Tag: Space

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R&D Roundup: Smart chips, dream logic and crowdsourcing space

I see far more research articles than I could possibly write up. This column collects the most interesting of those papers and advances, along with notes on why they may prove important in the world of tech and startups.

This week: crowdsourcing in space, vision on a chip, robots underground and under the skin and other developments.

The eye is the brain

Computer vision is a challenging problem, but the perennial insult added to this difficulty is the fact that humans process visual information as well as we do. Part of that is because in computers, the “eye” — a photosensitive sensor — merely collects information and relays it to a “brain” or processing unit. In the human visual system, the eye itself does rudimentary processing before images are even sent to the brain, and when they do arrive, the task of breaking them down is split apart and parallelized in an amazingly effective manner.

The chip, divided into several sub-areas, which specialize in detecting different shapes

Researchers at the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) integrate neural network logic directly into the sensor, grouping pixels and subpixels into tiny pattern recognition engines by individually tuning their sensitivity and carefully analyzing their output. In one demonstration described in Nature, the sensor was set up so that images of simplified letters falling on it would be recognized in nanoseconds because of their distinctive voltage response. That’s way, way faster than sending it off to a distant chip for analysis.

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Watch SpaceX launch the last of its original Dragon spacecraft to resupply the ISS tonight

SpaceX is launching its 20th resupply mission the International Space Station tonight, but this one has a bittersweet twist: It’s the last such mission that will use the first iteration of the Dragon spacecraft that has flown on all of the company’s missions for NASA thus far. Starting this summer, its successor will take its place.

Tonight’s mission will bring a variety of supplies, experiments, and new components to the ISS as usual. Launch is scheduled for 8:50 PM Pacific time, and you can watch it below.

The Dragon spacecraft and Falcon 9 first stage both flew on previous missions, the Dragon on two others, making it the third of its kind to make it to a third mission. And it will also be the last of its kind to do so.

An Adidas experiment and whole new exterior facility head to ISS next month

Dragon has spawned two successor craft, Crew Dragon and Cargo Dragon (sometimes with a “2” appended), the former of which has understandably gotten the lion’s share of attention. But the revised cargo spacecraft very well see more use.

The exact differences between the old and new Dragon aren’t completely clear, but we know that there have been significant improvements to the avionics, power systems, onboard software, and of course the general shape of the thing. Naturally there won’t be life support or an escape system on the craft, which isn’t intended in this form to carry passengers.

SpaceX’s Crew Dragon is now in Florida to prep for its first flight with astronauts onboard

This new, improved Cargo Dragon has its first commercial mission scheduled for August, and its sister craft, Crew Dragon, may very well by flying by then as well if everything goes according to plan.

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The Mars 2020 rover has a new name: Perseverance

The next NASA rover to go to Mars has shed its code name and assumed a new one, sourced from the ingenuous youth of our nation. Keeping with the tradition of using virtues as names, the Mars 2020 rover will henceforth be known as “Perseverance.”

This particular virtue was suggested by Alexander Mather, a middle-schooler in Virginia. He and some 28,000 other kids proposed names in an essay contest last year. The final nine contenders were: Endurance, Tenacity, Promise, Vision, Clarity, Ingenuity, Fortitude, Courage, and of course the winner, Perseverance.

The name is perhaps the most apropos, with the possible exception of Endurance, given the track record of Mars rovers vastly outliving their official mission length. Like some kind of scientific Gilligan’s Island, Opportunity famously set out for a 90-day tour of the Martian surface and ended up trundling around for over 14 years before finally losing power for good during a planet-scale sandstorm.

Opportunity Mars rover goes to its last rest after extraordinary 14-year mission

These rovers don’t just keep going effortlessly, of course; The teams must constantly exert their ingenuity to rescue, redirect, and reprogram the distant robotic platforms. It was this aspect that seems to have caught the space agency’s eye.

“Like every exploration mission before, our rover is going to face challenges, and it’s going to make amazing discoveries. It’s already surmounted many obstacles to get us to the point where we are today,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator of the Science Mission Directorate, in a news release. “Alex and his classmates are the Artemis Generation, and they’re going to be taking the next steps into space that lead to Mars. That inspiring work will always require perseverance.”

The kid, Mather, didn’t just do this as some in-class activity mass-emailed by the teacher. He went to space camp in 2018 and had his mind blown by the Saturn V rocket he saw there. Now, having won the naming contest, he’ll get to come with his family to Cape Canaveral to watch the rover launch this summer.

“This was a chance to help the agency that put humans on the Moon and will soon do it again,” Mather said. “This Mars rover will help pave the way for human presence there and I wanted to try and help in any way I could. Refusal of the challenge was not an option.”

NASA’s Mars 2020 rover rests on its own six wheels for the first time

In acknowledgement of the other kids who entered the contest, Perseverance will be equipped with a chip inscribed with the 8 semifinalists’ names, as well as 155 more semi-finalists proposals — in letters a thousandth the width of a human hair, but still.

We’ll have more coverage of the mission as launch time approaches, but in the meantime you can keep up with the latest at the obligatory and always delightful first-person-rover Twitter account.

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R&D roundup: soft 3D printing, backscatter Wi-Fi and other bleeding-edge tech

I see far more research articles than I could possibly write up. This column collects the most interesting of those papers and advances along with notes on why they may prove important in the world of tech and startups.

This week: advances in rocketry, machine learning, wireless transmission and more.

Firing up new rockets

In some ways, rocketry is not so different from its beginnings around WWII, but as other bottlenecks give way it is becoming feasible to experiment with truly innovative types of rocket engines. One such type is the rotating detonation engine, an alternative to the standard means of controlling and directing the combustion that creates thrust. The process is highly chaotic, however, and not well understood enough to control properly.

University of Washington researchers set up a test rotating detonation engine and studied the combustion patterns inside using an ultra-high-speed camera. The footage was analyzed to produce the first mathematical model simulating the process. It’s still at a very early stage but understanding the mechanism of a new technology like this is necessary before putting it into practice. When packaged in software, this type of simulation can also be licensed to aerospace firms. You can read the full paper here.

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Wondering about getting a job at SpaceX? Elon Musk says innovation is the main criterion

In a wide ranging discussion at the Air Warfare Symposium held by the U.S. Air Force, Elon Musk touched on some old and new themes, but one highlight of the discussion was the small window into hiring and firing practices at SpaceX — arguably one of the world’s most demanding engineering companies. 

The company prides itself on innovation and for its chief executive officer, that apparently extends to the interview process itself.

“[When we] interview people we ask for some evidence of exceptional ability that includes innovation,” says Musk. “At the interview point we select for new people who want to create new technology.”

The mercurial chief executive didn’t elaborate more fully on what proof of innovation looks like in the interview process or in an applicant’s previous work, but it’s an interesting bullet point on the company’s practices.

And the emphasis on innovation extends to the company’s incentive structure, advancement decisions and ultimately how long someone will remain at the company, Musk said.

“Incentive structure is set up that innovation is rewarded and making mistakes along the way but failure to try to innovate comes with a big penalty,” Musk said.  “You will be fired.”

It’s not just a failure to innovate, according to Musk. If the employee’s “innovations aspirations are not very good, they will no longer be at the company.”

This emphasis on innovation is critical for companies and nations to remain ahead of their competition. Musk said he doesn’t necessarily worry about intellectual property theft at either Tesla or SpaceX because hopefully the companies are developing technologies that are at least three years ahead of the competition.

“The way you achieve intellectual property protection is by innovating fast enough,” says Musk. “Speed of innovation is what matters. I do say this to my teams quite a lot. Innovation per-year is what matters.”

Although a company like IBM, with a massive patent portfolio and thousands of innovations locked in its laboratory might take issue with the sentiment, Musk says his point extends not just to companies, but to competing nation-states too.

Specifically, Musk mentioned the need for innovation if the U.S. is going to compete effectively against China, a country that could have an economy twice to three-times the size of the United States in the coming years.

“The foundation of war is economics,” Musk said. “If you have half the resources of the counterparty then you better be real innovative because [otherwise] we’re going to lose… The U.S. will be, militarily, second.”

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Relativity Space expands its rocket printing operations into an enormous new Long Beach HQ

Building a rocket is a big operation, even when you’re printing them from the ground up, like Relativity Space . The launch startup is graduating from its initial office, which is a bit cramped for assembling rockets, to a huge space in Long Beach where the company will go from prototype to first flight.

We recently visited Relativity at their old headquarters, which had the scrappy (literally — there were metal scraps everywhere) industrial feel you’d expect from a large-scale hardware startup. But except for the parking lot, there didn’t seem to be anywhere to put together… you know, a rocket.

So it was no surprise when co-founder and CEO Tim Ellis said that the company was just starting the process of moving to a gigantic new open-plan warehouse-style building in Long Beach.

Relativity CEO Tim Ellis is obviously excited about the new HQ.

“It’s a big step,” Ellis told TechCrunch. ” It’ll actually be the first factory we fully build out with 3D printers. This new space is actually big enough that we’ll be printing the first and second stages, and the fairing at the same time. The new ceiling height is approximately 40 feet, which will allow us to build taller – about twice the height of our current facility. We’re on track to start shipping parts to Stennis for testing later this year.”

In addition to the three “Stargate” printers that can print parts up to 15 feet high, they’ll have three more that can go up to 20 feet and two that can go up to 30. It’s a bit hard to imagine a single printed rocket part 30 feet tall until you’ve seen some of the pieces Relativity has already made.

Not only do the rockets take up a lot of space, but the company itself is growing.

“From two years ago to now we’ve over 20X-ed our entire footprint as a company,” Ellis pointed out. In other words, it was starting to feel a bit overpopulated in their old spot near LAX.

This the space as it is now; the image up top is a render of how it will look once active.

Assembly of the launch vehicle, called Terran 1, its Aeon engines, and R&D will all take place in the new HQ. It’s  nearly 120,000 square feet, and will be built as a very high-tech manufacturing operation indeed. There will be no fixed tooling, meaning the factory can be rapidly reconfigured, and will be highly automated. The company’s 3D printers aren’t like the simple ones used for rough prototyping but enormous, carefully monitored robot arms that perform real-time analysis of the metal they are laying down.

“It’s really the first autonomous factory, and it’s not just for rockets,” Ellis said. “Once we prove out the factory with this first launch vehicle, we’re convinced this works towards our long term plan of launching factories to Mars and building a wide range of products that you’re going to need there. It’s on the path for the long term vision but also a way for us to be a pioneer in this new value chain for aerospace.”

“It’s going to be cool,” he added.

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Relativity Space CEO Tim Ellis talks 3D-printed rockets at TC Sessions: Space in LA

The launch industry is undergoing a number of major changes, among them the shift from traditional manufacturing to 3D printing — which Relativity Space is spearheading. The company plans to build 95% of its rocket using the world’s biggest 3D printers, and could launch as early as next year. Co-founder and CEO Tim Ellis will be on hand at TC Sessions: Space in Los Angeles on June 25 to talk all about it.

Relativity has been on our radar for a couple years now, and to be honest we were all a bit skeptical when the proposition of 3D printing a rocket was revealed. After all, additive manufacturing is known for its speed, not the strength or detail of its products. But our recent visit to the company’s bustling headquarters near LAX was an eye-opening one.

Relativity Space could change the economics of private space launches

The challenges of this approach to rocketry are substantial, but the team has gone into it eyes open and the results are hard to argue with. Less mass, more strength, faster turnaround — and any drawbacks have been quantified and mitigated over countless tests and analyses.

Although the resulting components are in a way mechanically simpler than hand-assembled alternatives, the process of creating them is by no means simple itself. Ellis has been there for everything from the first wonky prints during their Y Combinator days to the latest high-precision, large-format ones going through live testing. He’ll be sharing insights on the startup journey, technical details, and plans for the company’s future on stage at TC Sessions: Space on June 25.

You can get early-bird tickets right now, and save $150 before prices go up on May 22 — and you can even bring a fifth person for free if you bring a group of four from your company. Special discounts for current members of the government/military/nonprofit and students are also available directly on the website. And if you are an early-stage space startup looking to get exposure to decision makers, you can even exhibit for the day for just $2,000.

This event will also feature a space startup pitch-off featuring five early-stage founders selected by TechCrunch editors. Applications open today; apply here.

Is your company interested in partnering at TC Sessions: Space 2020? Click here to talk with us about available opportunities.

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Max Q: How to build a Starship

Max Q is a new weekly newsletter all about space. Sign up here to receive it weekly on Sundays in your inbox.

Busy week for SpaceX – across funding, space tourism, and next-gen spacecraft. There’s also a space station resupply mission coming up that it’s getting ready for, and signs (this time literally) continue to suggest that its first human spaceflight mission is imminent.

Lots of other news, too, including our own: We announced this week that NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine is going to be our guest on stage at TC Sessions: Space coming up in June.

Farewell to a legend

Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who defied prejudice in the ’50s and ’60s to help NASA send the first men to the moon, has died at the age of 101. She was a pioneer, a role model and an instrumental part of America’s space program, and she will be dearly missed.

SpaceX plans to build Starships at a furious clip

Starship Mk1 night
SpaceX is serious about iteration – its strategy of building (and failing – and learning from its failures) fast is in full effect for its Starship development program. Elon Musk said on Twitter this week that the plan is to build them as frequently as possible with significant improvements between each successive spacecraft, with the aim of going through two or three iterations before flying an orbital mission later this year.

SpaceX seeking $250 million in new funding

The still-private SpaceX is going back to investors for more cash, likely to help it with the expensive proposition of building a bunch of Starships in rapid succession essentially by hand. It’s said to be seeking $250 million in a round that could close as early as mid-March, according to a CNBC report.

SpaceX finds an experienced partner for Crew Dragon space tourism

One side of SpaceX’s business that isn’t necessarily as obvious as its commercial cargo launch services is the space tourism angle. This week, the company announced a partnership with Space Adventures, the same firm that has arranged paid trips to the Space Station for private citizens aboard Soyuz capsules. The first of these trips, which won’t go to to the ISS but instead will fly up to a higher orbit, take a trip around Earth and come back, is set to take off as early as next year. And if you have to ask about the price, you probably can’t afford it.

New platform headed to the ISS in March

The ISS gets a new platform next month that can support attached payloads – up to a dozen – from research partners, including academic institutions and private companies. It’ll go up aboard SpaceX’s next resupply mission for the station, which is currently targeting liftoff on March 2. Also, Adidas is sending up a machine that makes its BOOST shoe soles just to see how it works in space.

Japan is going to get and return a soil sample from a Mars moon

Japan is sending a mission to Phobos and Deimos to study the two moons of Mars, using a probe that will orbit the red planet’s natural satellites loaded with sensors. It’ll also carry a small lander, that will itself deploy an even smaller rover, which will study the surface of Phobos directly. If all goes to plan, it’ll collect a sample and bring that back to Earth for further study here.

SpaceX talent is fueling the LA startup ecosystem

It turns out that SpaceX, not Snap, may be the most important young technology company for developing the Los Angeles startup ecosystem. Jon Shieber documents how SpaceX alum have gone forth and build a number of companies in the area that have gone on to raise big cash, as well as very young startups that have had a promising beginning. ExtraCrunch subscription required.

Meanwhile, in Canada

Yes, LA has a bustling space tech ecosystem. But communications satellite startup Kepler calls Canada home, and it recently made the interesting decision to build its small satellites in-house – in its own facility in downtown Toronto. Founder and CEO Mina Mitry tells me why that’s the best choice for his company. ExtraCrunch subscription required.

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Katherine Johnson, legendary NASA mathematician and ‘hidden figure,’ dies at 101

Katherine Johnson, a mathematician who defied prejudice in the ’50s and ’60s to help NASA send the first men to the moon, has died at the age of 101. Only recently famous after the film “Hidden Figures” was made about her and her colleagues, she maintained until the end that she was “only doing her job.”

For those who don’t know Johnson’s story, it is probably best told by reading the book (by Margot Lee Shetterly) or watching the movie — which although it takes some license with the events and persons depicted, is a fascinating and revealing triple portrait of its three protagonists. NASA has also collected numerous historical accounts and anecdotes at a special memorial page.

Johnson and her colleagues struggled unceasingly against racism and sexism, being three women of color attempting to enter an industry which was, and even half a century later remains, dominated by white men. Although Johnson always said her colleagues at NASA were kind and professional, there were nevertheless systematic and deep-seated biases against her at every step of her journey.

After the film’s release and acclaim, she treated her sudden fame with bemusement, happy to be recognized but insistent that she had only been doing her job. Receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Obama in 2015 was certainly a welcome perk.

But Johnson may have been wary of an over-concentration of credit. She more than anyone would have been aware of the others in similar positions who, while they may not have been quite as instrumental or prominent in the moment — John Glenn famously asked before a flight that a mechanical computer’s calculations be checked by “the girl,” meaning Johnson — were nonetheless indispensable and quite as hidden.

These women, like Johnson’s colleagues Mary Jackson and Dorothy Vaughn, not only challenged the racist and sexist zeitgeist of the time, but very simply helped America achieve what is perhaps its most historically remarkable achievement — the Apollo program — but also to aid in the invention and definition of multiple industries.

Johnson was a remarkable mind and person whose achievements went for too long unnoticed. Had she not been brought into the attention of popular culture her achievements would likely never have been known outside a few colleagues and historians — and we would all be the poorer for it. Who, and where, are today’s hidden figures, and would we recognize them if we saw them?

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Sensors are the next big thing in space, not starships

Understanding the opportunities available in the space industry — especially for early-stage companies and new founders — isn’t easy.

The pool of people who have deep aerospace technical expertise isn’t huge, and like any community that requires a high degree of specialist knowledge, it’s a tightly-knit field that relies on social connections. But space is increasingly opening up, and we’ve already reached a point where the most valuable new entrants might come from industries that aren’t specifically aerospace or aerospace-adjacent.

In fact, we could be reaching a stage where the parts of the space industry requiring actual rocket scientists are more or less saturated, while the real boon is set to come from crossover talent that develops new ways to leverage innovations in other areas on space-based operating platforms.

“We have enough low-Earth launch vehicles, we have enough rockets,” Bessemer VP Tess Hatch told me in an interview at the FAA’s Commercial Space Transportation Conference last month. “In 2020, we have even more coming online and a lot of the ‘fantasy’ ones [an industry term used to describe spacecraft that have been conceived and designed but not yet flown] are planning to launch, and I think maybe one of them will come to fruition.”

Hatch says she still sees much of the demand side of the industry cluster around existing and proven suppliers, even if new entrants, including Astra and Firefly, actually begin flying their rockets this year, as both have been planning. Companies like Rocket Lab (in which her company has a stake) will increase their volume and cadence and benefit from having a proven track record, taking up a lot of the growth in launch vehicle demand. “I don’t think there’s room for any more rockets in the industry,” she said.

Instead, Hatch is looking to payload variety and innovation as the next big thing in space tech. Satellites are becoming increasingly commoditized, and companies like Rocket Lab are looking to take this further by providing a satellite platform (Proton) as part of its launch offering. There’s still immaturity in the small-satellite supply chain, which is what led small-satellite operator Kepler to build its own, but the bigger opportunity isn’t in building satellites — it’s in equipping them with new, improved and radically redesigned sensors to gather new kinds of data and provide new kinds of services.