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Gravitics will work with Space Force on space station tech

Illustration: Gravitics space station module in orbit
An artist's conception shows a Gravitics space station module in orbit. (Gravitics Illustration)

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.”

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Radical raises $4.5M for stratospheric solar drones

Radical demonstration airplane seen from above during test flight
Radical's demonstration airplane takes a long-duration test flight. (Radical Photo)

Seattle-based Radical says it has raised $4.5 million to support the development of solar-powered, autonomous airplanes that can beam down connectivity and imagery during long-duration, high-altitude flights.

The seed funding round was led by Scout Ventures, with additional funding from other investors including Inflection Mercury Fund and Y Combinator. According to Pitchbook, Radical previously received $500,000 in pre-seed funding from Y Combinator.

Radical’s co-founders are CEO James Thomas and chief technology officer Cyriel Notteboom. Both founders are veterans of Prime Air, Amazon’s effort to field a fleet of delivery drones. They left Amazon in mid-2022 to found Radical — and the aerospace startup is just now coming out of stealth.

Thomas told me that Radical will use the fresh investment to expand its team, which currently amounts to four people. “We’re still a small team, but we’re growing very quickly,” he said. “We’re currently hiring. Those positions are up on our website, with more to come.”

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NASA awards millions to small businesses for space tech

Illustration: New Frontier's Bifrost orbital transfer spacecraft
Artwork shows two views of the Bifröst orbital transfer spacecraft. (New Frontier Aerospace Illustration)

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.

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Amazon drones advance in Arizona, retreat in California

Amazon MK30 drone
Amazon says its next-generation MK30 drone will start making deliveries later this year. (Amazon Photo)

Amazon says it’s gearing up to add a community in Arizona to its list of Prime Air drone delivery zones.

Later this year, customers in the West Valley region of the Phoenix metro area will be able to get their purchases via drones dispatched from Amazon’s Same-Day Delivery site in Tolleson, Ariz., the company said today.

The West Valley region joins College Station in Texas as an Amazon drone delivery site. Last year, Prime Air began free prescription deliveries in 60 minutes or less to customers in College Station, in partnership with Amazon Pharmacy.

For the past two years, Amazon has also been offering drone deliveries in Lockeford, Calif. — but today the company said it would be closing down that delivery site, citing the need to “prioritize our resources to continue growing the program.”

“We’ll offer all current employees opportunities at other sites, and will continue to serve customers in Lockeford with other delivery methods,” Amazon said.

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Fiction Science Club

How de-extinction could change our destiny

Illustration: Woolly mammoth and calf
A woolly mammoth and her calf are shown trudging through frozen steppes in a promotional video from Colossal Biosciences.

It may sound cool to bring back the woolly mammoth after thousands of years of extinction — but Douglas Preston, the author of a novel that features the revival of the mammoths, has his doubts.

“If you take this and game it out to its logical end, you’re going to end up with something really terrifying,” Preston says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

That realization led him to write “Extinction,” a fictional tale that wraps the genetic resurrection of woolly mammoths and other extinct species from the Pleistocene Era into a murder mystery.

“‘Extinction’ does not have any science fiction in it,” the 67-year-old author insists. “This really is actual science that’s being done right now. It is here, and the ability to resurrect these extinct animals is here. … Maybe in my lifetime, we are going to see a de-extincted woolly mammoth, or a creature that looks a lot like a woolly mammoth.”

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Universe Today

How did Pluto get its heart? Scientists suggest an answer

New Horizons view of Pluto
The heart-shaped region of Pluto's surface was formed at least in part by a cataclysmic "splat," scientists say. (Credit: NASA / JHUAPL / SwRI)

The most recognizable feature on Pluto is its “heart,” a relatively bright valentine-shaped area known as Tombaugh Regio. How that heart got started is one of the dwarf planet’s deepest mysteries — but now researchers say they’ve come up with the most likely scenario, involving a primordial collision with a planetary body that was a little more than 400 miles wide.

The scientific term for what happened, according to a study published today in Nature Astronomy, is “splat.”

Astronomers from the University of Bern in Switzerland and the University of Arizona looked for computer simulations that produced dynamical results similar to what’s seen in data from NASA’s New Horizons probe. They found a set of simulations that made for a close match, but also ran counter to previous suggestions that Pluto harbors a deep subsurface ocean. They said their scenario doesn’t depend on the existence of a deep ocean — which could lead scientists to rewrite the history of Pluto’s geological evolution.

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Cosmic Space

Halo Space reveals design for stratospheric tour capsule

Cutaway view of Halo Space Aurora capsule
A cutaway illustration shows the layout of Halo Space's Aurora capsule, with a toilet in the center. (Frank Stephenson Design)

If and when passengers climb into Halo Space’s capsule for a ballooning trip to the stratosphere, they’ll find cushy seats, fold-down receptacles for food and drinks, floor-to-ceiling windows that provide an astronaut’s-eye view of the curving Earth below — and a snug toilet to get them through the hours-long flight.

The interior design for Halo’s capsule, dubbed “The Aurora,” was unveiled on April 11 in London by Halo Space CEO Carlos Mira and famed automotive designer Frank Stephenson.

“Passengers will spend up to six hours inside our spaceship, and we want every minute to be unforgettable,” Mira said in a news release. “Frank and his team have created a capsule to enhance our flight experience, utilizing unique resources, design and technology.”

Halo Space is aiming to begin commercial service by 2026 with ticket prices starting at $164,000. It’s one of several companies targeting the stratospheric tourism market, a lineup that also includes World View, Space Perspective, Zero 2 Infinity and Zephalto.

Although these stratospheric tours are typically marketed as spaceflights, they wouldn’t go anywhere near as high as the suborbital rocket ships built by Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic — 20 to 25 miles for Halo Space, as opposed to 50 miles for Virgin Galactic. On the plus side, the trips would be much less expensive, and arguably less risky.

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Cosmic Science

Pompeii dining hall got Romans talking about Trojan War

Helen and Paris in Pompeii fresco
A wall painting shows Helen of Troy meeting Paris, with a handmaiden and a dog between them. (Credit: Archaeological Park of Pompeii)

Archaeologists in Pompeii have unveiled an ancient Roman banquet hall featuring a cleverly conceived set of frescoes inspired by tales of the Trojan War.

The 50-by-20-foot (15-by-6-meter) room was recently unearthed as part of a project aimed at shoring up the front of a perimeter between the excavated and not-yet-excavated areas of the Pompeii site near Naples, Italy. Pompeii’s archaeological park preserves sites that were buried in ash during the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in the year 79.

During Pompeii’s heyday, the “Black Room” opened onto an open courtyard with a long staircase leading up to the home’s first floor.

The banquet room’s frescoes — portraying heroes and deities associated with the Trojan War — were apparently meant to entertain banquet guests and serve as conversation starters. Gabriel Zuchtriegel, director of the Archaeological Park of Pompeii, said the frescoes took advantage of painterly tricks to serve that purpose.

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GeekWire

Amazon CEO’s letter gives a lift to Kuiper satellite network

United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket sends two prototype Project Kuiper satellites into orbit for Amazon in October 2023. (ULA Photo)
United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket sends two prototype Project Kuiper satellites into orbit for Amazon in October 2023. (ULA Photo)

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.

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Eclipse chasers take three different routes to totality

Diamond-ring effect before total solar eclipse
A diamond-ring effect is visible just before the beginning of a total solar eclipse, as seen from Arkansas. (GeekWire Photo / Kevin Lisota)

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? Check out three tales from GeekWire’s eclipse team.

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