To the Moon, Chang’e 6.

[MUSIC] They've done it before and they'll do it again.

China's sending a lunar rover back to the far side of the moon.

And this time they're taking some of it back home with them.

That's the plan anyway.

Best of luck to Chang'e 6 as it begins its travels to the moon today.

>> It's National Space Day today in the US, more on that later in the show.

And tomorrow is May the 4th be with you.

So I had to find you a Star Wars joke, Maria.

Are you ready?

>> You're asking a Trekkie.

A Star Wars joke, this will be interesting, okay?

>> Okay, why was Darth Vader bad at sports?

>> Why was Darth Vader bad at sports?

The button to call his mom on his chest console wasn't working, I don't know.

Didn't get enough orange slices.

>> He always choked.

>> Ooh.

[LAUGH] Oh my.

[LAUGH] That's a little spicy.

>> I've got a couple more for you later in the show as well.

[LAUGH] >> I like it, isn't it?

[MUSIC] >> T-minus. >> 20 seconds to L-O-I.

>> Go for the floor.

[MUSIC] >> Today is May 3rd, 2024.

I'm Maria Vermazus.

>> I'm Alice Carruth and this is T-minus.

[MUSIC] China launches the Changa Six Lunar Probe.

IAMPALS achieves lift off with their inaugural light this candle mission.

The GAO identifies gaps in NASA's cybersecurity measures for spacecraft acquisition.

>> And our guests today are Isabelle Crossley and Alex Walker from Durham University in the UK.

They're going to be talking to Maria about competing in my favorite event of the year, the Spaceport America Cup.

Stick around for more details.

[MUSIC] >> Happy Friday.

Let's unpack Friday's briefing, shall we?

China's Changa Six mission lifted off from Wenchang early this morning via a Long March 5 rocket.

Five days from now, Changa Six will reach lunar orbit and then stay there for 20 days before landing on the lunar far side in the South Pole 8-Kin Basin.

Once there, Changa Six's goal will be to retrieve samples of the lunar surface and then get it back to researchers on Earth.

And when you look at the Changa program, Changa Six is a pretty logical next step in what China has been working on moon-wise.

Changa Four landed on and roved around the lunar far side in 2019, making China the first and, as of yet, still the only nation that has done this.

And we were all a bit preoccupied in 2020, so you might have missed it.

But in 2020, Changa Five did a lunar regolith sample return from the moon's near side.

So when you combine the sample return with the far side roving, it follows that you get Changa Six that will be attempting both.

The lunar far side, aside from being the part that we can't see from Earth, also happens to be geologically distinct from the near side.

And the goal of Changa Six's sample gathering is to learn a bit about why the two lunar sides are so different.

And along for the ride on the Changa Six mission is Pakistan's first foray into space, with its iCube-Q lunar orbiter CubeSat.

Once deployed, it'll be orbiting the moon and taking pictures of the lunar surface with its two onboard optical cameras.

The iCube-Q is a collaborative effort between Pakistan's space agency, SUPARCO, and China's Shanghai University.

Pakistan's Prime Minister, Shabazz Sharif, said with the launch today that this achievement will bolster Pakistan's satellite communication capabilities and pave the way for new opportunities in scientific research, economic development, and national security.

And the other big and exciting launch news from today is from German company High Impulse.

They successfully test-launched the 12-metre long and 2.5-tonne single-stage rocket SR-75 from Australia's southern launch range in Koneba.

The light this candle mission was the inaugural launch attempt of High Impulse's SR-75 rocket, which tested a hybrid propulsion technology using solid paraffin fuel, similar to candle wax and liquid oxygen.

High Impulse says the rocket can transport small satellites weighing up to 250kg, to an altitude of 250km.

At 2.40pm local time, the launch vehicle lifted off successfully and the hybrid rocket propulsion system of the vehicle operated as planned.

The SR-75 will be retrieved for further examination and analysis of the data.

A crowd of locals and VIPs travelled to Koneba from across Australia and Europe to witness the launch, which was the first for both the company and the facility.

Congratulations!

In our next story comes from our sister podcast, The Cyber Wire.

Here's Dave Bittner.

The U.S.

Government Accountability Office, the GAO, has identified gaps in NASA's cybersecurity measures for spacecraft acquisition, emphasizing the need for updated policies and standards.

The GAO's review highlighted that while NASA has implemented cybersecurity requirements in contracts for projects like Orion and Sphere X, the agency lacks a comprehensive plan to incorporate newer security controls consistently across all spacecraft programs.

This inconsistency could lead to vulnerabilities and varied implementation of cybersecurity measures.

The GAO recommends that NASA develop a clear plan with timelines to update its policies to ensure robust defense against cyber threats.

This review follows NASA's issuance of a Space Best Practices Guide in 2023, which remains optional for programs.

The lack of mandatory guidelines leaves NASA and its projects at potential risk of cyber attacks.

Thanks for that, Dave.

NASA has awarded nearly $1.5 million to academic non-profits and business organizations to advance technology that will play a key role in the agency's return to the moon under Artemis, as well as future missions to Mars.

Twenty-four projects from twenty-one organizations have been awarded under NASA's Dual Use Technology Development Cooperation Agreement Notices or CANS.

The awardees also will receive assistance from propulsion, space transportation, and science experts at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Centre in Huntsville, Alabama.

The projects include ways to use lunar regolith for construction on the moon's surface using smartphone video guidance sensors to fly robots on the ISS, identifying new battery materials, and improving a neutrino particle detector.

The full list of recipients can be found by following the link in our show notes.

On to the Hubble Network now.

No, not the space telescope, but the Seattle-based communication for IoT devices company.

They have established the first-ever Bluetooth connection directly to space.

Hubble launched its first two satellites in March, and the spacecraft successfully reached their orbits and managed to receive signals from a simple three-and-a-half millimeter Bluetooth chip over a distance of 600 kilometers.

The company says it can enable any off-the-shelf Bluetooth device with a mere software update to connect their satellite network without cellular reception.

The startup says its technology can be used in markets including logistics, cattle tracking, smart collars for pets, GPS watches for kids, car inventory, construction sites, and soil temperature monitoring.

Pretty cool stuff, yeah.

Max, our intelligence says the first two Worldview Legion satellites are performing well after being launched on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket yesterday from Vanderberg Space Force Base in California.

The two satellites have already deployed their solar arrays and began receiving and sending signals.

The satellites will undergo commissioning, and Max, our intelligence says that they expect the first images from the spacecraft later this spring.

Sierra Space has announced that its expandable space station technology is scheduled for its seventh key validation test and second full-scale structural test, this June at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama.

This is the company's second full-scale and second ultimate burst pressure test to validate the technology's ability to perform flawlessly in the unforgiving conditions of space.

The test article, currently in assembly, is equivalent to one-third the volume of the entire International Space Station.

Satellogic has released a large open data set of high-resolution imagery to support the training of AI foundation models.

The data set contains around three million satellite images of unique locations, six million images including location revisits from around the world.

Each image is 384 by 384 pixels totaling 900 gigapixels spanning different land use types, objects, geographies and seasons.

The full data set can be accessed on Hugging Face, just think of that cute little emoji Maria.

My favorite website, Hugging Face.

[Music] That concludes our briefing for today.

You'll find links to further reading on all the stories that we've mentioned in our show notes and you'll also find details there about the new Space Nexus Igniter program that's looking for startups for its incubator program.

Hey T-miners crew, tune in tomorrow for T-minus Deep Space, our show for extended interviews, special editions and deep dives with some of the most influential professionals in the space industry.

Tomorrow we have a chat from our sister podcast, The Spy Cast with Andrew Hammond, speaking with Harvard astrophysicist Abby Loeb.

There'll be talking about interstellar intelligence.

It's a perfect topic for May the 4th be with you.

Check it out while you're setting up your Star Wars marathon, stocking up on snacks for your Star Wars marathon, as a break during your Star Wars marathon.

I can't think of a better way to spend my day on May the 4th, can you?

You don't want to miss it.

The 2024 Spaceport America Cup is coming up next month.

It's the world's largest intercollegiate rocket engineering competition and an event that I've supported since 2018.

Teams compete in two separate altitude categories, 10,000 and 30,000 feet, using commercial off-the-shelf or COTS engines, or SRAD, which stands for Science Research and Developed.

I'll be working with the livestream team again this year, so you can watch the 100+ launches planned for the Cup, which runs from June the 17th to the 22nd in southern New Mexico.

And we will be chatting to the organizers and judges in the coming weeks, but first we wanted to speak to one of the teams that is competing Durham University in Northern England are competing in the competition for the first time this year, and I spoke to Isabel Crossley and Alex Walker about their team.

I'm Isabel, I'm the president of the USF, and I'm part of the team for SAC this year, and I'm a fourth year physicist.

So we're a society of students, about fifth year buzz, who love space, and we work on engineering projects, which are mainly focused in rocketry, but we also do some house-cheap ballooning, and our goal is a society just to launch rockets to higher and higher altitudes, essentially.

Excellent.

Okay.

So how long has actually this program been going on?

Is it relatively new, or is it very well established somewhere in between?

So the society has been around for a long time, but initially we were a space debating group, and then it translated into doing engineering projects.

We started doing engineering projects about three years ago now, and then I took over the society about two years ago, and then it's just been growing from there.

Fantastic.

All right, so tell me a bit about what's going on this year.

I know the Spaceporn America Cup is coming up.

There's got to be some excitement around that, and I know there's also a lot of work that comes up before the cup itself.

There's a ton of work beforehand, so tell me a bit about this whole process, what you're looking for, do all of that.

Just walk me through it.

Alex Walker, I'm the head of rocketry for USF.

I'm also the team lead for the SAC project this year, and I'm a second year physicist.

So our biggest project, the SAC one, is called Rosemary 1.1.

So it actually started last year with the national, highest-powered UK national competition for UK universities.

Our place is called Macroharnesh.

So we built what's called Rosemary 1, and we launched up there, and we ended up actually winning that competition.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

And then with that, we wanted to go bigger, go to the main stage, which is the biggest one in the world is of course America.

So we made some modifications, we redesigned it a bit, and changed a few small things.

And that's the idea now, is we take it out to America, we do the 3K with it, and-- 10K cup.

Sorry, yeah, 3K is what the UK, obviously 10,000 feet.

And then the idea is that we keep building, what's the Rosemary project, the Rosemary line, is others trying to push our personal altitude higher and higher.

And it's called Rosemary actually, after Durham's very own astronaut, actually just graduated astronaut training.

I was just going to ask you both about that.

Yeah, yeah.

We'll get to that in a second, but I was wondering if that was the connection.

That's great.

Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

So that's the idea, that's the genesis of it all.

This is my second year, I started covering what a lot of teams are doing for the cup.

And I know, as you mentioned, there are a lot of competitions that lead up to it.

I know this is not the only one at all.

But there's a ton of work that you boast, and your teams must have been-- I mean, there's a lot of iterative process, there's a lot of design work.

I mean, just any highlights you want to talk about in terms of this process, because there's a lot that goes up until this point, right?

Yeah, yeah, it's been a long way.

I think for us, as a society, the Rosemary one, this is a slight iteration on that one, was basically the very first high powered rocket that we ever built.

So we started really from the very start, going off and learning absolutely everything, going through all the different softwares that we can possibly use from open rockets, and then go to RS Aero, so looking at stuff like Rocket Pie.

So going through that progression of learning the actual different simulation software, learning how to do the CFDs for all of it, for this was completely new to all of us.

We're also physicists, so it's a bit more engineering-y.

So we had to go and learn it as well.

And even just learning stuff about recovery, I remember all the way in the very start, we made a small failed test rocket, and it was absolutely terrible.

If you're sorry now, we would never fly at any competition.

The RSOs wouldn't even let us fly on the day, because it was so bad.

But now we can go back to them, we know those RSOs, and we know that we've actually learned a lot in those two years.

So there's so much to talk about.

We basically learn all of it.

It's technically our second high powered rocket.

But yeah.

I thought it's not.

No, not high powered, sorry.

Or main one, I don't know.

Yeah.

That's all right.

I was going to say, Isabel, did you have any addendum or correction in that?

Feel free.

I mean, we definitely have launched a few high powered rockets before, because a lot of us have our own high powered rockets resettifications, like we both do and so no other members.

And we also recently just launched our first dual stage rocket last weekend.

And we turned it through the new success.

Thank you.

Wow.

Yeah, that launched to 1.5 kilometers, and was just great fun to see that work.

So I think this will be our first time using an L3 impulse motor at SAC, given the four kilogram payload requirements.

So that'll be a big step for us, I guess.

Yeah.

I often like to ask what people are looking forward to.

Sometimes just getting everything to Spaceport America is, I was going to say, any thoughts on that?

Because I've especially for folks coming outside of continental US, that is a big challenge.

Love to hear how you all are doing.

So we've been in many debates over how we're getting our stuff to the US.

We initially were planning to put it on a boat and ship it out, but then we'd heard some negative previous experiences.

So we are actually flying the rocket on a plane with us, and it'll just go in the luggage.

So we've made cardboard boxes that are the absolute limits of the luggage size, and we are going to place our rocket in there with lots of bubble wrap and things to look after it.

And I am going to be very not nervous from the second we put the rocket on the plane, so when we actually see it, when we land in the US, but fingers crossed, all will be OK.

Fingers crossed for all of you.

Yeah, I've heard stories and usually they turn out OK, but that often is very treacherous.

So fingers crossed for you all.

Anything you're looking forward to, any experience that you're like, I've heard about that, I can't wait, or is it just like the launch?

I mean, launches are always so much fun and filled with excitement, and I can't wait for that.

But I think for me, going to the US to launch at White Sands, such an incredible thing, but meeting all your teams, and seeing teams that have decades of experience and going to see what challenges they faced and what their launches will be so much fun.

So I'm personally really excited for that.

That collaboration for sure.

Alex, I wanted to make sure I gave you a chance to answer that one as well.

Obviously, going to see the other teams would be really cool.

There's so many teams, and when you stalk them all online, right, see what they're all up to, and you'll look amazing.

I'm really interested in some of the teams.

Especially like some of the Aussies.

The Aussies seem really good.

I'm really excited to see some SRAD engine launches.

That is like a huge thing at the minute in the UK.

All the Unis are competing to try and do it, and I'm so excited to go see some of those guys.

Can I follow on from that and say that in terms of the SRAD engines, as a society, we're working on our first, our very own engine this year.

It's going to be a hybrid engine.

We initially started with a linear air-respec design, but we switched to a nozzle, so we can map work towards our hotfire date in July.

We'd love to move towards using our own propulsion system.

So, yeah, I can't wait to see what the other teams do with that.

That's so great.

I love hearing that.

That's so cool.

I did want to ask you about Rosemary Coogan.

Obviously, you all must be pretty excited.

I wanted to get your thoughts on that, because that is really great news for everybody.

Tell me, Isabel, if you want to start since you've got the mic, and then Alex, you can hand it over.

Yep.

It's so exciting.

I mean, she's the third British astronaut to pass astronaut training, and she's from Durham.

And some of our professors taught her and know her personally, so we spoke into them about her.

So, it just, when we were naming our rocket series, the single stage that we're hopefully trying to build an attitude with, it only felt natural to name them after her.

And it is such an inspiration for all of us, faith enthusiasts and rocket enthusiasts.

And we can't wait to see what our career ends up looking like and when she has assigned a mission.

So, we've talked a lot about your plans for the Spaceport America Cup.

I'm curious about your plans.

You're thinking about your career after university, your ambitions.

You all are at a very exciting time in your lives.

So, I'd love to hear what you're thinking about what's next.

As a second year, I'm not really sure.

I think I'll definitely, I'm almost suddenly wanting to do a PhD, and post that, I'm not really sure.

Maybe some of it's doing rocketry.

I think, is it, you probably have a lot better idea of the sign of it.

So, I'm actually about to start my PhD in October.

I'm staying in Durham.

Thank you.

I'm staying in Durham.

It's in physics, it's in superconducting detectors.

It's what I've done my masters in.

So, that's really cool.

I'm hoping through staying here, I can also continue running this rocketry club for the next few years, which I love.

But in terms of my personal career ambitions, I've always been interested in space since I was a kid, and especially Rockets.

And seeing the UK space sector growing is really, really exciting.

So, I'm hoping I can work in that once I graduate from my PhD.

Yeah.

That's fantastic.

I was going to say, it is really burgeoning in the UK.

So, it's a very exciting time to be doing what you all are doing and studying.

And I imagine there are a lot of possibilities for you, whatever you end up pursuing, but especially in the space sector in the UK, it's a great time to be there.

So, I'm going to wish you both and your team, really, the best of luck at the Spaceport America Cup.

My colleague Alice will be there, so I'm sure she'll say hi.

Good luck.

I hope everything goes well.

Getting the rocket there, and once you're there as well, of course.

I'll be right back.

Welcome back.

And as we mentioned in today's opener, today is National Space Day.

The US has dedicated the first Friday in May to extraordinary achievements, benefits, and opportunities in the exploration and use of space.

The goal of the observance is to promote math, science, technology, and engineering education in young people.

The hope is to inspire them to pursue a career in science, especially in the space sector.

And we do hope they'll expand it to steam to include the humanities, just saying.

One of the many cool opportunities that was presented today was run by Space Workforce 2030, which is a collaborative program led by the National Space Foundation and the Aerospace Corporation.

They compile a list of space education resources to launch students' exploration for today and thereafter.

And, by the way, they're free.

They also put on an annual event, aimed at fourth and fifth grade students.

This year's highlights included a Q&A between fourth and fifth grade students and America's leading experts on space, and a message and a challenge from the astronauts on the International Space Station just for the kids.

And now that the event is over, kids can submit a short letter with their thoughts on the future of space for a chance to have it shared with NASA leaders.

We say make it a national holiday, and then put it on the next day.

We say make it a national holiday, and then people will really start to pay attention and appreciate the space industry.

Just an idea.

Okay, one more joke for you, Maria.

Oh, no.

Really?

What do you call an invisible droid?

The droid that I was definitely not looking for.

C-thru-po.

Oh, no.

Oh, I'll give you that one.

I'll give you that one.

Thank you.

That's a good one.

It was drone-worthy.

Uh...

Yeah, you just hit me with them one after the other.

That's it for T-minus for May the 3rd, 2024, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire.

For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com.

We'd love to know what you think of this podcast and my really terrible jokes.

Your feedback ensures we deliver the information and the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry.

If you like the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app.

Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com.

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

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We make you smarter about your teams while making your teams smarter.

Learn how at N2K.com.

This episode was produced by Alice Caruth.

Our associate producer is Liz Stokes.

We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman.

Our executive producer is Jennifer Iban.

Our executive editor is Brandon Karp.

Simone Petrella is our president.

Peter Kilby is our publisher.

And I'm Maria Varmausus.

Thanks for listening.

Have a great weekend.

I've got one more joke for you.

You ready?

Oh, really?

One more?

Yes.

Why does Princess Leia keep her hair in buns?

I have no idea why.

So it doesn't hang solo?

Oh, my God.

You asked.

It was your fault.

You asked.

I guess I did, didn't I?

I did ask.

Yeah, I did.

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