Voyager One is back to full operations.

In the summer of 1977, NASA launched the Voyager spacecraft mission to go further into space than ever before. The spacecraft, along with its twin, was able to conduct close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn and later passed by Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. In August 2012, Voyager 1 made the historic entry into interstellar space, the region between stars, filled with material ejected by the death of nearby stars millions of years ago. And in November 2023, Voyager started to have some problems transmitting data back through the deep space network. We thought it was a goner when only two scientific instruments came back online, but Voyager 1 is back to fully functioning. You know, Maria, it's got me thinking about what happens if Voyager makes contact with intelligent life outside of our solar system. Perhaps we should have called it "Apology." Ah, the face you're making makes that even better. Apology. That is a good one. That's a good one. I like it. T-minus. Twenty seconds to L-O-I, Venus. Open aboard. Today is June 14th, 2024. Happy birthday, Army. I'm Maria Varmausus. I'm Alice Baruth, and this is T-minus. Voyager 1's four science instruments are all fully operational. Starliners stay on the ISS, extended until June 22nd. Blue Origin, accepted by USSF for the National Security Space Launch Program. And our guest today is Bailey Rykels, founding partner at Aegis Law and board member at the Association Commercial Space Professionals. Bailey will be telling us about the next ACSP event this fall, so stay with us for more details. Happy Friday, everybody. Let's get into our end of briefing. I started singing and I messed myself up. Let's get into our end of the week briefing, shall we? And we're starting off with some very happy news. That's why I'm singing. Space nerds are all excited to hear, myself included, that Voyager 1 is officially back online. It's the first time that the spacecraft has been able to conduct normal science operations since November 2023. All four science instruments are now fully functioning, allowing the probe to resume gathering information about interstellar space. Welcome back, Voyager 1. We missed you. Yay. And we're all hoping and praying that Sunny and Butch have figured out their underwear situation as NASA and Boeing are extending their stay on the International Space Station until June 22. NASA says the extension is giving them more time to finalise planning for the complicated process of undocking the Starliner capsule from the ISS. Starliner, while designed for future six-month missions, can stay docked to the ISS for a maximum of 45 days during its current mission. A fifth leak of helium, which is used to pressurise Starliner's propulsion system thrusters, was also found, and separately an oxidiser valve has been stuck. It's not been confirmed if these issues are contributing to the latest postponement of the capsule return. NASA has announced a new system to support disaster response organisations in the United States and around the world. The US Space Agency's Disaster Response Coordination System gathers science, technology, data and expertise from across the agency and provides it to emergency managers. The new system will be able to provide up-to-date information on fires, earthquakes, landslides, floods, tornadoes, hurricanes and other extreme events. According to Karen St. Germain, director of NASA's Earth Science Division, the new system is designed to deliver trusted, actionable earth science in ways and means that can be used immediately to enable effective response to disasters and ultimately help save lives. Super cool. Welcome to the table, Blue Origin. The US Space Force has awarded Jeff Bezos's space company, along with SpaceX and United Launch Alliance, spots on a potential 10-year contract valued at up to US$5.6 billion. The multiple award-indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract known as an IDIQ is to provide launch services as part of the third phase of the National Security Space Launch Programme known as NSSL. The Department of Defense has provided this contract for lane one of the NSSL Phase 3 Programme, which will procure launch services to deliver national security payloads to their intended orbits. The contract has an initial five-year ordering period that will run through June 2029. Blue Origin will get a $5 million task order to perform an initial capabilities assessment and explain its approach to tailored mission assurance. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, also known as CISA, has released a report highlighting the rapid integration of satellites, spacecraft, and their ground-based infrastructure into daily life. Titled "Space Systems Security and Resilience Landscape - Zero Trust in the Space Environment," the document outlines how space systems enable essential services, including healthcare, telecommunications, internet infrastructure, transportation, energy, and financial systems. The report primarily analyzes and defines opportunities for applying zero-trust principles across space infrastructure, as the US government did make the move towards zero-trust architecture back in 2022. Relying on the NIST cybersecurity framework components and concepts, this new report seeks to analyze where and how the framework can be applied specifically across space infrastructure. And you can find the full 18-page report in the link included in our show notes. Astroscale Japan's demonstration satellite, active debris removal by Astroscale Japan known as ADRAS-J, has successfully completed the safe and controlled approach to an unprepared space debris object, a rocket upper stage, to a relative distance of approximately 50 meters. Pretty impressive. The satellite was able to collect images and data while maintaining a controlled fixed-point relative position from the upper stage. Astroscale has released a second image from the mission, taken in May, which follows the first image released on April 26, captured from several hundred meters behind the debris. The ADRAS-J mission has reached several milestones since rendezvous operations began on February 22. In the next phase, ADRAS-J will attempt to capture additional images of the upper stage through various controlled close-approach operations. The images and data collected are expected to be crucial in better understanding the debris and providing critical information for future removal efforts. NATO's Space Operations Command held a second annual conference this week on future security and warfare. The conference aimed to capitalize on NATO, national innovation and engagement activities in order to strengthen ties between NATO allies and partners. Space has been an operational domain for the North Atlantic Treaty Organization since 2019. Floridian businesses and organizations such as Space Florida have sent a joint letter to Congress to express strong support for the Secure US Leadership in Space Act of 2024. The legislation would make Spaceport Facility Bond's tax exempt in line with most airports and seaports. To learn more about the need for spaceport infrastructure support, then listen to our deep space episode dropping on Saturday called "The Growing Importance of Spaceports to the World Economy." And in a story that exemplifies why you should be careful what you wish for, the Federal Aviation Administration has received public input for their environmental assessment of the SpaceX Super Heavy launches. And they're not all positive, big surprise. The FAA and SpaceX are walking through the process to prepare Launch Pad 39A for up to 44 launches a year of the Starship Mega Rocket. And the FAA held a series of meetings this week in Florida asking for public input on the process, and were met with understandable concerns raised by local residents about the impact on the ecosystem around the launch site. More details can be found in the Florida Today article linked in our show notes, along with the virtual meeting details, which will be held on June 17th. That concludes today's Intel Briefing. As always, you'll find information on all the stories that we've mentioned by following the links in our show notes. We've also added an announcement from Red Wire on their new legal counsel and a story from Aerojet Rocket Dine on delivering the 1000th Bad Rocket Boost Motor. What a great milestone. Hey T-minus crew, tune in tomorrow for D-minus Deep Space. It's 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 a recording from a Global Space Port Alliance panel discussion on Capitol Hill talking about the importance of spaceports in the U.S. and global economy. Check it out while you're doing your weekend chores or traveling to New Mexico in preparation for the Spaceport America Cup, which, by the way, starts on Monday. Woohoo! You don't want to miss it. Our guest today is Bailey Reichelt, founding partner at Agus Law and board member at the Association of Commercial Space Professionals. ACSP is hosting a new event this fall, and I asked Bailey to tell us all about it. So this year, October 4th is our DC event. It's going to be at the National Press Club and it's the U.S. Space Nuclear Policy Summit. And the goal of this event is to look at nuclear energy sources for space, whether it's propulsion or radioactive batteries, basically, or whether it's fission reactors. And we're going to be talking about the regulations and where we have enough of them, maybe too many of them, where they fall short in the gaps and steps to take to move forward between commercial space and regulators. We've got some really great speakers lined up that I'm super excited about. So from the commercial side, we have Alex Gilbert, who will be representing Xenopower. We have Kevin Maconson from Ultra Safe Nuclear Company. We have Travis Chadlin from BWX Technologies. Bob Yolow is actually going to be involved. She's moderating a panel on the commercial lunar payload services. We'll also be having Dan Clayton from Sandia National Labs. We've got Atomos Nuclear as well. That panel, commercial space panel, it's actually moderated by Sigeek Fier. A lot of people know Sigeek. He's out on his own now, but he used to work at Blue Origin. Clarence Tolliver will be talking about Part 440 and indemnification to set us up for a panel talking about the Part 440 regulations and how they do and do not work for commercial nuclear. This will be Chris Kunstatter, Amy Avgene. Karen Schenoworks actually moderating that. And then we're hoping-- Can you tell me a bit-- Oh, I'm sorry. Go ahead. I was going to ask about Part 440. I was like, I don't quite know what that means. Can you tell me a bit about that? Oh, yeah. Yeah, I'm so sorry. So based on this, I just forgot-- It's totally OK. Yeah. So Part 440 is the insurance piece of launch licensing. So a lot of people know the Part 450 process because of what happened with VARDA and not getting reentry permissions. Well, there's other parts that the FAA is controlling for launch licensing. And there's actually an insurance and indemnification piece, and that's Part 440 of the regulations. When it comes to regulations, there are numbers. And I'm just like, I know I interviewed someone from the FAA about this, and I'm going, was it 440? Was it 440? So I just can't remember. Thankfully, there are people like yourself who know this stuff. So thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah, no worries. And I'm hoping that we can clarify the regulations to the point where you don't have to be a lawyer to understand how they work. That's kind of the ultimate goal of ACSP, with democratizing access to space, which means a lot of things. But to us, it means lowering regulatory barriers. How do you do that? It also means taking some of the legalese out of this. So we're trying. Yeah. And I was going to say, I am fascinated by, I mean, okay, nuclear energy, I've always been really fascinated by just because of the science personally, but also because of its role in space. To me, when you're combining, I mean, it's been a part of space for a while, but I would imagine from the regulatory standpoint, just space was complicated enough. You start adding nuclear to it. I can't even imagine how to navigate that. Well, that's the thing is regulators can't either. We still have a lot of gaps and we need to point them out because it's really hard on the industry side. We can't put ourselves very cleanly into the roles of regulators because they have a different set of concerns than commercial space does. But same vice versa, right? Regulators don't understand everything that impacts commercial space companies. We have to come together and talk about it. We have to share our viewpoints or we're creating rules in a vacuum. Yeah. And I would imagine especially for nuclear, just the emergence of commercial space in general is just still so new that, I mean, it's just green field at this point. Especially with the CLIPS mission, the commercial lunar payload services, we're looking at things like how do you survive the lunar night? How do you actually do some of these missions that we want to do that are either on the moon or going to Mars? Well, nuclear is one of the very obvious answers because we need better power sources and we have to create a path forward and we've got contracts out there asking companies to work on these solutions, but we haven't paid the regulatory path for them to move forward, at least on the purely commercial standpoint. If the mission is sponsored by NASA or DoD, we kind of have a path, but we're moving away from that. We want the commercial sector to stand on its own. So now we have to deal with the regulations or the lack of regulations or the lack of clarity in how a commercial company can actually do this successfully. It's such an interesting place to be right now. That's really cool. So I think I also interrupted you midstream. You were going through the guests because I was like, part 440, I feel like I should know that. In fact, I really should. But I just needed a reminder of what that was. Sorry. You were also going through more of the agenda. So I apologize if you wanted to pick up there. No, no, that's it. We're talking to some government panelists and trying to get their participation. We feel pretty good, FAA and NASA are participating. We can't name names yet. As anyone who's tried to plan an event knows, you usually don't get government commitment to the last minute. So stay tuned. We'll have a lot of updates on this. And you can follow ACSP on LinkedIn to get most current updates. We're hoping to advance this conversation forward on nuclear solutions. And fun fact, a lot of people don't know about the different nuclear energy sources that we actually use in spacecraft already. Like, Perseverance, the Perseverance rover had a nuclear battery. It was based on a rate of decay and it generated heat to keep the electronics warm. You can also generate electricity that way. But what we've not done in a really long time is an actual fission reactor. Rush has done it quite a bit. We did it once and some subcomponents failed. This was the, I believe it was called the SNAP reactor. But we haven't done it much since. So we don't have a lot of, well, we haven't done it all since. We don't have precedent for nuclear fission reactors on spacecraft or licensing propulsion. So these are two big outstanding questions. And a lot of people assumed we've done it and we haven't yet. So all right, let's switch gears entirely from the event that you were just talking about to something really cool that is not ACSP related. So we were talking about a calculator that Aegis has worked on. Can you just give me the idea? Like, what is this? Lay it out for me. So this is the space regulatory calculator. So it's on our website, under our resources tab. It's free. It's a starting point for space, just space companies. I guess it's targeted towards space startups, but any new entrant to space really. You go on there. It's for US companies and the questions target and assume a US jurisdiction. So it still works if you're international, but it doesn't work as accurately. So it assumes you're a US based space company. And then it goes through five primary regulators and you give it some mission variables through a series of yes/no questions. And it answers the primary three questions of which agencies am I going to need to talk to? How long is it going to take to get whatever authorization I need from them? And how much is it going to cost? And it gives you regulatory fees. So the caveat here is it's a series of yes/no questions. So it can't be super-duper accurate. It also can't take into account things it doesn't know. Like, we know regulatory costs that are published in the Federal Register. We don't know how many consulting hours or attorney hours you might need to help you figure out how to build your Schedule S for the FCC or your DSP-5 for the State Department. That's a standard export license for the State Department. So it can't tell you all of that. It can give you general timelines based on what we're seeing trending right now. Of course, regulatory timelines, some are fixed, some move a lot. Some are theoretically fixed, but the government can stop them at random intervals, which extends your timelines. So the benefit of it is it gives you an idea of the questions you need to be answering and asking right on the front end. It gives you definitions you need to become familiar with before you even set a conversation with outside counsel or consulting firm. And you need to be thinking about regulations from the inception of your company. And I hope it drives that point home when you get to, "Oh, I have multiple two-year timelines to get agencies to approve what I need them to approve." Because a lot of companies really focus on developing their technology and fundraising. And then they sign the launch contract, they're about a year out normally when they do that. And then they realize, "Oh, shoot, I chose an antenna that has only the ability to operate in this frequency per the FCC, and it's going to be highly contested. And it's going to take me a long time in a lot of external counsel hours or something to argue that I should be allowed to use that frequency allocation." You don't want to be on contract and then discovering that you need to re-engineer which antenna you're choosing because of the regulatory battle you're about to fight. This can set you way, way back. And Aegis, my law firm, I have a founding partner, Jack, and we have four primary partners, Will Lewis and Kelly Cobble. We got together and said, "Hey, you know, a lot of our companies come to us when it's way too late. We need to put something out there that helps them understand just how big this burden is before they even get to engaging. They need a way to know this information that doesn't have lawyers attached to it because when it gets to talking to lawyers, I think that's scary for a lot of people, but we still need to get the information out there. So it's now in a calculator that my husband, Chris Reichelt, helped us code in literally the basement of my house in the evenings over the last year. So for those of you who are like, "This interface sucks," yes, it does, but it was built by lawyers and my husband in our basement for free. So that's the story. This is really cool. And as someone who is not launching anything, but just is, I'm going through the exercise just for fun because honestly, there's so much I seriously don't know. Yeah. How would you even know you didn't know this stuff? As you said, people are coming to you all and not knowing they don't know. It's just, yeah, wow, fascinating. It's absolutely. We needed a way to get the information out there. And I am hoping that there are other iterations of the calculator. My husband's already told us we're going to have to hire someone for those iterations. So we're working on it. Those conversations are happening. We've had a lot of requests to do an international facing calculator. That might be the next iteration just because, yeah, you have to assume jurisdiction when you ask some of these questions. When we do an intake as a firm, that's kind of the question list we would run through. The firm tries to focus holistically on all the regulations and they overlap in lots of places. Right. And when agencies, they do this thing called an interagency review when you submit a license application to them. And a lot of times that's what they're doing is they're talking to everyone else involved in the process among the regulators and getting input and FCC and State Department and DOD, they all talk to each other. So there's intersection everywhere and we try to take into account those intersections when we first do an intake and basically the calculator is the regulatory intake form. We'll be right back. Welcome back. You might remember us talking to Lone Star data holdings about their data center that flew on the intuitive machine's mission to the moon earlier this year. Well, it seems that the payload carried a rather important image of Dr. Kelpan Achala, the first Indian-worn astronaut who died in the Columbia disaster. The Institute of Space Commerce arranged for the image of Dr. Kelpan Achala taken aboard Space Shuttle Columbia in 1997 to be sent to the lunar surface as part of a 2024 mission led by Lone Star data holdings. Madhu Tangavelu, advisor at the Dr. Kelpan Achala Scholarship Project, said, "Hosting it on the lunar surface is a reminder of her legacy and an inspiration to future generations." We certainly hope so, and we're sure it's only the first of many important images that will be stored in the commercial data center on the lunar surface and preserved for many generations to come. Well, that's it for T-minus for June 14, 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. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like the show and we do hope that you do, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send us an email to space@n2k.com. We're privileged that N2K's 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 Carruth. 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 Iban. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. And I'm your host, Marie Overmazes. Thanks for listening. Have a great weekend. [MUSIC] [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]