NASA touts lunar landing tech, and Blue Origin says there’ll be a flight test ‘soon’

Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship makes a precision landing in May 2019. (Blue Origin Photo)

Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong famously had to dodge a boulder-strewn crater just seconds before the first moon landing in 1969 — but for future lunar touchdowns, NASA expects robotic eyes to see such missions to safe landings.

And Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture is helping to make it so.

Today NASA talked up a precision landing system known as SPLICE (which stands for Safe and Precise Landing – Integrated Capabilities Evolution). The system makes use of an onboard camera, laser sensors and computerized firepower to identify and avoid hazards such as craters and boulders.

NASA says three of SPLICE’s four main subsystems — the terrain relative navigation system, a navigation Doppler lidar system and the descent and landing computer — will be tested during an upcoming flight of Blue Origin’s New Shepard suborbital spaceship. The fourth component, a hazard detection lidar system, still has to go through ground testing.

In a tweet, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said technologies such as SPLICE “can provide spacecraft with the ‘eyes’ and analytical capability” for making safe landings. Blue Origin answered with a tweet of its own:

Very cool flight tests coming…we look forward to #NewShepard flying these lunar landing technologies soon. https://t.co/4c6S1aiuMj

— Blue Origin (@blueorigin) September 18, 2020

It’s been a long nine months since New Shepard’s most recent uncrewed test flight — primarily due to disruptions caused by the coronavirus pandemic. Before COVID-19, Blue Origin executives had voiced hopes of flying people on New Shepard by the end of 2020, but that time frame now seems out of the question. (To be fair, Bezos and others at Blue Origin have given optimistic forecasts for flights with people on board since 2016.)

Now another timeline is looming large: NASA’s Artemis program is aiming to land astronauts on the moon by as early as 2024, and the lander being developed by Blue Origin and its partners could play a key role in those lunar missions.

SPLICE could also guide the robotic landings leading up to the crewed missions, as well as future landings on Mars.

Back in 1969, NASA left it up to Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to pick the right spot within a target landing area that measured roughly 3 miles wide and 11 miles long. The target zone for the Viking Mars landers in 1976 was an even wider ellipse, spanning 62 miles by 174 miles.

Robotic landing technology has improved markedly since then: The landing ellipse for the Mars Curiosity rover in 2016 was a mere 4 by 12 miles. But SPLICE should be able to plot pinpoint touchdowns for future human and robotic explorers.

“What we’re building is a complete descent and landing system that will work for future Artemis missions to the moon and can be adapted for Mars,” project manager Ron Sostaric said in NASA’s news release. “Our job is to put the individual components together and make sure that it works as a functioning system.”

SPLICE’s camera is programmed to take up to 10 images per second, and feed them into a computer that’s pre-loaded with satellite images and landmark coordinates. The computer continuously compares the real-time views with the database to guide the spacecraft toward the safest site, while making sure to avoid hazards.

A version of the terrain relative navigation system will be used when NASA’s Perseverance rover descends to the Martian surface next February.

SPLICE’s navigation Doppler lidar system is designed to kick in during mid-descent, scanning the terrain with laser beams to keep track of the lander’s relative velocity and trajectory.

A separate laser-scanning system, the hazard detection lidar, will look out for obstacles within a 55-yard radius. That’s precisely the kind of system that could have steered the Apollo 11 lunar module well clear of that troublesome crater, avoiding the tense moments that marked Armstrong’s touchdown.

SPLICE could open up landing zones in areas of the moon and Mars that previously couldn’t be considered due to potentially hazardous terrain — for example, the permanently shadowed craters of the moon’s south polar region, or ledges overlooking the huge Martian canyon known as Valles Marineris.

If all goes well with New Shepard’s flights and SPLICE’s other trial runs, precision landing technologies could help robotic lunar probes find their way to a safe landing starting as early as next year.

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Zillow report fuels talk of ‘mass exodus’ in San Francisco, but other markets not seeing urban flight

The San Francisco skyline. (GeekWire Photo / Kurt Schlosser)

Zillow’s recent Urban Suburban Market Report opens by asking: Are people fleeing the cities for greener suburban pastures?

The short answer is no, the report says: “Some faint signals may have emerged in certain places, but by and large, the data show that suburban housing markets have not strengthened at a disproportionately rapid pace compared to urban markets.”

However, those “faint signals” are raising concerns about a potential “mass exodus” in the San Francisco metro area. SFGate called the exodus “real” and “historic,” referencing Zillow data showing that inventory has risen 96% year-over-year in the city proper as new listings during the pandemic have flooded the market.

In contrast, similar cities like Seattle, Boston, Miami, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have seen declining or flat inventory within and outside the city limits.

“When you step back and look at the bigger picture, it seems that those writing off urban real estate have done so prematurely,” Zillow economist Jeff Tucker said in a statement. “There is some localized evidence of a softer urban market, particularly in the highest-priced markets, San Francisco and Manhattan, and an eye-catching divergence in sale prices, but no evidence of a widespread flight to suburban pastures.”

(Zillow Graphic)

As tech companies and others allow workers to do their jobs remotely for extended periods of time, one theory is that people will abandon the need to live in cities close to work, fleeing to the suburbs, smaller markets or rural destinations for bigger, cheaper houses.

Redfin CEO Glenn Kelman made headlines back in May when he predicted a “seismic demographic shift toward smaller cities” such as Boise, Idaho, and Bozeman, Mont. Zillow also reported in May, on a survey about remote work, that two-thirds of employees who have the option of WFH would consider moving as a result of that change.

But Zillow economist Josh Clark dismissed remote work as the sole reason for what’s happening in San Francisco.

“It may be tempting to credit the city of San Francisco’s inventory boom to the advent of remote work that came with the pandemic, but one only has to look at to San Jose to question that narrative,” Clark told SFGate. “The San Jose metro, which like the city of SF is dominated by tech workers, has not seen a similar rise. Two things that could drive the difference are San Francisco’s density and its smaller share of family households.”

Business Insider’s take on the exodus cited San Francisco’s high cost of living (median home value in the city is $1.45 million) and the fact that everything that makes living in the city enjoyable is now closed or altered because of coronavirus.

When it comes to Zillow’s website, the report found, search behavior shows that suburban and urban listings are generating the same amount of attention in 2020 as they did a year ago. Traffic to Zillow’s mobile apps and websites in the second quarter did reach a record 218 million average monthly unique users, up 12%, and a total of 2.5 billion visits.

The U.S. housing market has rebounded from earlier this year, driven in part by record-low mortgage rates. The U.S. Census reported at the end of July that home ownership rates increased year-over-year from 64% to 68%, the highest level since 2008 and one of the largest increases in history.

Read the full Zillow report.

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