CHIPS are down? No, they’re in space.

When the CHIPS and Science Act of 2022 was signed into law by President Biden, it provided the U.S. Department of Commerce with $50 billion to essentially supercharge the American semiconductor industry, ramp up its output, and bolster its supply chain. Semiconductors truly are in just about everything, and specialized CHIPS for space applications are a crucial niche. No surprise then that the space industry is getting some of that CHIPS money now too. Today is June 11th, 2024. I'm Maria Farmazas and this is T-Minus. Rocket Lab to boost semiconductor production in New Mexico. Stoke hot fires its new engine. YASAT and Airbus announce another partnership. And our guest today is Anthony Baker, CEO and co-founder of SatView. SatView has recently announced a new partnership with Suhora in India, so we'll be hearing more about that later in the show. It's Tuesday, let's dive in. Rocket Lab USA has signed a non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms with the Department of Commerce under the CHIPS and Science Act, which may potentially provide Rocket Lab with up to $23.9 million in direct funding. This investment aims to support Rocket Lab's expansion in New Mexico, increasing production of compound semiconductors for spacecraft and satellites at its facility in Albuquerque. The expansion would create over 100 manufacturing jobs and boost production of space-grade solar cells, which are critical for national defense and security satellites. The proposed investment would enhance domestic supply chains for space-grade solar cells, increase production by 50% within three years, and meet growing national security and consumer demands. Additionally, the state of New Mexico has committed financial assistance and incentives worth $25.5 million to support Rocket Lab's efforts. Stoke Space has completed the first hot-fire of its full-flow stage combustion, or FFSC, rocket engine, which is intended for the first stage of its reusable medium-lift launch vehicle called the NOVA. The test took place on June 5 at Stokes' testing facility in Moses Lake, Washington, where the engine reached its target starting power level, producing the equivalent of 350,000 horsepower in less than one second. The engine can generate over 100,000 pounds of thrust at full power. The successful FFSC rocket engine test brings Stoke one step closer to its goal of creating the most robust, fully and rapidly reusable medium-lift rocket. And this milestone follows Stoke's successful vertical takeoff and vertical landing test of its reusable second stage back in September 2023. Stoke designed and manufactured this engine in 18 months, and the company plans to further develop its engine and vehicle design while preparing for orbital launch operations throughout 2024. YASA, the UAE's satellite solutions provider, has contracted Airbus Defense and Space to construct two new geostationary telecommunications satellites, the ALIA-4 and the ALIA-5. Following an initial agreement in Q2 2023, Airbus will use its Eurostar Neo platform to build the satellites, which feature flexible, software-defined payloads, allowing in-orbit reconfiguration of coverage areas, capacity, and communication frequencies. So the ALIA-4 and the ALIA-5 will replace the older ALIA-1 and 2 satellites, launched in 2011 and 2012. They'll provide secure governmental communications across the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and Asia. The contract also includes ground-control segment components and support for future low-Earth orbit satellite platforms. The satellites are planned for launch in 2027 and 2028, and will have a design life of 15 years. This partnership follows previous ongoing collaborations between the two companies, as Airbus is currently developing YASAT's Bariah-4 satellite, which is set to launch in late 2024. Scout Space has inked a launch services agreement with ABL Space Systems to deploy the Owlet Zero-1, its dedicated 16-U Space Domain Awareness Satellite, aboard ABL's RS-1 launch vehicle later this year. This marks Scout's maiden voyage for a standalone operational space domain awareness satellite, showcasing its OWL, long-range optical telescope, and payload system. The mission aims to not only de-risk critical elements of the OWL payload design, but also to demonstrate and validate Scout's software stack, including key algorithms and autonomy functionality. Philip Hover-Smoot, CEO of Scout Space, added this, "The team's ability to execute this mission on such a tight schedule is remarkable. We are taking this mission from concept to launch in less than six months. This includes not just the primary payload build within the next 90 days, but also the full integration and test of the bus within a few short weeks of follow." And some science news for you next. George Mason University has announced its very first NASA space mission, the Land-Olt mission, which aims to uncover the secrets of dark energy. The Land-Olt mission's budget is $19.5 million, and it will deploy an artificial star into orbit around the Earth. Not scary, but I promise it's cool. The artificial star will calibrate telescopes and improve the accuracy of measuring star brightness, addressing challenges in astrophysics, such as understanding the speed and acceleration of the universe's expansion. So how does an artificial star work exactly? Well the mission will launch a light source with a known emission rate of photons into the sky in 2029. This light source will then be observed alongside real stars to create new stellar brightness catalogs. The satellite, which will be equipped with eight lasers, will then calibrate ground optical telescopes. Another light source in the sky, huh? Well it won't be visible to the naked eye, but this artificial star will be observable with personal telescopes. And how big is this thing going to be? Well bigger than a breadbox? Nah, actually it's about as big as a breadbox. Once it is deployed in 2029, the Land-Olt will help astronomers remove the effects of atmospheric filtration of light. Faculty and students from George Mason University's College of Science and College of Engineering and Computing will collaborate with NASA, NIST, and nine other organizations for this project. And Butch Wilmore and Sunny Williams are having a nice time up in the International Space Station after their successful launch on Starliner the other day, and I should really say they are very hard at work conducting experiments and speaking to the public, of course. And when preparing for launch, it sounded like they'd be up in orbit for about a week. But it ends up it's actually going to be a bit longer than that. Perhaps we can blame those pesky helium leaks for this one, as NASA and Boeing have set a return date for the crew of no earlier than Tuesday, June 18th, allowing the crew time to perform a spacewalk on June 13th. And that's about 11 days up there, isn't it? And there were some concerns about the longevity of undergarments, and if they'd packed enough, astronauts, they're just like us. And that wraps our briefing for today. Our show notes, as always, have all the links to all the stories that I've mentioned today, plus a few additional stories for your reading enjoyment. One's on China's space program saying they're ready to take international astronauts to Tiangong, and another's on NASA's progress on building the lunar gateway. 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. Also if you could 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 if you haven't already. It's because 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, I really hope you do, please share the show so other professionals like you can find it and join the crew. Thank you so much for your support. It means a lot to me and all of us here at T-Minus. . Today's guest is Anthony Baker, CEO and co-founder of SatView. I'm Anthony Baker, CEO and co-founder of SatView. SatView is based in the UK, in London, and we have a satellite in space with a unique thermal camera that can take pictures of the Earth down to building level resolution to find where in the world energy's been emitted. So this can be for where in the world we're wasting energy or decarbonizing in our industry, or it can look at activity and we can actually see activity inside buildings based on the thermal output. So this is the new insight that we bring. Thank you very much for joining me today. I appreciate it. And I know that SatView is also, you're in the process of building out. I mean, you have a satellite, but that is only the beginning, right? There's a lot more coming. Yes. So we recently announced that we've ordered two more satellites for launching next year on SpaceX. And yeah, we're looking forward to those, which will provide more capacity and more opportunities for our customers to use our data. And typically the interests are in economic monitoring, so the activity side, and lots of climate applications around wasted energy, carbon emissions, etc. Excellent. And this imagery is generally in infrared. Is that correct? Yes. So we're using thermal infrared. You don't need the sunshine to illuminate things. You can just look at the emissions coming from the object themselves. That means we can now see nighttime images. So where you're looking at applications like Google Earth in the daytime, and you're looking at the outside of the structure. With thermal infrared, you see the same picture, but at night, but also you get an influence of what's going on inside a building. So is that a carbon-polluting machine on or off? Fascinating. Okay. So what brings us together today is also news of an interesting partnership that your company just announced. Tell us a bit more about that. Yes. So we are partnering with leading providers and distributors and value-added partners around the world. And the one which is most notable at the moment is with Sahora, who's based in India. And they are a very strong player in distributing and adding value to Earth observation data. And they kindly managed to connect together. And we've got a great partnership going together where they're going to distribute our data to the Indian continent. I was going to say, it is really interesting to hear these partnerships across continents and across countries. You've got the UK and India partnering together, I think that in the space industry, that is genuinely really cool to hear these kind of partnerships happening. So what was it that sort of brought you together? What was it that Sahora provides that was appealing to you all? So they have an existing customer base and they're very well connected into the markets we want to distribute into. It's much better for us to use someone who is in-country experience with the customers and the customers. And so it leverages their expertise and our unique data set. They've shown they've been super successful with other people and we want them to be super successful with our data. So yeah, it's there's almost similar size to us as well. So we're not dealing with a massive corporate bureaucracy. They're very agile, innovative and yeah, it is a great partnership match from size and vision, etc. Fantastic. I would always love to hear if you don't mind indulging me, maybe what's next for Sadview, what we can what we should be keeping our ears out for in terms of news or activities from you all. So on a number of fronts, so this is the first partnership deal we've announced. So there will be more in different countries. So that's great news coming along and in different sectors as well. So we're going to see more economic activity and finance related applications coming out. Then we're going to be quite a lot of those pre-launch, which is quite unusual. Normally you wait till the launch of the satellite and then you get these type of sales. But our data is so compelling that people want to be able to secure this before launch. That's complementary to us. Then secondly, next year we'll be launching two satellites on SpaceX. So you'll see videos on SpaceX. You'll see PR from us and hopefully more great interviews with you next year. So it's all good news and all in the right direction. That's fantastic. Well, thank you for sharing that. Is there anything else that you want to share with our audience before we close out? Yeah, so I think you should also keep an eye out on some of the different applications, particularly the climate ones where we're hiring good people to look at that. So come and take a look at our website. I think that's going to be upgraded shortly as well. So hang follow us on the social media channels and please follow our story. We'll be right back. Welcome back. The Red Planet Mars. There it is. The Red Planet Mars. Nice to surprise us. A recent study from researchers at Cornell University have revealed very unlike Earth, we might not find water under Mars' polar ice caps and instead we might find what seems to be frost covered peaks on equatorial volcanoes. You may remember a few years ago there was some excitement about the possibility of an ocean under Mars' ice caps, which was fueled by radar echoes detected by ESA's Mars Express spacecraft. But the Cornell team have proposed an alternative explanation. Perhaps those echoes are caused by dusty ice layers and not liquid water. Meanwhile, observations from ESA's trace gas orbiter unveiled bluish deposits on four of Mars' equatorial volcanoes, which are particularly visible during colder seasons. These bluish deposits, identified as frost, disappear by the afternoon, suggesting a dynamic process at play there. Scientists speculate that unique microclimates within the summit calderas contribute to this frost formation and challenge our previous assumptions about Mars' climate and water distribution. So, while frost decorates the tropical equatorial peaks on Mars of all places, the mystery of liquid water beneath Mars' polar ice caps remains unsolved. Still lots more to be done and learned when it comes to our understanding of the Red Planet's intriguing landscapes. That's it for T-Minus for June 11th, 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 prominent 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 Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. And I'm Marie Ovarmasis, your host. Thanks for listening, we'll see you tomorrow. T-Minus. T-Minus. T-Minus. [BLANK_AUDIO]