Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture says it’ll be ramping up an ultra-high-speed satellite data network called TeraWave, which will compete with SpaceX’s Starlink network for business from data centers, large-scale enterprises and government customers.

The service appears to dovetail with Amazon Leo, the satellite-based broadband internet service that was Bezos’ brainchild while he served as Amazon’s CEO. Amazon Leo — previously known as Project Kuiper — promises downlink speeds of up to 1 gigabit per second (Gbps). In contrast, TeraWave is targeting higher-end data applications with symmetrical data speeds of up to 6 terabits per second (Tbps), a rate that’s 6,000 times faster.

In today’s announcement, Blue Origin said TeraWave’s constellation would consist of 5,408 laser-linked satellites in low Earth orbit (LEO) and medium Earth orbit (MEO). It plans to start deploying the satellites in late 2027, presumably using the company’s New Glenn rockets.

Blue Origin’s plans are discussed in an application and technical annex filed today with the Federal Communications Commission. In its application, the company is seeking waivers from several regulatory requirements in order to get TeraWave off the ground quickly.

“TeraWave addresses the unmet needs of customers who are seeking higher throughput, symmetrical upload/download speeds, more redundancy and rapid scalability,” Blue Origin said. An array of 5,280 satellites in LEO would provide access speeds of up to 144 Gbps, while another 128 satellites in MEO would offer terabit-level speeds.

Blue Origin said the multi-orbit network design would facilitate ultra-high-throughput links between global hubs and distributed gigabit-scale user connections, particularly in parts of the world that are not well-served by optical fiber connections.

TeraWave could give Blue Origin a bigger role in knitting together a rapidly growing ecosystem of data centers and companies that are dependent on ultra-high-speed connections. SpaceX also plans to go after that market with Starlink V3 satellites that are said to be capable of terabit-level downlink speeds.

But what about Amazon, which is in the process of putting more than 3,200 satellites into low Earth orbit for Amazon Leo? Tech consultant Tim Farrar, the founder of TMF Associates, said the emergence of TeraWave raises questions about the relationship between the two best-known companies founded by Bezos.

“This is a very different design from Amazon Leo/Kuiper, but there is certainly overlap with Amazon’s target customers in the government and enterprise sectors,” Farrar told GeekWire in an email. “Is this all part of an ongoing negotiation with Amazon? … Or an alternative source of launch demand [for Blue Origin] in case Amazon decides to scale back their near-term space investments while they try to prove the case for Amazon Leo Gen1, before spending more money to launch a Gen2 system?”

Farrar speculated that the TeraWave initiative might represent an effort by Bezos to pressure Amazon’s current leadership to keep investing in space, or to spin off the Leo system to Blue Origin. He also said Blue Origin (Bezos’ private space venture) may be in a better position than Amazon (the publicly traded retail giant) to build out a next-generation satellite network.

“One takeaway is that everyone recognizes the value of vertical integration, where rocket makers create their own launch demand by building a constellation, as SpaceX has done,” Farrar said. “Amazon doesn’t have that right now, and it is a problem when you want to develop a mass-market satellite system with good enough economics to meet consumer price points, because you end up paying the full retail price for your launches.”

Starfish Space has secured a $52.5 million contract from the U.S. Space Force’s Space Development Agency to dispose of military satellites at the end of their operational lives.

The Tukwila, Wash.-based startup says it’s the first commercial deal ever struck to provide “deorbit-as-a-service,” or DaaS, for a satellite constellation in low Earth orbit. In this case, the constellation is the Pentagon’s Proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, which provides global communications access and encrypted connectivity for military missions.

The contract calls for Starfish Space to launch the satellite disposal service in 2027.

“This is not research and development. This is an actual service, in a structure that allows that service to scale for this constellation, for an entire industry,” Starfish Space co-founder Trevor Bennett told GeekWire. He said the arrangement validates the Space Development Agency’s approach to building and maintaining its constellation, and also validates “the path that we can take with the industry at large.”

Starfish is developing a spacecraft called Otter that would be able to capture other satellites, maneuver them into different orbits, release them and then move on. In a deorbiting scenario, Otter would send the target satellite into a trajectory for atmospheric re-entry that wouldn’t pose a risk to other orbital assets. Starfish’s system doesn’t require the target satellite to be pre-outfitted with specialized hardware — which is a significant selling point.

The system provides an alternative to what typically happens to satellites toward the end of their lives. Today, most satellite operators either have to execute a deorbiting maneuver while they’re sure that the propulsion system still works, or risk having their spacecraft turn into unmanageable space junk.

Bennett compared Otter to a tow truck that can be brought in to carry away an old vehicle when it really needs to be scrapped.

“With the tow truck kind of capability, we can provide that service as needed, but we are not trying to replace normal operation,” he said. “We are augmenting it and extending it so the satellites that are being flown in that constellation can go fly longer. … Once it’s done operating and it’s time to dispose, we can provide that transit to the right disposable altitude.”

Starfish’s deal with the Space Development Agency builds on a previously awarded mission study contract that supported work on the concept in 2024 and 2025. The $52.5 million won’t be paid out all at once. An initial payment will cover costs leading up to the first deorbiting operation, and from then on, the agency will pay Starfish for services rendered. Bennett declined to provide further financial details, citing confidentiality.

Otter’s capabilities aren’t limited to deorbiting satellites. The oven-sized spacecraft could also be used to change a satellite’s orbital path, or bring it in for servicing. “With Otter, we’ve dramatically reduced the cost and complexity of satellite servicing across orbits,” Austin Link, Starfish Space’s other co-founder, said in a news release. “This contract reflects both the value of affordable servicing missions and the technical readiness of the Otter.”

Starfish conducted a partial test of its first Otter prototype, known as Otter Pup, in 2024. A second prototype, Otter Pup 2, launched in mid-2025 and is currently undergoing tests that could include a satellite docking attempt. “That vehicle remains healthy and operational, and is actually progressing through some additional mission milestones,” Bennett said.

Three other projects are in the works:

• Starfish is due to send an Otter spacecraft to hook up with a retired SES satellite in geostationary Earth orbit, or GEO, and maneuver it into a graveyard orbit. The Otter would then dock with a different SES satellite and use its onboard propulsion system to keep that satellite in an operational orbit for additional years of life. (The deal was originally struck with Intelsat, but that company was acquired by SES last year.)
• The Space Force’s Space Systems Command awarded Starfish Space a $37.5 million contract that calls for a different Otter spacecraft to dock with and maneuver national security assets in GEO.
• Yet another Otter is due to conduct up-close inspections of defunct satellites in low Earth orbit under the terms of a three-year, $15 million contract awarded by NASA in 2024.

“Those Otters are all under construction and in testing,” Bennett said. “Actually, we’ll see a couple of those launched this year. And so this is an exciting time, where Otters are about to go to space and start operating as commercial vehicles.”

NASA’s massive Space Launch System rocket crept to its Florida launch pad today at a top speed of about 1 mph, marking the first step in a journey that will eventually send astronauts around the moon for the first time in more than 50 years.

The 4-mile trek to Launch Complex 39B at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center began at 7 a.m. ET (4 a.m. PT) and lasted nearly 12 hours. Because the rocket with its mobile launcher stands more than 300 feet tall and weighs millions of pounds, the trip required the use of a crawler-transporter — the same vehicle used for the Apollo and space shuttle programs, now upgraded for NASA’s Artemis moon program.

Liftoff for the Artemis 2 mission could come as early as Feb. 6, but there’s lots to be done in the weeks ahead. After today’s rollout, the mission team will conduct a thorough checkout of the Space Launch System and its Orion crew spacecraft. Then there’ll be a “wet dress rehearsal,” during which the launch team will fuel the rocket and count down to T-minus 29 seconds.

“We have, I think, zero intention of communicating an actual launch date until we get through wet dress,” NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman told reporters.

Artemis 2 is slated to send three NASA astronauts and one Canadian astronaut on a 10-day journey tracing a figure-8 route around the moon. The trip will take them as far as 4,800 miles beyond the lunar far side — farther out than any human has gone before.

One of the crew members, Christina Koch, recalled an exchange she had with Apollo 13’s Fred Haise at a commemorative event. “Before I even said, ‘Hello, sir, great to see you,’ he goes, ‘I heard you’re going to break our record,'” she said.

Mission commander Reid Wiseman said he’s already seeing the moon in a different light.

“One of the most magical things for me in this experience is, when I looked out a few mornings ago, there was a beautiful crescent in the morning sunrise, and I truly just see the far side,” he said. “You just think about all the landmarks we’ve been studying on that far side, and how amazing that will look. And seeing Earthrise, just flipping the moon over and seeing it from the other perspective, is what I think when I look out right now.”

Good morning, Moon. See you next month? pic.twitter.com/1FwBmxMEyZ

— Reid Wiseman (@astro_reid) January 15, 2026

Although Artemis 2 will be historic in its own right, the mission’s main purpose is to prepare the way for Artemis 3, which will put humans on the lunar surface for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972. That mission is officially set for no earlier than mid-2027, but industry experts expect the schedule to slip.

During today’s news briefing, Isaacman took an even longer view. “This is the start of a very long journey,” he said. “I hope someday my kids are going to be watching, maybe decades into the future, the Artemis 100 mission.”

Isaacman, who served as the billionaire CEO of the Shift4 payment processing company before becoming NASA’s chief last month, said that America’s space effort is sending humans back to the moon “to figure out the orbital and lunar economy, for all of the science and discovery possibilities that are out there, to inspire my kids, your kids, kids all around the world, to want to grow up and contribute to this unbelievable endeavor that we’re on right now.”

Several companies with a presence in the Seattle area are already part of that lunar economy. For example, L3Harris’ facility in Redmond has been building thrusters for NASA’s Orion spacecraft. Seattle-based Interlune is planning to bring helium-3 and other lunar resources back to Earth. And Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture, headquartered in Kent, is building a Blue Moon lander that’s meant to put Artemis crews on the lunar surface starting in 2030.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket is expected to send an uncrewed cargo version of the Blue Moon lander to the moon sometime in the next few months. Isaacman hinted that Blue Origin could be in for a bigger role in the lunar economy as the Artemis program hits its stride.

“I will say I did meet with both Blue Origin and SpaceX on their acceleration plans. These are both very good plans,” he said. “If we are on track, we should be watching an awful lot of New Glenns and Starships launch in the years ahead.”

A decades-old rocket factory in Redmond, Wash., is due to be rebranded with a time-honored name: Rocketdyne.

If all goes according to plan, the facility will become part of a joint venture created under the terms of an $845 million deal involving L3Harris Technologies and AE Industrial Partners.

L3Harris took control of the Redmond facility in 2023 when it acquired Aerojet Rocketdyne for $4.7 billion. Now L3Harris plans to sell a majority stake in its Space Propulsion and Power Systems business to AE Industrial, while retaining 40% ownership of the newly created Rocketdyne venture. The transaction is expected to close in the second half of 2026, subject to regulatory approvals and other conditions.

L3Harris will retain full ownership of the business line focusing on RS-25 rocket engines. Those engines, derived from space shuttle technology and used on NASA’s Space Launch System, are primarily manufactured in California.

For decades, the Redmond facility has built propulsion systems for space vehicles ranging from NASA’s space shuttles to Mars rovers to the Artemis moon program. Redmond-built thrusters are due to be used on NASA’s Orion spacecraft for the upcoming Artemis 2 mission, which will send four astronauts on a 10-day trip around the moon and back.

The facility traces its lineage back to Rocket Research Co., which was founded by former Boeing engineers in 1960 in Seattle. Rocket Research relocated to the 80-acre Redmond campus in 1968 and has gone through a string of name changes and acquisitions since then.

According to a 2022 presentation for the Redmond Historical Society by Jack DeBoer, a program manager at the site, the Redmond facility has been managed through the years by Rockor, Olin Aerospace, Primex Technologies, General Dynamics, Aerojet, GenCorp and Aerojet Rocketdyne.

Because of its heritage, the Redmond site could be regarded as the Seattle area’s oldest continuously operated facility exclusively dedicated to rocket production — as opposed to Boeing, which has played a leading role in aviation as well as space technology.

Today, more than 400 employees work at the Redmond campus. The sign at the entrance currently reads simply “L3Harris.”

The Rocketdyne name has its own tangled history: It was founded in California in 1955 as a division of North American Aviation and built the F-1 engines that were used on Saturn V rockets during the Apollo era.

It became part of Rockwell International in 1967 and was acquired in turn by Boeing in 1996 and by United Technologies in 2005. In 2013, Rocketdyne was sold to GenCorp, which merged it with Aerojet to form Aerojet Rocketdyne.

A space startup founded by veterans of Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is recruiting partners in its quest to build robotic arms powered by artificial intelligence.

Founded in late 2024, Puyallup, Wash.-based Orbital Robotics is still in its infancy — but it has already raised about $310,000 in funding. Orbital Robotics CEO Aaron Borger told GeekWire that the company is working with a stealthy space venture on an orbital rendezvous project for the U.S. Space Force, with a series of missions scheduled in the next year and a half.

And that’s just the start: Borger and his teammates are trying to get traction for a plan that could give NASA’s aging Hubble Space Telescope a much-needed boost.

“We worked to get to the right people to talk to, both on the servicing side and on the mission side, and we’re in conversations now on how we could work together on a collaborative mission,” said Doug Kohl, Orbital Robotics’ chief operating officer.

Borger and Kohl both worked at Blue Origin until 2024, and then went on to create Orbital Robotics with fellow co-founders Riley Mark and Sohil Pokharna. Their advisers include Chris Sembroski, an engineer who went into orbit in 2021 for a privately funded philanthropic space mission known as Inspiration4 and later spent two and a half years at Blue Origin.

Orbital Robotics aims to focus on a key challenge looming for the next stage of the new space age: how to build spacecraft that can interact with other orbiting objects safely.

That’s not as easy as it may sound, especially when you’re trying to manipulate objects in space while obeying Newton’s Third Law of Motion. When a robotic arm on a free-flying spacecraft moves around, the spacecraft itself reacts with an equal and opposite motion. The arm has to compensate for those movements as it reaches out to grab its target.

“That is exactly one of the hardest parts about putting robotic arms on spacecraft,” Borger said. “When you move the arm, your spacecraft is going to move as well.”

To address the challenge, Orbital Robotics is developing a suite of AI-based software tools designed to track targets in space, plan out orbital maneuvers and interact with other spacecraft. It’s also laying the groundwork for robotic arms and spacecraft that make use of its technology. “A lot of NASA engineers will say you can’t use AI because you can’t really predict what it’s going to do, but with our method, we can,” Borger said.

Earlier in their careers, Borger and Mark were involved in efforts to put small AI-controlled robotic arms through suborbital testing. Now Orbital Robotics has built a larger prototype arm with seven degrees of freedom. For the next few months, the company will be putting that hardware through its paces in its lab.

“Those smaller arms were designed to catch, like, a ball or a cube. We had a small 3D-printed wrench that we were focused on,” Borger said. “This one is more focused on how you dock with space debris, for example.”

The ability to inspect or link up with objects in space has obvious implications for national security in space, which is why the Pentagon is so interested in the technology. Borger declined to discuss that side of Orbital Robotics’ business plan, but he noted that there are commercial applications as well.

“Now that there’s the ability to put so much mass up there, it’s come to the point where, OK, you have all this stuff up there. How do you actually continue to use it, rather than just letting it come down or die up there?” he said. “If you want to refuel something, if you want to repair something, the first step is, how do you capture it? That’s what we’re really focused on right now. … Then we can start focusing on using our robotic arms to manipulate things, start refilling it, repairing it, all sorts of stuff.”

Orbital Robotics recently tested its tracking software using video footage that was captured during an earlier suborbital test mission. Now the team is collaborating with a stealth partner on a series of space missions. The first mission would test Orbital Robotics’ flight software. Later missions would test the company’s robotic arm and demonstrate its ability to capture a spacecraft in orbit. Borger said it would be premature to disclose the partner’s identity, but he mentioned a 2026-2027 time frame for the missions.

There’s a growing interest in orbital rendezvous, proximity operations and capture, or RPOC for short — and Orbital Robotics isn’t the only space company targeting that market. Starfish Space and Portal Space Systems are among other Seattle-area ventures on the RPOC frontier.

Borger said he prefers to think of such companies as potential partners rather than rivals.

“I think they could use our arms,” he said. “They could use some of our software.” The company has already announced partnerships with Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud and Texas-based Space Ocean.

Orbital Robotics is also recruiting partners for an effort to save the 35-year-old Hubble Space Telescope from a fiery, mission-ending descent. Kohl said he and his collaborators are working on a white paper about the project that would be reviewed by NASA experts as well as astronauts who participated in previous Hubble servicing missions.

The plan calls for building a robotic spacecraft that could attach itself to the telescope, install a star tracker package on its exterior, boost Hubble to a more stable orbit, and then undock.

Several years ago, tech billionaire Jared Isaacman was trying to get NASA interested in a crewed Hubble reboost mission. In 2024, the space agency decided not to take him up on his proposal — but now that Isaacman is NASA’s administrator, Kohl is hoping that the public-private consortium he’s trying to assemble, known as the “Save the Hubble Space Telescope Alliance,” will get a warmer reception.

“Jared is as interested in Hubble as we are, and so we’re hoping to take an unsolicited proposal to him with the white paper on helping to recover Hubble,” he said.

The clock is ticking: Last week, a team of scientists reported that Hubble could fall to its doom in as little as three or four years, due to increased atmospheric drag caused by heightened solar activity. “Even though it would come in around 2030, we actually need to save it before that,” Borger said. “The longer you wait, the more difficult it is.”

Meanwhile, the clock is ticking for Orbital Robotics as well. Borger acknowledged that it’s going to take more funding to fuel the venture’s grand ambitions. “We’re OK with where we’re at on funding for now, and then we’ll go for a much larger round in a couple of months,” he said.

Correction: Orbital Robotics has raised a total of $310,000 to date, including $110,000 from a friends-and-family funding round that was completed in November. An earlier version of this report didn’t reflect earlier investments.

Astronomers say they’ve found an asteroid that spins faster than other space rocks of its size.

The asteroid, known as 2025 MN45, is nearly half a mile (710 meters) in diameter and makes a full rotation every 1.88 minutes, based on an analysis of data from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. “This is now the fastest-spinning asteroid that we know of, larger than 500 meters,” University of Washington astronomer Sarah Greenstreet said today at the American Astronomical Society’s winter meeting in Phoenix.

Greenstreet, who serves as an assistant astronomer at the National Science Foundation’s NOIRLab and heads the Rubin Observatory’s working group for near-Earth objects and interstellar objects, is the lead author of a paper in The Astrophysical Journal Letters that describes the discovery and its implications. It’s the first peer-reviewed paper based on data from Rubin’s LSST Camera in Chile.

2025 MN45 is one of more than 2,100 solar system objects that were detected during the observatory’s commissioning phase. Over time, the LSST Camera tracked variations in the light reflected by those objects. Greenstreet and her colleagues analyzed those variations to determine the size, distance, composition and rate of rotation for 76 asteroids, all but one of which are in the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter. (The other asteroid is a near-Earth object.)

The team found 16 “super-fast rotators” spinning at rates ranging between 13 minutes and 2.2 hours per revolution — plus three “ultra-fast rotators,” including 2025 MN45, that make a full revolution in less than five minutes.

Greenstreet said 2025 MN45 appears to consist of solid rock, as opposed to the “rubble pile” material that most asteroids are thought to be made of.

“We also believe that it’s likely a collisionary fragment of a much larger parent body that, early in the solar system’s history, was heated enough that the material internal to it melted and differentiated,” Greenstreet said. She and her colleagues suggest that the primordial collision blasted 2025 MN45 from the dense core of the parent body and sent it whirling into space.

Astronomers have previously detected fast-spinning asteroids that measure less than 500 meters wide, but this is the first time larger objects have been found with rotational rates that are faster than five minutes per revolution. The Rubin team’s other two ultra-fast rotators have rates of 1.9 minutes and 3.8 minutes.

What would it be like to take a spin on 2025 MN45? Imagine riding on a Ferris wheel — say, the Seattle Great Wheel, which typically makes three revolutions in 10 to 12 minutes. Now make the wheel more than 10 times taller, and make the rotation rate at least twice as fast. It’d feel as if you were going more than 40 mph.

“If you were standing on it, it would probably be quite the ride to be going around on the outside edge of this thing that’s the size of eight football fields,” Greenstreet said.

But the significance of the study goes beyond imagining an extraterrestrial amusement ride.

“This is only the beginning of science for the Rubin Observatory,” Greenstreet said. “We are already seeing that we can study smaller asteroids at farther distances than we’ve ever been able to study before. And being able to study these fast rotators further, we’re going to learn a lot of really crucial information about the internal strength, composition and collisional histories of these primitive solar system bodies that date back to the formation of the solar system.”

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The study published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, “Lightcurves, Rotation Periods, and Colors for Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s First Asteroid Discoveries,” lists 71 co-authors. Authors from the University of Washington include Greenstreet as well as Zhuofu (Chester) Li, Dmitrii E. Vavilov, Devanshi Singh, Mario Jurić, Željko Ivezić, Joachim Moeyens, Eric C. Bellm, Jacob A. Kurlander, Maria T. Patterson, Nima Sedaghat, Krzysztof Suberlak and Ian S. Sullivan.

The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is jointly funded by the National Science Foundation and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Science. The University of Washington was one of the founding members of the consortium behind the project, which benefited from early contributions by Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates and software executive Charles Simonyi. The observatory’s Simonyi Survey Telescope was named in honor of Simonyi’s family.

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.

2026 could also be the year when Seattle-based Interlune sends its first prospecting instrument to the lunar surface to hunt for signs of helium-3, a rare material the company aims to bring back to Earth for use in fusion reactors or quantum computers.

As we close out 2025, here’s a look back at five of the past year’s space milestones and five trends to watch in the year to come.

Looking back at 2025

Blue Origin goes orbital: After a decade of development, Blue Origin launched its orbital-class New Glenn rocket for the first time in January, on a mission that lofted test equipment for its Blue Ring space mobility platform into orbit. A second launch in November sent NASA’s Escapade probes toward Mars and marked the first successful at-sea recovery of a New Glenn booster. On the suborbital side, Blue Origin’s New Shepard program provided rides to space for seven crews. Notable passengers included Lauren Sanchez, who became Bezos’ wife two months after her flight; Justin Sun, the crypto entrepreneur who paid $28 million for his space ticket; and Michaela Benthaus, the first wheelchair user to fly to space.

Amazon’s satellite network gets down to business: The first operational satellites for Amazon’s space-based broadband internet service were launched in April. The network’s name was changed from Project Kuiper to Amazon Leo in November. Terminals have been shipped to early-stage customers for a preview program, and the rollout is expected to gather steam in 2026. Meanwhile, SpaceX continues to grow its Starlink network, with more than 9,300 satellites providing high-speed internet service to more than 9 million customers worldwide.

Rubin Observatory delivers first images: A decade and a half ago, Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Charles Simonyi donated $30 million to support the creation of a giant sky-survey telescope in Chile. in June, the Rubin Observatory finally made its star-studded debut, with Simonyi in attendance. Researchers at the University of Washington played key roles in shepherding the $800 million project to completion.

A first for orbital data centers: Redmond-based Starcloud sent an Nvidia GPU chip into orbit in November, and weeks later it claimed to be the first company to train an artificial intelligence model in space. The achievement marked one small step in Starcloud’s campaign to create a network of data centers in orbit. Several tech titans — including Bezos, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Google’s Sundar Pichai — see orbital data centers as a way to satisfy the growing hunger for AI processing resources on Earth. Some say the trend is driving SpaceX’s plans to go public in 2026.

SpaceX’s Starship goes through ups and downs: Many of SpaceX’s ambitions, ranging from orbital data centers to moon landings to Mars migrations, depend on the successful development of its Starship super-rocket. Starship also plays a crucial role in the business models for lots of space startups, including Starcloud and a Seattle-based space travel venture called Orbite. Three Starship test flights ended badly in the first half of 2025, but SpaceX bounced back with two successful test flights in the second half of the year. Now SpaceX is working on an upgraded version of Starship — and dealing with the aftermath of a booster anomaly that occurred during a pressurization test in November.

Looking ahead to 2026

Artemis 2 to send humans around the moon: For the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972, humans will leave Earth orbit. The current plan calls for the Artemis 2 mission to take place in the February-to-April time frame. A crew of four — three Americans and one Canadian astronaut — will climb into the Orion spacecraft and be sent into space atop NASA’s Space Launch System rocket. The round-the-moon route will be similar to the trajectory used for NASA’s uncrewed Artemis 1 flight in 2022. If Artemis 2 goes well, that could set the stage for an Artemis 3 crewed lunar landing as early as 2027 (but more likely later).

Blue Moon’s lunar delivery: Blue Origin’s uncrewed lander is tasked with delivering a NASA experiment called SCALPSS to the moon’s south polar region. Stereo cameras will document how the landing burn interacts with the dusty lunar surface — and the results will be factored into plans for future landings. This Blue Moon Mark 1 mission will blaze a trail for Blue Origin’s Mark 2 lander, which is due to start taking astronauts to the lunar surface in 2030. Other robotic spacecraft scheduled for moon landings in 2026 include China’s Chang’e 7 rover, Firefly’s Blue Ghost 2 lander, Intuitive Machines’ IM-3 lander and Astrobotic’s Griffin lander (which will be carrying two mini-rovers and Interlune’s helium-hunting camera).

Seattle space companies count down to liftoff: In addition to Blue Origin, several other companies headquartered near the Emerald City are planning big space missions in 2026. Kent-based Stoke Space could launch its first fully reusable Nova rocket from Florida. Bothell-based Portal Space Systems’ Starburst space vehicle is due to make its orbital debut. And Tukwila-based Starfish Space is scheduled to demonstrate how its maneuverable Otter spacecraft can give satellites an in-space boost.

Golden Dome takes shape: A proposed $175 billion missile defense system known as the Golden Dome is already attracting interest from space ventures — particularly ventures that are focusing on in-space mobility (such as Portal Space and Starfish Space) or in-space data processing (such as Starcloud and Seattle-based Sophia Space). Marysville, Wash.-based Gravitics is building an orbital carrier that would serve as a “pre-positioned launch pad in space” for the U.S. Space Force, under the terms of a deal that could be worth as much as $60 million. Other big-ticket military projects are likely to come to light in 2026.

Whither NASA? Or will NASA wither? Isaacman is taking over at NASA following a year of layoffs and science program cuts. He has pledged to land astronauts on the moon during the current presidential term, but funding remains a hurdle. “I almost guarantee you he’s going to be walking up the street to the White House, saying ‘I really need more money,’” NASAWatch’s Keith Cowing said on Israel’s i24 TV.

Bonus: Coming to a sky (or a screen) near you: Keep an eye out for a total lunar eclipse on March 3 that will be visible over the U.S., weather permitting. There’s also a solar eclipse on Aug. 12 that will bring totality to narrow stretches of Greenland, Iceland and Spain. Although this eclipse can’t be seen in Seattle’s skies, you should be able to catch the highlights online.

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 Friday’s 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.

Bruno is expected to lead Blue Origin’s efforts to win more contracts for national security launches using the New Glenn rocket. In 2024, Blue Origin joined ULA and SpaceX on the list of approved providers for such launches, but New Glenn has flown only twice. Blue Origin needs to execute two more successful launches to complete the Space Systems Command’s certification process.

United Launch Alliance is a joint venture between Boeing and Lockheed Martin. Last year, there were rumors that ULA was the subject of acquisition talks, perhaps involving Blue Origin or Sierra Space, but so far those rumors haven’t panned out.

Earlier this week, Lockheed Martin’s Robert Lightfoot and Boeing’s Kay Sears announced that Bruno was leaving ULA “to pursue another opportunity” — and named John Elbon as the joint venture’s interim CEO. Elbon previously served as ULA’s chief operating officer. He joined ULA in 2018 after a 35-year career at Boeing.

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.”

‘Greetings, Earthlings’ from AI

Putting the pieces in place for that business is a primary focus for Redmond, Wash.-based Starcloud, which was founded in 2024 by Johnston, chief technology officer Ezra Feilden and chief engineer Adi Oltean. The co-founders are building on the experience they gained at ventures ranging from SpaceX’s Starlink operation to Airbus and McKinsey & Co.

Starcloud was one of the first startups to look seriously into the idea of using satellites as data centers. Initially, the business model focused on processing data from other satellites before sending it down to Earth, thus economizing on the cost of downlinking the raw data. Now, tech companies are also gauging the benefits of uplinking data to orbital data centers for processing.

The leading companies in AI — including OpenAI, Microsoft, Amazon, Google and Meta — are spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers that are increasingly hungry for square footage, electrical power and cooling capacity. That has led the titans of AI, and startups like Starcloud and Sophia Space, to look toward Earth orbit as the next frontier.

Starcloud’s first big move in space came with last month’s launch of Starcloud-1, a 130-pound satellite equipped with an Nvidia H100 chip. Launched by a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, the mission aimed to prove that the hardware on Starcloud-1 could process AI data reliably in the harsh radiation environment of outer space.

This month, executives confirmed success. Using the Nvidia chip, Starcloud trained a large language model called NanoGPT, a feat that hadn’t been done in space before. The AI agent was trained on the complete works of William Shakespeare — and so it answered queries in sometimes-stilted Shakespearean English. (For example, “They can it like you from me speak.”)

Starcloud-1 produced better results with a pre-trained version of Gemma, an open-source AI model from Google. When asked for its first statement, Gemma responded with “Greetings, Earthlings! Or, as I prefer to think of you — a fascinating collection of blue and green.”

Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who is now executive chairman and CEO of Relativity Space, said in a post to X that Gemma’s performance was “a seriously cool achievement.”

Starcloud gets serious

Coming up with orbital witticisms is only the beginning. “We’re also going to be running some more practical workloads,” Johnston said.

Next year, Starcloud-1’s Nvidia H100 chip will start analyzing synthetic-aperture radar data from Capella Space’s satellite constellation. “The idea is that we can draw insights from that data on orbit and not have to wait a few days to downlink all that data over very slow RF ground-station links,” Johnston said.

Starcloud-2 is due for launch next October, with about 100 times the power-generating capability of its predecessor. It will carry multiple H100 chips and Nvidia’s more advanced Blackwell B200 chip. “We’re also flying some on-premises hardware from one of the big hyperscalers. I can’t say exactly who yet,” Johnston said.

“From there, we scale up to Starcloud-3, which is about a 2-ton, 100-kilowatt spacecraft that will launch on the Starship ‘Pez Dispenser’ form factor,” he said. “So we can launch many of those.”

How many? Johnston envisions a constellation of tens of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit, or LEO. The satellites would travel in a globe-girdling “train,” with data transmitted from one satellite to the next one via laser links. “We just basically have a laser fixed [on each satellite], and then we very slightly adjust with a very finely tuned mirror. … You have one target that you’re aiming for,” Johnston said.

Johnston said the company has begun the process of seeking a license from the Federal Communications Commission for the Starcloud-3 constellation. The plan also depends on the development schedule for SpaceX’s Starship super-rocket, which would be charged with deploying the satellites.

Starcloud will need funding as well, from investors and from potential customers such as the U.S. Space Force. “We’ve raised about $34 million as of today,” Johnston said. “So we are funded actually through the next two launches at least.” He said the company may consider a Series A funding round in the first half of 2026 to support the development of Starcloud-3.

Starcloud currently has 12 team members. “We could easily triple the size of the team now … but we’ve got some of the most kick-ass engineers in the business,” Johnston said. The company is likely to be looking for a bigger facility next year. “We’ll stay in Redmond, almost certainly,” Johnston said.

Over the past year, industry observers have been debating whether orbital data centers could really offer a better value proposition than terrestrial data centers. But in light of the interest that’s been coming from the likes of SpaceX’s Elon Musk and Blue Origin’s Jeff Bezos, Johnston feels as if the debate has now been settled.

“People seem to trust that if Elon wants to do it, then there must be a sensible way to figure that out,” Johnston said.

Can Starcloud handle the competition from SpaceX or the dominant players in the data center market? Johnston noted that Google recently announced an AI-in-space moonshot called Project Suncatcher, “which is exactly what we’re doing.”

“They’re paying Planet Labs to do a demo in 2027, and as I understand it, the demo they’re doing in 2027 is less powerful than the one we’ve got in orbit — so we have a massive head start against all of those guys, AWS and SpaceX being the exceptions,” Johnston said.

“I think we become an interesting partner for some of those folks,” he added. “And I don’t mean an acquisition target necessarily. I do mean potentially a partner.”

Putting tens of thousands of satellites in low Earth orbit sounds like a job of astronomical proportions. But if everything comes together the way Johnston hopes, Starcloud’s power-generating, data-crunching satellites could go even farther on the final frontier.

“There are many different places you can put them, further away from Earth,” Johnston said. “We’re looking at lunar orbits. We’re looking at some other Lagrangian points — the lunar L1 to Earth, also just the Earth L1. It’s actually less radiation than in LEO.”

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 and others query NASA’s data using straightforward questions — for example, “Which regions may be facing elevated flood risk?”

Hydrology Copilot simplifies access to one of NASA’s most advanced hydrology datasets, the North American Land Data Assimilation System Version 3. The dataset integrates satellite measurements with computer models to present a continuously updated, high-resolution, continental-scale view of the water cycle.

Insights gleaned from the database can help planners figure out how to improve drought monitoring, agricultural planning, water resource management, flood risk assessment and emergency preparedness. Recent flooding in Western Washington, fueled by a succession of atmospheric rivers, shows how important it can be to gain such insights — and how useful Hydrology Copilot can be.

“The goal of this project is to provide the tools that can enable local officials, city planners and emergency responders to more easily understand weather patterns and better prepare for the types of hydrological events we are seeing now in the Pacific Northwest and around the world, and will likely continue to see in the future,” a Microsoft spokesperson told GeekWire in an emailed statement.

Hydrology Copilot is still under development, and is being used primarily by researchers for now. Microsoft’s Azure AI team can provide further information about the platform. To take a test spin through more publicly accessible hydrology datasets, check out King County’s Hydrologic Information Center and the interactive map provided by the National Water Prediction Service.

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 Thursday 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.

Benthaus was one of six crew members on today’s mission, known as NS-37. In a 2023 interview published by the Technical University of Munich, she said she set her mind on becoming an astronaut when she was 10 years old.

When Benthaus lost the use of her legs, she initially thought her flight into space “was never going to happen.” But in 2022, her hopes got a big boost when she experienced a zero-G flight arranged through AstroAccess, a project that’s dedicated to paving the way for spacefliers with disabilities. Last year, she was the commander of an analog space mission conducted at the Lunares Research Station in Poland.

Now the 33-year-old has blazed a new trail for space access. “You should never give up on your dreams,” she said after today’s flight.

Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp said in a post to the X social-media platform that the mission marked “another step toward making spaceflight accessible for everyone.” Phil Joyce, Blue Origin’s senior vice president for the New Shepard program, said in a mission recap that “Michi’s flight is particularly meaningful, demonstrating that space is for everyone, and we are proud to help her achieve this dream.”

Kent, Wash.-based Blue Origin has been working for several years to improve accessibility at its launch facility in Texas — for example, by adding an elevator to the seven-story launch tower. A business resource group named New Hawking, in honor of the late wheelchair-using physicist Stephen Hawking, helped lead the way. Blue Origin says it has previously flown people who are hard of hearing, have limited mobility or limb differences, have low vision or are legally blind.

Blue Origin didn’t need to make significant modifications in the New Shepard crew capsule for today’s flight. But launch commentator Joel Eby said the mission team made “a few ground system improvements,” such as providing a bench that Benthaus could use to get into and out of the capsule with assistance from others.

During their 10-minute flight, Benthaus and the rest of the crew rose to an altitude of 106 kilometers (65.7 miles). They experienced a few minutes of zero-gravity and views of a curving Earth against the blackness of space. At the end of the mission, the booster made an autonomous landing not far from the launch pad, while the crew capsule descended to a parachute-assisted touchdown in the West Texas desert.

Afterward, Benthaus said she enjoyed the ride. “I tried to turn upside-down,” she said.

Benthaus’ crewmates included:

• Joey Hyde, a physicist and quantitative investor who recently retired from his career at Citadel, a leading hedge fund. He lives in Florida with his wife and five children.
• Hans Koenigsmann, a German-American aerospace engineer whose career has been dedicated to advancing reusable spacecraft and launch vehicles, most notably as an early team member at SpaceX. Koenigsmann played a supporting role in arranging Benthaus’ flight and occasionally helped her get around. After landing, Koenigsmann said the spaceflight was “actually more intense than I thought.”
• Neal Milch, a business executive and entrepreneur who launched his career through Laundrylux, a family-owned business. He now serves as the chair of the Board of Trustees at the Jackson Laboratory, a nonprofit biomedical research institute.
• Adonis Pouroulis, an entrepreneur, investor and mining engineer with more than 30 years of experience in the natural resources and energy sector. He is the founder and chairman of Pella Resources, co-founder of Energy Revolution Ventures, chairman of Rainbow Rare Earths, and the CEO of Chariot Limited.
• Jason Stansell, a computer scientist and a self-proclaimed space nerd rooted in West Texas. He’s been watching from a front-row seat as the space industry has expanded to offer opportunities for commercial spaceflight. 

In addition to the crew, NS-37 carried more than 20,000 postcards submitted by students and others through a program organized by the Club for the Future, Blue Origin’s nonprofit educational foundation. The featured partners for this latest batch of postcards were UNIQLO, Arm & Hammer Baking Soda Rocket Day and Give Kids the World Village.

Blue Origin typically doesn’t reveal how much people pay to take trips on New Shepard. In some cases, crew members have flown as invited guests. On the other end of the spectrum, crypto entrepreneur Justin Sun paid $28 million for a ticket in a widely publicized auction.

The suborbital space program’s previous milestones include flying the world’s oldest spaceflier (former test pilot Ed Dwight, who was 90 when he rode on New Shepard last year); the world’s youngest spaceflier (Oliver Daemen, who was 18 when he flew with Bezos and two others in 2021). and the first married couple to reach the final frontier together on a commercial spaceship (Marc and Sharon Hagle in 2022).

Update for 8:40 a.m. PT: NASA’s new administrator, Jared Isaacman, congratulated Blue Origin and the NS-37 crew, with special shout-outs for Koenigsmann and Benthaus:

Congrats to the Blue Origin team and the NS-37 crew–including @HansKoenigsmann one of the great engineers of this new era. His work enabled so many to reach space–I am glad he finally made the journey himself. pic.twitter.com/hgtKRSZpPq

— Jared Isaacman (@rookisaacman) December 20, 2025

Congratulations, Michi! You just inspired millions to look up and imagine what is possible 🚀 https://t.co/RMHa54o6Xh

— Jared Isaacman (@rookisaacman) December 20, 2025

This is an updated version of a report first published on Dec. 18.

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 GeekWire 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.

“When the first indications from the new data analysis suggested the absence of a global ocean within Titan, the result prompted extensive discussion, careful double- and triple-checking, and contacting colleagues outside the team for critical feedback, even before submission for anonymous peer review,” he said. “We were all surprised, to say the least.”

The hypothesis about Titan’s hidden ocean goes back to NASA’s Cassini mission, which gathered data about Saturn and its moons between 2004 and 2017. “The Cassini spacecraft’s numerous gravity measurements of Titan revealed that the moon is hiding an underground ocean of liquid water,” according to the current version of NASA’s webpage about Titan.

Journaux and his colleagues used improved, up-to-date techniques to put Cassini’s radiometric measurements through a fresh round of analysis — and came to a different conclusion.

The earlier round of research proposed that there was a layer of liquid water potentially measuring hundreds of miles in thickness, sandwiched between Titan’s outer shell of low-pressure ice and a denser layer of high-pressure ice. That hypothesis was based on the best information available at the time about how tidal stresses propagated through Titan’s interior.

In contrast, the newly published research finds insufficient evidence for a liquid layer that large. Instead, it suggests that there’s an upper layer of low-pressure ice, roughly 106 miles (170 kilometers) thick, which transitions into a 235-mile-thick (378-kilometer-thick) layer of high-pressure ice.

Pockets of slush and liquid water could exist within and between layers of ice, or between the deepest layer of ice and Titan’s core. That gives Journaux cause for hope.

“Even a conservative melt fraction of 1% of the hydrosphere (to account for the observed tidal dissipation) would still correspond to total volumes of liquid water inside Titan comparable to that of the entire Atlantic Ocean, implying the presence of vast potential habitable spaces,” Journaux said.

Journaux pointed out that ice tends to exclude salts and other dissolved materials as it freezes, which means “these slushy, near-melting environments would be enriched in dissolved species and nutrients for life to feed on, as opposed to a dilute open ocean.”

“For these reasons, there is strong justification for continued optimism regarding the potential for extraterrestrial life on Titan,” he said.

Such life would probably be most similar to the types of organisms found in sea-ice ecosystems on Earth. “This realization helps constrain the range of plausible life forms and signatures to target, thereby sharpening and strengthening our search strategies,” Journaux said.

Titan’s interior is by no means the Saturnian moon’s only region of interest: Titan also has lakes of liquid ethane and methane, plus an atmosphere that’s rich in hydrocarbons. If life exists on the surface, most astrobiologists say it would be nothing like life as we know it today.

NASA’s Dragonfly mission, which is due to lift off from Earth in 2028 and touch down on Titan in 2034, could provide new insights about the moon’s surface conditions and its interior structure.

Looking beyond Titan, there are several other icy moons in our solar system that are thought to harbor hidden reservoirs of water, including the Saturnian moon Enceladus and three of Jupiter’s moons: Europa, Callisto and Ganymede. Those three Jovian worlds will get a close look from the European Space Agency’s Juice spacecraft (launched in 2023) and NASA’s Europa Clipper (launched in 2024).

Journaux hopes the results announced today will help other scientists get a better sense of what they should be looking for on all of these icy moons. “As our understanding of their interiors will become much more accurate and refined with upcoming missions … this result shows us how we can, with new measurements, place much stronger and more precise constraints on the types of habitable environments that may exist,” he said.

Flavio Petricca of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is the corresponding author of the study published in Nature, “Titan’s Strong Tidal Dissipation Precludes a Subsurface Ocean.” In addition to Journaux, co-authors include Steven D. Vance, Marzia Parisi, Dustin Buccino, Gael Cascioli, Julie Castillo-Rogez, Brynna G. Downey, Francis Nimmo, Gabriel Tobie, Andrea Magnanini, Ula Jones, Mark Panning, Amirhossein Bagheri, Antonio Genova and Jonathan I. Lunine.

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 GeekWire. “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.”

Before launch, the LEO Express 2 Mira was equipped with a peripheral flight computer that was loaded with Starfish’s Cetacean and Cephalopod software. During the Remora mission, that Mira spacecraft used Starfish’s guidance system and a single lightweight camera system supplied by TRL11 to close in on a different Mira that had been used for Impulse Space’s LEO Express 1 mission.

As the distance decreased from about 100 kilometers (62 miles) to roughly 1,200 meters (three-quarters of a mile), Starfish’s software processed the camera imagery to generate estimates of relative position. Then it computed optimal orbital trajectories and commanded Mira’s thrusters to fire accordingly.

Starfish is working on an in-house spacecraft called Otter that will be capable of approaching and docking with other objects in orbit to conduct inspections, perform orbital servicing or get rid of space debris. Bennett said the success of the Remora mission could open up new market opportunities that don’t depend on Otter.

“What we’re trying to show is that you don’t have to design a vehicle just for RPO [rendezvous and proximity operations] and docking,” Bennett said. “You can design the vehicle for the core mission that it needs to do in addition to that. … What we’re trying to do is remove this high barrier to having RPO and docking be a mainstay in our industry.”

Eric Romo, president and chief operating officer of Impulse Space, said Remora was a plus for his company as well.

“Our Mira spacecraft uses high-thrust chemical propulsion, and what that means is, we’re typically pretty good at moving really quickly between two points in space,” he told GeekWire. But Romo said some potential customers have wondered whether Mira’s high-thrust system had the precision and accuracy that would be required when operating near another spacecraft.

For those customers, the Remora mission showed that there’s no trade-off between speed and accuracy, and that Mira “has the commandability and the controllability you need to do this type of proximity operation,” Romo said.

Bennett and Romo both said their companies would look at future opportunities for collaboration. “For us, the path forward is to pull it away from just a pure demonstration mission to a truly day-to-day capability that we rely on and build on,” Bennett said. “We’re very fortunate that Impulse was our partner up to this point, and I think there are plenty of opportunities for us to be partners going forward.”

In the meantime, both companies are busy with other projects. Starfish Space is in the midst of an Otter Pup 2 test mission that was launched in June — and the company has its first three full-scale Otter missions lined up for NASA, the U.S. Space Force and the SES satellite company (which acquired Intelsat) in the 2026-2027 time frame.

Impulse Space’s third Mira spacecraft was launched last month to deploy and host payloads for the LEO Express 3 mission. Looking ahead, Impulse is pursuing a partnership with Anduril to conduct a high-precision rendezvous and proximity operations mission in geosynchronous Earth orbit in 2026. And looking even further ahead, the company has laid out a roadmap for sending medium-sized payloads to the moon.

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 with GeekWire, 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 said.

Armenta said Outbound was caught between its initial strategy to create a different kind of passenger aircraft and an evolving strategy to start out building drones for military customers. That commercial-to-military pivot is an option many aerospace startups are considering as the prospects brighten for programs including the Golden Dome missile defense system, next-generation drones, tactically responsive space systems and hypersonic air vehicles.

“We didn’t really plan on being a military vendor,” he said. “But I have a background in Boeing Phantom Works, and I spent a lot of time working on drones at Boeing … so I know exactly what kind of things the U.S. government’s looking for. In that regard, we were able to put together a pretty compelling kind of platform.”

Outbound’s team came up with a drone concept called the Gateway UAV, which closely resembles the 22-foot-wide, blended-wing prototype that was tested in March. Gateway would fly rapidly deployable “mission containers” that could carry cargo or a suite of sensors for national security missions.

Armenta said the concept attracted significant interest from potential military customers. “But the U.S. military is a slow customer to work with, and the truth is, they prefer to work with companies that are very well funded,” he said.

Unfortunately, Outbound was not that kind of company in the summer of 2025. The company had raised $1.3 million dollars in total investment — including $500,000 from Blue Collective, a matching amount from Antler, and the remainder from smaller private investors. But even $1.3 million goes only so far.

“By pivoting away from the big aircraft, we lost the interest of some of the initial investors who were really wanting to do big moonshot projects,” Armenta said. “And then the investors who wanted to invest in military drones wanted to see a lot more traction than we had.”

Outbound CEO Ian Lee told GeekWire that the company faced a “chicken-and-egg” problem.

“We got stuck with DoD customers who were saying, ‘Hey, this is amazing. We want to see it demoed. And then we can write a contract, and contract equals dollars,'” Lee recalled. “So, then we turned around and went to the investment community and said, ‘They want to see a demo, and we need to raise [money] to do that.’ It’s kind of a ‘we need money to go make money’ situation, and we were too far along to raise that young money, if you want to call it that.”

Armenta said the timing was bad for a shift in strategy. “You know, there’s a version of this where if we had decided early on, ‘Hey, we’re going to build a military drone first and put all of our effort into that’ … I think we would have been able to sell it without a problem in the time frame that we had,” he said. “But we didn’t really decide that until midway through.”

Ironically, at the same time Outbound Aerospace was running on empty, the buzz surrounding the venture was revving up.

A month ago, the BBC featured Outbound alongside JetZero and Volatus Aerospace’s Natilus project in a story about the rising interest in blended-wing aircraft designs. And two months ago, Lee said in a LinkedIn post that he was “excited for y’all to see what’s next.”

“That post was leading into several discussions with investors to go do the DoD work that we needed to do,” Lee said this week. “We had half of our round secured at that point, we were talking to a number of other players, and we had the DoD product ready. … At that point, I was expecting investment to come on pretty quickly and [we could] start talking about that publicly. It never came through.”

So, what’s next? Outbound’s website still touts the Gateway drone as well as the 254-passenger Olympic airliner, which is said to be “coming in 2033.”

Lee promised that those concepts won’t be “disappearing into the ether,” and Armenta plans to make sure they don’t.

“We designed not one or two, but five novel transport-category aircraft at Outbound … and all of them are pretty neat,” he said. “I’m going to spend a little bit of time talking about those more publicly over the next couple of months. Maybe next year.”

Both founders are taking time to consider their next steps.

“I’m doing some consulting,” Lee said. “I am advising a couple of friends and also interviewing at various companies. Actually, part of what I’m trying to do is pick what the next few years of projects look like. I’m taking a pause on running a startup directly. I’ll probably be back at that at some point, but not for the next few years.”

Armenta is also helping out some friends in the aerospace industry while he takes stock of what he’s learned over the past couple of years.

“We were a lot closer than we had any right to be,” he said. “The thing is, there’s so much hunger in the market, and in every market for new aircraft across the board. We saw that in the drone space, but it’s really there in the commercial space and even in the business-jet space.”

Even though Outbound’s fortunes have fallen back to earth, Armenta is still looking up. “This has been something that I’ve been wanting to do — literally — for 30 years,” he said. “I’m 34 years old, and I can remember being a very small child and wanting to build aircraft. This has never stopped.”

The lessons learned at Outbound have only heightened his resolve. “Through this journey over the last couple of years, I saw a small, constrained number of errors that we made,” Armenta said. “I think that in the future, with a slightly different strategy, with all the knowledge and information and preparation that I have now … I’ll be back. Like I said, I’ll be back.”

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.”

Portal already operates an 8,000-square-foot facility in Bothell, where it’s been developing the hardware for its flagship Supernova in-space mobility platform and a smaller spacecraft dubbed Starburst. Supernova will feature an innovative solar thermal propulsion system, which uses concentrated sunlight as a heat source for its thrusters. Both spacecraft are designed to provide greater mobility for commercial and government payloads in orbit.

“We’ve spent the last year proving what’s possible. Now we’re scaling to deliver it,” Portal co-founder and CEO Jeff Thornburg said. “This support from Washington isn’t just about growth. It’s about building a strategic capability for the nation and doing it right here in Bothell.”

Revenue for the Strategic Reserve Fund comes from unclaimed lottery prize money. The funds are intended to attract and retain jobs and economic investment in Washington, limited to highly strategic projects that deliver significant job creation and capital investment. These projects are considered in partnership with local associate development organizations, such as Economic Alliance Snohomish County. The governor determines awards based on recommendations from the Department of Commerce.

“Portal Space Systems represents the kind of bold, future-facing innovation we’re proud to see growing in Washington,” said Commerce Director Joe Nguyen. “With the governor’s new investment, Portal is better equipped to scale up its cutting-edge operations. This strengthens Washington’s position as a hub for world-class talent and national space infrastructure.”

Grants from the Strategic Reserve Fund must be accompanied by private investment. Since its founding in 2021, Portal has raised more than $22 million in venture capital financing and grants, and received a commitment of $45 million in public-private funding through the U.S. Space Force’s STRATFI program.

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”)

The company’s backers include Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates‘ investment fund as well as Samsung Ventures, the Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund, Silicon Valley’s MetaVC and Oman’s ITHCA Group.

When Lumotive was founded, the spotlight was on the technology’s use in lidar systems for self-driving cars. Since then, lidar sensing has turned up in a wider array of devices, ranging from robots to smartphones.

“To be honest, even though we have had good engagements in automotive, our primary focus has been robotics,” Heidari told GeekWire. Lumotive has announced deals to provide its 3D sensor systems to three robotics companies: Hokuyo Automatic in Japan, Namuga in South Korea, and E-Photonics in Saudi Arabia. More deals are in the works.

To address anticipated demand, Lumotive has added Oman and Taiwan to a list of corporate locales that includes its Redmond HQ and branch offices in San Jose, Calif.; and Vancouver, B.C.

Lumotive’s Center of Excellence in Muscat, Oman, provides dedicated customer engineering and program management resources for Middle East and European markets. The Taiwan office beefs up Lumotive’s manufacturing operations, sales and field application capabilities near key partners in Asia.

Heidari said Lumotive has expanded its workforce by 50% over the past year. The current tally has risen to nearly 80 employees worldwide, roughly half of whom are based in Redmond.

That expansion is driven by two factors. “One is that as more customers come up, we need to build the infrastructure to be able to support them and help them through their designs,” Heidari said. “The second thing is that we’re actually looking at new areas of design, to augment our product and increase our market presence.”

Heidari highlighted two hires: Lumotive’s executive vice president of global business, Tristan Joo, brings more than two decades of experience in optical semiconductors at companies including Ofilm, Polight and ams OSRAM. Hassan Moussa, vice president of customer engineering and general manager of Lumotive Oman, previously led Valeo’s lidar program and has more than 20 years of experience in automotive sensing systems.

Lumotive has also expanded its distribution network and its partner ecosystem. In today’s news release, Joo said the new offices and partnerships will give Lumotive “the reach, capital and scalability to lead this next phase of global adoption — from robotics and automation to automotive and smart infrastructure.”

Moussa said Lumotive is redefining how 3D sensors are built, “shifting 3D sensing from niche lidar systems to a broader ecosystem where anyone can build it, just like cameras.”

When the bulk of this year’s Series B round was announced in February, The Wall Street Journal noted that Lumotive was bucking a trend that favored investment in artificial intelligence over non-AI technologies. Months later, Heidari acknowledges that getting investors excited about 3D sensing hasn’t always been easy.

“Coming up with something that is not AI today — sometimes you just don’t get the audience, even though what we are doing obviously is going to benefit the AI revolution,” he said. “AI is like a brain, right? Your brain without your senses is very limited. You need the eyes and the ears to absorb the physical world in order to utilize your brain.”

Looking more broadly, Heidari sees opportunities for optical semiconductors in the data centers that are powering the AI revolution.

“In data centers, there are switches that connect different racks of CPUs or GPUs, and these switches today are very power-hungry and very expensive,” Heidari said. “There are initiatives in the industry to simplify them by keeping them all in the optical domain, versus a hybrid of optical and electronic types of switches. So we are planning to be active in that market as well.”

In the meantime, the semiconductor industry is taking notice. Electronic Product Design & Test, a British journal focusing on electronics design, put Lumotive on its list of the year’s top startups last month. And just last week, the Global Semiconductor Alliance gave Lumotive its “Startup to Watch” award.

“We had Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, and many other brand names in the semiconductor space in the room,” Heidari said. “It was attended by 1,700 people, all executives and managers of semiconductor companies, and we were honored to receive the award for the best startup.”

Is an interstellar spacecraft zooming through our solar system? That’s the big question for fans of unidentified flying objects — and for a researcher at the University of Washington who analyzed the speculation over the interstellar comet known as 3I/ATLAS.

Mert Bayar, a postdoctoral scholar at the UW Center for an Informed Public, focused on 3I/ATLAS to track how social-media influencers use over-the-top speculation to fill in information gaps.

“I’ve written previously on how expert opinions can fuel conspiracy theorizing through elite-driven rumoring and amplification,” Bayar explained in an email to GeekWire. “My academic interest in philosophy, epistemology and the politics of conspiracy theories, plus a personal interest in space-related conspiracy theories, led me to look more closely at 3I/ATLAS.”

His analysis, published this week, is titled “Alien of the Gaps: How 3I/ATLAS Was Turned into a Spaceship Online.” The title takes inspiration from a concept known as “God of the Gaps,” which traces how thinkers through the ages explained phenomena they couldn’t fully understand by appealing to the influence of higher powers.

In ancient Greece, those higher powers might have been the gods on Mount Olympus. Bayar argues that a similar process exists today: “Where natural explanations feel incomplete, we substitute a different higher agency, not Zeus this time, but extraterrestrials,” he writes.

Such questions came into the spotlight when 3I/ATLAS was spotted in July. The object’s trajectory suggested that it was only the third known celestial interloper coming into the solar system from far beyond. Even after astronomers built up evidence to classify it as a comet, 3I/ATLAS exhibited enough anomalous behavior to sustain speculation about alien technology.

Exactly how was that speculation sustained? A key figure is Harvard astronomer Avi Loeb. Years before 3I/ATLAS was found, Loeb and a colleague raised the possibility that a previously sighted interstellar object known as ‘Oumuamua “may be a fully operational probe sent intentionally to Earth vicinity by an alien civilization.”

Loeb hit upon the alien-technology theme repeatedly in follow-up research papers and a book published in 2023. This year’s discovery of 3I/ATLAS gave a fresh boost to his speculative musings. To track how such musings influenced online discussions about 3I/ATLAS, Bayar used a media analytics platform called Brandwatch to analyze roughly 700,000 posts about the comet that were published on the X social-media channel between July 1 and Nov. 21.

“Almost 280,000 of the 700,000 posts invoke aliens or ET technology — about 40% of the 3I/ATLAS conversation on X,” Bayar writes. About 130,000 posts reference Loeb by name or by his status as a Harvard scientist. More than 82,000 posts explicitly pair his name with the alien-technology hypothesis.

“To be fair, at times, Avi Loeb states that 3I/ATLAS is most likely a natural interstellar comet,” Bayar says. “But he then spends far more time walking through its supposed ‘anomalies’ and entertaining the alien-technology hypothesis. For most audiences, the volume and emphasis of that speculation effectively buries the initial caveat and recenters the story around the alien frame rather than the natural-comet explanation.”

All that feeds into a broader online ecosystem that Bayar calls the “mystery economy.”

“Our information systems reward the production of mystery and speculation,” he writes. “That reward is amplified by a ready-made ecosystem of websites, content creators across platforms who produce, spread and amplify speculative takes. Those creators need a steady supply of ‘new’ material, and Loeb’s ever-growing list of anomalies, even when indirectly refuted by organizations like NASA, feeds that need for sustained mystery and endlessly recyclable content.”

In case you’re curious about the anomalies, Penn State astronomer Jason Wright, who focuses on studies of extrasolar planets and the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, ticks through Loeb’s list (and offers explanations that don’t involve aliens) in a blog post that was published last month.

But the point behind Bayar’s research has more to do with social-media dynamics than with planetary science. The insights gained from studying the “Alien of the Gaps” could well be applied to other spheres of conspiratorial theorizing, ranging from vaccine denialism to the search for a Jan. 6 pipe-bomb suspect.

Bayar had to limit his statistical analysis to posts about 3I/ATLAS on X, but he saw signs that information was flowing between different online platforms. “One of the most frequently appearing terms in the 3I/ATLAS conversation on X is ‘@YouTube,’ suggesting that many X accounts are reacting to or sharing YouTube videos,” he told GeekWire.

“Because of data-access constraints, we can’t confidently identify a single ‘nexus’ of spread,” Bayar said. “What we can say is that the conversation on X is both widely distributed and largely contained within alien-adjacent communities: Total volume is still under a million posts, which suggests it hasn’t broken out into a truly mass-viral story beyond the UFO/UAP crowd.”

That could change, however. 3I/ATLAS is due to make its closest approach to Earth on Dec. 19, which means there’ll be further opportunities for astronomical imagery — and for speculative online buzz.

Thanks to Julien De Winter for permission to republish a Nov. 25 image of 3I/ATLAS that was captured by Victor Sabet and De Winter using a Starfront Observatories telescope in Texas.