Earlier this month, things really looked like they had turned a corner for Starliner, didn't they? The crewed flight test was happening, the rocket was ready, the astronauts were ready, the capsule was so ready, except the rocket wasn't ready and, ah, dang it, now the capsule's not ready either. T-minus. Twenty seconds to ALOS, P-dra. Open aboard. Today is May 22nd, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasas, and this is T-minus. In definite delays for Starliner, Viacet reduces annual revenue forecasts, ESO selects Telus Alenius Space to demo ISS cargo delivery service, and our guest today is Casey Dourad, CEO of New Space Nexus, on the state of the Space Industrial Base Conference, which is being held next week. Stick around to find out more. [Music] We're halfway through the week, people. Here's your Wednesday intel briefing. Late yesterday, the news from NASA was that the crewed flight test scheduled for Boeing's Starliner this Saturday is off indefinitely. The terse update from NASA was that the team has been in meetings for two consecutive days, assessing flight rationale, system performance, and redundancy. There is still forward work in these areas, and the next possible launch opportunity is still being discussed. NASA and Boeing teams need more time to assess the helium leak on Starliner's propulsion system, a leak that was discovered not long after this month's scrubbed crewed flight test. It might end up that after a few more days of assessment, the leak is not a showstopper and a crewed flight test can happen sooner rather than later, or it might not. We'll know more, hopefully, very soon. Viasat shares have tumbled after the company delivered its quarterly update, forecasting its annual revenue below Wall Street estimates. Viasat stated that the reduced forecasting was due to anticipation of a slowdown in its satellite services business. The company said it expects revenue from its satellite services to decline in low to mid-single digits as its U.S. fixed broadband business faces competition from wireless carriers that offer cheaper plans. It's not all doom and gloom, though. Viasat's quarterly government system segment revenue rose 77% to $385.8 million from a year ago, while analysts were expecting just $340 million. Telusilena Space has signed a first-phase contract worth 25 million euros with the European Space Agency to demonstrate a complete cargo delivery service to and from space stations in low Earth orbit by 2028. The company will be responsible for the initial development of the spacecraft, focusing on requirements, architecture, technology maturation, and de-risking activities. Telusilena Space in Italy is the industrial prime contractor. Telusilena Space in France will be involved in the spacecraft development, while Altec, which is a joint venture between Telusilena Space Italia and the Italian Space Agency, will be responsible for the ground segment and recovery ground support infrastructure developments. The second phase will cover the further development of the service and spacecraft, as well as the execution of the demonstration mission. This demo mission, which includes the delivery of pressurized cargo to the ISS and the safe return of the cargo back to Earth, is targeted by the end of 2028. Staying in Europe for this next story, and ESA Director General Joseph Oshbacher has announced the first two astronauts from the 2022 ESA astronaut class, who will embark on long-duration missions to the International Space Station. Sophie Adeno and Raphael Léjois have been assigned for their first space flights to the ISS on missions currently planned for 2026. And we're back to stories on space weapons next. It's a hot topic of the mainstream medium. The US is now saying that Russia launched a counter space weapon into low Earth orbit last week, an accusation that Russia denies. US Space Command claims a launch earlier this month of a Soyuz rocket from Russia's Placetsk launch site, likely involved a "counter space weapon presumably capable of attacking other satellites in low Earth orbit." Russia's Defense Ministry said the May 17 launch had a spacecraft on board, but gave no other details on what it was for. It's been observed that the Russian spacecraft, Cosmos 2576, has not gone near a US satellite, but appears to be in the same orbital ring as USA 314, which is an NRO satellite launched in 2021. IDirect government has won a contract with the US Defense Innovation Unit to build an operational 5G co-channel interference mitigation solution prototype. The contract is part of the US Department of Defense initiative to nullify 5G interference in satellite communications. The bandwidth used by SATCOM equipment often encounters substantial overlap with the 5G radio frequency spectrum, causing a detrimental impact on the quality and dependability of received SATCOM signals. This issue is especially pronounced due to the proliferation of 5G technology, which is expanding in many regions worldwide. The DOD says techniques and technologies developed through this project have the potential to be generalized and adapted to safeguard other critical communication and navigational systems from similar disruptions. Redwire Corporation has been awarded a contract by the European Space Agency to develop a robotic arm prototype for the agency's Argonaut Lunar Lander. ESA's Argonaut plans to land 1,500 to 1,800 kilos of cargo, infrastructure, and scientific instruments on the lunar surface. The manipulator for Argonaut payload needs and unloading support system, also known as MANUS, will be a critical capability for the lunar lander's logistics operations on the surface of the moon. Redwire will develop, test, and verify the functions of the MANUS at the company's Luxembourg facility with the opportunity to compete for a follow-on contract. Earth Observation Company Planet has expanded its existing commercial partnership with BASF Digital Farming, which is growing its use of planet satellite data to power its advanced digital farming products and services. Using satellite data, BASF is building new solutions and services to advance precision farming, yield estimation, and seed selection. And the Slovak Republic says it intends to sign the Artemis Accords. You can read about that and more by following the links in our show notes. We've also included an opinion piece on why the Earth should prepare for future solar storms. AT-MINUSCREW, if you find this podcast useful, please do us a favor and share a five-star rating and short review in your favorite podcast app. That will help other professionals like you to find the show and join the T-MINUS crew. Thank you everyone for your ongoing support. We do really appreciate it. Our guest today is Casey Derrard, CEO of Newspace Nexus. Newspace Nexus is co-hosting the State of the Space Industrial-Based Conference happening next week. Casey started our chat by telling me more about how the conference started. So this started with some meetings that some DOD partners got together and started saying, "Hey, we really need to be careful. Watch out for what are the challenges for our commercial space industry and what are recommendations we could do." It actually started with a DIU Defense Innovation Unit and AFRL getting together in 2019. And they really outlined what are the challenges, also just how to keep pace with our international competition. And so then in 2020, we decided to start these workshops where not only just talking about the challenges, but what are the solutions. So Newspace Nexus was honored to be able to start hosting these conferences since 2020. We've done it annually and we do it with the key government partners. We work with Defense Innovation Unit, the Space Force, Air Force Research Lab, NASA's Participated in Times. We're really trying to get NASA and commerce to come on board a lot more now and in the future. But what happens is it's really a cool conference. It's not just where a bunch of talking heads are speaking about this program and that program. It's really we pull together what are the topics we're going to cover that are these challenging areas for the space industrial base, all of the space industry. And so we'll pull together topics. We have concurrent working groups. We have discussions. We have some great presentations as well. But from this, you know, there's these set discussions and from the output of this then goes into an annual report that the DOD has led writing this report for the last four years. The 2023 report just came out in March of this year. And that report has actually influenced policymakers. We talk about, you know, different things like the in space servicing and manufacturing. A lot of the terminology came from what some of our early workshops and space policy and finance issues are also covered workforce and and launch and, you know, many of the topics. So it's just really like taking these topic areas and what are the challenges. When we get into the working groups, the first step of it is, you know, what's the current state, what's been happening? You know, where are we? The next session would be where we look at, okay, what are the challenges? What are some of the major inflection points that could happen good or bad? If this happens or that happens and then the next step of the the workshopping is, okay, what are some of the recommendations and who like who would have to make that recommendation? Happen. And so from that, it's sort of like a game plan for the next year for a lot of policy leaders, Congress and and others. I feel like a lot of conversations get back to, you know, how's the supply chain doing? What's the capacity? Do we have the ability to build what we need? Do we have manufacturers or who actually have the materials that they need? Do we have that capacity or, you know, these are really fascinating questions that I think I'm so glad to see. I'm so glad to see this emphasis here through this conference because I, you know, these so much gets back to these important key questions about what can we actually make? And if we do we have, do we have the ability? Do we have the talent? Do we have the materials? And it's it's so fascinating hearing that there's such an emphasis on this here and I'll be very curious to hear sort of the output from this conference. And I guess what's your what's your temperature? What's the temperature on all this right now? I think it's a little bit more than that. The report came out a couple months ago. I mean, is the trajectory positive? Like what's it? What are we looking at? Well, it's positive, but we're, you know, we have to keep moving. We have to keep working together. Like some of the main recommendations is that we need to sort of have this North Star vision with all of government, not just, you know, the DoD or NASA or commerce that needs to, you know, come together. And I think that's a really good point. And then also the Space Force put together an integration strategy. So that'll be a big discussion this year of just how the DOD can use the services at the commercial space industry where they can use it and where they can lean on commercial space versus having to build everything they have to behind the fence. That makes sense. With the continuing resolutions, I imagine for a smaller business, I mean, that's got to be just extremely hard to be resilient and sort of just maintain business operations given that environment. Is there something for those small businesses in the conference in terms of maintaining resiliency, I guess, in the face of this really tough environment that they're in? We are going to talk about that. Like I said, that's one of the topics. And so, you know, I described to you how we go off in these working groups. We also do some sessions within where, you know, everyone's all together. We call them co-innovation sessions. And that way, it's like where we might have a person or two setting the stage of what the issue is. And then we use tools like polling and surveys that all the participants can kind of input to what their issues are. And then there's a discussion time. And so, supply chain challenges definitely going to be is going to be one of the co-innovation sessions. And basically, we have some really great speakers. I was just going to ask, I was like, who's going to be speaking that we can know about? Well, so we always have our key partners. So from Defense Innovation Unit, Steven, they call him Bucky Butoh, who's amazing. We'll be here. And Colonel Ray Lee from our first research lab. Colonel Nicely, who he's trying to work it out. We're hoping in person, but he might be virtual and it is a hybrid conference. So we could do virtual too. But he is standing up the new commercial space office for the Space Force. And so a lot of the, like, the commercial space programs are going into him. So we're really excited to have him. Dr. Derek Tornier will be speaking. He's virtual. And he's the head of the Space Development Agency. And that agency has just been amazing just doing things you know, demonstrating resilient ways of doing space. And so we're really excited to have him. And he's been speaking about like our supply chain resiliency. And so we're hoping to hear a little bit more about that from him. That's going to be fascinating. I'm a little envious of the people that get to hear that. That's going to be really cool. Yeah, there's still a few more around that list. We're trying to balance the speaker time to go enough to the working group time and get it all done in tune, basically two and a half days. And then the afternoon on the 28th from 2 to 5, we have our new space igniter companies that will come do some pitches and we like that to be a networking event between like government customers, investors, other primes. And then after that will be the opening reception of the actual conference. So that Tuesday afternoon, you don't have to register and pay. The actual conference will start Wednesday morning. So for folks who are listening the conference starts on the 28th of May. So can people, if they are hearing it before the conference, can they still register? Or is it too late? Can it be like day of? Well, it starts with the opening reception on the 28th in the afternoon. But that pre-conference with the company pitches and networking session, that is just, that's an open event. So if you want to register, the 29th is where you know, the SSIB you know, presentations and working groups and so on will start and it goes through, I think lunch on the 31st. [Music] We'll be right back. Welcome back. Our sun gets a lot of extra love when we have a solar eclipse or unexpectedly intense auroras but there's still a lot about our very important local star that we just don't know. And that's why NASA has announced that they're sending a Jedi to study how the sun creates massive solar eruptions the kind that can create disruptive space weather for satellites and terrestrial systems. Yes Jedi is the joint EUV coronal diagnostic investigation instrument. NASA knew exactly what it was doing by naming it that and this Jedi won't be using the false but it will be studying the forces that influence space weather by looking at the sun in ultraviolet. This Jedi will specifically look at the sort of intriguing middle between the sun's surface and the sun's corona or outer atmosphere and help us understand what links features on the sun's surface to dramatic solar eruptions in the corona. In turn that will help us better understand and hopefully better predict space weather and its effects. Once complete, NASA's Jedi will be hanging out at Lagrange 0.5 with a constant eagle eye view of the sun. Yes, look towards the light. After all, when you look at the dark side, careful you must be for the dark side looks back to you. [Music] That's it for T-minus for May 22nd 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. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures that we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. N2K's strategic workforce intelligence optimizes the value of your biggest investment, your people. We make you smarter about your team while making your team smarter. This episode was produced by Alice Karuth, our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eibn. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilby is our publisher. And I'm Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music]
