Keeping Vigil on space weather.

[MUSIC] As a species, we are rather obsessed with weather. I know many people check their weather app every morning before they get out of bed. And yeah, guilty is charged, I do it too. And yay space for making that happen. And space, weather is also increasingly becoming an area of interest. We can all thank solar storms for those gorgeous images of the auroras that have been shared online recently. And it's no wonder that space agencies, including ESA, are spending millions, sometimes maybe even billions, on improving space weather forecasting. [MUSIC] >> T-minus. >> 20 seconds to LOS. >> Open aboard. [MUSIC] >> Today is May 23rd, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasus, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] ESA selects Airbus to develop the Vigil satellite. We've got gorgeous new images from Euclid. University of Leicester and Ice Space are partnering on Lunar Night Research. And our guest today is science journalist and author Brad Bergen. He's releasing a new book in June called Space X. Elon Musk and the Final Frontier. Stay with us to hear more about it. [MUSIC] It is Thursday, isn't it? Let's get into today's headline, shall we? The European Space Agency has signed a contract with Airbus Defense in Space UK worth 340 million euros for the development of its Vigil satellite. The Vigil mission aims to improve the ability to accurately forecast space weather. With a spacecraft set to be placed into a solar orbit where it can observe the sun, the earth, and the space in between. Vigil will keep constant, well, Vigil of the sun from Lagrange 0.5 in deep space. And from there, it can see the side of the sun and observe activity on the surface of the sun days before it rotates into view from earth. Some of this might sound a bit familiar if you caught our story about NASA's Jedi in yesterday's show, because yep, Jedi's two telescopes are going to be on Vigil. The data collected by Vigil will feed into the ESA Space Weather Service Network, which is maintained by ESA's Space Weather Office, part of the agency's Space Safety Program. ESA Director General Josef Oschbacher added a statement along with the press release on the contract stating that Vigil will be Europe's first 24/7 operational space weather satellite, providing valuable time to protect critical infrastructure, such as power grids or mobile communication networks on earth, as well as valuable satellites in earth orbit, including the International Space Station. Vigil will drastically improve both the lead time of space weather warnings, as well as their level of detail from its unique vantage point in deep space. And according to the UK Space Agency, Vigil will sustain more than 150 highly skilled jobs in the UK and reinforce Airbus UK's position as a space prime. The spacecraft itself is due to launch in 2031. And ESA's Euclid mission, designed to explore the composition and evolution of the dark universe, has released five new images and they are stunning. The space telescope is mapping the large-scale structure of the universe across space and time by observing billions of galaxies across more than a third of the sky. And according to ESA, the never-before-seen images demonstrate Euclid's ability to unravel the secrets of the cosmos and enable scientists to hunt for rogue planets, use lensed galaxies to study mysterious matter, and explore the evolution of the universe. If the first images from Webb made your jaw drop, Euclid is ostensibly a zoom-out view and its images are really quite awe-inspiring. Run, do not walk, and go and check them out. The images have been released along with the mission's first scientific data and 10 forthcoming scientific papers. The full set of early observations targeted 17 astronomical objects, from nearby clouds of gas and dust to distant clusters of galaxies, ahead of Euclid's main survey. The University of Leicester in the UK and iSpace have entered into a strategic consulting agreement to explore lunar night survivability using radioisotope heater units on the series 3 Lunar Lander and Rovers. The University was awarded funding under Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the UK International Bilateral Fund to create mission concepts leveraging the technology on future missions. iSpace's Japan entity is currently in an advanced design and development phase for the series 3 Lander with partial funding through a Japanese government small business innovation and research grant through the Ministry of Economy, Trade, and Industry. In addition to the lunar radioisotope heater units, iSpace is in discussions with a number of entities to transport payload to lunar orbit and the surface on future missions. The UAE's YASAT has signed a memorandum of understanding with UTELSAT for a multi-year deal to leverage capacity on UTELSAT Group's Connect satellite across multiple African and Middle East nations. As part of the agreement, YASAT will enjoy exclusive rights to UTELSAT's Connect capacity over Ethiopia, which is one of the fastest growing African markets. YASAT said this deal will support the growth of its broadband services to consumer and enterprise markets. Financial terms of the deal, though, were not disclosed. Chinese commercial company Galaxy Space has established a ground test station at the Mahanakorn University of Technology in Thailand. The two entities are collaborating to conduct the first trial of a low-orbit satellite internet broadband communication network in Thailand. Galaxy Space's Vice President Liu Chang says that this collaboration provides a platform for local enterprises and universities to conduct research on low-orbit satellite communication systems, contributing to the advancement of Thailand's technological capabilities and application scenarios in this field. And we've got an update now that you might have heard on the Starliner crewed test flight. Mission managers from NASA, Boeing, and ULA are evaluating the path forward toward launching Starliner to the International Space Station. The teams are now working towards a launch opportunity on Saturday, June 1st, with additional opportunities on Sunday, June 2, Wednesday, June 5, and Thursday, June 6. Genuinely, good luck to all of them. The Space Coast in Florida will officially become the home of the Space Training and Readiness Command, or StarCom headquarters, for the U.S. Space Force. Patrick Space Force Base and Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, which are both former Air Force facilities, were named in May 2023 as the presumptive home for StarCom. It's one of three Space Force Field Command units, similar to an Air Force Air Command. U.S. Senator Marco Rubio confirmed the decision was now made final, posting congratulations on the social media platform X. IntelSat is expanding its agreement to use Northrop Grumman's Mission Extension Vehicle, or MEV, to provide an expected additional nine years of life to the IntelSat 10-02 Geosynchronous Satellite. The Satellite Life Extension Mission will deliver years of additional reliable broadband, video distribution, and mobile satellite service to customers across three continents. This is not the first mission between the two companies. In fact, in 2020, IntelSat became the first satellite operator to commit to deploying two of Northrop Grumman's MEVs to extend the life of an otherwise healthy satellite. Both MEVs have been successful at their mission and have allowed IS 10-02 and IntelSat 9-01 to provide five years of service beyond the expected lifespan of the satellite. Under amendments to the original agreements with Northrop Grumman's Space Logistics, both MEVs will stay in space, serving IntelSat satellites for several more years, allowing them to operate longer. Bloomberg is reporting that Firefly Aerospace is considering a sale of the rocket launch company. Backers, which include US private equity firm AE Industrial Partners, are apparently working with an advisor on strategic options for the company. Firefly Aerospace is currently valued at $1.5 billion. We'll keep an eye on more updates when they're reported. And that concludes our updates for today. Head to the selected reading section of our show notes to find links to further reading on all of the stories that we've mentioned. We've included additional pieces on Viya Space's Hypersonic Missile Study, an update from Ceres Robotics on their latest design review, and an update from Australia's Space Machines Company on their Optimus satellite. Hey T-Minus Crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership or recruit talent, T-Minus can help. We'd like to hear from you. Just send us an email at space@n2k.com, or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. Today's guest is science journalist and author of the new book, SpaceX, Elon Musk, and the Final Frontier, Brad Bergen. I asked Brad what inspired him to write about the commercial space industry. Around 2019-2020, beginning of the pandemic, I received an email asking me to write a book on the second space space, and that came out, I believe, in 2022. A elevator picture of that would be not with an implied or transferred negative connotation, but in the 19th century, everybody is vaguely familiar with the robber barons who had a sort of oligarchy or monopoly on the most essential industries and resources of the time. It was a time of increased class disparities, and a lot of people got really wealthy, but what happened in the background of that are more the foreground stories that we industrialized very quickly and it changed societies. We know it. The concept of space space 2.0 is that for the 21st century, so instead of robber barons, we have space barons. You don't have to think of them in a negative connotation, but it reveals that the most promising industries that will probably dominate the rest of the century, if not the next century are increasingly under the market share and control of a few pioneering billionaires, including people like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson. They also seem to be very active in space endeavors with public-private partnerships with NASA and other private partners and also the military industrial complex. It's basically a quick history of the man behind it, the story behind the company's rise, the technology, and where we go from here. That's the first book. The second book I was also commissioned, again by Corto Books, to focus on what seems to be the sort of de facto leader of the second space race. And right now, I think everybody knows that's SpaceX and Elon Musk and all the great engineers over there. What this book focuses on is basically an up until now report on SpaceX, its beginning, the development of all of its rockets, the engineering behind it, a little more about Elon Musk. But this focuses a lot more on the technology and every single launch. And some of the drama that happens in the background has to do with business, entrepreneurs. There's for a long time that sort of rivalry between Bezos, NASA, and Musk competing for contracts to go to the moon. But this is much more technology-oriented and has a really fun info and lead that takes you in from the Berlin Wall and the Fukuyama declaration that history is over to history wasn't finished with us and it also wasn't finished with the space race. That's a fascinating pitch. Thank you for both the intros to both of those books, Brad. I'm personally very interested in how much, and I feel like I can't overstate how much the rideshare programs that SpaceX has implemented have really changed the way that we do space now. I mean, do you think we are underselling this almost to the public in terms of how much this has changed things or do you think we've done a good enough job telling people about this? I think it's kind of a mixed bag. On one hand, the ways that the space racers, even SpaceX alone, the things that this company and other companies and the technology that's emerging from them is shifting the course of our history is definitely understated in terms of its potential. But what's a little bit weird, I think, where people have a harder time relating to it sometimes, is the fact that what's happening on Earth is going to be and is already a lot more similar to what we're doing in space than it seems maybe in the first space race, where there are arguably more noble reasons, at least officially, ostensibly, for going to space, putting science first. So I think all of that is still very possible, and I think a lot of that is still likely to happen. But for now, building infrastructure out there, the bottom line still has to come first. And that's one of the reasons this book is on SpaceX, is because it has done the best job of managing the bottom line while still pushing to exceed things for reasons of scientific excellence, scientific exploration, and eventually getting to Mars, let's say, the starship. So I think it's kind of like, it's a really heterogeneous proposition to go to space with SpaceX and a lot of the publicly owned companies. That's kind of key to understanding what the present and at least near and midterm future of space travel will be. It'll be in cooperation with companies that will kind of be ever present from low orbit, low Earth orbit to the moon, and potentially even to asteroids in the Mars. So it's more difficult to humanize it than it was maybe in the 60s. But yeah, I think in terms of the commercial thing, we're not understanding it in terms of the scientific and technological potential. Yeah, I think so. But there's also a lot happening on Earth. When we were talking about the noble causes that are still driving today's new space race, scientific exploration is a big one. But something that Elon has talked a lot about was about humanity needing to become interplanetary. And you had written this really fascinating article for futurism that I just would love for you to sort of pitch to the audience, because I thought this was a really great read. And it was called, "Colonize or Become Extinct? Is there any real rationale for colonizing another world?" Tell me a bit about this. A little probis of this was, I think, seven or eight years ago. But it's still a very pressing matter today, because we're even with Starship's recent launch into suborbital flight for the first time in March, we still have an Earth's orbit. But there's a lot of problems. But years and years ago, Musk, I think, was in Mexico City and he was giving a presentation, basically pitching the idea why should we go to space, but from a sort of meta, almost Isaac Asimov high-level interpretation of philosophy, what are the philosophical reasons we should go. And he wrote, and commentary about that came later, "One path is we stay on Earth forever, and there will be some eventual extinction event." And he continues, "I do not have an immediate doomsday prophecy, but eventually history suggests there will be some doomsday event. The alternative is to become a space-bearing civilization and a multi-planetary species, which I hope you would agree is the right way to go." And to me, how I interpreted this, and I think how a lot of people interpreted this, is it's a very compelling reason to go, right? I mean, death is a reason that we do arguably everything in life. But the implication here is that if we don't go to space, we're all going to die eventually by some extinction level event, a mass extinction level event. So what I did is just for fun, I wanted to look around and pretend to call this bluff, like, okay, are they really that bad? So I ended up talking to volcanologists, astronauts, NASA scientists, professors, I basically like consulted the oracles of our time, as it were, and said, okay, what are the mass extinction events that could really end humanity? I went from super solar flares to the most important one, the most likely one, is a super volcano like Yellowstone exploding. And just the amount of mass that could go up there, like it's a number I couldn't even relate to it. But yeah, if that happens, it would definitely put us back, if not make a lot of humanity extinct in very scary ways. So then, okay, okay, so maybe we should try to go to space if all of humanity will eventually die, even if there isn't a mass extinction event that's listed in this article. And on a long enough timeline, the sun's going to begin the end of life, and then it will expand, and then all the water will evaporate from earth, and it'll be completely unlivable for any life as we know it. So either we leave in that sense, or we stay and we die with all life on the planet. [J] The data point that you had mentioned in your article, I just found it for our listeners. You had said that the last known super volcano 75,000 years ago ejected the equivalent of a nearly 100 billion dump trucks worth of scaldingly hot material into the atmosphere. [C] Yeah, that would definitely, that would ruin your day, I think. Maybe even your week. A five-year plan would have to be pushed back. [J] I apologize, I just wanted to make sure I got that data point in there because it is just a mind-bogglingly large number. So yeah, should some event like this happen? Is Mars our best bet? [C] Yeah, that's kind of why I moved on from here. Moving on from the most high-threat mass extinction event, super volcano, which I see here, Wilcox from NASA, I believe, saying that they erupt every 100,000 years or so, which makes them one order higher magnitude probability than an asteroid impact. Moving on from that, okay, so maybe we should go because we have 100,000 years basically to do something that we might be due for one now. I said, should we go to the moon? Should we colonize asteroids? Or should we go to Mars? Do we have to go to Mars if we have to leave? Or couldn't we do something that's a little bit more close? And other people have argued that it has to be Mars. They're one of the mentors of Musk. His name is slipping right now, but it's also in the book. I said no, it absolutely has to be Mars because it has at least some atmosphere, although it's not a friendly one. It's a place where we can try to establish some kind of settlement that can last in the long term. We can't really do that on the moon as easily. But then talking with a lot of astronauts, the conclusion of this paper or this article of futurism was that asteroids are possibly the best thing. And one of the strongest arguments is the probability of contamination. Not only like us contaminating another body, like if we contaminate an asteroid, who really cares after a certain point? There's just so many of them, I couldn't even begin to estimate, like, well, that's one down another trillion to go or something. If we do it on the moon, well, there's not that really like an atmosphere. So it's okay. And it's also like extremely irradiated all the time by the sun as it goes around. So there's not a lot of life that we think and grow there, although there might be enough water to work with. But it'll be harder to build a settlement there. On Mars, yeah, there's some atmosphere, but there's also a lot of problem with radiation because the core is basically dead, not moving. There's no protection from the sun. There's no electromagnetic protection. So we have to find a way to live there. And the conclusion is basically that asteroids are the best because if there is some kind of outbreak that's actually affecting humans, forget about us affecting the other bodies, what about an outbreak of some virus or a new disease on humans? At least it can be contained. So if we have, you have to really think like centuries ahead of time, we have a lot of settlements out there. If it's all just on Mars and something bad happens, if we just had an epidemic, whether or not it was a serious, as we thought it was four years ago, it definitely changed the game of how you can live your normal life for quite a while. But at least we had air to breathe. At least we had like water we could drink. If that's happening on Mars, it could end the whole enterprise in a matter of like weeks or months. If it's an asteroid, well, that's really sad. But maybe the other asteroids can continue. We talk about going to Mars to save humanity sort of as a shorthand, but that may not be enough, which makes my brain go in two directions. One that just shows how precious Earth is, but two, if we want to be interplanetary, Mars is not far enough. So, man, we really, we have a lot of work to do. Yeah, completely. I also wanted to clarify really quickly looking at my article that the whole Yellowstone exploding thing, that's roughly every 620,000 years, but there's some kind of super volcano every, I think, 100,000 years. So this one's a long range. I just wanted to say that so people don't freak out saying humans have been around for like, how long has it been around for almost that long? Oh my gosh, we're going to die. Please don't freak out, everybody. We're not here to do doom and gloom. That's not what we're about. Brad, you've written so much about what's going on in like new space, which is a space that we also cover on our show. And I imagine when you've been talking to people who, again, are not necessarily the space diehards, you must have been having some conversations that may be surprised you what people's perceptions are, misconceptions or things that other people find important that maybe us space nerds don't. I'm just curious what you've noticed or maybe what kind of conversations you've had along those lines that, for what you've heard from people who aren't necessarily in the space bubble. Yeah, this is an interesting question. I have to admit that although like we live in an age of internet, I spend most of my time in New York, and in New York can be a place that's kind of concerned with social issues a lot of the time. And sometimes when you project like, let's say, provincial moralities into a place that's definitely not provincial, namely outer space, things get a little bit strange. Probably the most often interpretation or like take on space that takes me back are people that say basically the way that we're doing business on earth and the way that we exploit people specifically from like a financial standpoint and resources standpoint is not very good. And if we took say the entire military or even like a third of the military industrial complexes revenue or the money that they get that we subsidize through tax dollars and put that toward like, you know, universal healthcare and education and stuff like that, that that would be far better than putting money into contracts with SpaceX. But I think that the contracts that SpaceX has to the federal government is something like less than 1% of all federal spending. So it's a very, very small part that I think is necessary. And also to me, it's kind of my while of course, like in space at first, yes, you will be under the thumb of your sort of corporate overlords. There was a great essay written in the bathroom a few years ago that that summarized it like if you have a complaint, try like try unionizing when there's no air or something like that. And that can be kind of a scary thought to have. But it's my firm belief that humans won't really find their true purpose on earth, because down here, it's too easy to let things descend into intra conflicts about religion, ethnicity, when the two meet and in between, even about sex and sexuality, it's kind of like living an eternity on the same grid the longer we stay the smaller the categories we disagree on. On space, to the contrary, there is no limit. There is no grid. There's no human history as we ordinarily consider it. Who we are in space is then an existential question before it's anything else, which means that in space, no matter what kind of person you are, where you come from, if you're building any kind of community, hopefully for a more scientific or noble enterprise than just to make money and send home, the only way for us to build our story in space is for humanity to grow up. And I think that it'll force us to because I think that franchises like that the original late 70s alien movie is a lot closer, not necessarily with aliens being there, but the sense of isolation and how like the ship feels like you're living inside of an iPad that kind of infantilizes you a bit, but you still have to learn to like forge your new values and get along with the crew that's diverse in ways that go beyond race, it's diverse in ways of class and seniority and what kind of reason you're out there for, whether it's mining or science, learning to basically forge our own story and our own identity without just relying on the old categories of earth that are infinitely self-devisable is a reason I think we should go out there. At the end of the day, if I say there is like a big like horrible mining operation on Mars and people are trapped there, I feel like I'm describing early 2000s video game, it's possible since there's such a huge distance between anybody who's out there and the powers that be on earth, corporate or government. I don't think that humans would that are out there exploring or having to work under not so great conditions would basically want to live with that and have all generations after them live with that and maybe there's a possibility for new forms of humanity in society, so it's not only to go to space to explore what's out there, but I think and this might send a little cliche the exploration of human interiority and possibilities of the human spirit as it were will be far more beneficial in space than just sticking around on earth waiting for the sun to get old. [Music] We'll be right back. Welcome back. Now brace yourself for some word salad. A group of ducks in Portugal witnessed the meteor while on twitch. Okay, let me explain. On May 18th, you might have seen this in the early hours on the Iberian Peninsula, the universe provided a lot of people a beautiful light show. There was this meteor that flew over Spain in Portugal traveling at roughly 45 kilometers a second before burning up over the Atlantic Ocean at an altitude of approximately 60 kilometers and it was captured by a lot of people on camera with this bright blue and white light and yeah that surprised even the most unassuming passengers on spaceship earth. Yeah, that was the sound of ducks or maybe even a few geese, it's a little unclear, in Portugal who were also caught on camera observing the meteor streaking by overhead. Yes, that is the sound of birds in awe. The feathered friends were caught off guard by the streaking light as they gathered to wet their beaks and can you blame them? The video was part of a live stream on the platform twitch. Why ducks on twitch? Why not? On the internet, maybe nobody knows you're a dog but everybody knows you're a duck. A duck that saw a meteor while on twitch. The internet's amazing. [Music] That's it for T-minus for May 23rd 2024 brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. We're privileged that N2K 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 Caruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben. Our executive editor is Brandon Karpf. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Varmasas. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. T-minus.