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A very exciting thing happened this week…

Our company http://beta.team successfully flew one of our electric Alia aircraft from Plattsburgh NY to Bentonville , Arkansas last week. The flight was made in 7 hops each of about 200 miles.. The plane recharged from a truck that was following along on the ground. As far as I know it’s the longest all electric trip of an aircraft of our size and weight. .. The plane performed beautifully  and was piloted alternately by my friends Lochie and Arlo .

I’m only able to talk about it now that its been publicly disclosed. (see this story in Popular Science today  and this short video about the trip )

My friend Kyle (our CEO) flew down to be there for the last leg . He took a samstone for us to be aboard  for this historic flight.   Lochie was piloting and he sent me these pictures of his Samstone above Arkansas and in the hanger in Bentonville.

Here’s a video from the cockpit

Whats so cool about having a samstone on board  is that in addition to doing freight logistics for some of the worlds biggest shippers, one of Beta’s primary missions is to deliver genetically engineered organs  for transplantation. Sam was an organ donor and anyone who’s ever been involved in human organ transplantation knows just how  hard it is to match donors and receivers. There just aren’t enough organs to go around. One of Beta’s  first and principle investors is Martine Rotheblatt . Martine is an amazing inventor and visionary. She formed United Therapeutics.

to engineer live saving therapy for her daughter who had a rare disease. Since that time UT has pioneered many lifesaving therapies  including human lung rehabilitation for transplant and the creation of genetically engineered animal organs that are designed to be suitable for human transplantation  (eg see here)

Congratulations and thanks to all the folks at Beta who made this possible.. and huge thanks   to Lochie , Kyle for taking Sam along for the ride !

nite all, nite sam

-me

My good freind Naeem is my favorite space freak… He’s been working very hard with a group from Bulgaria to build a small “cube sat” satellite which will be an orbit for the next three or so years. He’s going to be using it for cloud computing from space experiments. So cool

And when Naeem told me about the project I mentioned how much I would love to get a samstone in orbit. (There was already one in space.. but not in orbit  see http://samstones.org/WordPress1/?p=1827)
We explored different options but it turns out that the satellites are very space and weight constraint so instead of putting a real Sam stone on it I created an image from a 3-D scan of a real stone and gave it to the manufactures. They etched into the side of one of the struts inside the small satellite.

Anyway.. Naeem was told that the space launch was today. 2 PM specifically… And then the satellite itself would be deployed around 2:30. Here’s a picture of it…

Sam is now in orbit!

Name: Jay Catalano

Location: Found at my address

Story: I noticed the stone shortly after moving in to this apartment building, a year and a half ago. The stone resides in the sill of a 3rd floor window. With my curiosity being piqued, the research led me here.