[MUSIC] We are still writing yesterday's achievements in spaceflight. Starship and Starliner kept us glued to live streams all day. And we've got an update from Starliner's docking in a bit, but first, Alice, I can see that you are itching to share something. >> Of course, I had to go with the star theme for this week's joke. So why couldn't the star stay focused? Why couldn't the star stay focused? Because something, I don't know why. [LAUGH] >> Because he kept spacing out. >> One day, one day I will get it. One day I will get these jokes. [MUSIC] >> 20 seconds to L-O-I, we're open aboard. [MUSIC] >> Today is June 7th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmausus. >> I'm Alice Karuth, and this is Team Alice. [MUSIC] >> Sunny Williams and Butch Wilmore arrive at the ISS. Rocket Lab announces their 50th electron flight. Planet Lab shares financial updates. >> And today we're sharing part of our AWS Inorbit series featuring DeGas, a Japanese company working to help farmers in Ghana using AI and cloud infrastructure solutions. It's a great story, so stay with us for that later in the show. [MUSIC] >> Happy Friday, y'all. Let's dive into today's briefing, shall we? And as we were recording yesterday's show, the Boeing Starliner capsule docked to the International Space Station. And we were glued to the live stream, waiting for astronauts Sunny Williams and Butch Wilmore to disembark. Slowly, very slowly, the team joined the other seven crew members on the orbiting lab with Sunny Williams dancing her way out of the capsule. [LAUGH] Ring that bell. Joyful faces all around aboard the ISS as Butch and Sunny came aboard. You can hear it in their voices from their opening remarks as well. >> I'm not sure we could have gotten a better welcome. >> [LAUGH] >> I mean, we had music, we had po-. Matt was dancing. >> [LAUGH] >> It was great. What a wonderful place to be. I'm great to be back here. It feels like, I mean, obviously, Sunny and I've been gone for a little while, but it's very familiar. There's only one problem, Matt is in my crew quarters. >> [LAUGH] >> So I don't know what we're gonna do about that. But hey, thank you all for the great welcome. And thanks to ULA, Got Us Going, Boeing, KEPUS Going, Mission Control MO, KEPUS Going, and Got Us Here. What a great, wonderful team effort. I mean, team, team, team, this organization, these organizations are the epitome of teamwork. And it is a blessing and it's a privilege to be a part of it. It's just amazing. >> Yeah, I just want to say big thanks to family and friends who've lived this for a long time. And I think you're glad we're not with you anymore. >> [LAUGH] >> And we have another family up here, which is just awesome. Like Butch said, we, it was such a great welcome. Little dance party, and that's the way to get things going. And we're just happy as can be to be up in space. One in Starliner on an Atlas V and then here on the International Space Station. It just doesn't get much better. >> Yeah, we're ready to go to work for the International Partners here. Whatever it is you got us to do, we're ready. All right. >> Yeah. >> We're ready. >> Thank you all so much. >> [LAUGH] >> All right. >> That concludes the welcome ceremony. >> The International Space Station, we are now resuming operational audio communications. >> Rocket Lab has announced the launch window for the company's 50th Electron launch. The mission will deploy five Internet of Things satellites for French company, CNES. And I'm sorry if I mispronounced that. The mission is the first of five dedicated electron launches for CNEUS, a company backed by private and public investors, including the French government space agencies, CNES, and Electrolocalization Satellites or CLS. And I do apologize for the fact that I can't pronounce things in French. Of course, the mission has an exceptional name, No Time to Loose. >> [SOUND] >> And is scheduled to launch from the Rocket Labs facility in New Zealand during a 14 day launch window that opens on June the 19th. >> Can we get audio of No Time to Loose from Monty Python or will we get in trouble for that? >> Possibly the latter. We'll see what we can do. >> Okay. >> [LAUGH] >> It's no time to looser. >> Right. >> Planet Labs has shared their first quarter financial reports. The Earth observation company's first quarter revenue increased 15% year over year to a record $60.4 million. They ended the quarter with $276 million in cash, cash equivalents, and short term investments. Planet also used the opportunity to unveil its first hyperspectral satellite. The spacecraft arrived at Vandenberg Space Force Base on June 3rd, in preparation for lift off as early as July, on board the Transporter 11 rideshare mission with SpaceX. >> Now last week we talked about galactic energy setting new records in China. And it seems that the commercial launch company isn't content with the record of two launches in three days. The Beijing based rocket company carried a further three satellites into space on Thursday marking its third launch in ten days. The satellites were taken into orbit by a series one Y-13 carrier rocket on a mission called Love On Top. The satellites include one imaging satellite, the T-01B, and two remote sensing satellites for technology verification named NS3A and NS3B. >> The US Missile Defense Agency is preparing for its first major test of new space based sensors designed to track hypersonic missiles. Tracking hypersonic missiles from space is required to give more time for interceptors to lock onto signals with current ground and ship based radar only able to see them just as they swoop in. The first hypersonic test bed calibration flight is expected within a week. The agency plans to take a hypersonic test bed target and launch that and for the first time have sensors tracking and looking to see how they're doing to figure out if they could potentially close the fire control loop. >> RTX's Blue Canyon Technologies has established communication with both CubeSats for the NASA Prefire Mission. The Prefire Mission, which stands for Polar Radiant Energy in the Far Infrared Experiment, will measure the amount of heat Earth emits into space from the Arctic and Antarctica. Blue Canyon provides two heritage 6U CubeSats for the mission, which is managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for the agency's Science Mission Directorate. >> The European Space Agency and VAST have signed a memorandum of understanding for future VAST space stations. The agreement outlines the party's intention to foster human space flight, science, technology and commercialization development, and explore collaboration in low Earth orbit destinations other than the International Space Station. The collaboration will initially focus on exploring opportunities for access to space or Europe through the VAST space stations. VAST says its Haven 1 will enable ESA astronaut missions starting in 2026. >> Italy's Telepazio, a joint venture between Italian aerospace giant Leonardo and Francis Thales, has announced an agreement with SpaceX for the commercialization of Starlink services. Telepazio will integrate Starlink into its global hybrid connectivity network, which is made up of satellites and terrestrial solutions, to provide reliable and resilient communication services with global coverage. >> The Federal Aviation Administration added two new companies to its space data integrator tool, which provides improved situational awareness and helps the FAA safely and efficiently manage air traffic during space operations. The agency can now track Virgin, Galactic and Sierra space vehicles in near real time during their launch and re-entry operations. The companies will transmit vehicle telemetry data, such as position, altitude and speed, to the SDI tool, which helps to increase safety for all airspace users. And of course Virgin Galactic is scheduled to fly again this Saturday from Spaceport America in my home state, New Mexico. That flight will be carrying Turkey's second astronaut to space thanks to Axiom. And I apologize already in advance for mispronouncing this wonderful guy's name. Tuva Chungangir Ataserva's flight is part of the AX3 mission, which went to the International Space Station in January. The AX3 crew that flew to the ISS are currently in Turkey to promote the mission and share results. Ataserva will be carrying out scientific experiments on the Virgin Galactic flight, which he hopes will significantly contribute to space research and studies in Turkey. Now, Godspeed Unity and a huge congrats to Jamil Jendure, who's piloting the space plane for the first time tomorrow. That concludes today's briefing. Heads of the selected reading section of our show notes define further information on all the stories that we've mentioned. Hey T-minus 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. And tomorrow we have Ross Garelek Bell talking about the Aerospace States Association. Yeah, it's a great organization, so you'll want to tune in for that. Check it out while you're catching up on house chores, flooding your yard for the pecan trees like I am, or house hunting like you are, Maria. You don't want to miss it. [Music] In January, we shared our AWS in orbit episode called "Empowering Small Farming Through AI and Space Technologies." And today we're sharing a short part of that chat with Yohei Nakahama, Chief Technology Officer at Degas, and AWS Solutions Architect, Emi Higashikawa. Yohei shares how his company is revolutionizing small farming in Ghana through AWS's cloud, AI and space technologies. Our mission is changing people's lives dramatically. So the term "people" here is specifically refers to African farmers. And what we are doing is like Degas platform is providing financial opportunities with farmers and implementing data-driven precision farming. So let me explain a little bit financing part first. So it's like in-kind financing, so specifically we purchase fertilizers and seeds from major agrarian companies and provide them as a loan to farmers. And after the financing part, we start the precision farming part with the farmers. So at Degas, we are hiring around 100 agents across Ghana, and the agents work together with the farmers to grow their crops in an optimized way. And because of that, the land productivity greatly increases and eventually the income of the farmers are increasing. So that's what Degas is doing basically. I would love to know a little bit more about specifically how Degas is achieving this mission using AI and space-based data. How does that come into play? Yes, so basically to realize this business, we are developing two main data streams. One is coming from ground. So our agents are using our in-house Android application and it's like boost on the ground data collection. So all interactions with farmers and agents are done with the app and agents collect detailed information of every farmer from, for example, their name to farmland polygons. And the main second data stream is coming from the Earth's observation. We are collecting many types of observation data, like both optical and radar satellite observation data, and to analyze the farmlands. And basically, the two data streams forms data lake on the cloud and we are using the data lake to analyze the farmland and create machine learning models. For example, the machine learning models is like for detecting floods or drought or calculate farmers credit or predicting yields. Basically, welcome to Ghana. The mobile network is not stable and electric system is not stable. And how to access high quality fertilizers and seeds, which is a little bit lacking. So we are developing farmers credit to provide financing opportunities. So that's one challenging part. And how to scale our business, which is also challenging. So for that, we are developing our in-house under-debarcation, as I stated. And for that, we are collecting tons of data to calculate the credit. Excellent. All right, so we're talking about large amounts of data. How is that being processed? Is that something that Degas is doing? Is that something that you needed help with? Or what's happening there? So for example, there is one operation called farm mapping. So at the operation, for example, farmers agent go to the farmland with the farmer and work around the farmland. And then the Android application collect the series of locations where the agent worked. And we can get the figure of the farmland. And the data is sent to the cloud. And on the cloud, we map our observation data to the polygon and calculate, for example, vegetation index to check the farmland and the status of the farmland. That's how we're merging local data to observation data. So let's talk a bit about the big picture. The motivation for Degas to be in Ghana, to be in Africa, and help solve these incredibly difficult challenges. Like, let's set the stage. What are the challenges there, especially in the face of climate change? I'm Aikido Shikawa, and I'm a Solutions Architect on the aerospace and satellite team at AWS. And what that means is I support space industry customers in achieving their missions through designing and implementing solutions on AWS. So Africa compromises approximately 17% of the world population, although it only contributes actually less than 4% of global greenhouse gas emissions. But despite that, Africa is already contending with some of the harshest impacts of climate change. That includes extreme heat, drought, desertification, flooding. And that really heavily impacts, especially agriculture and food production. And this is especially devastating in Africa, because more than 60% of the population of sub-Saharan Africa are smallholder farmers. That means a majority of the population depends on agriculture for their livelihoods. And of course, this contributes to growing food insecurity, displacement, and conflict in the region. There's a phrase that came up a number of times about regenerative agriculture. Yohei, could you walk me through what regenerative agriculture means? Yes, so regenerative agriculture has a lot of definitions, but basically it's a way of agriculture which can issue carbon credit. So it has two meanings, which is it's sustainable, sustainable way, and at the same time, it reduces CO2 emission. So we are doing regenerative agriculture with the farmers. And it's a little bit difficult or complicated way, but using our Android application and the chatbot, we are expanding this regenerative agriculture in Africa. Wonderful. Okay, so we have this incredibly sophisticated chatbot that runs on a large amount of data and also uses a large language model. It also runs on an AWS service. Emma, could you walk me through a little bit about that, please? So the chatbot that Degas is currently building runs on Amazon Bedrock. And Amazon Bedrock is a service AWS recently announced that lets customers easily build and scale generative AI applications in AWS. And the first thing is through Bedrock, AWS offers access to a number of high performing foundation models or FMs, and all this through a single API. Currently, Bedrock provides FMs from Amazon, as well as from leading AI providers like AI21 Labs, Anthropic, Cohere, Meta, and Stability AI, all through a single pane of glass API. And there's two, I think, key features of Bedrock that Degas has really leveraged in the solution we're discussing today. And the first one is the ability to easily experiment with and compare the performances of different foundational models for specific use case through things like playgrounds and the single pane of glass API. The second is the ability to create custom solutions, integrating existing AWS services and also using your own proprietary data in AWS with techniques such as retrieval augmented generation or RAG. And especially to the second point, I think Degas's solution is very exciting because it leverages the power of other AWS services like Kendra for searching scientific papers and agricultural journals, also retrieving like farmer metadata from RDS and RDS database, and also Athena to leverage and search Degas's existing dataset in S3. I wanted to talk a little bit about the credit scoring model because I'm seeing 1.2 million data points and that is incredible. I don't want to skip that. Yohei, could you talk a little bit about that model because those are a lot of data points. Oh yeah, so yeah, there are a lot of data points and with that we are calculating farmers credit, which is our core technology because with that we can provide financing opportunities to the farmer. And how we calculate, it's totally related to their yield, right? Because it's directly related to their income. So the credit model consists of, for example, yield prediction model. At the same time, we are calculating the land risk, for example, predicting flood or drought. And at the same time, we are checking the farmer is diligent or not. On the ground, the agents score the farmer's farmland, for example, scoring the distance of the seeds or checking how to apply our fertilizers to the farmland. So all the kind of things are also digitized and collected. And we are calculating credit using the ground data and our self-observation. And you can find that full episode at space.ntuk.com/aws. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Did you miss all the fun on May 14th when Aurora's graced the skies for many places in the world where that kind of ethereal light show doesn't usually happen? I saw it while standing on my front stoof just outside Boston City Limits. Definitely not something I'd ever thought I'd see if I wasn't on a trip to Iceland, that's for sure. Yeah, we drove out to the desert to see it in southern New Mexico. It was amazing and certainly not something I would expect to see this close to the equator. Well, if you have Aurora FOMO, I don't want to get your hopes up too much, but you should know that the active region on the Sun that created the solar flares that then resulted in a coronal mass ejection that then resulted in the Aurora making geomagnetic storms here on Earth, it's back. That region is AR 13697 and its reappearance is not, and I repeat, not a guarantee of Aurora. A bunch of things do need to happen in succession while also pointing directly at Earth, and if you need a reminder, the Sun's a lot bigger than us, so we are easy to miss. But it came into view at the end of May and coming up on mid-June are our best chances for another geomagnetic storm that might give us a light show. Keep in mind though that the geomagnetic storm we got in May that gave us those unexpected Aurora was a G5 level storm. That's a 5 out of 5 magnitude and we haven't had a storm that strong since 2003. So chances are we won't get another back-to-back G5, though never say never of course. Still, keep your eyes at the skies at night when conditions are right. You might get lucky a second time around. But that's it for T-minus for June 7th, 2024. We are privileged that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine 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, N2K makes it easy for companies to optimize your biggest investment, your people. 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 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 Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Varmausus. Thank you for listening. Have a great weekend. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
