Today , Xplore has teamed with NASA , the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and The Aerospace Corporation to build a next-generation light sail . Xplore calls it the LightCraft .
Instead of having just one sail capturing photons flying out from the Sun , the LightCraft will have six that can be adjusted to best capture the energy . “ It ’ s very much like the masted sailing ships that the ancient mariners used ,” Rich said .
As planned , LightCraft missions will start with a satellite launch into Earth orbit . The sails will deploy , and then the LightCraft will head toward the Sun , coming inside the orbit of Mercury before swinging around to fully capture the massive pressure from the solar radiation at its source .
From there , it will head out into the Solar System at a speed fast enough to get to Jupiter within a year .
Xplore already is building prototypes for the LightCraft , which is part of the reason it needed the big space in Redmond .
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Rich and her co-founders began Xplore four years ago . They located the company in suburban Seattle to take advantage of its rapidly developing Space 2.0 cluster .
Puget Sound has advantages for space companies that no other region has , Rich said . “ It ’ s a hub of the space industry and the talent is here .”
First , of course , is the fact that we ’ ve been building flying things for more than a century . “ The history of our area , starting with aerospace at Boeing , you ’ ve got engineers who ’ ve worked on aerospace and space . You ’ ve got that technology and understanding of how to work with these materials that will be used in space .”
Along with that is the obvious fact there ’ s a leading global tech hub in Puget Sound . Successful flights in space require a lot of computing power on the ground , Rich said . “ Space is ultimately about the data you bring back ,” she said . “ You ’ re going to have to cache it , store it .”
Xplore and other space companies can tap into data center operations run by Microsoft and Amazon , each of which have thousands of software engineers dedicated to their cloud computing services .
In addition , Rich said , Amazon founder Jeff Bezos has had a strong impact by founding Blue Origin , which is based in Kent , Washington .
Bezos is putting about a billion dollars a year into the company , which is quietly being spent in ways that will benefit the whole industry . Rich said ,
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