You might remember this one. Back in September, the FAA provided a report to the U.S. Congress on risk associated with reentry disposal of satellites from proposed large constellations in low-Earth orbit. Bit of a mouthful, but yeah. Oh, how we scoffed at the analysis that said the total number of hazardous fragments surviving reentries each year is expected to reach 28,000 by 2035. And its casualty expectation, in other words, the number of individuals on the ground predicted to be injured or killed by debris surviving reentry, would be 0.6 per year. And since we're not worried about half people generally, that means one person on the planet would be expected to be injured or killed by space debris every two years. Such far-off statements, those cannot be real, right? Well, that's what we thought until reality came crashing down, quite literally, in fields and homes in North America. More on that later. Today's May 28, 2024, I'm Rhea Vermazes, and this is T-Minus. Lab successfully launches the first of NASA's pre-fire CubeSats. SpaceX's Starship aims to launch on June 5. The spaceport company contracted by DIU to deliver cargo to Leo. And our guest today is Onika Yasui, captain of the High Power Rocketry Club at WPI, or the Worcester Polytechnic Institute. We're going to be talking about the Spaceport America Cup, so definitely stick around to hear more. Let's get into some space updates for this Tuesday, shall we? And we're kicking things off with some launch news from Rocket Lab. Over the weekend, the company launched the first of two back-to-back launches for NASA's pre-fire. And pre-fire stands for Polar Radiant Energy in the Far Infrared Experiment, which is a climate change-focused mission. The pre-fire CubeSats will measure the amount of heat that Earth radiates into space from two of the coldest, most remote regions on the planet, the poles. Data from the pre-fire mission will help researchers better predict how Earth's ice, seas, and weather will change in a warming world. The missions CubeSats each carry an instrument called a thermal infrared spectrometer, which uses specially-shaped mirrors and sensors to measure infrared wavelengths. A lot of the heat radiated from the Arctic and Antarctic is admitted as far infrared radiation, but there is currently no detailed measurement of this type of energy. So, data collected from pre-fire will give researchers information on where and when far infrared energy radiates from the Arctic and Antarctic environments into space. The pre-fire mission is expected to operate for 10 months. And the launch, named "Ready Aim Pre-Fire," lifted off from Rocket Lab's launch complex in New Zealand. A second pre-fire launch will follow on another dedicated electron launch this week. And SpaceX, no surprise here, has been all over the news in the last week. The company's routing static fire of its Raptor engine ended in a pretty dramatic explosion on the livestream. SpaceX is yet to confirm the cause of the explosion, but it's confirmed that it will not deter their Starship launch schedule. The company is currently targeting June 5 for the fourth test flight of its Starship spacecraft, pending regulatory approvals of course. SpaceX is aiming to achieve a controlled, soft splashdown of the Super Heavy booster in the Gulf of Mexico and a successful controlled atmospheric re-entry of the Starship upper stage with this next test flight. The spaceport company has been awarded a contract by the Defense Innovation Unit to deliver cargo from their mobile space launch complex. The company plans to demonstrate delivery to a mission-designed orbit and test autonomy-like features of its sea launch vessel. In Phase 1 of the novel responsive space delivery project, the spaceport company will construct and demonstrate foundational maritime launch technologies within the next 12 months. Ravada Space has announced a series of new partners in the Asia-Pacific region. Ravada says it's expanding its network with partnerships in Korea, the Philippines, Brunei, Japan, and Taiwan. The company says it has lined up over $9 billion of business globally for its LEO network. The Ravada communications systems have demonstrated the orbit-air TRX-30 business aviation terminal over Viasat's advanced global express satellites. A series of recent tests have validated the next generation systems' ability to provide reliable and consistent high-speed connectivity for in-flight connections. According to a recent filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, or SEC, Earth Observation Company Satellogic approved a workforce reduction of 34 employees, which constitutes about 13 percent of its employee base. According to the filing, the reduction is part of the company's previously announced and ongoing efforts to reduce operational costs and control spending. Satellogic says they continue to evaluate their workforce needs on a go-forward basis to ensure alignment with operational requirements. Consorciums led by Demos and OpenCosmos have been selected by the European Space Agency to develop the Spanish component of the Atlantic Constellation. Constellación Atlántica, or the Atlantic Constellation, will consist of 16 Earth Observation Satellites for Ocean Earth and Climate Monitoring. Contracts for the consolidation phase of Spain's eight satellite component of the Atlantic Constellation were awarded in early April to a pair of consortiums led by Demos and OpenCosmos Europe, the Barcelona-based subsidiary of OpenCosmos. This initial three-month phase of the project will see the contracted companies consolidate the constellation's mission requirements in collaboration with the Spanish Space Agency as the end-user and ESA as the contracting supervisor. Additionally, the UK Space Agency has entrusted OpenCosmos with the development of its contribution to the constellation. Japan's National Manned Space Agency says the Shenzhou-18 crew aboard the Tiangong Space Station completed their first extravehicular activity earlier today. The three-man crew completed a eight-and-a-half-hour spacewalk, working on tasks such as installing space station debris protection devices and conducting inspections of extravehicular equipment and facilities. And lastly, but not least, congratulations to South Korea on the opening of their space agency on Monday. The Korea Aerospace Administration, also known as CASA, will lead the nation's space programs, targeting a homegrown spacecraft on the moon by 2032 and missions to Mars in 2045. CASA's headquarters are in Satcheon, about 300 kilometers south of Seoul. The South Korean government says the agency's 293-strong workforce will be filled in phases. And that concludes our briefing for today. You'll always find links to further reading on all the stories that we've mentioned in the selected reading section of our show notes. And today you'll find stories on the US Space Force's decision to accept Air Force Reserve volunteers for full-time positions and a report on space warfare from the Wall Street Journal. Hey, T-Minus Crew, if you're just joining us, welcome and be sure to follow T-Minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. And also do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday, please show three friends or coworkers this podcast. A growing audience is the most important thing for us and we would love your help as part of the T-Minus Crew. So if you find T-Minus useful, and as always, we really hope that you do, please share the show so other professionals like you can find it. Thank you so much. It means a lot to me and all of us here at T-Minus. [Music] Our guest today is Annika Yasui, captain of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute's High Power Rocketry Club. Hi, my name is Annika. I'm a recent WPI graduate. I did my undergraduate in mechanical engineering. And then I also did my master's in aerospace engineering at the same time with the WPI BS/MS program. I've been a part of the High Power Rocketry team at WPI for the past three years and it has honestly been probably my favorite experience at WPI. And this past year, I've had the privilege of being the captain. Hey, congratulations on graduating and on two degrees at once, my goodness. That's amazing. That is not a small thing. Wow. And on top of it, being the captain of your team and competing at Spaceport America Cup coming up, I don't think you're busy enough just for the record. I think you could squeeze a few more. Alright, so yeah, we're going to be talking about Spaceport America Cup. So I imagine you've been a few times now. Tell me about your experiences so far. Yeah, so in general, our team has gone the past, this will be our third year. So I've gone every year that our team has gone. My first year was on the recovery team. So I got to go out and trek out into the desert with seven other students from our team to find our rocket. We didn't have the most successful launch that first year. It had a what I would call a successful in-flight disassembly where part of it kept going up to 10,000 feet and most of it fell back down at about 3,000 feet. That definitely didn't slow us down. We put a lot of processes in place to kind of prevent what happened that year from happening again. Last year, we went back for the second year. I was there to kind of learn the ropes of being captain and running around everything. We did incredibly well. We placed I think like eighth or ninth overall in our category, which I'm really impressed with. Awesome. Yeah. This next year, I'm really excited to head back and have one last chance to hang out with all my friends from the team. Oh, that's awesome. Like a victory lap for you. That's so cool. Yes. So tell me about what you all are working on for this year. I mean, the as of time of this recording were a little less than a month out. Oh my gosh. And I know this process takes like a year easily. So you're really close to that finish line. So what's going on right now? Yeah. So this year we have project Revolatio sets the name for both our rocket and our payload. So our rocket, we're in the 10,000 foot commercial off the shelf category. Our rocket is a six inch diameter rocket that's 148 inches long. We're using a CTI M3400 motor. We weigh about just over 68 pounds with the motor installed. What's unique about our rocket? We do a lot of composite work on the Fincan. So we do a tip to tip composite layup, which is really cool. I got to watch all of our composite teams work throughout the year and it's just awesome to see all their hard work. We also have a really cool couplings design that we designed this year. Different from previous years as we found threads in the desert. Don't really mix together with all the sand. So this year we have a radio bolt design completely machined here on campus completely designed by students. I got to watch the machine. I got to watch them integrate it. And it's just so awesome to see all the hard work from that design process right after last year's competition. When we had to pry the rocket apart and being like, nope, let's not do that next year. And then going through that redesign process and figuring out what works better. So this year we can assemble our rocket in just about an hour, which is great. Much better than the like three hours that took us last year. So I'm really hopeful we can launch on the first day. And then also on the payload side of things, we have a basically it's a deployable payload. So it deploys at about 1300 feet and it has a rocket man parachute that we've modified the lines, which sounds scarier than it actually is. Attached to servos and then we have a super fancy control system that uses computer vision to scan the ground and find an optimal landing spot. And then it basically pulls on those different lines to kind of guide that lander to that landing spot. Yeah. Wow. Oh my gosh. Okay. That all of that is amazing. And I love that you mentioned that you learned something from previous years and integrated that into this year's design. I do talk to a lot of teams and a lot of teams are often brand new. So I love that you have that benefit of experience because yeah, Worcester is very different from New Mexico. I look, sand is not a thing you are going to be thinking about Massachusetts. That's a great learning to bring back. I was going to say, especially now that this is your third time around, you've got to have a lot of really good advice, maybe for teams that are brand new that are trying to figure out their way to New Mexico this year, people who may be thinking about it even for 2025. If I could take your brain, I mean, you've probably given people advice at this point. But I mean, I'm just curious, what would you advise maybe people who are trying to figure out their path? Yeah, so much advice. So first one is when you're at Spaceport America, it's such a great opportunity. There's like 160 teams there. So don't be afraid to just go around and ask people about their designs. That's how we found some of the inspiration for our projects. We started this experimental project with retractable rail buttons. And we saw a team that was doing it really well. And so we asked them kind of about their mechanism so we could kind of kickstart that project for us. Also, don't be afraid to ask for help. Everyone there is just so nice and amazing. So, you know, if we ever didn't have a part we needed for whatever reason, we could always run to another table and ask for help. Or if we're having an issue with our system, feel free to just ask people for help because they're always there to support you, even though it's a competition. It doesn't always feel like it when you're there because just everyone's so nice and wonderful. When I've done not competitions like this, I've never done anything like this, but I've always been really nervous personally about if I see something that someone else is doing that works about asking like, how did you do that? Because it feels almost like I'm not supposed to ask that question. How do you get over that feeling of like, actually, it's okay because we're all here to learn. That for me has always been a huge barrier. Yeah, no, I completely agree. Especially like aerospace, everything is so like proprietary and things like that. It's just not being afraid. You're not, it's always like when you're asking for help on homework, you're not asking for the answer. You're just asking for what their approach to the problem was to kind of help you figure out what your approach is. Kind of how I think about it, which might not be a great analogy, but. I think it's a very wise analogy actually. Yeah, spot on. I wish me 20 years ago I'd heard that. More asking about like the why behind their design. Because you might find that they ran into specific issues and you can avoid running into those same issues if you kind of take their approach and then modify it for what works best for your team. Because every rocket is slightly different. It's very true. So again, this is probably your last go around for, I mean, I don't know if you're going to be a student again. You've already gotten your master's. I mean, I don't know. You want to go again? But I mean, this is that bit of a victory lap for you. I feel weird asking what are you looking forward to? Because I imagine the whole thing might be the answer. I mean, it is such a cool event. Is there a certain part that you love the most? Oh, you're right. The whole thing. I'm really excited just to see we have a lot of students that this is their first year going. We're taking 24 students, which is an absurd amount, but our team has like 100, 220, I think students this year. And so just trying to just seeing everyone see a rocket launch because I've seen it a couple of times now. It still blows my mind every time, but having our freshmen and sophomore that have never been there before have them experience it. And they're probably going to be the leaders of the team in the future. So just kind of watching them learn from this experience and grow, I think is going to be kind of a really heartwarming thing for me. That's kind of how I got my start my first year as being just a regular member and then kind of moving up through the ranks, being treasurer, taking all more leadership positions to get where I am today. Onika, that's awesome. And now you're the captain. So that's that's really what a great example for others to follow. And I love that that's that's how you came up also. That's so great. And given that you just graduated, I have to ask what are your plans now? I will be starting full time at M2 Aero engines down in Rocky Hill, Connecticut. So I'm really excited to be working on something aerospace related and then the rotation program to kind of help me figure out what I want to be working on specifically. But now I'm really excited. That's awesome. Onika, I'm congratulations again. Just congrats on graduating. That's a huge milestone. What a what an exciting time in life. And I'm wishing you and all the all the WPI folks that are going to be down there as a Massachusetts resident. I'm cheering y'all on. And of course, I'm cheering on everyone. I'm not playing favorites, but I am a little bit. I wish you all the best. I hope it's a great competition and a great time. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me today. Yeah, thank you so much for this opportunity. [Music] We'll be right back. [Music] Welcome back. We open today's show teasing the announcement of more space debris landing here in the United States. And as is often said in the news business, three times makes a trend. So first we had the ISS pallet battery crashing through a Florida home, then a bit of a SpaceX Dragon Trunk in Saskatchewan, Canada. And now over the weekend we got news of a third incident involving space debris showing up where it definitely does not belong. It seems that once again, a piece of SpaceX hardware has landed back on Earth. And for the record, we're not talking about a booster landing. We're not talking about a small fragment either. This latest piece of debris was so large and heavy that the finder had to tow it out of the area where it was found in North Carolina. The space debris finders stumbled upon the suspected bit of space trash along a remote trail in Canton. The three foot wide object was covered in burnt carbon fiber and heavy duty metal plates held together by thick bolts. And it looks eerily like the same piece of debris that was found in a Canadian field last month. Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist who works at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Chandra X-ray Center, and also tends to track this sort of thing, warned on May 21 that the trunk from the SpaceX Dragon that carried Crew 7 astronauts to the ISS was returning to Earth about two months after the crew splashed down in the Gulf of Mexico. So could this piece of debris be part of a Dragon capsule? Well, we'll let you know when the reports have been confirmed. But for now, space fans, definitely keep your eyes on the sky and watch out for falling chunks of debris. That's it for T-minus for May 28, 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 Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eibn. Our executive editor is Brandon Karpf. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Varmasus. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. [BLANK_AUDIO]
