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Year in Space: Get ready for magnificent moon missions

Orion making a lunar flyby
An artist’s conception shows the Orion spacecraft’s main engine firing during a lunar flyby. (NASA Illustration)

Lunar missions once felt like the domain of history books rather than current events, but an upcoming trip around the moon is poised to generate headlines at a level not seen since the Apollo era.

NASA’s Artemis 2 mission, which is due to launch four astronauts on a round-the-moon journey as a warmup for a future lunar landing, is shaping up as the spaceflight highlight of 2026. NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who took the agency’s helm this month after a tumultuous year, says it’s the top item on his must-see list.

“What’s not to be excited about?” he said last week on CNBC. “We’re sending American astronauts around the moon. It’s the first time we’ve done that in a half-century. … We’re weeks away, potentially a month or two away at most from sending American astronauts around the moon again.”

The Pacific Northwest plays a significant role in the back-to-moon campaign. For example, L3Harris Technologies’ team in Redmond, Wash., built thrusters for Artemis 2’s Orion crew vehicle. And Artemis 2 isn’t the only upcoming moon mission with Seattle-area connections: Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, headquartered in Kent, plans to send an uncrewed Blue Moon Mark 1 lander to the lunar surface in 2026 to help NASA get set for future moon trips.

“We are taking our first steps to help open up the lunar frontier for all of humanity,” Paul Brower, Blue Origin’s director of lunar operations, said in a recent LinkedIn post.

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United Launch Alliance’s former CEO joins Blue Origin

Image: Tory Bruno
United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno, shown here at the Space Symposium in 2016, is joining Blue Origin. (GeekWire Photo / Alan Boyle)

Eleven years after United Launch Alliance CEO Tory Bruno partnered with Blue Origin to create a new rocket engine, he’s joining Jeff Bezos’ space venture as the president of Blue Origin’s newly created National Security Group.

The move could signal a major shift in the commercial space race as Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin revs up its competition with SpaceX. Bezos welcomed Bruno to his company on social media, and Bruno told Bezos that “we are going to do important work together.”

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman added his congratulations via the X social-media platform.

In its Dec. 26 announcement of the change, Blue Origin said Bruno would report to CEO Dave Limp. “We share a deep belief in supporting our nation with the best technology we can build,” Limp said in a post on X. “Tory brings unmatched experience, and I’m confident he’ll accelerate our ability to deliver on that mission.”

Bruno, 64, led ULA for 11 years following a 30-year career at Lockheed Martin. Not long after taking the reins at ULA in 2014, Bruno sat beside Bezos to announce a close collaboration on the development of Blue Origin’s BE-4 engine, which is used on ULA’s Vulcan rocket as well as Blue Origin’s orbital-class New Glenn rocket.

Since then, SpaceX has displaced United Launch Alliance as America’s dominant launch company. In 2014, ULA executed 14 launches while SpaceX executed six. So far this year, SpaceX has registered 165 launches, while ULA has registered six.

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Starcloud plans its next power moves for AI in space

Starcloud's founders in white suits: Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden and Adi Oltean
Starcloud's founders — Philip Johnston, Ezra Feilden and Adi Oltean — wear protective gear in a clean room. (Starcloud Photo)

After taking one small but historic step for space-based AI, a Seattle-area startup called Starcloud is gearing up for a giant leap into what could be a multibillion-dollar business.

The business model doesn’t require Starcloud to manage how the data for artificial intelligence applications is processed. Instead, Starcloud provides a data-center “box” — a solar-powered satellite equipped with the hardware for cooling and communication — while its partners provide and operate the data processing chips inside the box.

Starcloud CEO Philip Johnston said his company has already worked out a contract along those lines with Denver-based Crusoe Cloud, a strategic partner.

“In the long term, you can think of this more like an energy provider,” he told GeekWire. “We tell Crusoe, ‘We have this box that has power, cooling and connectivity, and you can do whatever you want with that. You can put whatever chip architecture you want in there, and anything else.’ That means we don’t have to pay for the chips. And by far the most expensive part of all this, by the way, is the chips. Much more expensive than the satellite.”

If the arrangement works out the way Johnston envisions, providing utilities in space could be lucrative. He laid out an ambitious roadmap: “The contract is 10 gigawatts of power from 2032 for five years, at 3 cents per kilowatt-hour. That comes to $13.1 billion worth of energy.”

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Blue Origin launches first wheelchair user into space

NS-37 crew member Michaela Benthaus spreads her arms in celebration as she sits in a wheelchair with Blue Origin's New Shepard capsule behind her
German engineer Michaela Benthaus celebrates after her suborbital space trip. (Blue Origin via YouTube)

Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture added a page to the space history books today by sending the first wheelchair user into space.

“It was the coolest experience,” said Michaela “Michi” Benthaus, a German-born aerospace and mechatronics engineer at the European Space Agency who sustained a spinal cord injury in a mountain biking accident in 2018.

Blue Origin’s suborbital New Shepard rocket ship lifted off from the company’s Launch Site One in West Texas at 8:15 a.m. CT (6:15 a.m. PT). An initial launch attempt had been called off on Dec. 18 because the flight team “observed an issue with our built-in checks prior to flight,” Blue Origin said. It didn’t provide further details about the issue, but today’s countdown went off without a hitch.

This was the 37th New Shepard mission, and the 16th to carry humans on a brief ride above the 100-kilometer (62-mile) altitude level that marks the internationally accepted boundary of space. Eighty-six people, including Bezos himself, have now flown on New Shepard. Six have gone multiple times.

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How AI can help scientists head off water woes

Screenshot showing interactive map generated in response to AI query: "Show me the drought condition in North America for August 2012"
A screenshot shows how Hydrology Copilot can turn a simple query into an interactive, color-coded map. (Microsoft Infographic)

Microsoft and NASA say they’re applying artificial intelligence to a challenge that has become increasingly urgent: how to cope with flooding and other disasters driven by extreme weather.

The result of their efforts is Hydrology Copilot, a set of AI agents aimed at making hydrological data easier to access and analyze. The platform is built on the foundation that was established for NASA Earth Copilot, a cloud-based AI tool that can sift through petabytes of Earth science data.

Hydrology is the scientific study of Earth’s water cycle, which encompasses precipitation, runoff, evaporation and the movement of water through rivers, lakes and soil. It’s not just an academic exercise: Hydrologic insights are put to use in fields ranging from agriculture to forestry to urban development.

“NASA has long produced advanced hydrology and land-surface datasets, powering breakthroughs in drought early-warning systems, environmental planning and environmental research,” Juan Carlos López, a senior solution specialist at Microsoft who focuses on space and AI, wrote in a blog post. “Yet despite their value, these datasets and the specialized tools required to navigate and interpret them remain difficult to access for many who could benefit most.”

That’s where Hydrology Copilot comes in: Powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI Service and Microsoft Foundry, the platform lets researchers query NASA’s data using straightforward questions — for example, “Which regions may be facing elevated flood risk?”

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Scientists revise view of Titan — and hold out hope for life

Cassini photo of Titan with Saturn in background
An image from NASA’s Cassini spacecraft shows Titan in front of Saturn and its rings. (Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / SSI)

A fresh analysis of tidal perturbations on Titan challenges a long-held hypothesis: that the cloud-shrouded Saturnian moon harbors an ocean of liquid water beneath its surface ice. But the scientists behind the analysis don’t rule out the possibility that smaller pockets of subsurface water could nevertheless provide a home for extraterrestrial life.

“The search for extraterrestrial environments is fundamentally a search for habitats where liquid water coexists with sustained sources of energy (chemical, sunlight, etc.) over geological time scales. Our new results do not preclude the existence of such environments within Titan, but rather, further support their plausibility,” University of Washington planetary scientist Baptiste Journaux, a co-author of the study published in Nature, told me in an email.

Journaux acknowledged that the results don’t match up with conventional wisdom. He said they represent a “true paradigm shift” in how scientists think Titan is put together.

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Space startups team up for a novel satellite meetup

Mira spacecraft in orbit with Earth's disk in background
A sign on Impulse Space’s Mira spacecraft in orbit reads “How’s My Orbital Maneuvering?” (Impulse Space Photo)

Tukwila, Wash.-based Starfish Space and California-based Impulse Space say they’ve successfully demonstrated an in-space satellite rendezvous during a mission that handed over control of an Impulse Mira spacecraft to Starfish’s guidance and navigation system.

The demonstration was code-named Remora, in honor of a fish that attaches itself to other marine animals. Operation Remora was added to Mira’s agenda for Impulse Space’s LEO Express 2 mission, which was launched in January. Impulse and Starfish waited until the Mira spacecraft completed its primary satellite deployment tasks for LEO Express 2. Then they spent several weeks monitoring the maneuvers for Remora.

“About a month ago, we concluded the major steps here,” Starfish co-founder Trevor Bennett told me. “Since then, we’ve been getting data down and understanding the full story. And the full story is incredible.”

Remora was kept under wraps until today, primarily because both companies wanted to make sure that the demonstration actually worked as planned. “There was never a guarantee that there would be an outcome here,” Bennett explained. “And so what we wanted to do is talk about it when there was something to talk about.”

Bennett said the demonstration showed that Starfish’s software suite for guidance, navigation and control could be used on a different company’s satellite to make an autonomous approach to another spacecraft in orbit.

“Remora became definitely a first for us, in terms of being able to allow a whole new vehicle platform to autonomously do this full mission, all the way in and through,” he said. “Basically, we had no operator commands necessary for the vehicle to fly itself all the way down to 1,200 meters, take a bunch of pictures and then autonomously egress back out to further distances.”

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Outbound Aerospace hits the end of its financial runway

Outbound's Jake Armenta wheels prototype aircraft down a runway
Outbound Aerospace's Jake Armenta wheels a prototype aircraft along a runway during a flight test earlier this year. (Outbound via YouTube)

Only a few months ago, Outbound Aerospace was on its way up — literally — after raising more than $1 million in pre-seed funding and flying a prototype meant to pave the way for a blended-wing passenger jet. But now the Seattle startup’s fortunes have fallen back to earth.

Outbound’s co-founder and chief technology officer, Jake Armenta, announced on LinkedIn last week that the company was shutting down. He joked that the news would be greeted with celebration by “competitors such as Boeing, who have been rightly terrified of us.”

During an interview, Armenta took a more serious tone as he discussed why Outbound fell short: “The simplest answer is that we ran out of money, and hadn’t really secured customer commitments that were strong enough to secure the next stage of investment,” he told me.

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Portal Space’s satellite factory wins support from state

Illustration: Portal Space Systems' Supernova space vehicle in orbit
An artist’s conception shows the Supernova spacecraft in orbit. (Portal Space Systems Illustration)

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson is setting aside $350,000 from an economic development fund to support Portal Space Systems’ expansion into a new 50,000-square-foot satellite manufacturing facility in Bothell, Wash.

Ferguson announced today that he’s directing the state Department of Commerce to award funds from the Governor’s Economic Development Strategic Reserve Fund to Economic Alliance Snohomish County. The funding will help Portal transition from testing and development to scalable production, with a goal of building four spacecraft a month by 2027.

The expansion is expected to create more than 100 jobs in the next two years, and more than 700 jobs by 2030.

“Strategic Reserve Funds are targeted investments that create good paying jobs and spur innovation across Washington,” Ferguson said in a news release. “This project not only achieves those goals, it also reaffirms our state’s role as a leader in the space industry. I am proud to support pioneering projects like this in Washington.”

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Lumotive goes global with optical 3D sensor chips

Lumotive 3D sensor module with golf ball shown to give a sense of scale
Lumotive’s LM10 LCM module, shown here next to a golf ball for scale, serves as a 3D sensor. (Lumotive Photo)

Months after raising $59 million in venture capital to commercialize its miniaturized 3D sensors, Redmond, Wash.-based Lumotive is going global.

The company says it has opened offices in Oman and Taiwan to help bring its products to market — and has added two senior tech industry leaders to its management team.

“These milestones mark a pivotal moment for Lumotive as we move from innovation to large-scale commercialization,” Lumotive CEO Sam Heidari said today in a news release.

Founded in 2017, Lumotive is one of several startups that were spun off from Bellevue, Wash.-based Intellectual Ventures to take advantage of an innovation known as metamaterials. The technology makes it possible for signals to be “steered” electronically without moving parts.

Lumotive’s Light Control Metasurface platform, also known as LCM, can steer laser light to capture a 3D rendering of its surroundings, using a device that’s smaller than a credit card. Such laser-based location sensing is known generically as lidar (an acronym that stands for “light detection and ranging”)

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