Voyager 1 is back online.

[SOUND] You know, things were not looking great for the venerated and venerable Voyager 1 back in November.

The nearly 50 year old interstellar spacecraft was sending back nonsense information to Earth.

And we all heaved a sigh at that news, didn't we?

Was this its death rattle?

Was it time for us all to say goodbye?

Well, our answer from NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab yesterday officially is, Voyager 1's not dead yet.

In fact, she is getting better, thank you very much.

[MUSIC] >> T-minus. >> 20 seconds to alloy.

>> [INAUDIBLE] >> Go for it.

[MUSIC] >> Today is April 23rd, 2024.

I'm Maria Varmasus and this is T-minus.

[MUSIC] Voyager 1 is back online again.

>> Yay.

>> Satellogic supports O&E Amazon's Internet of Forests.

Lockheed Martin files Q1 financial reports.

And our guest today is Sean Kane, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at Mott Corporation.

And I spoke to Sean about the state of the supply chain in space manufacturing.

So stay with us for that chat.

[MUSIC] Let's take a look at our Tuesday Intel Briefing, shall we?

The Tiger team at JPL has been working on troubleshooting what's been going on with Voyager 1 since it started sending gibberish binary back on November 14th, 2023.

And since then, the team figured out the source of the issue, a chip within Voyager 1's flight data subsystem, had become unusable.

Cue the Voyager engineering team at JPL, figuring out that a lot of code needed to be relocated to working locations across Voyager 1's three onboard computers.

While also making sure that all the code and its references still work once it is all moved locations.

And those three onboard computers, by the way, have a total of 68 megabytes of memory to work with, which admittedly was a ton in 1977.

Still, we are talking about precision surgery from an extremely long distance to get this fixed.

The firmware update from the mission team went to Voyager 1 on April 18th.

And after waiting those 22 and a half hours for it to send, and another 22 and a half hours for a signal back from Voyager 1.

On April 20th, the mission team confirmed that they got usable data from Voyager 1 once again.

That had to have been incredibly gratifying to everyone who worked on this.

I can only begin to imagine.

So congratulations to everyone who contributed to fixing Voyager 1 over the last five months.

And yes, the work continues on optimizing the fix to the flight data subsystem.

May it all continue to go well.

And Voyager 1, it's great to hear you clearly once again.

And we're continuing with the positive news.

Satelogic signed a letter of intent with ONE Amazon to mark Earth Day yesterday.

Now, ONE Amazon is focused on creating sustainable impact for the environment and investors by using next generation technology to bring innovation to conservation.

Satelogic plans to support ONE Amazon's creation of the Internet of Forests, which is a large scale sensor network that, along with machine intelligence infrastructure, will be used to monitor key variables within the Amazon Rainforest.

You've got to love the name Internet of Forest seriously.

Bravo, Satelogic, for using your platform to monitor the planet and help solve the Earth's most pressing issues.

Yeah, we've reached that time in the calendar when Q1 financials are being reported, and today it's Lockheed Martin's turn.

The leading global security and aerospace company reported an uptick in financials for Q1 with net sales of $17.2 billion compared to $15.1 billion in the first quarter last year.

Net earnings in the first quarter of 2024, however, were $1.5 billion or $639 per share compared to $1.7 billion or $661 per share in the first quarter of 2023.

The full report and financial outlook can be found in our show notes.

Onto not so great news now, and Momentus has received formal notice from NASDAQ, notifying the company that it is not in compliance with the requirements of a NASDAQ listing rule as the result of not having timely filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission Form 10K for the year ending December 31st, 2023.

So Momentus is quick to point out that the notice has no immediate impact on the listing of the company's common stock on the NASDAQ, and the company's listing remains fully effective.

Momentus now has 60 calendar days from the date of this notice, or until June 17th, 2024, to file the Form 10K or to submit to NASDAQ a plan to regain compliance with the NASDAQ listing rule.

It's a bit of a risk slap then really.

And they're not the only company facing public shaming.

AST Space Mobile is currently under investigation for misleading investors regarding its launch schedule.

AST Space Mobile purports to be in the advanced stages of assembling and testing its first generation of commercial Bluebird satellites, the Block 1 Bluebird satellites to be specific, in advance of launching its space-based cellular broadband network.

Following the planned launch and deployment of five Block 1 Bluebird satellites, the company intends to initiate limited, non-continuous cellular service in targeted geographical areas that include the United States in order to generate revenue.

But on April 1st, 2024, after the market closed, Space Mobile issued a press release disclosing that the production of five Block 1 Bluebird satellites had been, and I quote, "impacted by two suppliers, leading to delays in integration and testing."

And as a result, these five satellites were expected to be transported to the launch site between July or August 2024, which is later than the previously expected launch in the first quarter of 2024.

So, on this news, Space Mobile's stock price fell 62 cents, or 23.6%.

The class action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of all persons and entities that purchased or otherwise acquired AST Space Mobile securities between November 14th, 2023 and April 1st, 2024.

Ouch.

And as we do like balance on the show, we're going to go back to some positive news now.

The Space Exploration and Research Agency, also known as CERA, is partnering with Blue Origin to develop a human spaceflight program for citizens of nations who have historically lacked access to space.

The program will provide the opportunity for everyday citizens from around the world to become astronauts and participate in space science.

Its first flight has reserved all six seats on a future Blue Origin new shepherd mission.

That is a great opportunity.

And we have more positive news from Spain now, and PLD Space has announced that it's attained 120 million euros in funding to date.

The launch company says that the funding ensures that it can meet its upcoming technological and corporate milestones, culminating in the launch of the MIRRA 5 mission at the end of 2025.

And by the way, congratulations to Parrish Episcopal School from Dallas and the University of Alabama in Huntsville for winning their age categories of the 30th Human Exploration Rover Challenge.

You can read more about the competition and updates on SpaceX's woes by following links in the selected reading of our show notes.

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[Music] Our guest today is Sean Kane, Vice President of Strategy and Business Development at Mott Corporation.

And no, they're not the Applesauce people.

I spoke to Sean on the conference floor at the Space Symposium, and I asked him to tell us more about the company.

So Mott and its art, we inspire engineers to escape the ordinary.

That's our headline.

So we do things from insulin pumps that get implanted, very tiny drug delivery components, all the way to clean energy.

If you've seen anything in the news around reducing carbon footprint, we're one of the largest suppliers to electrolyzers around the world that produces clean hydrogen.

All the way up to three story high process systems that you might see at a big chemical facility that makes the world turn kind of products.

Other components that are big are like semiconductor.

So if you have a phone, we're the filter that goes into chip making for major companies out there.

So we're that company.

There's a Fortune 500 company.

We probably do business with them in some form or other in the background.

In the background is the phrase that you keep using.

That's fascinating that you all are in so many different industries.

Obviously, we're at a space conference right now.

We're at the 39 Space Symposium.

You have a big involvement in the space industry as well.

Can you tell me a little bit more about that?

So we're a 65-year-old company, and one of our first products, I believe, was an aerospace product.

That's kind of how a gentleman named Bud Mott converted us from a little garage to an actual company at that point.

So if you look at-- I'll use kind of a simple example.

When a rocket launches, a whole lot of things happen where gases and propellants are flowing through those systems.

If there's even small particles stuck inside a tank somewhere or something corrodes over time, who knows.

That can prevent things like valves or other-- like the thrusters from actuating properly.

We will protect all those components so they can operate as intended.

That's what we do.

That's the big part.

The incredibly important part of the entire system.

You are an integral part of that supply chain that makes everything else run.

I mean, this is a basic question about, what is that like?

Yeah.

So let me start with what's happening in the space industry and why that's important to how we supply.

So if you think of the last, gosh, the last 50 years of space, it was very multi-year, one-off NASA projects where you might send one rocket launch a year or something.

I don't know.

Don't quote me on the actual numbers.

But it's very limited, right?

Yeah, limited, yes.

And now, largely, I think because of SpaceX, it became economical and the whole door to space opened.

And now it's like a gold rush of 1,000 companies along with the core space companies, your Lockheed Martins, your Northrop Grummans, and the people that everyone knows about.

And that's just opening up space for a lot of people.

And now there's a lot more government bids.

And now they talk about potentially defense and security measures in space, things like that.

In addition to your Wi-Fi, internet.

And now there's a supply chain that I think of people that were all approved by NASA that now haven't necessarily caught up to what they have to do to handle a lot of spacecraft.

Yeah, that demand has just exploded.

How do you keep up with that?

So now we're set up, like our whole strategy is rapid customization, is speed.

Because if you really talk to the people making spacecraft, they know mostly what they want.

But as the systems and people's requirements change, the system dynamics change, which means all the flowdowns of specifications change, and there's thousands of components that go into a spacecraft.

So the ability to rapidly respond to those needs and say, "Yep, I can tweak my component from this to this, and now it will meet that new specification."

So what we found is a lot of those customers love kind of the 24-hour hotline and say, "We just want to call an engineer and verify, hey, if we tweak this, is this still going to be okay?"

And that's where we've been winning, is people like that.

That's fantastic.

And it's great to have that connection also just being able to call.

I love that.

It's very human.

Yeah.

Yeah, that's great.

Because when we think about these great machines, and we forget the human aspects, sorry, I'm going on a ramble, but it's true.

So like business is people.

That's what a lot of times people will forget that these things happen because a good team of people came together, designed it, built it, had a supply chain, and made it happen.

Yeah.

So you said supply chain.

That is the phrase.

So my way back background was doing supply chain reporting ages and ages ago.

So I know for companies like yours, I would imagine fluctuations in supply chain, security issues in supply chain.

I mean, you must be very sensitive to all of that.

Navigating that can be very tricky.

Tell me about that.

So I'll take this from two fronts.

There's the front of forecast are uncertain, and then there's the actual, what we're doing, I'll call it upstream of all these spacecraft.

So what we do uniquely is we have a lot of stable supply base for things like powder suppliers, hardware, et cetera, that we can kind of flex and modify relatively quickly to accommodate thousands of spacecraft.

The strength of MOT is we're a very diverse business.

So we have semiconductor healthcare, energy, et cetera, that we can pull on those supply chains who are used to selling tens of thousands of filters a month to, hey, a thousand spacecraft filters actually isn't that hard for us because we have the supply chain already in place.

It's good to have that resilience.

They handle that kind of demand.

But then, so there's delivering to schedule, and then there's meeting certain cost targets and other things in addition to the performance testing that goes on.

So our challenge is to, hey, if you want this on time and with cost reduction, we need a contract.

So are you going to sign up to buying a thousand of these for this many spacecraft?

And I think that's where we're kind of hearing, yes, kind of, you know, and that's the challenge.

Like we'll deliver really, really quickly and expedite so your spacecraft launches on time and meets all the specifications.

If you want it at that cost, we need a contract.

We need a scale.

Yeah, we need a scale.

Yeah, I was going to say that otherwise that's quite a squeeze for you all providing what you provide.

I mean, that's a precarious place to be, but you all are handling it clearly very well.

But it's a tricky place to be.

That said, you all have an incredible corporate heritage and again, that diverse portfolio of what you provide is really impressive.

I'm curious, especially since you all are an employee and a company, that is really fascinating.

What do you think about like long-term vision, maybe specifically in the space world?

Yeah, so like when we think, you know, so we think in execution is 12 months, you know, strategy is kind of three year plan and then vision is anywhere from 10 to 20 years.

So just for calibration on timelines, you know, right now we're, we're executing on a strategy we built about a year ago for our three year plan and it's going very well.

And a lot of this is we're trying to get a lot of these products we've kind of specified and proven, you know, I, you know, virtually every spacecraft we have some, some product in flight on.

So the heritage, like you said, is there, you know, our focus is now getting a lot of this under contract and say, all right, good, it works.

Everyone, you know, you demonstrated correctly.

Let's now get it.

If you're going to launch a thousand more, and I'm using a thousand subjectively, but like we're ready to go.

But as we think about vision, so we're kind of investing in a couple areas.

So additive manufacturing is pretty big.

I hear it all the time.

So one of the unique things we do is what we call controlled porosity additive.

And it's kind of like a swear word in the additive industry where it's like most people want fully dense parts.

So controlled porosity.

Yes.

Huh.

So we will print the filter or other flow control component integrated with the hardware that, you know, virtually is very few people in the world that can do that.

We're a market leader.

We've been doing it for 10 years on that front.

And now we're doing more lucrative materials and things like that.

So that's definitely, you know, probably one of our biggest investment points because we see, let me take it from this approach.

So Mott focuses on next gen technology.

Like we're not going to go follow somebody that's been doing a filter of this way for the last 20 years.

We're looking for somebody who's going to change the industry.

And if you kind of hear like, yes, they're launching rockets now, but I think eventually the world will get to Star Wars level of, hey, we're just going to take off and go into space.

I don't necessarily need to sit on a rocket to do that.

You know, so that might involve new technologies like hypersonics and kind of funky stuff that we want to be on the R&D end of.

And while it's not a good business model for the next three years, you know, there's funded developments that we can do, you know, such that in 10 to 15 years from now, Star Wars might be actually reality.

We'll be right back.

Welcome back.

Oh, the doors that ingenuity opened.

Our favorite Mars copter showed that exploring other worlds with rotorcraft is honestly not at all a bad idea.

So NASA said, yeah, let's do that again.

But elsewhere.

So how's about the largest moon of Saturn, Titan?

And indeed, after many, many years in development and a few years on budgetary thin ice, with the fiscal year 2025 budget request finally confirmed, NASA says the Dragonfly mission to explore Titan now has its funding locked in and is confirmed to move ahead to final development, meaning design, construction and testing.

And Dragonfly's mission will be not just to explore Titan, but also to investigate various locations on the moon for any prebiotic chemical processes that may be the predecessor for the formation of life.

So this will be our first copter on another world actually doing scientific investigation.

And like our explorer friend, Ginny on Mars, Dragonfly is going to be kind of a cross between a little helicopter and a drone.

Whereas ingenuity had two rotors stacked on top of each other, Dragonfly will have eight rotors in all two sets of two stacks on each side.

So four wings and all so to speak, just like its namesake.

Fingers crossed that timelines hold everybody.

Dragonfly's estimated time of arrival on Titan is 2034.

That's it for T-minus for April 23, 2024.

For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.ntuk.com.

Our privilege that NTK and podcasts like T-minus are part of the daily routine of many of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector.

From the Fortune 500, to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies.

This episode was produced by Alice Carruth, mixing by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music and sound design by Elliot Peltzman.

Our associate producer is Liz Stokes.

Our executive producer is Jen Iben.

Our VP is Brandon Karpf.

And I'm Maria Varmausis.

Thanks for listening, and we'll see you tomorrow.

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