Amazon’s first satellites were launched today on a mission aimed at testing out the hardware and software for the Seattle company’s worldwide Project Kuiper broadband internet constellation.

Two prototype satellites — known as KuiperSat 1 and 2 — rode a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida into space at 2:06 p.m. ET (11:06 a.m. PT).

United Launch Alliance provided updates on what it called the Protoflight mission via its X / Twitter account. In a post-launch statement, ULA declared the mission to be successful and said that the Atlas V “precisely” delivered the satellites to orbit.

The satellites were sent into 311-mile-high (500-kilometer-high) orbits with a 30-degree inclination. In a status update, Amazon said Project Kuiper’s mission operations center in Redmond, Wash., confirmed first contact with both satellites within an hour after launch.

“Five plus years in the making. So much care, persistence, boldness and beauty,” Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said in a posting to Instagram and Threads. “What an amazing endeavor. … Big milestone and much more to come!”

Project Kuiper, an ambitious program that was publicly unveiled in 2019, aims to provide broadband internet access — and satellite-based access to Amazon Web Services — to millions of people who are currently underserved.

Amazon plans to use the prototypes — which were built at Project Kuiper’s HQ in Redmond — to test the hardware on the spacecraft, as well as ground operations and customer terminals.

“We’ve done extensive testing here in our lab and have a high degree of confidence in our satellite design, but there’s no substitute for on-orbit testing,” Rajeev Badyal, vice president of technology for Project Kuiper, said in a launch preview. “This is Amazon’s first time putting satellites into space, and we’re going to learn an incredible amount regardless of how the mission unfolds.”

The results of the tests will factor into further preparations for building production-grade satellites at a factory that’s being set up in Kirkland, Wash. If all goes according to plan, mass production of thousands of satellites will begin early next year, and Amazon will make Project Kuiper service available on a beta testing basis to commercial partners by the end of 2024.

Launch of the prototypes had been delayed for a year due to logistical and technical schedule slips. Most recently, ULA switched the launch from its next-generation Vulcan rocket to the Atlas V, a workhorse rocket that’s nearing retirement.

Amazon is facing schedule pressure from at least two directions: First of all, the terms of Project Kuiper’s license from the Federal Communications Commission require Amazon to have at least half of the 3,236 satellites in its proposed constellation launched by mid-2026.

To meet that requirement, Amazon reserved scores of rocket launches — on Atlas V’s, Vulcans, Ariane 6’s and on the New Glenn rockets currently being developed by Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

Just as importantly, Amazon is trying to catch up with SpaceX and its Starlink satellite internet service, which already has more than 2 million customers.

Dave Limp — who is leaving his longtime post as Amazon’s chief of devices and services to become Blue Origin’s CEO in December — insisted last year during a live-streamed chat session that there’d be room enough in the marketplace for multiple broadband satellite constellations in low Earth orbit.

“I think more constellations is generally good,” he said. “I do think we have some benefits, though, in ours.”

He pointed to the synergies between Project Kuiper and Amazon’s other lines of business, including AWS. He also hinted that Project Kuiper will compete with Starlink on a price basis.

Amazon says it’s committed $10 billion to getting Project Kuiper off the ground. More than 1,000 employees are said to be working on the project, and Amazon’s careers website lists an additional 200-plus open positions — with most of those positions based in Washington state.

Back in 2019, Bezos was asked to identify one of Amazon’s recent “big bets,” and he didn’t hesitate to name Project Kuiper. Will that multibillion-dollar bet pay off? Today’s launch marked a significant step toward finding out.

Even as Starfish Space works to get its first orbital demonstration mission back on track, the Tukwila, Wash.-based startup has won a contract from NASA to look into an even more ambitious project to inspect orbital debris up close.

The newly announced study contract follows up on earlier work that Starfish has done to prove out features of its system for making a rendezvous with other spacecraft in orbit — and either servicing them or guiding them to their demise.

Some of those features — including Starfish’s Cetacean relative navigation software and its Cephalopod autonomous guidance software — could be tested sometime in the next few months on the company’s Otter Pup prototype spacecraft, which was sent into orbit in June but was forced into an unfortunate spin during deployment. Starfish stabilized the spin in August and is currently making sure that all of Otter Pup’s systems are in working order for future tests.

NASA’s follow-up contract, awarded through the space agency’s Small Business Innovation Research program, or SBIR, calls for Starfish to assess the feasibility of using its full-scale Otter satellite servicing vehicle to rendezvous with large pieces of space debris and inspect them.

NASA and other federal agencies are getting more serious about addressing the proliferation of orbital debris: Last month, the Federal Aviation Administration proposed new regulations that would require space operators to do more to avoid leaving debris behind — and this week, the FAA said it fined Dish Network $150,000 for failing to remove a satellite from geostationary orbit properly.

Starfish Space says its Otter spacecraft could serve as a robotic repair crew for satellites that need servicing, or as a robotic cleanup crew for orbital debris.

In an email exchange, Starfish co-founder Trevor Bennett told GeekWire that NASA’s SBIR Phase III contract will help his company clear the way for Otter.

“The undertaking of this project is in alignment with Starfish’s technology maturation trajectory, which includes the development of an Otter vehicle, anticipated to be operational for on-orbit tasks as soon as 2025,” he said.

Bennett said the contract “aims to explore a potential mission to examine multiple debris objects in orbit.”

“This type of mission would entail rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) and the detailed characterization of the debris,” he said. “Before any disposal mission can commence, an inspection acts as a preliminary step. It’s essential to first inspect the object, gather relevant data and pinpoint potential docking sites.”

An orbital inspection mission like the one envisioned by Starfish “can serve as a valuable precursor to many missions, including active debris removal,” Bennett said.

The contract’s monetary value wasn’t announced. If everything goes the way Starfish hopes, the biggest payoff is likely to come in the form of future opportunities.

“NASA sees our collaboration efforts building toward an actual flight demonstration to prove out rendezvous and proximity operations capability,” Bennett said. “This three-month concept study contract term has the potential for a follow-on multimillion-dollar on-orbit demonstration mission contract.”

United Launch Alliance says the first prototype satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband network have been placed atop their Atlas V rocket, with launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida set for Oct. 6.

The launch window will open on that day at 2 p.m. ET (11 a.m. PT), ULA said today in an online update.

Liftoff will mark a milestone for Project Kuiper, which aims to put more than 3,200 satellites into orbit to provide broadband internet access to millions of people around the world who are currently underserved. Kuiper is seen as a competitor to SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, which already has more than 2 million subscribers.

The satellites for both those networks are built in the Seattle area: SpaceX’s satellite development and manufacturing facility is in Redmond, Wash., where Amazon’s Project Kuiper is also headquartered. Amazon is readying a 172,000-square-foot facility in nearby Kirkland to start turning out production models of its satellite by the end of the year.

Project Kuiper’s two prototypes — Kuipersat 1 and 2 — are meant to test the hardware and system operations in advance of the expected production ramp-up. They had originally been slated to launch on ULA’s next-generation Vulcan rocket, but the payload was switched to ULA’s workhorse Atlas V after the Vulcan development program encountered a series of delays.

The Atlas 501 variant that’s due to be used for next week’s launch is capable of putting nearly 18,000 pounds of payload into low Earth orbit. That’s far more power than what’s required to loft two Kuiper satellites, which are thought to weigh somewhere around 1,300 to 1,540 pounds each.

Amazon’s license from the Federal Communications Commission calls for launching half of the 3,236 satellites for the Kuiper constellation by mid-2026 — which suggests the launch schedule will be tight. Schedule considerations are likely to have figured into this summer’s decision to switch from Vulcan to the Atlas V.

Amazon has contracted with ULA, Arianespace and Blue Origin (which is owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos) to conduct up to 77 launches for satellite deployment. Most of those launches would use next-generation rockets that haven’t yet flown: ULA’s Vulcan, Arianespace’s Ariane 6 and Blue Origin’s New Glenn. Nine launches are set to use the Atlas V, and next week’s scheduled launch counts as one of the nine.

The Federal Aviation Administration says that it’s closed its investigation of last year’s mishap involving Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital rocket ship, but that Jeff Bezos’ space venture isn’t yet cleared to resume flights.

New Shepard’s engine anomaly occurred during an uncrewed research flight on Sept. 12, 2022, and led to the suspension of further flights. The booster’s misfire marked a rare setback for the New Shepard program, which had conducted more than 20 successful launches at Blue Origin’s Launch Site One in West Texas — including six missions that provided suborbital space trips to a total of 31 people.

During last year’s aborted mission, Blue Origin’s launch escape system worked as planned, blasting the capsule away from the booster for a parachute-assisted landing while the booster fell onto the Texas spaceport’s open terrain. The company said that if people had been in the capsule, they would have survived. No one was injured on the ground.

This March, Blue Origin reported that the booster’s BE-3 rocket engine malfunctioned when its nozzle suffered a structural failure, due to engine operating temperatures that were higher than expected. The FAA said its final report reflects that conclusion.

The FAA also said Blue Origin was required to take 21 corrective actions to prevent a reoccurrence of the mishap. Those measures included a redesign of the engine and nozzle components to improve structural performance during operation, plus organizational changes.

“The closure of the mishap investigation does not signal an immediate resumption of New Shepard launches,” the FAA said today in a news release. “Blue Origin must implement all corrective actions that impact public safety and receive a license modification from the FAA that addresses all safety and other applicable regulatory requirements prior to the next New Shepard launch.”

Back in March, Blue Origin said that it had already begun implementing corrective actions. “We’ve received the FAA’s letter and plan to fly soon,” the company said today in a posting to X / Twitter.

The next New Shepard flight is expected to be an uncrewed mission, potentially with research payloads aboard. Jeff Bezos’ fiancée, Lauren Sanchez, has said that she’s planning to participate in an all-female suborbital space mission once New Shepard is cleared to carry people again.

Blue Origin has confirmed that Dave Limp, who is leaving his post as Amazon’s senior vice president of devices and services, will take over as the CEO of Jeff Bezos’ privately held space venture.

The current CEO, longtime aerospace executive Bob Smith, is retiring from the post but will stay on with Blue Origin until January to help with the transition, a company spokesperson told GeekWire in an email.

Limp presided over Amazon’s Echo hardware line and its Alexa voice assistant business, among other initiatives. The most relevant initiative for Blue Origin would be his oversight of Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellite project, which is due to have its first prototype satellites launched as soon as next month.

Those satellites will be sent into low Earth orbit on United Launch Alliance’s Atlas V rocket, but Blue Origin is a major contractor for the Kuiper launches to come.

Reports about the transition began percolating out on social media today, after Blue Origin distributed internal memos to the company’s staff. In today’s emailed statement, Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin praised Limp’s record at Amazon.

“Dave is a proven innovator with a customer-first mindset. He has extensive experience in the high-tech industry and growing highly complex organizations, including leading Amazon’s Kuiper, Kindle, Alexa, Zoox, Fire TV and many other businesses,” Blue Origin’s statement noted.

The statement also paid tribute to Smith’s leadership: “In his six years, Bob led Blue Origin’s transformation from an R&D-focused company into a multifaceted space business nearing $10 billion in customer orders and over 10,000 employees. Dave will join in December, and Bob will be here through January 2 to ensure a smooth transition.”

Under Smith’s watch, Blue Origin began sending spacefliers — including Bezos — on suborbital trips using its New Shepard rocket ship. The company also ramped up efforts to build its orbital-class New Glenn rocket and unveiled the Orbital Reef space station project. This year, Blue Origin and its partners won a $3.4 billion contract to work on a lunar lander for NASA’s use, after losing out to SpaceX for an earlier contract.

For what it’s worth, Smith’s tenure has also been marked by controversy, including internal acrimony over Blue Origin’s COVID policies and concerns relating to safety and sexual harassment.

If Limp’s tenure lasts as long as Smith’s, he could oversee the resumption of crewed suborbital space trips after a yearlong hiatus, as well as the start of Blue Origin’s orbital space program and its participation in crewed missions to the moon.

Meanwhile, Amazon is expected to name longtime Microsoft executive Panos Panay to take Limp’s place as its devices and services chief. Microsoft announced Panay’s departure just last week.

Seven years and 4 billion miles after its launch, NASA’s OSIRIS-REx spacecraft has successfully dropped off a capsule containing a precious sample of one near-Earth asteroid — and is now on course to rendezvous with another one in 2029.

Rocket thrusters built at Aerojet Rocketdyne’s facility in Redmond, Wash., have been guiding the bus-sized probe every step of the way.

Today marked the climax of OSIRIS-REx — which stands for Origins, Spectral Interpretation, Resource Identification and Security-Regolith Explorer. The billion-dollar mission is designed to let scientists examine pristine stuff from a space rock that could shed light on the chemistry of the primordial solar system, and give them a better idea of the resources that could someday be gleaned from asteroids.

The sample was blasted away from a 1,600-foot-wide asteroid called Bennu back in 2020, four years after the spacecraft’s launch from Florida. Months later, the spacecraft began its two-year journey back toward Earth.

When the probe came within 63,000 miles of Earth, it sent an 30-inch-wide capsule containing the sample on a trajectory that brought it down through the atmosphere hours later.

The capsule took advantage of a heat shield to withstand temperatures of up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit during its 27,000 mph plunge. Then it deployed its parachute and floated down to a touchdown on the Defense Department’s Utah Test and Training Range at 8:52 a.m. MT (7:52 a.m. PT).

Dante Lauretta, the OSIRIS-REx mission’s principal investigator, told reporters that he “literally broke into tears” when he heard that the parachute had deployed as planned. “That was the moment I knew we made it home,” he said.

A recovery team rode helicopters out to the landing site and carefully secured the capsule for processing. The sample, which is thought to amount to as much as 8.8 ounces (250 grams) of asteroid rubble, is due to be flown to NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Texas on Monday for an initial round of study.

“The real science is just beginning,” Lauretta said.

Eileen Stansbery, who’s in charge of Johnson Space Center’s Astromaterials Research and Exploration Science Division, said she expected more than 200 researchers on the mission’s science team to start studying the material within the next few weeks. “These samples are an amazing treasure trove for generations,” she said.

Even as the capsule fell toward Earth, the OSIRIS-REx mothership fired its Aerojet-built thrusters to dodge the planet and get set for the journey to another asteroid called Apophis.

Apophis grabbed the headlines years ago when initial observations of its orbit held out a slight chance of a collision. (Additional observations ruled out the threat.)

The first maneuver toward Apophis is due to take place in a month. If all goes according to plan, the spacecraft will conduct an 18-month survey of the asteroid just after its close approach to Earth in April 2029.

In recognition of the transition, the main spacecraft’s mission has a new name: OSIRIS-APEX — with APEX standing for “Apophis Explorer.”

Bill Cahill, Aerojet’s OSIRIS-REx program manager, said the spacecraft’s thruster system was critical to the mission’s success. He highlighted the system’s performance during the sample collection operation in 2020.

“There’s so little gravity around Bennu that even the smallest of pulses from a thruster would have a great impact on OSIRIS-REx’s orbit around the asteroid,” he said in a news release. “The thruster had to be highly specialized so we didn’t throw the spacecraft out of orbit as the necessary maneuvers were conducted.”

By all accounts, the thrusters performed just as well today.

“The complexity of the operation and our ability to provide thrusters that can be an integral part of maneuvers that help achieve science goals is incredibly rewarding,” Cahill said. “The delivered regolith samples will teach us a phenomenal amount about the asteroid, and more importantly, the origins of our solar system, and this is something our entire team can be proud of.”

OSIRIS-REx follows up on earlier sample return missions — including Stardust, which brought back samples of cometary and interstellar dust in 2006 under the leadership of University of Washington astronomer Don Brownlee; and Hayabusa 1 and Hayabusa 2, a pair of Japanese missions that returned smaller samples of asteroids in 2010 and 2020.

After today’s touchdown, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson heralded OSIRIS-REx as the beginning of a new chapter in the study of near-Earth objects. “This mission proves that NASA does big things,” he said. “It wasn’t ‘Mission Impossible,’ it was ‘The Impossible Became Possible.'”

Chris Lewicki, who once served as the president and “chief asteroid miner” for Redmond-based Planetary Resources, said his heart was pounding as he watched the OSIRIS-REx sample return capsule descend.

“I look forward to the day when a human has taken a journey as long and interesting as the OSIRIS-REx capsule which has just returned to Earth,” Lewicki said in a post to X / Twitter. “The human would be a better conversationalist. These samples will require some study to tell their tales.”

Planetary Resources faded away in 2018 due to lack of funding, but Lewicki is still involved in the field of asteroid exploration. He’s a member of the standing review board for NASA’s Psyche mission, which is due to launch a probe toward a metal-rich asteroid named Psyche next month. He’s also working on a project for the XPRIZE foundation that could result in the creation of a prize for orbital debris removal.

Lewicki told GeekWire that analysis of the OSIRIS-REx sample could give scientists — and future asteroid miners — fresh clues as to the composition of carbonaceous asteroids, including the presence of hydrated minerals, silicates and metals that could help fuel a 21st-century space economy.

“It’s the very stuff that we’d be interested in,” Lewicki said.

A four-year-old Seattle-area startup called Stoke Space executed a successful up-and-down test of its “Hopper” developmental rocket vehicle today, marking a major milestone in its quest to create a fully reusable launch system.

Hopper2’s 15-second flight took place at Stoke’s test facility at Grant County International Airport in Moses Lake, Wash., at 11:24 a.m. PT. A hydrogen-fueled rocket engine sent the test vehicle to a height of 30 feet, with a landing 15 feet away from the launch pad, Stoke CEO Andy Lapsa told GeekWire.

“It’s the last test in our development program for Hopper, and by all accounts, it’s been very successful,” Lapsa said.

Today’s test follows up on work that was done this spring with an earlier prototype, Hopper1, and a static engine firing for Hopper2 that was conducted this month.

In a Sept. 12 posting to X / Twitter, Stoke Space said “we’ve now learned everything we were looking for from this dev test vehicle in order to finalize the orbital design … but HELL YES we’re gonna hop it for icing on the cake.”

“This Hopper program was really geared to develop the reusable second-stage system, and specifically prove out a lot of the new and novel technology elements that go into it,” Lapsa explained today. “There’s the actively cooled, regeneratively cooled heat shield. We have a very unique rocket engine … with a single set of turbo machinery that feeds an array of thrusters. Both of those two, the heat shield and the engine, are coupled.”

Lapsa said Stoke Space’s rocket may well mark the first use of differential-thrust vector control for attitude control since 1972, when that approach was used for the last Soviet N1 moon rocket.

In addition to testing out the technical innovations, Stoke’s team also had to go through a steep learning curve on launch logistics. “We’re a young company, so developing operational procedures, ground support equipment, guidance, navigation and control, flight software, flight computers, comms — all of these things are new,” Lapsa said. “We have a very experienced team, but this is the first time that we’ve been doing all those things as a Stoke team.”

Stoke Space was founded in 2019 by Lapsa, a veteran of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture; and Tom Feldman, who worked at Blue Origin after interning at SpaceX. In addition to the testing grounds at Moses Lake’s airport, the company has a 21,000-square-foot engineering and manufacturing headquarters in Kent, Wash., not far from Blue Origin’s HQ.

In 2021, the company raised $65 million in a funding round led by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates’ Breakthrough Energy Ventures. And earlier this year, Stoke won the go-ahead to take over Cape Canaveral Space Force Station’s Launch Complex 14 in Florida, the site of John Glenn’s history-making Mercury launch in 1962.

Going forward, Stoke’s team will concentrate more fully on developing its rocket’s first stage and ramping up operations in Florida, Lapsa said.

“The focus is now very centrally on getting to orbit, and the first stage is the most critical part of that,” he said. “We’ll be focusing on first-stage engine development. I would say it’s a custom-designed engine, but in terms of novelty and world-first, it’s not intended to be one of those.”

Eventually, Stoke plans to offer a fully reusable launch system, including a second stage that can be brought back to Earth without having to rely on exotic shielding.

The concept behind Stoke Space’s launch system has been compared to the much larger two-stage Starship system that’s being developed by SpaceX for trips beyond Earth orbit. You can extend that comparison to characterize today’s Hopper flight as a parallel to SpaceX’s Grasshopper test flights in 2012 and 2013, or the Starhopper tests in 2019.

Lapsa said he was “incredibly proud” of his team.

“The team is unbelievable, and you know, we’ve developed everything. Two and a half years ago, this spot in Moses Lake was a blank desert. Today we’ve launched a brand-new hydrogen-oxygen engine — and it’s a very unique engine — on a vehicle that took off and landed vertically,” he said. “I think everybody’s on cloud nine.”

TUKWILA, Wash. — Thirty years after the first flight of a pioneering reusable rocket ship known as the Delta Clipper Experimental, or DC-X, a commercial venture is aiming to bring its legacy to life in the Seattle area. Even its name — New Frontier Aerospace — is a callback to the earlier days of America’s space effort, going back to John F. Kennedy references to outer space as part of his “New Frontier.”

“We’re sort of like the grandson of DC-X,” New Frontier’s co-founder and CEO, Bill “Burners” Bruner, said at the startup’s headquarters in Tukwila.

But he doesn’t see New Frontier as a space launch venture in the strictest sense of the word. “We’re not doing the squat, or cylindrical or conical shapes that we were talking about in those days,” he told GeekWire. “We’re proposing to combine the hypersonic research of the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, and some of those geometries, with reusable rockets to attack the trillion-dollar air transportation market instead of the $11 billion space launch market.”

New Frontier was founded in 2020 by Bruner, whose aerospace experience includes stint as an assistant administrator at NASA, as a policy director at the Pentagon, and as an Air Force colonel; Jess Sponable, who handled space programs at DARPA and the Air Force Research Laboratory and is now New Frontier’s president and chief technology officer; and chief operating officer David Gregory, a veteran of rocket engine programs at Blue Origin and Ursa Major Technologies. The chairman is Alex Tai, who previously served as Virgin Galactic’s chief operating officer.

The startup is one of several companies whose prospects are on the rise partly because of the U.S. military’s interest in hypersonic aerial vehicles that travel at more than five times the speed of sound. Like Stratolaunch — a company founded by the late Seattle billionaire Paul Allen more than a decade ago — New Frontier aims to help the Pentagon counter hypersonic threats from Russia and China.

Bruner said New Frontier is taking a step-by-step approach, starting with the Pathfinder, a hypersonic vehicle that could be used for weapons testing or suborbital point-to-point cargo transport. The company has been awarded $2.25 million to develop the craft’s 3D-printed Mjölnir rocket engine, which is named after the hammer wielded by Thor in Norse mythology (and in Marvel movies). In June, New Frontier received an additional $150,000 from NASA for Mjölnir development.

Component testing for Mjölnir is ramping up, with a full-up test firing scheduled for next spring. Meanwhile, New Frontier’s hypersonic flight system one of 20 tech projects vying for prizes in the Army’s xTechPacific competition for cutting-edge technologies that range from jet guns to wall-building robots. Up to 10 projects could be selected to receive cash prizes and opportunities for follow-up grants.

Winners of the xTechPacific contest are due to be announced later this month, and Bruner said the recognition could accelerate New Frontier’s drive to get its Pathfinder off the ground.

“The program plan there is to start in earnest bending hardware for that,” he said. “It would be about two years to an integrated ground test, and then the start of the flight test campaign.”

New Frontier’s team doesn’t intend to stop there — but future development depends on future funding. “At about $15 million, we could fly that single-engine airplane,” Bruner said. “It would be north of 30 [million dollars] to fly the three-engine airplane that really has practical utility.”

The company aims to leverage several innovations that weren’t around when the DC-X flew. For example, the engine as well as the airframe would make use of 3D printing — a technology pioneered by Relativity Space, another aerospace startup with Seattle roots.

Bruner said the engine is designed to run on renewable natural gas, which makes use of the smelly gases produced by decomposition at landfills and water treatment plants, or by defecation in livestock facilities. “Renewable liquid natural gas is net carbon-negative, because you’re removing the methane that would otherwise have been dumped into the atmosphere,” he explained.

New Frontier could also take advantage of the work that’s being done to foster the return of commercial supersonic flight — including Boom Supersonic’s development of a new faster-than-sound passenger jet and NASA’s efforts to turn down the volume on sonic booms.

If New Frontier’s vision becomes a reality, its hypersonic aircraft could be used not only for weapons systems and cargo delivery, but for intercontinental passenger travel as well. Bruner has already called dibs on his preferred term for what New Frontier plans to build. “Just like in the ’50s — when everybody said, ‘Well, that’s a jetliner’ — people will call these ‘rocketliners,'” he said. “And on the chance that that happens, I trademarked it.”

Does New Frontier have a realistic chance of opening up the rocketliner age? Bruner noted that one of his co-founders, Jess Sponable, was a program manager for the DC-X — and that David Gregory, New Frontier’s third co-founder, helped create Blue Origin’s BE-3 engine as well as Ursa Major’s Hadley engine.

“I would say our odds of success, if properly funded, are pretty darn near 100%,” Bruner said. “All they’ve got to do is replicate what they did before.”

Washington’s other xTech entrants

New Frontier Aerospace is one of eight Washington state ventures on the Army’s list of finalists in the xTechPacific competition. Other Washington finalists include:

• Monroe-based AIM Intelligent Machines, which is developing autonomous machines for construction and material handling.
• Kirkland-based Echodyne, which produces radar technology for drones and sensor networks.
• Seattle-based Overland AI, which is developing technologies for autonomous off-road vehicles.
• Seattle-based Pertinacious Holdings, which is working on a wall-building robot nicknamed Wally.
• Everett-based Wave Motion Launch Corp., which is building a jet-gun launcher for projectile payloads.
• Bingen-based Zepher Flight Labs, which is developing hydrogen-electric drones that take off and land vertically.
• Spokane-based Zylinium Communications, a stealth venture that’s working on a generative adversarial receiver.

Other finalists are headquartered in Alaska and Hawaii. Up to 10 projects will be selected to receive $25,000 cash prizes and the opportunity to seek small-business grants worth up to $1.9 million. Winners are to be announced Sept. 19.

The nonprofit Mars Society is getting set to take the next giant leap in its mission to support Red Planet exploration and settlement, by establishing a Mars Technology Institute to develop the tools and processes those settlers will need.

Robert Zubrin, the Mars Society’s founder and president, outlined the plan today during the advocacy group’s Red Planet Live podcast.

Many of the details in that plan still have to be fleshed out — including sources of funding, the precise structure of the organization, and where the institute will be headquartered. But the Pacific Northwest is one of the top prospects for the institute’s center, along with Colorado, the longtime home of the Mars Society.

During the podcast, Zubrin touted the Seattle area’s array of biotech and AI ventures, as well as its quality of life. “The Pacific Northwest is perhaps at the top of the list,” he said. “Colorado’s an alternative.”

He said the Mars Technology Institute will complement the efforts of NASA and other space agencies, and follow through on SpaceX founder Elon Musk’s vision to make humanity a multiplanet species.

“SpaceX and other entrepreneurial launch companies are already moving rapidly to develop the transportation systems that can get us to the planet Mars,” Zubrin said in a news release. “What is needed is an institution devoted to developing the technologies that will allow us to live once we are there.”

The Mars Technology Institute would focus on three tech frontiers:

• Biotech innovations that could maximize the prospects for producing food, pharmaceuticals and other supplies using Martian resources.
• Innovations in robotics, automation and artificial intelligence that would enable small communities of settlers to make Mars more habitable and build the infrastructure that they require.
• Advanced nuclear technologies, starting with small-scale fission reactors and potentially moving on to fusion facilities, in order to provide the power needed for growing human settlements.

The institute would be structured as a nonprofit organization, funded by tax-deductible contributions. There would also be a taxable C-Corp entity known as the Mars Technology Lab, which would be fully owned by the institute. Such a structure is designed to provide investment opportunities for backers, and generate revenue through intellectual property licensing, spin-offs and contracts for research and development.

“We can start relatively small, with a couple of million dollars to begin a research program,” Zubrin said. “The idea here is that we’re going to do research that generates income.”

The plan calls for the institute to conduct research on its own central campus — and also outsource research work to companies and universities as well as to volunteers who propose relevant projects.

Zubrin said he’d like to get the Mars Technology Institute started up in one form or another “by the first of the year.”

“You should know, we’ve gotten a pretty good response so far, although we’ve only just put our little toe in the water,” he said during the podcast.

NASA’s current schedule for deep-space exploration envisions sending astronauts to the moon for a series of missions starting in the mid-2020s, and applying the lessons learned during those lunar missions to trips to Mars starting as early as the 2030s. Musk and SpaceX intend to transport settlers to Mars on a shorter time frame, using SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket.

The Mars Society already operates research stations in Utah and the Canadian Arctic, both of which focus on trying out the technologies and processes that could come into play during real missions to Mars.

Can the Mars Society turn its latest vision into reality as well? Zubrin acknowledges that the business case for investing in the Mars Technology Institute might not be as obvious as it would be for, say, a new launch company.

“The initial funders will have to be motivated by a long-term vision rather than short-term gain,” he said in today’s news release. “It is hope, rather than greed, that will get us to Mars.”

For more details about the Mars Society and plans for developing the Mars Technology Institute, contact Michael Stoltz, the Mars Society’s director of media and public relations. Phone: 847-560-1275. Email: mstoltz@marssociety.org. You can donate to assist with the formation of the institute by going to the Mars Society’s online contribution form and selecting “Mars Technology Institute” as the optional “Project or Area for Donation.”

GeekWire’s Alan Boyle participated in the Red Planet Live podcast announcing the campaign to create the Mars Technology Institute.

Several employees at Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin are reporting that they’ve been laid off, marking a rare turnabout in the rapid growth of Jeff Bezos’ space venture.

The reduction in force appears to be focused in the areas of human resources and talent acquisition, based on employees’ postings to LinkedIn.

TechCrunch’s Aria Alamalhodaei, who reported the layoff trend on X / Twitter, said it looked as if “some (but not all) folks were given the opportunity to find another role” within the privately held company.

Micah Thornton, a production control specialist at Blue Origin, wrote on LinkedIn that “several people from the Blue Origin Space Human Resource/Talent Acquisition team have been let go due to downsizing.”

Several other employees wrote that they were laid off on Tuesday and are seeking new roles elsewhere. We’ve reached out to Blue Origin and will be updating this story with anything further that we can pass along.

Founded in 2000, Blue Origin’s employment profile has been trending sharply upward in recent years, due to projects that include the suborbital New Shepard program (currently grounded after a launch anomaly that occurred a year ago), the BE-4 rocket engine and the orbital-class New Glenn rocket, the Blue Moon lunar lander and the Orbital Reef space station.

The company’s workforce tally was less than 1,000 as recently as 2018. Two years ago, that count was reported at nearly 4,000 employees, and the figure rose to 6,000 by July 2022. Blue Origin’s current number of employees — including workers in Kent as well as in Alabama, California, Florida, Texas, the Washington, D.C., area and other locales — is said to have hit nearly 11,000.

Despite the newly reported layoffs, Blue Origin is continuing to hire employees for other types of jobs, primarily in technical fields. The company’s career website currently lists more than 440 open positions.

Vodafone and its African subsidiary, Vodacom, have made a deal to use Amazon’s yet-to-be-deployed Project Kuiper satellite broadband network to extend the reach of their 4G/5G cellular networks.

The deal, which was announced this week by Amazon as well as British-based Vodafone, would give Project Kuiper business connections in Europe and Africa that are comparable to Amazon’s previously announced partnership with Verizon for extending telecom services in the U.S.

Vodafone and its subsidiaries provide mobile and fixed telecom service to more than 300 million customers in 17 countries, and partner with mobile networks in 46 other countries. “This is our second telco partnership, and we look forward to working with other telcos,” an Amazon spokesperson told GeekWire in an email.

Like SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network, Project Kuiper aims to provide broadband internet service to millions of people around the world who are underserved. SpaceX is far ahead of Amazon: While SpaceX has deployed thousands of Starlink satellites and has more than 1.5 million subscribers, Amazon hasn’t yet deployed a single Kuiper satellite.

Kuiper’s first prototypes are due for launch as early as this month, kicking off what’s expected to be an ambitious campaign to deploy half of the network’s planned 3,236 satellites by mid-2026. The satellite operations for Kuiper and for Starlink are both based in Redmond, Wash.

Project Kuiper’s plan calls for selling satellite terminals to end users, as well as working with partners to connect geographically dispersed cellular antennas with the companies’ core telecom networks. The latter strategy is the focus of the newly announced deal with Vodafone and Vodacom.

“Vodafone’s work with Project Kuiper will provide mobile connectivity to many of the estimated 40% of the global population without internet access, supporting remote communities, their schools and businesses, the emergency services and disaster relief,” Vodafone Group’s chief executive, Margherita Della Valle, said in a news release. “These connections will be complemented further through our own work on direct-to-smartphone satellite services.”

Amazon’s senior vice president for devices and services, Dave Limp, said the partnership is a good match for Project Kuiper.

“Amazon is building Project Kuiper to provide fast, affordable broadband to tens of millions of customers in unserved and underserved communities, and our flexible network means we can connect places that have traditionally been difficult to reach,” said Dave Limp, Amazon’s senior vice president for devices and services.

“Teaming with a leading international service provider like Vodafone allows us to make a bigger impact faster in closing the digital divide in Europe and Africa,” Limp said. “Together we’ll explore how we can help our customers get the most value from expanded connectivity, particularly in areas like residential broadband, agriculture, education, healthcare, transportation and financial services.”

Shameel Joosub, CEO of Vodacom Group, highlighted the prospects for widening broadband service in Africa. “Collaborating with Project Kuiper gives us an exciting new path to scale our efforts, using Amazon’s satellite constellation to quickly reach more customers across the African continent,” Joosub said.

Amazon’s current plan calls for starting the deployment of operational satellites next year, and beginning beta tests of the network with select customers by the end of 2024. Vodafone and Vodacom say they plan to participate in those tests.

An Ohio-based pension fund has filed a lawsuit alleging that Amazon didn’t give due consideration to SpaceX as a potential launch provider for its Project Kuiper broadband internet satellite constellation, which is a rival for SpaceX’s Starlink satellite network.

The lawsuit, filed by the Cleveland Bakers and Teamsters Pension Fund in the Delaware Court of Chancery, says Amazon’s board of directors acted in bad faith last year when they chose three other providers — including Blue Origin, the space venture owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — but left out SpaceX.

The other two companies were the European Arianespace consortium and United Launch Alliance, which will use Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine on its Vulcan Centaur rocket. The lawsuit says the three agreements add up to Amazon’s second-largest capital expenditure, after its $13.7 billion acquisition of Whole Foods in 2017.

So far, Amazon has spent nearly $1.7 billion on the launch deal, including $585 million paid out to Blue Origin directly, the lawsuit says.

In its filing, the CB&T Fund — which owns shares in Amazon — says that the company’s directors and officers, including the board of directors’ audit committee, made “no effort to properly discharge their fiduciary duties.” It suggests that Amazon’s decisions were unduly influenced by Bezos’ outside interest in Blue Origin.

The lawsuit tracks the tiffs that have arisen between Bezos and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk over the years, as well as the setbacks experienced during the development of Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket and ULA’s Vulcan rocket.

The pension fund questioned whether the company would be able to make a federally mandated deadline to deploy half of its planned 3,236 satellites by mid-2026. It implied that the prospects would be better if Amazon had struck a deal with SpaceX, which it said “has by far the most proven launch track record in history.”

“In the face of SpaceX’s proven reliability and cost advantages, Bezos-led Amazon’s decision to not even consider SpaceX as a launch provider illustrates the glaring conflict of Bezos’ affiliation with both Amazon and Blue Origin presented, and the substantial impact these conflicts had on the board’s ability to protect the best interests of the company and its stockholders in negotiating the contracts,” the pension fund said in its suit.

The suit seeks unspecified damages, legal costs and “immediate disgorgement of all profits, benefits and other compensation obtained by defendants as a result of their breaches of fiduciary duties.”

In an emailed statement, an Amazon spokesperson said that “the claims in this lawsuit are completely without merit, and we look forward to showing that through the legal process.”

Despite the setbacks, Amazon has said that it remains on track to meet its satellite deployment schedule for Project Kuiper, which aims to make satellite access available to millions of people around the world, No satellites have yet been launched, however — in contrast with SpaceX, which has put thousands of Starlink satellites in orbit and claims more than 1.5 million subscribers.

Amazon is planning to have its first two prototype satellites launched by ULA’s Atlas V rocket as early as Sept. 26, and its satellite factory in Kirkland, Wash., is due to begin mass production by the end of this year. (For what it’s worth, SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are built at a facility nearby in Redmond.)

The fact that Bezos is the founder of Amazon as well as Blue Origin has long been seen as a point of potential conflict when it comes to Project Kuiper. It’s not clear whether Bezos took any special measures to distance himself from decisions about publicly traded Amazon’s involvement with privately owned Blue Origin, but those details may come out if the legal proceedings go forward.

The lawsuit suggests that SpaceX wasn’t even considered for the Kuiper launch contracts — but in the past, Amazon executives have referred to SpaceX as a potential choice. In 2020, for example, Amazon’s senior vice president for devices and services, Dave Limp, insisted that Project Kuiper was “launch-agnostic” and pointed to SpaceX’s methane-fueled Raptor engine as a “demonstration of breakthroughs.”

Last year, Limp sized up SpaceX’s launch offerings in more detail.

“I would say Falcon 9 is probably at the low end of the kind of capacity that we need,” he said during a Washington Post online chat. “As you think about them getting more Falcon Heavys, but more importantly, as they think about Starship and getting that into production readiness, those become very viable candidates for us as well.”

Full details: Space News has posted the publicly released version of the CB&T Fund lawsuit, with some redactions. Although information about the total value of Amazon’s launch contracts has been redacted from the filing, a report from CNBC noted Amazon’s disclosure that it expects to pay about $7.4 billion for satellite launch and related services through 2028, with $2.7 billion of that sum expected to go to Blue Origin.

Two and a half months after Starfish Space’s first orbital mission teetered on the edge of failure because its Otter Pup satellite docking system took a wild tumble, the Kent, Wash.-based startup says that it has stopped the spin and is moving ahead with preparations to rendezvous with another satellite.

Mission controllers still have to make sure that Otter Pup is in working order, and they still have to identify a satellite they can link up with. But Starfish co-founder Austin Link said the team has gotten over the highest hurdle: “de-tumbling” a spacecraft that had been rotating at a rate of roughly one revolution per second.

“This is the first time that we as a company have gone and done something really unique and really extraordinary in space,” Link told GeekWire. “It wasn’t the thing that we set out to do with this mission. We still have that ahead of us. But to do that is, to me, another proof point for how excited I am to get to work with all the incredible folks we have at Starfish.”

The challenge began shortly after Otter Pup and dozens of other spacecraft were sent into low Earth orbit by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket on June 12. Starfish’s spacecraft, which is about the size of a dorm-room fridge, was designed to be deployed from an orbital space tug.

That space tug that would then serve as the target for a months-long demonstration showing how Otter Pup — and eventually, Starfish’s full-size Otter — can rendezvous and dock with other spacecraft for servicing.

Unfortunately, the space tug went into a rapid spin after separating from the Falcon 9 upper stage, with Otter Pup still attached. Mission controllers made an emergency decision to release Otter Pup immediately, but Starfish’s spacecraft continued to tumble. Atmospheric drag slowed down that tumble somewhat; nevertheless, the Starfish team worried about the solar-powered spacecraft’s ability to recharge itself.

“It’s disheartening when you put so much effort into a mission and it ends up at risk,” Link said. “I mean, the Otter Pup died twice during the de-tumbling process, and it just happened to come back to life.”

To stop the spin and get the solar arrays pointing at the sun again, Starfish’s engineers devised an algorithm that made use of the interaction between Earth’s magnetic field and three magnetized torque rods on Otter Pup. The rods are basically electromagnets that can be turned on and off to slow down (or speed up) the rotation of a spacecraft.

“Earth’s magnetic field is pointing a certain direction in space, and when your satellite rotates through it, the way that you need to turn on your torque rods changes,” Link said. “If you have a one-second delay in your system, well, if you’re rotating 5 degrees per second, that’s OK. But if you’re rotating 300 degrees per second, you’ll be way off from where you thought the magnetic field was aligned.”

Starfish’s engineers devised software code that checked the alignment on the order of 10 times per second, and they spent weeks testing the code in simulated space conditions. “We were making super-quick-turn engineering decisions … and then you’d say, OK, this worked, or this didn’t work,” Link said. “It was pretty fast-paced and exciting, really.”

At the end of July, the team uploaded the code for a 30-minute test run and waited for the results. Link said he and Starfish’s other co-founder, Trevor Bennett, made a bet on how much improvement they’d see after the test. “It ended up right between our bets,” Link recalled.

As soon as they could, engineers uploaded another batch of code for a three-hour run. That brought the rate of spin down to zero.

“We managed to get the Otter Pup stable and pointing toward the sun and not spinning along the way,” Link said. “I’ll confess, it happened much faster than I expected we’d be able to do it.”

Starfish’s team was supported by partners including Astro Digital, which built Otter Pup’s frame to fit Starfish’s requirements; Advanced Solutions Inc., a subsidiary of Rocket Lab that contributed some of Otter Pup’s onboard flight software; and Vast as well as its Launcher team, which provided the Orbiter SN3 space tug.

Chris Biddy, co-founder and CEO of Astro Digital, told GeekWire that rescuing Otter Pup “was a big recovery effort and the most difficult we have been involved with.”

“Things can get very weird and scary when a satellite is not under three-axis control and spinning at rates that are nearly 100 times what is normal,” Biddy said in an email. “Off-nominal temperatures, power generation and communications are big threats to the survival of the satellite under these conditions. To have recovered fully from that and to have the satellite now under three-axis control is a huge relief, and a testament to the teams involved and the design of the hardware.”

The Starfish team still needs to determine whether Otter Pup can do the things it needs to do.

“It was never designed to spin this fast,” Link said. “It hit conditions that may have stretched the satellite in multiple ways. We need to go test and turn on a bunch of different parts, and that’s a process that we’ve been doing and will continue to do. We need to see if everything works in the way that it needs to for the satellite to do proximity operations, to maybe go try to dock with another satellite.”

Starfish is also looking for another satellite to fill in as the mission’s target. The original target, Orbiter SN3, is out of the picture because of the anomaly it suffered.

“Even if we do both of those things well, then that just means that we get to do the initial mission, which was already a really challenging mission,” Link said. “So there are definitely hurdles in front of us here. But in a weird way, it’s exciting. … The engineer in you just loves solving crazy-hard problems.”

As the Otter Pup saga continues, Link is keeping the bigger picture in mind.

“It’s a great moment for the team to go de-tumble the satellites, and what that means as a technical accomplishment,” he said. “But it’s also a great moment in that we get a chance to continue with our Otter Pup mission. If we’re able to dance around another satellite, or even dock with another satellite, then that’s paving the way for the Otter in the future — and paving the way for it becoming a more regular and common thing for humans to go interact with satellites on orbit.”

A robotic Indian lander set down safely on the moon today, setting off a wave of pride that reached from Mission Control in Bengaluru to Seattle’s tech community.

“India is now on the moon,” Prime Minister Narendra Modi said over a video link moments after the landing at 6:03 p.m. Indian Standard Time (5:33 a.m. PT). He went on to say that “this success belongs to all humanity.”

A roomful of mission controllers in Bengaluru cheered when the landing was confirmed at the end of a six-week-long space odyssey. “This will remain the most memorable and happiest moment for all of us,” said Kalpana Kalahasti, associate project director for the Chandrayaan-3 mission at the Indian Space Research Organization.

Today’s touchdown added India to an exclusive club of moon-landing nations that also includes the U.S., Russia and China. India’s Vikram lander is the first robotic probe to visit the moon’s south polar region, which is thought to be prime territory for human exploration and settlement.

Soon after the landing, Vikram sent back an image showing its surroundings — including one of the lander’s legs and its shadow:

The lander also returned imagery showing the deployment of its Pragyan rover, which sparked a fresh round of cheers at Mission Control:

Chandrayaan-3 is designed to study the composition of lunar soil as well as the thermal and seismic environment at the landing site, using instruments aboard the Vikram lander as well as the Pragyan rover. Scientists hope the data will shed light on the availability of water ice near the lunar south pole.

But today, the scientific angle was overshadowed by the boost to India’s national prestige. The elation that Indians felt was particularly high — coming four years after the Chandrayaan-2 mission’s lander crashed into the lunar surface, and four days after Russia’s Luna-25 lander met a similarly ignominious fate.

One of Chandrayaan-3’s fans is Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, who was born in Hyderabad, India, and came to the United States more than 30 years ago.

“What an exciting moment for India — and the future of space exploration,” Nadella said in a congratulatory post on X / Twitter.

S. Somasegar, a managing director at Seattle-based Madrona Group, passed along his congratulations as well.

“This is proud moment and another huge step forward as far as advances in science and space go.  I am sure every Indian, and for that matter, everybody in the world is genuinely excited when we make significant progress and do something which hasn’t happened before,” Soma, who traces his roots to the Indian coastal city of Puducherry, told GeekWire in an email. “ISRO has had a fantastic track record of making space-related scientific breakthroughs in a cost-effective way, and this is another example of that.”

Samir Bodas, CEO and co-founder of Bellevue, Wash.-based Icertis, told GeekWire in an email that India’s success in space resonated deeply with him.

“As an entrepreneur, I’m always inspired by great achievements like the Chandrayaan-3 moon landing,” said Bodas, who grew up in Pune and still has family there. “As someone with deep ties to India, I’m thrilled and overjoyed to experience this moment of great pride and celebration for all Indians.”

This year is a big one for robotic moon missions: In addition to the failed Russian landing and the successful Indian landing, the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency is due to launch its Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or SLIM, as early as this weekend.

Meanwhile, two commercial U.S. probes are being readied for launch with NASA’s backing. Houston-based Intuitive Machines says its IM-1 lunar lander could begin its mission as early as Nov. 15 with a launch aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. And Pittsburgh-based Astrobotic says its Peregrine lander is ready to head for the moon with a boost from United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur rocket, currently set for its first liftoff late this year.

Both of those missions will target the lunar south polar region, where reserves of water ice in permanently shadowed craters could theoretically provide drinkable water, breathable oxygen and burnable hydrogen fuel for future explorers and settlers. NASA is planning to send astronauts to the region for the Artemis 3 mission in the mid-2020s.

There’s more to come from India as well: ISRO is getting ready to launch a sun-observing mission called Aditya-L1 next month. It’s also ramping up its Gaganyaan human spaceflight program — and talking with Japan’s space agency about LUPEX, an international robotic mission to the lunar south polar region.

“I am confident that all countries in the world, including those from the global south, are capable of achieving such feats,” Modi said. “We can all aspire for the moon, and beyond.”

Seattle-based Integrate says it has raised $3.4 million in funding and secured a $1.25 million contract from the U.S. Space Force to boost its program management software platform into a higher orbit.

The year-old startup has also brought Firefly Aerospace on board as a customer.

“It has been a busy and exhilarating month,” John Conafay, CEO and co-founder of Integrate, said today in a news release.

The newly announced seed funding round was led by Hyperplane, with participation from Riot Ventures, Ravelin Capital and John Capodilupo, former chief technology officer and co-founder of Whoop. This follows a pre-seed investment round that brought in $970,000 last year.

Integrate said the fresh funding will go toward expanding the company’s team, which currently consists of eight full-time employees and a handful of contractors.

“With our new partners at Hyperplane, Riot Ventures and beyond, we have the resources to accelerate development and truly meet the needs of all companies pursuing ambitious hardware development programs,” Conafay said. “This funding and customer validation is critical to helping us bring modern collaboration tools to the hardware world.”

Samara Gordon, general partner at Hyperplane, said “Integrate is the first company we’ve seen to successfully transform the way organizations collaborate with their suppliers and vendors.”

One of Integrate’s early adopters is the Mission Manifest Office, which is part of the U.S. Space Force’s Space Systems Command at Los Angeles Air Force Base in California. The newly announced $1.25 million Space Force contract calls on Integrate to provide the office with software for launch mission management and coordination.

Defense applications for Integrate’s software mesh well with the background of the company’s co-founders: Conafay was formerly a specialist on the team supporting the Air Force’s Airborne Warning and Control System, while fellow co-founder and chief architect Paul Reesman was a four-tour Army Ranger.

Conafay said the contract will allow the Space Force to test the utility of Integrate’s mission management platform as an enabler for the Pentagon’s Tactically Responsive Space initiative and as a tool for coordinating the Space Systems Command’s programs.

Integrate’s platform will also be used by Firefly Aerospace, which is working with the Space Force on Victus Nox, a mission aimed at demonstrating the ability to launch a spacecraft with just 24 hours’ notice.

“Starting with our upcoming launches, we also see an opportunity to leverage Integrate for Firefly’s lunar and on-orbit missions,” said Adam Oakes, Firefly’s vice president of launch. “We look forward to seeing the possibilities unfold using Integrate’s digital solutions.”

Integrate’s digital platform is designed to help alleviate issues relating to program management, coordination and documentation for space missions as well as for down-to-earth projects. The platform is securely built for commercial and government programs on AWS GovCloud.

The company recently participated in Amazon Web Services’ third annual AWS Space Accelerator program — and Conafay gave that program a glowing review. “The networking opportunities were spectacular,” he told GeekWire in an email, “and we made invaluable connections with both the cohort and other participants.”

Kent, Wash.-based Starfish Space says it’s been awarded $1.8 million by AFWERX, the innovation arm of the Department of the Air Force, to support continued development of the company’s Cephalopod software for satellite guidance, navigation and control.

The award builds on previous collaborations between Starfish and the Air Force Research Laboratory.

Technically speaking, the contract is known as a Tactical Funding Increase, or TACFI. Ari Juster, strategy and operations lead at Starfish, said it was awarded as a follow-up to a $1.7 million Phase II Small Business Innovation Research contract that the startup received in 2021.

In a news release, Starfish co-founder Austin Link said he was “excited to continue our collaboration with AFRL.”

“Cephalopod can serve as a key technology enabling future servicing missions to benefit satellite operators, and we have found the AFRL team to be great partners in supporting its development,” Link said.

Cephalopod is a software platform that enables satellites powered by electric propulsion systems to rendezvous, conduct proximity operations and execute docking maneuvers with other objects in space autonomously. The software is built into Otter Pup, a demonstration spacecraft that was sent into low Earth orbit in June.

Otter Pup was designed to test Cephalopod and Starfish’s other innovations under real-world orbital conditions. But when the Launcher space tug that was designed to put Otter Pup into its proper orbital position went into an extreme spin, Launcher’s team made the emergency decision to deploy the satellite immediately. As a result, Otter Pup went into a tumble, and the Starfish team wasn’t sure whether the satellite could rendezvous and re-dock with the space tug as planned.

The Starfish team has been working for more than a month to “de-tumble” the satellite in hopes of rescuing the mission. “The satellite is still alive, and we remain in communication with it, though there are many challenges we are still working on,” Juster told GeekWire in an email.

Juster said the newly announced contract will complement the Otter Pup mission and enable Starfish to make substantial enhancements in the Cephalopod platform. “The initial period of performance will be 18 months, and though it will initially run in parallel to the Otter Pup mission, performance of this contract is not dependent on the status of Otter Pup,” he said.

Starfish’s long-term plan calls for building a full-featured satellite known as the Otter that could be used to service other satellites in orbit to extend their operating lives — or push them down to be deorbited when their work is done. The company was co-founded in 2019 by Link and Trevor Bennett, who previously worked for Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture in Kent.

The startup has attracted more than $21 million in investment, including a $14 million Series A funding round that was announced in March. In addition to the work for the Air Force Research Laboratory, Starfish has also won contracts from NASA and the U.S. Space Force’s SpaceWERX program.

Update for 4:15 p.m. PT Aug. 8: We’ve revised the description of the anomaly that occurred during Otter Pup’s deployment to state more clearly what happened.

Amazon’s plans to launch the first prototype satellites for its Project Kuiper broadband internet constellation have changed for the second time in a year — and once again, rocket development snags are the reason.

The revised plans call for KuiperSat-1 and KuiperSat-2 to be sent into low Earth orbit by a United Launch Alliance Atlas V rocket, with launch set for no earlier than Sept. 26 from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida.

The spacecraft are meant to test the systems and processes that Amazon will use for thousands of satellites designed to provide global internet access. Production of those satellites is scheduled to begin this year at a 172,000-square-foot factory in Kirkland, Wash.

Originally, Amazon planned to have the prototypes launched last year on ABL Space Systems’ RS1 rocket, but ABL repeatedly ran into setbacks during development of the rocket. (Its first RS1 launch failed in January.)

Last October, Amazon switched the KuiperSat launch to ULA’s next-generation Vulcan Centaur rocket. The plan called for the prototypes to go into orbit as secondary payloads on the first-ever Vulcan launch, with Astrobotic’s Peregrine lunar lander as the primary payload.

At that time, the Vulcan launch was set for early 2023; however, issues involving the readiness of the lander and the rocket have caused a string of delays since then. In March, the rocket’s Centaur V second stage exploded during a pre-launch test, due to a hydrogen leak. ULA has reinforced the Centaur’s structure to address the problem, but further testing could require further delays.

Last week, a filing with the Federal Communications Commission suggested that ULA was planning to launch the KuiperSats on its tried-and-true Atlas V rocket rather than on the first Vulcan rocket. Amazon and ULA confirmed the switch today.

“ULA is working backward from a launch date in fall 2023,” Amazon said in an updated blog posting. “We will have more detail to share as the mission approaches.”

Although Amazon didn’t provide further details, the realities of the company’s development timetable probably factored into the decision to make the switch. Under the terms of its FCC license, Amazon is required to have half of its planned 3,236-satellite constellation operating in low Earth orbit by mid-2026. Even though ULA insists it’s on track to launch Vulcan by the end of this year, Amazon may have decided to reduce the risk of further postponements.

Amazon has reserved nine Atlas V launches as part of its grand plan to deploy the Project Kuiper constellation, and next month’s launch counts as one of those nine.

Tukwila, Wash.-based LeoStella is unveiling its latest, greatest platform for small satellites, which should hit a sweet spot for future manufacturing contracts.

LeoStella, which is a joint venture co-owned by European satellite manufacturer Thales Alenia Space and a geospatial data analysis company called BlackSky, started out in 2018 building Earth observation satellites for BlackSky’s Global constellation.

LeoStella’s LS-100 spacecraft platform, which is known in the space industry as a bus, was right-sized for those 120-pound (55-kilogram) satellites. But that was about as much mass as the LS-100 bus could accommodate.

When BlackSky came up with a more capable payload for its Gen3 satellites, LeoStella boosted its bus design to handle the added mass. Its LS-200 bus is suitable for satellites with a total weight of 330 pounds (150 kilograms), including 130 pounds (60 kilograms) of payload.

Now there’s a growing demand for a bigger class of small satellites, and LeoStella’s LS-300 bus is designed to serve that demand. The LS-300 design, unveiled in conjunction with this week’s Small Satellite Conference in Utah, can be used for satellites weighing 1,100 pounds (500 kilograms), with half of that mass available for the satellite’s payload.

That’s still small potatoes compared with, say, the 20,000-pound Jupiter 3 satellite that was sent into orbit last month by SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket. But LeoStella CEO Tim Kienberger told GeekWire that the LS-300 bus should make a big difference for the market that his company is targeting.

“Normally you would have jumped up to about the 300-kilogram class,” Kienberger said. “We jumped to the 500-kilogram class with the LS-300 satellite because that’s what the rideshare opportunities are offering up now. And I think that’s a big part of what’s shifting the market. This is all about total cost on orbit, so as the rideshare costs come down and enable the launch of larger satellites, it opens up the door to new capabilities.”

The larger size makes it possible to offer a xenon-based electric propulsion system that’s built by Astra. The propulsion system can achieve velocity changes of more than 440 mph (200 meters per second), which adds significantly to the LS-300’s capability for orbital maneuvering and precision pointing. The LS-300 can also provide up to a kilowatt of power for satellite payloads.

In the process of developing the LS-300 design, LeoStella’s engineers worked with two graduated seniors from the RAID Robotics team at Thomas Jefferson High School in Federal Way, Wash., to create a full-scale mockup for display.

“We’re seeing a big demand for the LS-300 already,” Kienberger said. He said one customer already has been secured — but he wasn’t yet at liberty to identify that customer.

Loft Orbital CEO Pierre-Damien Vanjour, who’s been a LeoStella customer in the past, said the LS-300 is “well-positioned to meet the varied needs of customers seeking access to space.”

“Loft Orbital has had great success with LeoStella’s established bus platforms,” Vanjour said in a news release. “I’m confident the updated LS-300 bus platform will enhance the company’s already established reputation.”

Kienberger is hoping to enlist the Pentagon’s Space Development Agency as a future LS-300 customer. The agency is soliciting bids for scores of satellites that will become part of its constellation for military communications in low Earth orbit.

“The LS-300 is, maybe not intentionally, but definitely targeted in the right size and capability for SDA opportunities,” Kienberger said. Defense contractors could conceivably use the LS-300 spacecraft bus as the foundation for the satellites they’d offer in their bids.

Kienberger said production of the new bus is due to begin early next year. He figures that the Tukwila factory currently has enough capacity to build about 24 LS-300 buses annually, “and with a small expansion in our current footprint, we think we can accommodate more than double that number.”

“We’ve kind of rolled back from production, and we’ve been focusing on developing new products so that we can then take off with those new products,” he said. “So right now we’re forecasting an increase in production next year, but really ramping up in 2025, For sure, if we win some SDA work, there’ll be a lot of production activity going on here in ’25 and ’26.”

A new technique for finding potentially hazardous asteroids before they find us has chalked up its first success.

In this case, the asteroid isn’t expected to threaten Earth anytime in the foreseeable future. But the fact that the technique — which uses a new computer algorithm called HelioLinc3D — actually works comes as a confidence boost as astronomers get set to step up the asteroid hunt with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile.

The University of Washington’s DiRAC Institute will play a leading role in analyzing the data from the Rubin Observatory, and HelioLinc3D is meant to make the job easier. It’ll be another couple of years before the Rubin Observatory starts surveying the skies, but researchers put HelioLinc3D to the test by feeding it data from the NASA-funded Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System, or ATLAS.

During the July 18 test run, the algorithm combined fragments of ATLAS data from four nights of observations to identify an asteroid that had been previously missed.

The asteroid, designated 2022 SF289 and described in a Minor Planet Electronic Circular, is thought to be about 600 feet wide. That’s wide enough to cause widespread destruction on Earth in the event of an impact. The good news is that projections of 2022 SF289’s orbital path show it staying 140,000 miles away from Earth at its closest. Nevertheless, the space rock fits NASA’s definition of a potentially hazardous asteroid because of its estimated size and the fact that it can come within 5 million miles of our planet.

UW researcher Ari Heinze, the principal developer of HelioLinc3D, said the algorithm’s success should carry over to the Rubin Observatory’s future database.

“By demonstrating the real-world effectiveness of the software that Rubin will use to look for thousands of yet-unknown potentially hazardous asteroids, the discovery of 2022 SF289 makes us all safer,” Heinze said in a news release.

Astronomers had missed identifying 2022 SF289 in their data because the asteroid passed in front of the bright star fields of the Milky Way. That provided a type of cosmic camouflage and made it difficult to collect multiple sightings on a single night, which is the typical route for asteroid discovery. In contrast, HelioLinc3D was able to piece together data from different nights to track the asteroid.

“Any survey will have difficulty discovering objects like 2022 SF289 that are near its sensitivity limit, but HelioLinc3D shows that it is possible to recover these faint objects as long as they are visible over several nights,” said Larry Denneau, a lead ATLAS astronomer from the University of Hawaii. “This in effect gives us a ‘bigger, better’ telescope.”

Once astronomers had a fix on 2022 SF289’s orbital path, they were able to locate the asteroid in images previously collected by Pan-STARRS, the Catalina Sky Survey and the Zwicky Transient Facility.

About 2,350 potentially hazardous asteroids have been detected to date, and based on statistical projections, astronomers say at least 3,000 more are yet to be identified. When the Rubin Observatory goes into action, HelioLinc3D is likely to become an important tool for identifying them.

“This is just a small taste of what to expect with the Rubin Observatory in less than two years, when HelioLinc3D will be discovering an object like this every night,” said UW astronomer Mario Jurić, who is the director of the DiRAC Institute. “But more broadly, it’s a preview of the coming era of data-intensive astronomy. From HelioLinc3D to AI-assisted codes, the next decade of discovery will be a story of advancement in algorithms as much as in new, large telescopes.”

Financial support for Rubin Observatory comes from the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Energy and private funding raised by the LSST Corporation. In addition to Heinze and Jurić, members of the HelioLinc3D team include Siegfried Eggl, Joachim Moeyens, Lynne Jones, Ian Sullivan, Eric Bellm and Matthew Holman. ATLAS astronomers John Tonry and Larry Denneau contributed data for the algorithm’s test.

About 900 members of the space community — including astronauts, government officials, researchers and industry professionals — are converging on Seattle this week for the International Space Station Research and Development Conference.

But this week’s ISSRDC event is about more than just the ISS.

The 12th annual conference, which is being held in the Pacific Northwest for the first time, comes as NASA and its commercial partners are making plans for privately operated outposts that will take the place of the ISS when it’s brought down from orbit. That fiery retirement party is currently set for the 2030-2031 time frame.

“We’re at that critical juncture,” said Patrick O’Neill, marketing and communications manager for the Center for the Advancement of Science in Space, or CASIS. The center manages the activities that the ISS takes on in its role as a national laboratory, and is the organizer of the ISSRDC.

For now, the ISS is one of only two space stations in low Earth orbit, or LEO. (The other one is China’s Tiangong space station.) But the next seven years are likely to see the launch of multiple commercial LEO destinations, which have come to be known as CLDs in NASA’s three-letter-acronym parlance. One of those CLDs could well be Orbital Reef, which is currently under development by a consortium that includes Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

“This conference is a great opportunity for us to learn about future avenues of inquiry that could be advantageous for other government agencies, and ways for us to build on the science that’s been done previously, so that we can segue toward those CLDs,” O’Neill told GeekWire.

Blue Origin, Boeing and other Seattle-area aerospace companies will be well-represented at the event, and the list of speakers includes some of the up-and-coming executives in Washington state’s space industry — such as Colin Doughan, CEO of Marysville-based Gravitics, which is working on modules for future space stations; Kelly Hennig, chief operating officer of Kent-based Stoke Space, which is developing a fully reusable launch system; and Lisa Rich, chief operating officer of Redmond-based Xplore, which is pioneering a “Space as a Service” business model.

Space station research will be Topic A for this week’s conference — and O’Neill said the guiding principles for managing that research have evolved since the creation of CASIS in 2011.

“Back in the day when CASIS first assumed management of the national laboratory, the mission statement was to leverage the space-based environment for the benefit of life here on Earth,” he recalled. “Whereas now we’ve expanded that a little bit: It’s not just trying to benefit life on Earth, but also to enable a sustainable market in low Earth orbit.”

O’Neill said more and more companies are see. And some of those companies aren’t the sorts of ventures that you’d typically associate with outer space. For example, one space station research project involves Lamborghini, the Italian sports-car company, working in partnership with the Houston Methodist Research Institute.

“They’re coming together because Houston Medical Research Institute is looking to create an implantable device for therapeutics,” O’Neill said. “And Lamborghini was able to develop some carbon-fiber 3D-printed technologies and send those to the space station. Those [carbon-fiber materials] might end up being on the outside of that implantable chip.”

Medicine and the life sciences are high on the ISS’ research agenda, in part because minimizing the negative health effects of long-term weightlessness will be essential for future treks to Mars and other deep-space destinations.

One of the speakers at this week’s ISSRDC is Arun Sharma, a stem cell researcher at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In May, Sharma and his team worked with Seattle’s Allen Institute for Cell Science on an space station experiment aimed at studying how zero-G conditions could facilitate the production of millions of stem cells for therapeutic applications. That particular experiment was flown as part of a privately funded Axiom Space mission.

O’Neill said Sharma has a unique perspective on space station research. “He has done things through the ‘traditional’ method of leveraging the space station, but now he’s doing it through private-astronaut options — which opens up new avenues, not only for people to access space quite literally, but also for them to be able to leverage the space station from an R&D perspective,” O’Neill said.

In O’Neill’s view, Seattle is the perfect place to highlight the blending of space-based research and down-to-Earth technologies — which is where the space station’s research program is heading.

“Seattle obviously has a very rich history in technology innovation. And there’s also a variety of partners that are already affixed to the space station program or are getting further involved in space, whether that’s Blue Origin, Boeing or Microsoft,” he said. “So it’s a very tech-laden community where those who are interested in becoming part of the space station research community can definitely come and check it out, and learn a little bit more about what’s happening on station and how it applies to their R&D.”

This week’s International Space Station Research and Development Conference will run from Monday through Thursday at the Hyatt Regency Seattle. Check the ISSRDC website for further information on registration and the agenda.

Florida-based L3Harris today announced that it has completed its acquisition of Aerojet Rocketdyne, two days after the Federal Trade Commission gave its OK for the deal.

The acquisition, which was valued at $4.7 billion when the agreement was announced last December, adds Aerojet’s expertise in rocket propulsion systems to L3Harris’ portfolio of space and defense technologies.

“I’m thrilled to welcome more than 5,000 employees to the L3Harris team today,” L3Harris’ chair and CEO, Christopher Kubasik, said in a news release. “With national security at the forefront, we’re combining our resources and expertise with Aerojet Rocketdyne’s propulsion and energetics capabilities to ensure that the Department of Defense and civil space customers can address critical mission needs globally.”

Going forward, Aerojet Rocketdyne will be known as “Aerojet Rocketdyne, an L3Harris Technologies company.” The upward-swooping rocket in Aerojet’s logo has been replaced by L3Harris’ buckyball logo, and Aerojet’s main internet domains — Aerojet.com and Rocket.com — now redirect to L3Harris.com.

The acquisition isn’t expected to affect operations at Aerojet’s facility in Redmond, Wash., where about 470 employees work on a wide range of small thruster systems. The Redmond operation traces its lineage back to Rocket Research Corp., which was founded in Seattle by former Boeing engineers in 1959. Scores of spacecraft, including Mars rovers and NASA’s Orion moonship, have used thrusters built in Redmond.

Before the L3Harris deal, Lockheed Martin mounted an attempt to acquire Aerojet Rocketdyne — but terminated the agreement early last year when the FTC sought to block the acquisition due to antitrust concerns.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture has won $34.7 million in funding from NASA to support the development of a system that could produce solar cells on the moon from materials that are available on site.

The Blue Alchemist project is one of 11 proposals winning support from the space agency’s Tipping Point program, which partners with commercial ventures to back technologies that could contribute to long-term space exploration.

“Harnessing the vast resources in space to benefit Earth is part of our mission, and we’re inspired and humbled to receive this investment from NASA to advance our innovation,” Pat Remias, vice president for Blue Origin’s Capabilities Directorate, Space Systems Development, said today in a news release. “First we return humans to the moon, then we start to ‘live off the land.’”

Blue Alchemist would use lunar regolith — the dust and crushed rock that covers the moon’s surface — as the raw material for solar cells and electrical transmission wire. Oxygen, iron, silicon and aluminum would be extracted through a process known as molten regolith electrolysis, and fed into the manufacturing process. The oxygen could be used for life support or for rocket propulsion.

Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin has been working on the technology over the past couple of years, with Earth-produced simulants taking the place of lunar regolith.

Blue Origin is also on the team for another Tipping Point project, led by Washington, D.C.-based Zeno Power Systems. Zeno was awarded $15 million for Project Harmonia, which aims to create a new type of radioisotope power supply for the Artemis moon program that uses americium-241 as fuel.

Other partners on Project Harmonia include Intuitive Machines, NASA Glenn Research Center, NASA Marshall Flight Center, Sunpower and the University of Dayton Research Institute. Zeno plans to have its technology ready for a lunar surface demonstration in 2027. Theoretically, the team’s Stirling generators could provide continuous power to lunar bases for years, using radioactive material that’s currently classified as nuclear waste.

“Project Harmonia will provide the technology to transform the moon from a location darkened by night and shadow to one enlightened by science and exploration, ultimately for the good of the nation and humankind,” Tyler Bernstein, CEO and co-founder of Zeno Power, said in a news release.

This is NASA’s sixth round of Tipping Point grants. Each company receiving a grant is expected to cover a minimum percentage of the total project cost — at least 10% to 25%, based on company size. NASA’s investment in this newest round is expected to amount to $150 million over the course of a period lasting up to four years.

“Partnering with the commercial space industry lets us at NASA harness the strength of American innovation and ingenuity,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said in a news release. “The technologies that NASA is investing in today have the potential to be the foundation of future exploration.” 

In addition to Blue Origin and Zeno Power, the newly announced Tipping Point awardees include:

• Astrobotic Technology of Pittsburgh, $34.6 million – Astrobotic will demonstrate the robotic deployment of one kilometer of cable, and power transmission through that cable across the lunar surface. A CubeRover delivered by Astrobotic’s Griffin lander will deploy the power line. The demonstration will advance power generation and distribution technologies, including a high-voltage power converter and cable, plus a cable reel system.
• Big Metal Additive of Denver, $5.4 million – The company will advance materials, manufacturing processes, equipment and facilities for metal hybrid additive manufacturing. The project aims to increase technology readiness and reduce lead time, material waste and cost to enable a range of structural products, including space habitats.
• Freedom Photonics of Santa Barbara, California, $1.6 million – Freedom Photonics will develop a new tyupe of direct diode laser source that could enable more efficient lidar systems. The system could better detect methane in Earth’s atmosphere and improve scientists’ understanding of climate change. 
• Lockheed Martin of Littleton, Colorado, $9.1 million – The company will demonstrate in-space component joining and inspection technologies for structural, electrical and fluid systems. The capability would reduce risk and advance the maturity and reliability of in-space assembly architectures.
• Redwire of Jacksonville, Florida, $12.9 million – The company will develop a grader, compactor and microwave emitter into a scalable platform that removes rocks, compacts loose regolith, and melts or sinters regolith into a solid surface. This technology could enable dust mitigation areas, habitat foundations, roads and landing pads.
• Protoinnovations of Pittsburgh, $6.2 million – Protoinnovations will advance modular, flight-ready mobility control software for lunar rovers and robots
• Psionic of Hampton, Virginia, $3.2 million – Partnering with Draper Laboratory, Psionic will conduct a flight demonstration of its Navigation Doppler Lidar and terrain contour matching system. Crewed and robotic missions could utilize the high-precision navigation system to land at various planetary destinations, including the moon.
• United Launch Alliance of Centennial, Colorado, $25 million – The company will continue to evolve a proven Hypersonic Inflatable Aerodynamic Decelerator (HIAD) technology design. ULA will develop a larger 10-meter HIAD that leverages a two-piece structure to enable effective load distribution for even larger inflatable decelerators.
• Varda Space Industries of El Segundo, California, $1.9 million – Varda will mature Conformal Phenolic Impregnated Carbon Ablator (C-PICA), a cost-effective and mass-efficient thermal protection system material developed by NASA. The project will put C-PICA through a flight test and start commercial production of the material.

Astronauts have been making music in orbit for almost 60 years, but at least some of the members of a band called Bandella prefer to think of themselves as musicians who just happened to become astronauts.

“We were musicians before we got into the astronaut corps,” one of the band’s founders, Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, told GeekWire.

Bandella’s Seattle concerts, set for Saturday at the Museum of Flight, won’t be your typical summer music tour. The event will feature some space-themed tunes — including David Bowie’s “Space Oddity,” which went viral when Hadfield recorded a tribute performance on the International Space Station in 2013. There’ll also be a Q&A session during which the musicians recount their experiences in space.

Hadfield said it’s only natural that astronauts bring music with them when they go into orbit. “We’re just people, multifaceted,” he said. “And when you’re a long way from home, you know, you need art and music in amongst all the busyness.”

It’s also natural for astronauts to share their out-of-this-world experiences via the creative channels that they’ve developed throughout their lives.

“A lot of it goes back to when you have been so incredibly lucky to have had the experiences that the members of the band have had. What do you do with those experiences? How do you explain it, and make it part of your own life, and not just a weird perturbation?” Hadfield said.

Those who have seen their home planet from space — including Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos — sometimes talk about a heightened sense of Earth’s beauty and fragility that’s commonly called the Overview Effect. But Hadfield thinks the Overview Effect is “way too confining a definition of what it actually means to us.”

“How are you going to share it with other people?” he asked. “Everybody in the band has a different answer to that question, but that’ll be one of the things, I think, that really makes this performance special.”

Bandella got its start 20 years ago, when Hadfield was going through training at Russia’s Star City complex for future space station missions. Back then, astronauts from NASA as well as the Canadian and European space agencies liked to hang out at an impromptu bar in the basement of one of their housing units.

One night, Hadfield worked up a jam session with Micki Pettit, the wife of NASA astronaut Don Pettit.

“Micki has been a musician and a performer and a disc jockey and a real free spirit her whole life. She’s got a really big, strong torch-song voice. But she also is one of those people who is just an instinctive and beautiful harmony singer,” Hadfield said.

Other musically minded astronauts soon joined the group, including:

• Cady Coleman, who had her own turn in the orbital music spotlight when she performed history’s first orbit-to-ground flute duet with Jethro Tull front man Ian Anderson in 2011.
• Steve Robinson, who took on a spacewalk to repair the shuttle Discovery in 2005. “Anything with strings, he can play beautifully,” Hadfield said.
• Dan Burbank, who participated in two space station assembly missions (in 2000 and 2006) and spent more than five months aboard the station as an expedition crew member in 2011-2012. “He’s like an Art Garfunkel kind of guy with that beautiful ability to just make the music fuller with harmonies and occasionally take the lead. And he is a really deft guitar player and bass player as well,” Hadfield said.
• Ken Cockrell, a retired astronaut who’ll be playing the keyboard for the Seattle concerts. “He commanded the space shuttle [for missions in 1996, 2001 and 2002] and was chief astronaut [in 1997-1998], but he’s a keyboards player,” Hadfield said.

“Everybody’s either an experienced spaceflier or, in Micki’s case, the spouse of an experienced spaceflier,” Hadfield said. “So it’s joyful and fun, and there’s a real reunion feel to it.”

Hadfield said it’s not easy to get the band together for their gigs. “You can imagine — I mean, Steve Robinson is a tenured professor working on a huge number of projects at UC-Davis. Micki’s husband is preparing for a spaceflight right now,” he said. “I help run several companies and have three television shows in pre-production, and I’m writing my sixth book. And Cady is just finishing up her book.”

This week’s gig at the Museum of Flight will mark the first time that Bandella has performed in Seattle.

“Part of the reason to play there, obviously, is the venue,” Hadfield said. “It’s not just a random place. When you look at the huge amount of aerospace industry activity in the Seattle area — with Boeing and SpaceX and what’s going on with Blue Origin and all the other companies — there’s a lot of interest up there.”

Not every song that Bandella performs is about outer space, but one of Hadfield’s favorites — “I.S.S.: Is Somebody Singing” — celebrates the International Space Station. And “Space Oddity” is sure to be on the playlist.

“People expect it,” Hadfield said.

At the same time that Bandella is bringing the space experience down to Earth through their music, spacefliers are continuing to bring music with them to the final frontier. In 2021, for example, Seattle-area engineer Chris Sembroski strummed a ukulele aboard a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule for a video streamed from orbit.

For his part, Hadfield can’t wait for musical performances to reach even farther frontiers. He noted that astronauts are due to start a series of Artemis missions to the lunar surface in the mid-2020s.

“We are switching now from exploration to settlement, sort of like Antarctica between 1910 and, say, the 1950s or ’60s,” he said. “Once we start having a settlement somewhere in a very new environment, we’re going to bring with us a subset of instruments and a subset of culture including music, and then it’s going to evolve in that new place.”

Perhaps musicians on the moon or on Mars will develop their own distinctive styles, just as Celtic music from Ireland, Scotland and England gave birth to bluegrass in America. “That’ll be a really interesting next step,” Hadfield said. “Imagine when you are doing a tour, it’s no longer just a world tour, you know? Which world? It sounds crazy, but you know, it’s coming faster than everybody thinks.”

Check the Museum of Flight’s website for tickets to Bandella’s concerts, which are set for 6:30 and 8:30 p.m. Saturday. But don’t delay: The 6:30 show is already sold out.

Construction is underway for a $120 million facility in Florida that will process Amazon’s Project Kuiper satellites for launch — marking one more giant leap toward creating the company’s global broadband internet constellation.

Details about the facility came to light today at a ceremony hosted by Amazon and Space Florida, the state’s aerospace industry development agency, at Kennedy Space Center’s Launch and Landing Facility. That former space shuttle landing strip where Amazon’s 100,000-square-foot facility will take shape in the months ahead.

The construction project complements Amazon’s efforts to create a 172,000-square-foot satellite production facility in Kirkland, Wash., which will turn out thousands of satellites for Project Kuiper. Today Amazon said that facility will begin production by the end of this year.

Amazon’s plans call for setting up a 3,236-satellite constellation, with at least half of those satellites launched by mid-2026. The resulting network is meant to provide broadband internet access for tens of millions of people around the world who are currently underserved — and will facilitate satellite-based offerings from Amazon Web Services and the Seattle-based company’s other divisions.

Project Kuiper has lagged behind SpaceX’s Starlink broadband satellite network, which already has more than 1.5 million subscribers around the world. The launch of Kuiper’s first two prototype satellites has faced repeated delays due to schedule snags — and is currently set for the last quarter of this year.

Steve Metayer, vice president of Kuiper Production Operations, vowed that Amazon would catch up quickly.

“We have an ambitious plan to begin Project Kuiper’s full-scale production launches and early customer pilots next year, and this new facility will play a critical role in helping us deliver on that timeline,” he said in an Amazon blog post.

The Florida processing facility will receive satellite shipments from the Kirkland factory, prepare the satellites for launch, connect them to Beyond Gravity’s orbital dispensers, and integrate the loaded dispensers with launch vehicles. The facility will feature a 100-foot-tall high-bay clean room that can accommodate the payload fairings for heavy-lift rockets such as Blue Origin’s New Glenn and United Launch Alliance’s Vulcan Centaur.

Blue Origin and ULA will provide most of the 77 heavy-lift launch vehicles that Amazon has secured for its Project Kuiper launches. Those rockets will lift off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, not far from the processing facility. Amazon’s billionaire founder, Jeff Bezos, is also the founder and owner of Blue Origin — but Amazon says it’s treating Bezos’ privately held space venture as if it were any other launch provider.

Space Florida has been facilitating the use of assets in and around NASA’s Kennedy Space Center and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station for commercial applications. For example, it played a big role in establishing Blue Origin’s Florida presence.

Frank DiBello, president and CEO of Space Florida, said his state provides an “unbeatable location” for aerospace companies. “We couldn’t be more thrilled that Project Kuiper chose Space Florida’s Launch and Landing Facility for this facility, and we look forward to being a part of their mission of global connectivity,” he said.

Amazon has committed more than $10 billion to the build-out of Project Kuiper, and more than 1,400 employees are part of the project. Amazon said the Florida satellite processing facility would create up to 50 new jobs on Florida’s Space Coast.

For what it’s worth, the Project Kuiper careers website lists more than 350 open positions, including five in Florida and more than 300 in Washington state. One of the jobs sounds particularly intriguing: Amazon is looking for a project manager to focus on ground mobility applications, including connected cars.

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture confirmed that one of its BE-4 rocket engines suffered a significant anomaly during testing at its West Texas facility in late June.

The incident first came to light today in a report from CNBC, which quoted unnamed sources as saying that the engine detonated about 10 seconds into a test firing on June 30. CNBC said the engine was meant to be used for the second launch of United Launch Alliance’s next-generation Vulcan rocket. That launch, known as Cert-2, is meant to send Sierra Space’s Dream Chaser space plane on an uncrewed cargo delivery mission to the International Space Station.

Blue Origin already has delivered two BE-4 engines to ULA for the first Vulcan launch, Cert-1, which is tasked with deploying the first two prototype satellites for Amazon’s Project Kuiper broadband network into low Earth orbit as well as sending Astrobotic’s robotic lunar lander on its way to the moon.

In a statement emailed to GeekWire, ULA said the anomaly is “not expected to impact our plans” for Cert-1. “The Cert-1 engines successfully passed acceptance testing and the BE-4 engines are qualified for the Cert-1 mission,” ULA said.

The cause of last month’s anomaly is under investigation, Blue Origin said today in an emailed statement:

“In late June, we ran into an issue while testing Vulcan’s Flight Engine 3 at our West Texas facility. No personnel were injured, and we are currently assessing root cause. ULA was immediately made aware. The West Texas test facility is able to continue testing at the site. We already have proximate cause and are working on remedial actions. We will be able to meet our engine delivery commitments this year and stay ahead of our customer’s launch needs.”

Getting Blue Origin’s BE-4 engines ready for their first launch has already taken years longer than Blue Origin or ULA anticipated when they announced the rocket development project in 2014. The BE-4 is designed to use liquefied natural gas as fuel and provide 550,000 pounds of thrust with deep throttle capability.

The engines are to be used not only on Vulcan’s first-stage booster, but also on Blue Origin’s orbital-class New Glenn rocket, which is expected to have its first launch no earlier than 2024. Blue Origin has already struck deals for multiple satellite launches using New Glenn, and NASA plans to use New Glenn for the launch of twin spacecraft to Mars in late 2024. If it takes longer than Blue Origin anticipates to address the issues raised by last month’s test failure, that could have a domino effect on those missions.

Meanwhile, the first Vulcan launch has been delayed due to a completely different issue: a fiery anomaly that ULA experienced during testing of the Vulcan rocket’s Centaur V upper stage in March. ULA says it’s modifying the upper stage to address issues raised by that anomaly, which did not involve the BE-4 rocket engine.

ULA is a joint venture involving Boeing and Lockheed Martin.

Update for 10:15 p.m. PT July 11: United Launch Alliance’s CEO, Tory Bruno, discussed the June 30 incident in a series of tweets. The failure of the engine’s acceptance test, or ATP, was “way less interesting than it sounds,” he said.

“They happen. That’s why we acceptance test each component coming off the line before accepting delivery,” Bruno said. He said he was “very” confident that the failure of the test was due to poor workmanship on that particular engine, rather than an overlooked flaw in the engine design.

Here’s a sampling of other tweets in the thread:

Sen. Maria Cantwell and NASA Administrator Bill Nelson met Wednesday at the Washington State Space Summit to hash out what’s needed to grow and strengthen the Pacific Northwest’s aerospace industry — including a potential new manufacturing institute.

The event featured some of Washington state’s top aerospace companies and educational institutions. Blue Origin, the space company launched by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, hosted the event at its headquarters in Kent, just south of Seattle.

The emphasis was on U.S. manufacturing capacity to support the space sector, particularly in the area of cutting-edge thermoplastic composites that can replace metals and other polymers in space and aviation crafts.

“I encourage the [U.S.] Department of Commerce and NASA to create a new manufacturing institute here in the Pacific Northwest,” Cantwell said.

Cantwell is chair of the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation, which oversees NASA and the space industry. Cantwell and Nelson, a former senator, were commerce committee colleagues for well over a decade.

“She used to tell me what to do then, and she still tells me what to do now,” Nelson quipped. “So when she said, ‘We’re going to have this manufacturing institute.’ I said ‘Yes, ma’am.'”

Cantwell said she was “happy to hear” that Nelson has been working on an effort with the White House to increase manufacturing aerospace technologies in the U.S.

An institute has not yet been designated for Washington state. There are already 17 innovation institutes as part of the Manufacturing USA network, which is a public-private partnership supporting manufacturing in the areas of semiconductors, advanced lightweight materials, biotech, fabrics and other fields.

Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith was part of the panel discussion at the Space Summit. He agreed that better manufacturing is a key need for the sector.

“One of the things that the aerospace industry as a whole undervalues [is] that manufacturing is the hard problem,” Smith said. Historically the focus has been on the exciting technology, he added, but there is a need to produce high quality materials at scale.

Nikki Malcolm, CEO of the Pacific Northwest Aerospace Alliance, noted the potential for crossover between manufacturing in space and commercial aviation sectors to benefit both.

“There’s such an amazing collaboration opportunity between the two because we’re making the same kind of parts,” Malcolm said. “Quite frankly, a lot of times the machines don’t care whether you’re making space parts or commercial parts.”

As Boeing’s original home, Washington state has long been a global leader in aviation. Over the past decade, it has developed a robust space ecosystem with dozens of companies, including Blue Origin, Gravitics, Stoke Space and Starfish Space, whose CEOs all spoke at the event on Wednesday.

Many Washington companies are working in partnership with NASA — 42 serve as suppliers to the agency’s Artemis program, which plans to send astronauts to the moon and eventually Mars. Blue Origin in May won a $3.4 billion NASA contract to provide a lunar landing system for the Artemis 5 mission, which is set for 2029. Elon Musk’s SpaceX, which is providing landing systems for earlier Artemis missions, has its Starlink satellite headquarters in Redmond, Wash.

The summit also tackled the issue of workforce training and promoting diversity in the sector.

The state’s space industry has an annual economic impact of $4.6 billion and provides 13,103 jobs, according to Cantwell’s office. In July, the senator helped lead the passage of the CHIPS and Science Act, which included billions of dollars for STEM education and workforce development.

Leaders from the University of Washington, Washington State University and Sno-Isle TECH Skills Center participated in the discussion Wednesday and highlighted their efforts to grow education and training in the sector with an eye to bringing more women and racial and ethnic minorities into the field. The Northwest Indian College had a booth at the event’s accompanying trade show featuring its engineering and aerospace efforts.

STEM students were invited to the event, and a young girl offered the first question of the panel, asking leaders how they planned to get middle school kids interested in STEAM (science, technology, engineering, art and math) and aerospace.

Nelson cited the emotional tug of space.

“You want to get kids interested in space, I can tell you one way NASA does [it]. We have an astronaut in a blue flight suit walk into the classroom and you ought to see how their eyes light up,” Nelson said. “There is a fascination about spaceflight from the American people, but that’s particularly so with children.”

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson will visit Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture in Kent, Wash., to get a firsthand look at the Seattle area’s growing space industry.

Next Wednesday’s Washington State Space Summit will feature a trade show with nearly 20 regional space companies, plus a panel discussion that will focus on the economic opportunities opening up on the space frontier over the coming decade. The summit will be hosted by Sen. Maria Cantwell, the Washington Democrat who chairs the Senate committee that oversees NASA — and who played a leading role in passage of the $280 billion CHIPS and Science Act last year.

“Washington’s space industry has doubled in just four years, a success story our whole state can be proud of,” Cantwell said today in a news release announcing the summit. “More than 13,000 Washingtonians work in this growing industry, which will help send the first American woman to the moon and the first person to Mars.”

Cantwell said Nelson “will see for himself what new investments in the state can deliver for the nation – from high-rate composite aircraft manufacturing to building new space stations.” Boeing has been pioneering aerospace applications for carbon composites at its aircraft manufacturing facilities in the Seattle area, while Blue Origin and Marysville, Wash.-based Gravitics are among regional companies working on commercial space stations.

Nelson said that “NASA’s work with Washington commercial space companies and academic institutions demonstrates the power of investing in America.”

He took particular note of the role of Washington state companies in facilitating NASA’s Artemis program, which aims to land astronauts on the moon in the 2025-2026 time frame.

“NASA partnerships in the state are creating good-paying American jobs and fueling groundbreaking research and technology that will help propel humans back to the moon and onward to Mars,” Nelson, a former U.S. senator, said in today’s news release. “With the help of Washingtonians, NASA will make new and more exciting discoveries while also inspiring the Artemis Generation — the next generation of scientists, engineers, technicians and explorers.”

Blue Origin is the Seattle area’s largest space company, based on employment estimates, and its projects range from the New Shepard suborbital launch system to the orbital-class New Glenn rocket and the Orbital Reef space station concept. In May, NASA awarded $3.4 billion to a team led by Blue Origin to build a crew-capable lunar landing system that would provide an alternative to SpaceX’s Starship lander.

Blue Origin CEO Bob Smith will join Cantwell and Nelson for the summit’s panel discussion. Other industry representatives include Stoke Space CEO Andy Lapsa, Starfish Space co-founder Austin Link and Gravitics CEO Colin Doughan. Nikki Malcolm, CEO and executive director of the Pacific Northwest Aerospace Alliance, will also be there.

The STEM education community will be represented by Jihui Yang, vice dean of the University of Washington’s College of Engineering; Mary Rezac, dean of Washington State University’s Voiland College of Engineering and Architecture; and Kareen Morales Vincent, an aerospace manufacturing and maintenance instructor at the Sno-Isle TECH Skills Center. In addition, Washington state students have also been invited to sit in at the summit.

Stoke Space, Starfish Space, Gravitics, Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp., MagniX and Off Planet Research will be among the exhibitors at the trade show.

Astrophysicists have found the best evidence yet for a low-frequency “hum” of gravitational waves rippling through the cosmos, based on 15 years’ worth of ultra-precise measurements checking the timing of radio pulses from distant stars.

The evidence, newly published in the Astrophysical Journal Letters, comes from several teams of researchers working in the U.S. and Canada as well as Europe, India, Australia and China.

The teams monitored radio emissions from a total of 115 ultra-dense, spinning stars known as pulsars. Nearly 70 of those pulsars were observed by the North American Nanohertz Observatory for Gravitational Waves, known as NANOGrav.

“This is key evidence for gravitational waves at very low frequencies,” Vanderbilt University’s Stephen Taylor, who co-led the search and is the current chair of the NANOGrav Collaboration, said today in a news release. “After years of work, NANOGrav is opening an entirely new window on the gravitational-wave universe.”

The NANOGrav Collaboration has more than 170 members, including researchers from the University of Washington at Bothell, Oregon State University and the University of British Columbia. Jeff Hazboun, a physics professor at Oregon State who previously served as a postdoctoral researcher at UW-Bothell, said working on NANOGrav has been “really wonderful.”

“I’d definitely say that big problems nowadays really require a lot of people to work on them, and collaborations are a great way to get things done,” he told GeekWire. “You know, we were using Zoom two years before the pandemic.”

Hazboun said his primary role is to “make sure that what we’re seeing is what we think we’re seeing, and understanding how sensitive our array of pulsars is as a detector for gravitational waves.”

A detector of galactic proportions

Pulsars send out radio waves in a rotating beam as the stars spin —somewhat like the rotating spotlight in a lighthouse. The fastest-spinning pulsars rotate hundreds of times a second, which means they can serve as ultra-precise cosmic clocks.

In the mid-1990s, scientists figured out that the timing of the radio flashes from pulsars could theoretically be used to detect gravitational waves created by powerful phenomena such as the interactions between two supermassive black holes.

Such waves should create subtle ripples of distortion in the fabric of spacetime, in accordance with Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. To observers on Earth, it would look as if the timing of the radio pulses was thrown off ever so slightly.

Earth-based experiments — such as the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-wave Observatory, or LIGO — have detected high-frequency gravitational waves associated with small to medium-sized black holes. But supermassive black holes are a different matter. They’re millions of times more massive than the black holes that LIGO has been targeting. It’d be impossible to use an Earth-based detector to look for the low-frequency gravitational waves that those monster black holes are thought to emit as they interact.

“A really important thing to note is that our detector doesn’t lie solely on Earth, or even in the solar system,” Taylor told reporters during a teleconference about the results. “We’re using a decades-old discipline of timing pulsars throughout the Milky Way, and we’re effectively building a galaxy-scale gravitational-wave antenna from them.”

It’s not an easy task. “Pulsars are actually very faint radio sources, so we require thousands of hours a year on the world’s largest telescopes to carry out this experiment,” said West Virginia University’s Maura McLaughlin, co-director of the NANOGrav Physics Frontiers Center. NANOGrav’s radio observations were made using the Green Bank Telescope in West Virginia, the Very Large Array in New Mexico, and the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico (which collapsed in late 2020).

Don’t use the D-word

Over the years, NANOGrav and other collaborations have been gradually closing in on a confirmed detection of low-frequency gravitational waves. But McLaughlin said she and her colleagues weren’t quite ready yet to use the D-word.

“We’re not reporting a ‘detection,'” she told reporters. “We’re being very careful with our language, and we are calling this ‘evidence’ for gravitational waves.”

The reason for her caution has to do with the statistical analysis of the findings so far. A key measure for the significance of results has to do with standard deviation, also known as “sigma.” Physicists would like to see a rating of 5-sigma for an official discovery, like the discovery of the Higgs boson in 2012. But none of the pulsar timing groups has yet reported 5-sigma results.

China’s research team is the closest, with a confidence level of 4.6-sigma — which translates into a 2-in-a-million chance that the report is just a false alarm. “However, it’s only based on three years of data on a very short dataset, so it’s quite difficult to really assess the validity or pull any astrophysics out of it,” McLaughlin said.

NANOGrav’s researchers expect to clear the 5-sigma hurdle once the results from all of the pulsar timing groups are combined, probably in the next year or two. “We’re looking forward to the boost in gravitational-wave sensitivity that this kind of data combination is going to be able to afford us,” said Cornell University’s Thankful Cromartie, chair of NANOGrav’s pulsar timing working group.

What could be causing the hum?

Based on the analysis so far, the NANOGrav team says the best way to describe the gravitational-wave patterns would be as a background hum — analogous to overlapping voices in a crowd, or the din you hear when musicians in an orchestra are tuning their instruments.

“Now that we have evidence for gravitational waves, the next step is to use our observations to study the sources producing this hum,” said Sarah Vigeland, an astrophysicist at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. “One possibility is that the signal is coming from pairs of supermassive black holes, with masses millions or billions of times the mass of our sun. As these gigantic black holes orbit each other, they produce low-frequency gravitational waves.”

But that’s not the only possibility. Northwestern University’s Luke Zoltan Kelley, chair of NANOGrav’s astrophysics working group, said the results are “also consistent with new physics — gravitational waves produced by cosmological or inflationary processes in the very early universe.” Theorists have already come up with alternate explanations.

NANOGrav and the other pulsar timing groups will need to collect more data to determine which possibility makes the most sense.

“The answer is probably much more complicated, that it’s really a mixture of different processes, and it’s unlikely that supermassive black hole binaries aren’t in the mix somewhere,” Taylor said. “We’re trying to put a constraint on all of these different parameters and all of these different processes at the same time.”

What’s next?

Hazboun said pulsar timing techniques and Earth-based interferometers like LIGO are providing a variety of ways to look at different ends of the gravitational-wave spectrum.

“It’s akin to seeing something from the rest of the universe in radio, or in ultraviolet, or in the infrared,” he explained. “You need different detectors to see different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. And it’s the same thing with gravitational waves.”

In the decades to come, still more types of detectors are expected to fill in gaps in the gravitational-wave spectrum.

“There are a couple of Chinese projects [TianQin and Taiji] and a European-NASA project [LISA] to build space-based gravitational-wave detectors,” Hazboun said, “and those are actually sensitive in the region of the frequency band between pulsar timing at the really low end and LIGO at the high end.”

Studies in Astrophysical Journal Letters about the NANOGrav 15-year data set:

• Evidence for a Gravitational-Wave Background
• Observations and Timing of 68 Millisecond Pulsars
• Detector Characterization and Noise Budget
• Search for Signals from New Physics

Other studies focusing on low-frequency gravitational waves:

• Searching for the Nano-Hertz Stochastic Gravitational Wave Background with the Chinese Pulsar Timing Array Data Release I
• Search for an Isotropic Gravitational-wave Background with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array
• The Gravitational-wave Background Null Hypothesis: Characterizing Noise in Millisecond Pulsar Arrival Times with the Parkes Pulsar Timing Array

In coordination with other pulsar timing groups, members of the NANOGrav team will discuss their results during a live-streamed presentation at 10 a.m. PT Thursday.

Even the Men in Black need their day in the sun. And they’re getting it this week, in the place where those classic characters in UFO tales made their debut.

Roswell may be the nation’s best-known UFO capital — but you can make a good argument that the Seattle area served the true birthplace of the Men in Black and helped inspire shows including  “The X-Files,” “Project Blue Book” and yes, “Men in Black.”

Steve Edmiston — a lawyer, film writer and producer who’s one of the organizers of the Men in Black Birthday Bash — can make an especially good argument.

“It’s like almost the original X-File, if you think about it,” he says in the latest episode of the Fiction Science podcast.

Edmiston is talking about the Maury Island Incident, a flying-saucer tale that dates back to June 21, 1947 — two weeks before the Roswell UFO Incident took place in New Mexico.

The main character in the Maury Island Incident is Harold Dahl, a man from Tacoma, Wash., who goes out on his boat in Puget Sound with his son and his dog on the fateful day. As he plies the waters, Dahl spots what he describes as six doughnut-shaped flying objects in the sky above. One of the UFOs explodes and drops a blizzard of burning slag onto the boat, killing Dahl’s dog and burning his son’s arm.

“They’re so frightened, they have to get off the water,” Edmiston said. Dahl and his son take shelter on Maury Island’s shores and wait for the saucers to fly away.

“The very next morning, Harold Dahl gets a knock at his door in Tacoma,” he said. “And the man at that door is dressed in black. White shirt, black tie, black suit, black shoes. Got the fedora on. Came up in a black 1947 Buick. It’s all there in the records.”

The man takes Dahl to a diner and proceeds to tell him everything that happened the day before. Then he issues a warning that becomes the signature for all the Men in Black who follow in his footsteps:  “Don’t pass this around. You don’t even know what you saw. Bad things will happen if you talk about this information.”

The rest is UFO history — including disappearing alien artifacts and a plane crash, weird occurrences experienced by Dahl and his family, and what may have been the FBI’s first investigation of flying saucers.

“The FBI conducted almost a three-week investigation, with documentation on a daily basis, going all the way to J. Edgar Hoover,” Edmiston said. “I mean, Hoover’s got his fingerprints all over this. He was super-fascinated by it.”

Why was there so much interest?

“We had a new enemy, the Soviet Union, right?” Edmiston said. “And President Truman had just said, in May, we gotta contain ’em. And all these agencies were now worried that maybe some of us are seeing things overflying our country, and we should investigate that.”

Similar concerns about China and Russia are now fueling the federal government’s renewed interest in UFOs — or to use the new label, unidentified anomalous phenomena. The Pentagon and NASA are taking a more serious look at reports that were previously met with ridicule. And some folks who claim inside knowledge even say the intelligence community is hiding evidence of alien technology.

You could argue that the UFO renaissance is getting weird enough to pique the interest of Fox Mulder, the fictional FBI agent in “The X-Files.” And the Maury Island Incident has its very own Mulder: FBI Special Agent Jack Wilcox, who wrote up a 14-page memo summarizing his investigation for Hoover in August 1947.

Harold Dahl, the Tacoma man who made the original UFO report, had decided to claim it was all a hoax — perhaps to get the Men in Black off his back. Hoover was also ready to write off the case as a hoax. But Wilcox wasn’t willing to call it quits. He sent Hoover a teletype insisting that Dahl “did not admit … that his story was a hoax, but only stated that if questioned by the authorities he was going to say it was a hoax because he did not want any further trouble over the matter.”

“Imagine the courage to tell the executive director of the FBI at the height of his powers, ‘No, you’re wrong,’” Edmiston said.

Despite Wilcox’s efforts, the Maury Island Incident did end up being widely seen as a hoax, in part because Fred Crisman, a teller of tall tales, got tangled up in the story. Over the decades, Dahl’s story faded into obscurity — to the point that Edmiston, who has spent nearly his whole life in the Puget Sound region, never heard anything about the incident until it came up in a coffee-shop conversation in 2011.

Edmiston and the Maury Island Incident were made for each other. “I love talking about this story because it’s just so crazy,” he said. He and his friends founded the Maury Island Incident Historical Society to preserve the UFO tale — and in 2014 he teamed up with a cadre of filmmakers and actors to create a 30-minute movie version. “It’s not a documentary, it’s a narrative film,” he said.

“The Maury Island Incident” is available for rent or purchase via Vimeo, and you can even watch a free sample:

Last year marked 75 years since the Maury Island Incident, and in recognition of the anniversary, Edmiston wrote a recap of the story for Fate magazine. He and other keepers of the UFO flame also threw a party in Des Moines, Wash. — but it wasn’t on June 21, the date on which Dahl said he saw the flying saucers. Instead, it was on June 22, the date when the first Man in Black showed up.

This year’s “Men in Black Birthday Bash,” presented by Seattle Southside, is even bigger: There’ll be a mass gathering of Men (and Women) in Black on Thursday, followed by a film festival on Friday and an evening of Sinatra-style swing on Saturday.

Why have stories about the Men in Black held so much appeal over the past seven and a half decades? Speaking as a writer, Edmiston thinks there’s a dual appeal.

“You’ve got this confluence of ‘Maybe there’s something nefarious going out here, and maybe there’s something to be afraid of,’ and that’s sort of thrilling to know that that could be happening,” he said. “And then, ‘Boy, would I like to know!’ That sense of discovery.”

And what does he think Harold Dahl saw — or didn’t see? Edmiston gave a lawyerly answer to that question.

“I have a very open mind about things that can happen,” Edmiston said. “I make no claim about what actually happened at Maury Island. I feel pretty strongly that this hoax theory should be cast aside. We can decide not to believe Harold Dahl, but I don’t think the hoax thing is the reason we shouldn’t. When the FBI has basically got in writing that the hoax is itself a fabrication, I think we need to move on.”

Check out the Explore Seattle Southside website, the 6/22 Facebook page, the 2023 Summer Saucer Search and MIBBB Fest 2023 for more about the Men in Black Birthday Bash in Des Moines, Wash.

This report was first published on Alan Boyle’s Cosmic Log. Stay tuned for future episodes of the Fiction Science podcast via Apple, Google, Overcast, Spotify, Player.fm, Pocket Casts, Radio Public and Podvine. If you like Fiction Science, please rate the podcast and subscribe to get alerts for future episodes.

Starfish Space’s ambitious mission to test its on-orbit satellite docking system has taken an unfortunate turn — or, more precisely, an unfortunate spin.

The Kent, Wash.-based startup’s Otter Pup spacecraft was one of 72 payloads sent into low Earth orbit on June 12 by SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket for Transporter-8, a dedicated rideshare mission. Otter Pup and several other spacecraft were attached to Launcher’s Orbiter SN3, a space tug that’s designed to release piggyback payloads at different times.

Soon after Orbiter SN3 separated from the Falcon 9 upper stage, it experienced an anomaly that set it spinning at a rate on the order of one revolution per second, far outside the bounds of normal operating conditions.

By the time Launcher’s team made contact with Orbiter, fuel and power levels were critically low — and the team made an emergency decision to deploy Otter Pup immediately. In a joint statement issued today, Launcher and Starfish Space said that quick action “gave the Otter Pup mission a chance to continue.”

With assistance from Astro Digital and ground station partners, Starfish’s team contacted Otter Pup and determined that it was generating power — but was also spinning because of the circumstances of its emergency deployment.

Starfish co-founder Austin Link told GeekWire that the spacecraft, which is about the size of a dorm-room fridge, has drifted several kilometers away from its Orbiter mothership. “They’re still in the same orbital neighborhood,” he said.

Starfish’s mission plan called for Otter Pup to execute a series of maneuvers leading up to a rendezvous and docking with Orbiter. Such maneuvers would demonstrate that Starfish’s guidance and navigation system, electric propulsion system and electrostatic capture system all work in orbit as designed. But Link said the maneuvers can’t be done unless the spinning can be stabilized.

“We’re uncertain what the future for the vehicle is,” Link said. “It’ll be very challenging to de-tumble and arrest the momentum. There’s also a chance that things have been damaged by this rotation rate that would prevent us from being able to do the mission going forward.”

And as if that’s not challenging enough, Orbiter SN3 is no longer available as a docking target because of its own rotation rate. We’ve reached out to California-based Launcher, which was recently acquired by a space station startup known as Vast, and will update this report with anything we hear back.

“Otter Pup is still alive, but the mission is hanging on by a thread,” Link said.

In the months ahead, Starfish’s team will try to stabilize Otter Pup and determine the satellite’s health. Link said the primary method for reducing rotation relies on the spacecraft’s magnetic torque rods.

“These are effectively electromagnets that you can use to push off of Earth’s magnetic field to de-tumble the satellite,” he explained. “They’re designed for much lower rotation rates than what we’re experiencing now, but they may be able to make a difference.”

If Otter Pup is healthy, and if the rotation rate can be reduced, Starfish Space could look for other satellites in nearby orbits to serve as replacement docking partners. Or it could demonstrate its maneuverability without doing a docking.

“It’s going to be more of a challenge than what we wanted it to be for this Otter Pup,” Link said. “We’ll keep working to see if we have a chance to test out some of the key technologies for this Otter Pup, and we’ll also double down on other ways to test, both on orbit and terrestrially in the laboratory.”

If resurrecting the spinning Otter Pup is a lost cause, Link said “there are definitely scenarios where we would consider similar on-orbit demonstrations.” The important thing is to prove out the technologies so that Starfish’s team can move on to offering its customers a full-scale Otter docking craft to assist with satellite servicing or end-of-life disposal.

“It’s definitely not a mortal blow,” Link said. “The company’s fortunate to still be in a very strong position, with a great team and great technology and great customer interest. The on-orbit proof points for the technology are at the very least delayed, unfortunately, because of the position that Otter Pup was put in. But there are still a variety of paths forward for us to pursue. It’s still a really exciting future, and we’re really excited to chase after it.”

Starfish Space was founded in 2019 by Link and Trevor Bennett, both of whom previously worked as engineers at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture. The startup has attracted a little more than $21 million in funding from investors including Munich Re Ventures, Toyota Ventures, PSL Ventures, NFX and MaC Venture Capital. It has also received a series of technology development grants from the U.S. Space Force and NASA.

NASA says it will collaborate with Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture on the development of new space transportation capabilities that will provide high-frequency access to low Earth orbit for astronauts and cargo.

The project is one of seven selected for the second round of NASA’s Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities initiative, or CCSC-2. The first round began in 2014. All of the companies involved in CCSC-2 will work with NASA under the terms of unfunded Space Act Agreements. That means no money will change hands, but NASA will make its expertise available for the companies’ projects.

“It is great to see companies invest their own capital toward innovative commercial space capabilities, and we’ve seen how these types of partnerships benefit both the private sector and NASA,” Phil McAlister, director of commercial spaceflight at NASA Headquarters, said today in a news release.

“The companies can leverage NASA’s vast knowledge and experience, and the agency can be a customer for the capabilities included in the agreements in the future,” he said. “Ultimately, these agreements will foster more competition for services and more providers for innovative space capabilities.”

Blue Origin’s suborbital space launch program, known as New Shepard, already has flown 31 people and scores of scientific payloads to space and back, in the course of six launches from its facilities in West Texas. That program has been on hold since last September, when an anomaly occurred during an uncrewed research flight. Blue Origin plans to resume flights once an investigation overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration is wrapped up.

The Kent, Wash.-based company is also getting set to launch orbital-class New Glenn rockets from Florida. And there’s still more: Blue Origin is part of a commercial space station project called Orbital Reef, and it’s leading an industry consortium that’s working on a lunar lander for NASA.

The newly announced collaboration with NASA would presumably support the development of a capsule capable of sending crew members to orbit. More than a decade ago, Blue Origin talked about building an orbital-class Space Vehicle for NASA’s use, but not much has been heard about that project lately.

The six other CCSC-2 projects are similarly aimed at extending the capabilities of the companies involved. Here’s how NASA describes those projects:

• Northrop Grumman is collaborating with NASA on the company’s Persistent Platform to provide autonomous and robotic capabilities for commercial science research and manufacturing capabilities in low Earth orbit, or LEO.
• Sierra Space is collaborating with NASA for the development of the company’s commercial LEO ecosystem, including next-generation space transportation, in-space infrastructure, and expandable and tailorable space facilities providing a human presence in LEO.
• SpaceX is collaborating with NASA on an integrated LEO architecture to provide a growing portfolio of technology with near-term Dragon evolution and concurrent Starship development. This architecture includes Starship as a transportation and in-space LEO destination element supported by Super Heavy, Dragon and Starlink, and constituent capabilities including crew and cargo transportation, communications and operational and ground support.
• Special Aerospace Services is collaborating with NASA on an in-space servicing technology, propulsion and robotic technology called the Autonomous Maneuvering Unit and the Astronaut Assist-AMU. The technology would enable commercial in-space servicing and mobility applications intended for safer assembly of commercial LEO destinations, servicing, retrieval and inspection of in-space systems.
• ThinkOrbital is collaborating with NASA on the development of ThinkPlatforms and CONTESA (Construction Technologies for Space Applications). ThinkPlatforms are self-assembling, single-launch, large-scale orbital platforms that facilitate a wide array of applications in LEO, including in-space research, manufacturing and astronaut missions. CONTESA features welding, cutting, inspection and additive manufacturing technologies, and aids in large-scale in-space fabrication.
• Vast Space is collaborating with NASA on technologies and operations required for its microgravity and artificial gravity stations. This includes the Haven-1 commercial destination, which will provide a microgravity environment for crew, research and in-space manufacturing; and Vast-1, the first crewed mission to Haven-1. Development activities for larger space station modules will also take place under the Space Act Agreement.

Update for 9:55 a.m. June 16: When contacted by GeekWire, Blue Origin said it had nothing to add to NASA’s announcement at this time.

Spaceflight Inc.’s former CEO, Curt Blake, is joining the Seattle office of Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati at a time when the California-based law firm is launching an industry group to focus on the needs of emerging space ventures.

Wilson Sonsini’s clients already include high-profile investors and companies in the NewSpace industry sector, such as Astranis Space Technologies, BlackSky, Lunasonde, Skylo Technologies and Slingshot Aerospace.

Craig Sherman, a partner at Wilson Sonsini who focuses on the space industry, said in a news release that Blake’s addition to the team as a senior of counsel serves as “an ideal opportunity for us to work more closely with the innovators and established companies leading the way forward in the NewSpace sector.”

During his 12-year tenure as the CEO at Spaceflight Inc. — which is currently headquartered in Bellevue, Wash. — Blake oversaw the company’s rise as a coordinator of satellite rideshare logistics and the manufacturer of Sherpa orbital transfer vehicles. He was a board member for the Commercial Spaceflight Federation from 2012 to 2022.

Before he helped Spaceflight Inc. get off the ground, Blake served in a variety of senior executive and legal roles at software companies including Microsoft, Aldus, Corbis and the late billionaire Paul Allen’s Starwave media venture. He earned his B.A., J.D. and MBA degrees from the University of Washington.

“I’m excited about joining Wilson Sonsini because of its impressive legacy of working with innovative technology and life sciences clients,” Blake said in today’s news release. “Taking on this role at such a unique time gives me the opportunity to continue focusing on the rapidly growing and dynamic space technology sector while building upon the relationships I’ve established in the industry.”

Spaceflight was a subsidiary of Seattle-based Spaceflight Industries until 2020. That’s when Spaceflight Inc. was sold to a 50-50 joint venture involving Japan’s Mitsui & Co. and Yamasa Co. Ltd. Spaceflight Industries then rebranded itself as BlackSky, with a focus on satellite imagery and geospatial intelligence solutions.

Blake transitioned out of the CEO role at Spaceflight Inc. in February, passing the baton to veteran aerospace executive Tiphaine Louradour in February. Since March, he’s been a strategic and legal adviser to Mitsui and other clients.

Last week, Texas-based Firefly Aerospace announced that it acquired Spaceflight Inc. from Mitsui and Yamasa and will sharpen the operation’s focus on orbital vehicles.

Phosphorus, an essential ingredient for life as we know it, has been detected for the first time in water samples that can be traced back to Enceladus, an ice-covered moon of Saturn.

The discovery, reported today in the journal Nature, lends further support to suggestions that life could lurk within Enceladus’ ice-covered oceans — and perhaps in similar environments elsewhere in the solar system.

Phosphorus-containing compounds, known as phosphates, provide the molecular backbone for DNA and RNA molecules. Adenosine triphosphate, or ATP, serves as the source of energy for living cells. This research marks the first time that phosphates have been traced to an extraterrestrial ocean. The Nature paper suggests that phosphate levels in Enceladus’ hidden seas could be hundreds or even thousands of times higher than what exists in Earth’s oceans.

“By determining such high phosphate concentrations readily available in Enceladus’ ocean, we have now satisfied what is generally considered one of the strictest requirements in establishing whether celestial bodies are habitable,” study co-author Fabian Klenner, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Washington, said in a news release.

The team behind the research was led by Frank Postberg, a planetary scientist at Freie Universität Berlin. Klenner participated in the project during his studies at the German university, and started working at UW in May.

More than a decade ago, readings collected by NASA’s Cassini mission confirmed that water is spraying out of crevices in Enceladus’ surface — and that the grains of ice gravitate toward Saturn’s faint E ring. Cassini’s Cosmic Dust Analyzer sampled the spray coming from Enceladus, but didn’t register the presence of phosphorus.

“Previous geochemical models were divided on the question of whether Enceladus’ ocean contains significant quantities of phosphates at all,” Postberg said.

To address the question in a new way, Postberg and his colleagues looked at a set of readings from the Cosmic Dust Analyzer that focused on the material in the E ring.

“The E ring data that we looked at gives us better statistics, as compared to data from the few Enceladus flybys,” Klenner explained in an email exchange. “Phosphorus is hard to find because it’s the least abundant of the bio-essential elements, which are carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur.”

Klenner set up an experiment that mimicked the data generated by grains of water ice hitting Cassini’s detector. He tried different chemical compositions and concentrations, hoping to come up with readings that matched the chemical signatures recorded by Cassini.

“I prepared different phosphate solutions, and did the measurements, and we hit the bull’s-eye,” Klenner said. “This was in perfect match with the data from space.”

Klenner said the ice grains contain phosphates “because of water-rock interactions on the moon’s seafloor.”

“We show in the paper through geochemical experiments and modeling that high phosphate concentrations are an inevitable outcome from interactions of a carbonate-rich fluid that has an alkaline pH (= Enceladus ocean) with unaltered carbonaceous chondritic rock (= Enceladus rocky core),” he said via email.

Enceladus isn’t the only icy world that’s thought to harbor hidden seas. Scientists say that Europa, an ice-covered moon of Jupiter, appears to have an ocean that’s up to 10 times deeper than Earth’s. Other icy celestial bodies that may have subsurface seas include two other Jovian moons, Ganymede and Callisto; Titan, a smog-covered moon of Saturn; and the dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto.

Robotic space missions could well provide more insights into the composition of extraterrestrial oceans, and the prospects for habitability. NASA’s Europa Clipper and the European Space Agency’s Juice mission will take a closer look at Jupiter’s icy moons, while NASA’s Dragonfly mission will explore Titan.

Enceladus isn’t yet on the list for a future robotic visit, but several mission concepts have been proposed — including Enceladus Orbilander, Moonraker and Breakthrough Enceladus.

Postberg said the ultimate question about Enceladus still needs to be answered.

“Although we know now that Enceladus is a habitable place, we have no clue if it is actually inhabited,” he told GeekWire in an email. “We need a new mission to find that out.”

In addition to Postberg and Klenner, the authors of the paper published by Nature, “Detection of Phosphates Originating From Enceladus’s Ocean,” include Yasuhito Sekine, Christopher Glein, Zenghui Zou, Bernd Abel, Kento Furuya, Jon Hillier, Nozair Khawaja, Sascha Kempf, Lenz Noelle, Takuya Saito, Juergen Schmidt, Takazo Shibuya, Ralf Srama and Shuya Tan. The research was the subject of a presentation at the American Geophysical Union’s meeting in Chicago last December.

A well-traveled SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket today launched dozens of satellites, including an experimental docking craft created by a Seattle-area startup called Starfish Space.

Starfish Space’s Otter Pup spacecraft was one of 72 payloads that were deployed into low Earth orbit after the launch of SpaceX’s Transporter-8 satellite rideshare mission from California’s Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Liftoff came at 2:35 p.m. PT, just hours after SpaceX launched 52 Starlink internet satellites from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Minutes after the California launch, the Falcon 9’s first-stage booster flew itself back to a landing pad not far from the launch site, marking the ninth successful launch and recovery for that booster. It was the 200th successful recovery of a Falcon 9 booster.

Meanwhile, the rocket’s second stage reached orbit and executed a meticulously choreographed series of deployments that ended nearly an hour and a half after launch. The long list of payloads included small satellites and a re-entry vehicle, as well as an orbital transfer vehicle that carried its own complement of spacecraft.

Starfish Space’s Otter Pup was attached to Orbiter SN3, a space tug provided by Launcher Space. During the months ahead, Otter Pup will separate itself from Orbiter SN3 and conduct a series of maneuvers using a xenon-fueled electric propulsion system. The primary goal is to return to the vicinity of the orbital tug and then use an electrostatic-based capture mechanism to latch onto a docking target.

The experiment is a group effort: The Otter Pup spacecraft was built for Starfish Space by Astro Digital. The propulsion system was provided by Exotrail. Redwire’s Argus camera hardware will be used for relative navigation, with guidance provided by Starfish’s Cetacean computer vision system and its Cephalopod trajectory planning software. Honeybee Robotics, a Blue Origin subsidiary, supported development of Starfish’s Nautilus capture mechanism.

Starfish Space co-founder Austin Link told GeekWire that the Otter Pup launch “is the beginning of a journey that we’ve now been working toward for most of our company’s existence.”

“It’s going to be a big challenge to successfully dock, but if we end up being successful, we believe the ability to affordably and safely interact with other objects in space opens up a new paradigm for how humans can operate in the universe,” Link said in an email exchange.

It will take months to gauge the Otter Pup’s level of success. “Between commissioning, checkout testing, some long-range rendezvous, and calibration we’re projecting internally that it won’t be until Q4 this year that we get the chance to dock,” Link said.

Otter Pup is meant to blaze a trail for Starfish Space’s full-scale docking craft, known as the Otter. Link said the specifics relating to future missions will depend on the results of the Otter Pup experiment, as well as the outcomes from a series of conversations with potential customers.

“At a high level, the Otter Pup is designed to be a springboard to full Otter missions that provide value to customers through satellite life extension and end-of-life disposal,” he said. “We’re always trying to chart the most efficient paths to a capable and reliable Otter.”

Starfish Space was founded in 2019 by Link and Trevor Bennett, both of whom previously worked as engineers at Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture.

The Tukwila, Wash-based startup has attracted a little more than $21 million in funding from investors including Munich Re Ventures, Toyota Ventures, PSL Ventures, NFX and MaC Venture Capital. It has also received a series of technology development grants from the U.S. Space Force and NASA — including, most recently, a $150,000 NASA grant to support the development of the Nautilus capture system.

Here are a few of the other payloads launched by the Transporter-8 mission:

• Varda Space Industries’ W-1 re-entry capsule, which is designed to process the ingredients for pharmaceuticals in microgravity and deliver them back to Earth. This first experiment will focus on research relating to ritonavir, a drug that has been used to treat HIV and is also included in Paxlovid, a drug combination that targets COVID-19. Future missions will provide hypersonic flight test data for the U.S. Air Force.
• The first four Blackjack Aces satellites for a DARPA constellation that will demonstrate the use of optical satellite links and on-orbit data processing for autonomous operations.
• A dozen SpaceBEE picosatellites that will become part of an Internet of Things constellation operated by Swarm, a SpaceX subsidiary.
• SpeiSat, a football-sized satellite provided by the Vatican and the Italian Space Agency. The satellite carries a “nanobook” with prayers from Pope Francis, plus a ham-radio rig that will broadcast papal messages of hope and peace.

Texas-based Firefly Aerospace says it has acquired Bellevue, Wash.-based Spaceflight Inc. and will shift the operation’s focus from satellite rideshare logistics to its line of orbital transfer vehicles.

Firefly says the strategic acquisition will add to its portfolio of low-cost space transportation services, ranging from launch vehicles to its Blue Ghost lunar lander.

“Spaceflight’s flight-proven orbital vehicles, facilities and mission management expertise will support Firefly’s rapid growth, provide a robust roadmap for investors, and meet the high demand for our on-orbit and responsive space services,” Firefly Aerospace CEO Bill Weber said today in a news release. “The acquisition further accelerates Firefly’s timeline to support end-to-end missions with launch, lunar, and in-space services.”

Financial terms of the transaction were not disclosed.

Spaceflight Inc. was established in Seattle in 2009. Ownership passed to a 50-50 joint venture between two Japanese companies — Mitsui & Co. and Yamasa Co. Ltd. — in 2020 as part of a complex deal that also involved a geospatial company called BlackSky and a share of a Tukwila, Wash.-based satellite manufacturing company called LeoStella.

Spaceflight will now fall under the Firefly Aerospace brand, said Risa Schnautz, Firefly’s senior manager for marketing and communications. The entire Spaceflight team will be joining Firefly, and Schnautz said the team’s talents, roles and responsibilities will be assessed in the months ahead.

“Firefly’s plan is to utilize Spaceflight’s Bellevue facilities to manufacture its orbital vehicles,” Schnautz told GeekWire in an email. “Our Blue Ghost lunar lander will continue to be manufactured at our facility in Cedar Park, Texas.”

Spaceflight was ranked No. 66 on the GeekWire 200, our list of privately held startups based in the Pacific Northwest.

Spaceflight’s Sherpa orbital transfer vehicles are designed to be launched on rockets including SpaceX’s Falcon 9. Multiple satellites can be attached to a single Sherpa, and then deployed into a variety of orbits after the orbital tug separates from its launch vehicle.

In addition to building Sherpas, Spaceflight Inc. has handled pre-launch arrangements for satellites on rideshare missions. But Schnautz said that part of the business will be de-emphasized.

“We’re currently assessing the needs of our combined customers to meet their mission requirements with Firefly’s launch vehicles,” Schnautz said. “Firefly will honor Spaceflight’s current contracts but will not be aggregating payloads on other launch vehicles moving forward.”

Firefly is a portfolio company of AE Industrial Partners, a private equity firm specializing in aerospace, defense and other industrial markets.

Weber said the acquisition of Spaceflight Inc. “is the result of Firefly’s business plan to strengthen the company through organic growth in addition to accelerating its capabilities with strategic acquisitions.”

Firefly’s Alpha launch vehicle is manifested through 2023 with the U.S. Space Force, NASA and other commercial customers. The company is also developing a new medium-lift launch vehicle in collaboration with Northrop Grumman. Firefly’s Blue Ghost lunar lander is due to complete the first of two planned missions to the moon next year with NASA as the anchor customer, and Firefly’s Space Utility Vehicle has a mission scheduled early next year to demonstrate the vehicle’s on-orbit capabilities.

“The combination of Spaceflight’s on-orbit experience with Firefly’s launch vehicles, Blue Ghost landers, and Space Utility Vehicles is an overnight game changer for our customers and investors,” Weber said.