiming to put data centers in orbit: ASCEND, a project funded by the European Union, has been looking into the feasibility of creating a fleet of space-based data centers, with Thales Alenia Space taking a leading role. And Texas-based Axiom Space says it’s partnering with Kepler Space and Skyloom to set up an orbital data center on Axiom’s first space module, which is due for launch in the 2026-2027 time frame.

Rob Meyerson, a longtime aerospace executive who’s the former president of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture and a current member of Axiom Space’s board of directors, told GeekWire back in 2021 that in-orbit data storage and processing was one of the space industry’s most attractive new markets.

Today, Johnston said he doesn’t regard Axiom’s planned data center as competition for what Lumen has in mind. “We don’t view anyone else as being able to offer the service that we will be able to offer with what is currently publicly available,” he said.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is aiming to send an uncrewed lander to the surface of the moon in the next 12 to 16 months, according to the executive in charge of the development program.

John Couluris, senior vice president for lunar permanence at Blue Origin, provided an update on the company’s moon lander program on CBS’ “60 Minutes” news program on Sunday.

“We’re expecting to land on the moon between 12 and 16 months from today,” Couluris said. “I understand I’m saying that publicly, but that’s what our team is aiming towards.”

Couluris was referring to a pathfinder version of Blue Origin’s nearly three-story-tall Blue Moon Mark 1 cargo lander, which is taking shape at Blue Origin’s production facility in Huntsville, Ala. The Pathfinder Mission would demonstrate the MK1’s capabilities — including its hydrogen-fueled BE-7 engine, its precision landing system and its ability to deliver up to 3 tons of payload anywhere on the moon.

Blue Origin envisions building multiple cargo landers, as well as a crewed version of the Blue Moon lander that could transport NASA astronauts to and from the lunar surface. The MK1 cargo lander is designed for a single launch and delivery, but the crewed lander would be reusable.

“We’ll launch them to lunar orbit, and we’ll leave them there,” Couluris explained. “And we’ll refuel them in orbit, so that multiple astronauts can use the same vehicle back and forth.”

The Pathfinder Mission would be funded by Blue Origin, but NASA is providing support for other Blue Moon missions. Blue Origin’s $3.4 billion contract with NASA calls for the crewed lander to be available for the Artemis 5 moon mission by 2029, with an uncrewed test flight as part of the buildup.

The in-space refueling operation would make use of a cislunar transporter, built by Lockheed Martin, that could travel between low Earth orbit and lunar orbit with supplies. “We are now building with NASA the infrastructure to ensure lunar permanency,” Couluris said.

NASA is providing funding for the Blue Moon landing system as an alternative to SpaceX’s Starship system, which is under development at SpaceX’s Starbase in South Texas. The crewed Starship lunar lander is scheduled to come into play for Artemis 3, a milestone landing mission that’s currently scheduled for 2026.

The “60 Minutes” segment focused on questions surrounding the schedule and cost for the Artemis program — including questions raised by NASA’s Office of the Inspector General. Jim Free, NASA’s associate administrator, acknowledged that the challenges relating to sending astronauts to the moon were “daunting.”

Free said that’s why it’s important to support the development of multiple commercial lunar landers. “If we have a problem with one, we’ll have another one to rely on,” he said on the show. “If we have a dependency on a particular aspect in SpaceX or Blue Origin, and it doesn’t work out, then we have another lander that can take our crews.”

Blue Origin plans to send the MK1 lander to the moon on its reusable New Glenn rocket, which is also under development. A couple of weeks ago, a pathfinder version of that rocket was raised on a Florida launch pad for the first time, and it’s currently going through a series of cryogenic tanking tests.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, who was brought over to the company from Amazon last year to accelerate work on New Glenn, said in a LinkedIn post that he’s “looking forward to bringing this heavy-lift capacity to our customers later this year.” One of the early launches is tasked with sending a pair of NASA probes to Mars.

During last week’s Lake Nona Impact Forum in Florida, Bezos shared the stage with NASA Administrator Bill Nelson to discuss the Blue Moon lander, New Glenn rocket and the connection between Amazon’s origins and Bezos’ goals for Blue Origin.

“I could only start Amazon because the heavy-lifting infrastructure was already in place,” Bezos said. “This is what I want to do for space. I want to take the financial winnings that I got from starting Amazon … and use it to build heavy infrastructure for space, so that the next generation of entrepreneurs can do what I did with Amazon.”

New Glenn, which has faced years of schedule delays, won a strong endorsement from NASA’s chief. “This is a monster of a rocket,” Nelson said.

Update for March 5: Blue Origin says it has completed the initial round of cryogenic tanking tests for its New Glenn rocket. “Rest assured, there’s much more to come,” the company said in a posting to X / Twitter.

For the first time, Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture lifted up an orbital-class New Glenn rocket on its Florida launch pad — with the billionaire boss keeping watch.

“Just incredible to see New Glenn on the pad at LC-36,” Bezos wrote today in an Instagram post that referred to Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. “Big year ahead. Let’s go!”

Blue Origin’s CEO, Dave Limp, agreed that the sight was incredible.

“Its size alone — more than 30 stories high and a 7-meter diameter fairing with 487 cubic meters of capacity — is humbling,” he wrote in a LinkedIn post.

The rocket-raising party marked the climax of New Glenn’s first-ever rollout. “Pending weather, the vehicle will remain on the pad for at least a week for a series of tanking tests, including flowing cryogenic fluids for the first time,” Limp said.

But this pathfinder rocket isn’t destined for liftoff. The coming round of tests will be conducted without New Glenn’s BE-4 rocket engines, which are powered by liquefied natural gas and have been going through tests in Huntsville, Ala., and at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in Texas. Eventually, the rocket will be rolled off the pad — and then an engine-equipped version, incorporating components from the test vehicle’s first stage, will be prepared for launch.

Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin has been launching its suborbital New Shepard rocket ship from Launch Site One for nine years. That rocket is named after NASA astronaut Alan Shepard, who took a milestone suborbital space mission in 1961.

New Glenn — whose name pays tribute to John Glenn, the first U.S. astronaut to go into orbit — is in a different class entirely. The heavy-lift rocket’s reusable first-stage booster is meant to last for at least 25 missions. It’s designed to land itself on a sea-based platform after sending New Glenn’s expendable second stage spaceward. The fairing, or nose cone, is roomy enough to hold three school buses.

New Glenn’s development timeline has faced a series of delays over the years. When Blue Origin revealed the rocket’s design in 2016, Bezos said he expected the first flight to take place “before the end of this decade” — that is, before 2020 — but it’s taken longer than planned to get the BE-4 engines and Blue Origin’s facilities in Florida ready for prime time.

The slower-than-expected pace has drawn unfavorable comparisons to Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which was founded two years after Blue Origin but has grown to become the world’s dominant space launch company.

Bezos said he chose Limp, who previously served as Amazon’s devices chief, to become Blue Origin’s CEO because of his ability to get results quickly. “Dave has an outstanding sense of urgency, brings energy to everything, and helps teams move very fast,” Bezos said in last September’s announcement about Limp’s selection.

In today’s LinkedIn post, Limp insisted that this is the year for New Glenn’s debut.

“Manufacturing continues to make progress with multiple boosters, fairings and second stages in our factory. What a great set of milestones delivered by the team,” he wrote. “We’re looking forward to bringing this heavy-lift capacity to our customers later this year.”

Blue Origin says it has a full customer manifest, with launches penciled in for Telesat, Eutelsat and other telecom providers. The two most prominent customers are NASA, which is counting on New Glenn for the launch of its twin ESCAPADE Mars probes this year; and Amazon, the other tech venture founded by Bezos, which has reserved at least 12 New Glenn launches for its Project Kuiper broadband internet satellites.

Also today, Ars Technica reported that Blue Origin has emerged as the sole finalist to purchase United Launch Alliance, a joint space venture currently co-owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin. The report attributed that information to two unnamed sources, and quoted those sources as saying they expected the sale to be announced within a month or two.

Speculation about the potential sale of ULA has been circulating for months, with the price rumored to be in the range of $2 billion to $3 billion. ULA’s next-generation Vulcan rocket, which made its debut last month, uses Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines on its first stage.

A stealthy space venture co-founded by the former president of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it’s raising funds to move ahead with its plan to harvest resources on the moon and bring them back for use on Earth.

Former Blue Origin executive Rob Meyerson is listed among the executive officers for Interlune in a financial form filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Feb. 1. The form reports that the startup is offering $17.7 million in equity, and that $15.6 million of that total was sold as of the filing date.

The SEC filing says 18 investors have taken part in the offering but does not identify those investors. We’ve reached out to Meyerson for more information and will update this report with anything we can pass along.

Interlune was founded in 2020, but details about the venture were shrouded in secrecy until last October — when one of the venture’s other co-founders, Blue Origin engineer Gary Lai, discussed the company’s vision during an awards banquet at Seattle’s Museum of Flight.

“We aim to be the first company that harvests natural resources from the moon to use here on Earth,” Lai told the audience. “We’re building a completely novel approach to extract those resources, efficiently, cost-effectively and also responsibly. The goal is really to create a sustainable in-space economy.”

This isn’t the first time Interlune has turned to the investment market. A form that was filed with the SEC in 2022 focused on an investment offering that involved an agreement for future equity.

Interlune has also been awarded a $246,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to work on a system to sort out moon dirt by particle size.

This month’s SEC filing lists a Seattle address for the venture, but previous reports have mentioned connections to Tacoma, Wash.; and to Estes Park, Colo.

Meyerson has a long history in the aerospace industry: He’s best-known for his role as Blue Origin’s president from 2003 to 2018, but before joining Bezos’ space company, he served as senior program manager for Kistler Aerospace’s K-1 rocket program and as an aerospace engineer at NASA’s Johnson Space Center.

Since leaving Blue Origin, Meyerson has been a consultant to several aerospace ventures. In 2021 he became a member of the board of directors for Texas-based Axiom Space, which is wrapping up its third crewed mission to the International Space Station this week.

Other executive officers listed on Interlune’s SEC filing include Harrison Schmitt, who walked on the moon during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972; Indra Hornsby, who previously served as an executive at Rocket Lab USA; and Katelin Holloway, who is a founding partner at Seven Seven Six, an early-stage venture capital firm backed by Alexis Ohanian.

NASA’s Artemis program to send astronauts to the moon has heightened interest in concepts for extracting raw materials on the moon.

The top item on the list is water ice — which could theoretically be converted into drinkable water as well as hydrogen fuel and breathable oxygen. But there are other potential resources. For example, Blue Origin is looking into a process for manufacturing solar cells and transmission wire from lunar materials — and some experts say the moon could be mined for resources suitable for export to Earth, ranging from precious metals to helium-3 for future fusion power plants.