Today is Day 1 of the world's largest intercollegiate rocket engineering competition, the Spaceport America Cup. Teams from around the world have arrived in Las Cruces, New Mexico and had their range safety inspection of their rockets. Tomorrow we'll be heading to the convention centre to see those rockets on display. Good luck to all of those who have made it this far. Oh and one more thing, today is our 300th episode. Thanks for sticking with us crew. Today is June 17th 2024. I'm Alice Karoof and this is T-minus. DARPA selects red wire for a very low earth orbit demonstration. MDA tracks hypersonic launch from space. China test fires a new engine designed for lunar missions. And our guest today is Jeff Nunn, space curator at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. We're going to be discussing their new exhibit that recently opened called Home Beyond Earth. So stay with us for that chat. Happy Monday all! We're all familiar with Geostationary orbit or Geo, Medium Earth orbit or MEO, or even Low Earth orbit or LEO. But are you as acquainted with VLEO? Very low Earth orbit is the subject of a new DARPA mission. The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency, aka DARPA, has selected red wire as the prime mission integrator for the development of an air breathing satellite that will demonstrate the use of novel electric propulsion systems in VLEO. VLEO spacecraft fly above airborne anti-access areas while operating significantly closer to the area of responsibility on the ground than existing satellites. Unlike LEO, MEO and Geo, debris from VLEO deorbit's in hours or days rather than in decades or more. Red wire's Sabersap vehicle will be used to support critical VLEO technology advancements for DARPA's Otter program. Red wire will be responsible for building the Sabersap bus, advancing the critical technologies necessary for the mission, and integrating, coordinating and leading the team for the project. Details were left out from the press release on the value of the contract and the timeline for the mission. Last week we mentioned that the US missile defence agency planned to track its first hypersonic launch from space, and it seems that the agency completed its mission. In a statement late last week, MDA shared that initial reports show that the stensors successfully collected data after launch. MDA will continue to assess flight data over the next several weeks. The agency didn't disclose the date of the flight, which took off from Wallops Island in Virginia. Kepler Communications says that they successfully validated their optical inter-satellite links known as OISLs between two data relay satellites in low Earth orbit. Kepler established optical inter-satellite links between two pathfinder satellites equipped with space development agency compatible optical terminals. The pair of satellites were launched in November of 2023 to demonstrate technology for the company's space data relay constellation. The first file transferred over the optical connection was a recent picture of Kepler's global team gathered near its headquarters in Toronto, Canada, SuperCube. Over to China now, and the country's completed a series of tests last week on a new engine system designed for future lunar missions. The system composed of three YF100K engines will be installed on the first stage of the Long March 10, a three and a half stage rocket designed to carry over 27 tonnes of payload to the Earth to Moon transfer orbit. A report from China Media Group said that the test was the largest scale engine test ever conducted for a Chinese rocket under development, and during the test the engines generated a ground thrust of 382 tonnes. Next up is a second ground test of the first stage propulsion system, which is scheduled to take place soon. A joint mission between the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the European Space Agency that aims to deepen the understanding of the connection between the Earth and Sun has reached a major milestone. Work on the development of In-Orbit Detectors for the Solar Wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer, or SMILE, mission has been completed. The mission aims to observe the dynamic interaction between solar wind and the Earth's magnetosphere. SMILE is scheduled for launch in 2025 from Europe's spaceport in French Guyana. Israeli satellite communications company Satix-V says that it will be supplying Prime 2 space-grade chips and software over the coming five quarters for an undisclosed customer. The company's Prime 2 space-grade chip is a digital beam-former application-specific integrated circuit designed for multiple input, multiple output antennas in space. The contract value is more than $20 million and is a follow-up order to an earlier $4 million order from September 2023. And NASA has rescheduled the Spacewalk 90 on the International Space Station for next Monday, June 24. Spacewalk 90, which was planned for last Thursday at the ISS, did not proceed as scheduled due to a space suit discomfort issue. No further details were shared about the issue, though NASA says the crew members on the station are healthy and the space suits are functioning as expected. The June 24 spacewalk will focus on radio frequency group hardware removal. That concludes our briefing for this Monday. Follow the links in the selected reading section of our show notes to find more information on all the stories mentioned throughout the show. You'll also find an additional article on NASA's Roman mission using a supercomputer to simulate images of the cosmos. Super cool stuff. Hey, T-miners crew, on Mondays we produce a written intelligence roundup. It's called Signals in Space. If you happen to miss any T-minus episodes, the Strategic Intelligence product will get you up to speed in the fastest way possible. It's all signal, no noise. You can sign up for signals in space in our show notes or at space.ntk.com. My guest today is Jeff Nunn, curator at the Museum of Flight in Seattle. The museum has just opened up a new exhibit on space stations called Beyond Earth. For first I asked Jeff to tell me more about the museum. So the Museum of Flight is located on Boeing Field, south of Seattle. We are the largest private non-governmental air and space museum in the world. We've got roughly 450,000 square feet of exhibit space that ranges from lots of aviation history content all the way up through the future of spaceflight and what's coming next. Some of our kind of highlight artifacts are we have an MD-21, which is a variant of the Blackbird spy plane that has a drone mounted on it on its back. It's one of the rarest variants of that particular vehicle. We also have a British Airways Concorde, which people can walk through. We have the very first jet to serve as Air Force One, SAM 970, which flew Kennedy, Nixon, Khrushchev, lots of various dignitaries. And one of the things we learned around 2019 with the 50th anniversary of the Apollo moon landing was that it was actually the aircraft that the astronauts took on their post landing around the world tour. So yeah, a lot of history here. We've got galleries dedicated to World War One, World War Two aviation. And then our largest artifact is Boeing's original aircraft factory nicknamed the Red Barn. And that is actually where this space station exhibit is located. So we have an exhibit about the past and future of space located in an aircraft factory from 1916. Wonderful. What a great way of marrying up space history and space future. Tell us about this exhibit. It's called Home Beyond Earth, correct? Yes. So Home Beyond Earth takes a look at the past, present and future of space stations. And one of the big things that we wanted to do with this exhibit was, you know, when we started researching, we were thinking about we have two separate permanent space galleries. One that tackles the beginnings of modern rocketry up through the moon landings and then the post-poll in 1970s. And then another that features NASA's space shuttle full fuselage trainer, which covers the shuttle era roughly mid-70s up through and then looking at the future and the current new space movement. So we thought about how do we differentiate this temporary exhibit on humans living in space from the two permanent galleries that definitely overlap content-wise. And one of the things we discovered was the cultural connection. So we started looking at how do we go beyond the stem of it, beyond the science and technology of getting to and living in space and really explore the deeper meaning and the deeper kind of human motivations for where we're so fascinated with living beyond Earth. It's a good question because we really are, aren't we? And I think for a lot of people, they think of living in space, they think of the ISS, but I believe that your exhibit actually goes way earlier than that and even includes some sci-fi as well. Can you tell us a bit about what people see when they come to it? Our collection actually has a fantastic amount of conceptual space station work that dates all the way back to before the space race in a lot of ways. And so we were trying to think about, okay, how do we marry this sort of these grand visions of space with space reality? And so the exhibit actually goes all the way back to the first fictional account of what could be considered a space station, which was from a story written in 1869 called the Brick Moon. And that year happened to be the same year that the Transcontinental Railroad was completed in the United States and the same year that the Suez Canal opened. And so if you think about that was a time when people were first considering the possibility of global connectivity and travel being a reality. And so this story comes along about trying to launch an artificial satellite to serve as a navigation aid, a second moon that ships could use to help coordinate their position. And then it accidentally launches with people on board while they're touring it and then they have to form this whole new civilization on board the Brick Moon. That's awesome. So are these miniature versions of space stations that we are looking at? And if so, are there any interaction parts of the exhibit? We have a lot of models of conceptual, fictional and real space stations. The exhibit in total is about 3,500 square feet. So not really enough room to fit any sort of full-size representation. But we go from the Brick Moon, we've got examples of the US Air Force's manned orbiting laboratory. We've got a model of the space station from the movie 2001, A Space Odyssey. In there we've got models of Salyut and Mir and the International Space Station and Skylab all in this exhibit that really show this progression of thinking. But interactivity is definitely a big part of this exhibit. And one of the things that our team did was we developed this sort of connected interactive through line, which we call our passport to space. And visitors can come and they get an RFID card that people go to the first station and they actually create their persona. So they enter a nickname, they select a cartoon avatar to represent them and then they write it to this card that they scan. And then the exhibit has four additional stations as they go through where they sort of build out their future life in space. And the first one they can select from a variety of space stations that will be their home space station that they live on. We pulled in stats from real space stations, fictional space stations, conceptual space stations, and you can compare these stations side by side and see how they compare up scale wise, all that sort of thing. So you can look at how large is the International Space Station compared to the Death Star, for example, or compared to Deep Space Nine. And then after you've done these comparisons and kind of played around with it, then you get to select which space station you want to be from. What is your original home space station? Then you move into the next area of the exhibit where you get to explore what sort of jobs might be available in the future of space. And so as the space community is growing and changing, the role of what we think of as an astronaut is also going to change. And so we have this interactive where you can select from your own personal interests. If you're interested in art or reading or hiking, all of these things you can can select those interests and then it will give you a list of job recommendations along with examples of how those jobs have already started to trickle into the space community through space history. And then you select your job role for your future space station. And then the final sort of content gathering station, you go through a survey that kind of asks you about your priorities. Why do you want to go to space? What do you want to do when you get there? What do you want to bring with you? Those sorts of questions. And then all of this gets written onto that same ID passport card. And then at the final station, you upload your virtual avatar to our museum of flight space station and you see yourself arrive and the role that you have and those sorts of things then impact what buildings and things you will gradually see on the space station. So we're building out the population there. We're almost to 2000 people on the museum of flight space station already. And then you can actually go and visit the station from home after you leave the exhibit on our website. You can check in on, okay, who else has joined you there? And what are they, what do they want to do in space? What a great way of taking that space fiction into space reality and really making a place for people to really imagine themselves in space. I find this exhibit really timely given that the commercial space stations are about to go and launch now when we're looking at Axia and we're looking at vast and others that are building their space station. How much are you exploring the future of what we're going to be doing in low earth orbit in space stations? Yeah, the future and the current moment in long-term space habitability was really key to why we chose to do this exhibit at this time. The International Space Station is scheduled to retire by the end of the decade and is we've got all of these various commercial players that are looking to develop replacements for it. And meanwhile, you've got, for example, the Chinese Cheonggong Space Station and the number of international space agencies starting to spin up at countries that have not traditionally had access to space. So we worked closely with a number of companies that are exploring these new opportunities, including Blue Origin, including Axium Space, the Aurelia Institute, Tethers Unlimited. They all provided objects and resources to the exhibit so that we're not just telling the history, but we're looking ahead to what's next and what the implications are for the in-space community. This exhibit is really one of the most collaborative efforts that we've ever undertaken with the museum. We worked with, as I mentioned, everyone from companies that are focused on the future of space to the Boeing Historic Archives, to the University of Washington, and everyone really came together. In a lot of ways, it's like the efforts in space themselves where you're much more successful when you're working as a team and crossing those boundaries in order to come together to make something happen. I know you've also got the Spaceship One at your museum as well, so you're really exploring that future of space travel from this commercial space age. You must have a personal favorite story from this exhibit because you must have done a lot of diving into what these space stations represent. What is your takeaway from this exhibit? There are a number of... I have a difficult time picking one particular story. One of the funnest rabbit holes that I really dove down was around space concept art. One of the things that I don't think gets enough airtime is that while we were undertaking these major engineering efforts, they were being supported by teams of artists who were helping to make these visions a reality. We really took a look into who was making this artwork and what roles did they have and what was their thinking around this. There was one particular set of images from our collection that did not have a whole lot in the way of detail around who created them. I managed to track down one of the signatures to an artist named Denise Watt. I got her story. I connected with her. We had wonderful conversations and found out that she had this incredible career story where she started out doing art for a team of students at Rice University who were working with NASA on some concepts and then went on to do work for NASA, for PBS, for the Nova television program, for things like Star Date calendars and had this career of space art that has kind of been disconnected from who she is as an artist. There are a number of examples of art working its way into the exhibit. Astronaut Nicole Stott very generously provided the original of her first watercolor that was painted in space on the International Space Station. Visitors who come through the exhibit can see that up close and personal, the original painting, which is right next to a video screen where she talks about her process of what it's like to paint in weightlessness. You mentioned that the exhibit is short term. How long have people got to come out to the Museum of Flight to see the exhibit themselves? Yes, so it opened on June 8th and it runs until January 20th of 2025. So you've got, I think about six or seven months to come here to Seattle and check out the exhibit. We'll be right back. Welcome back. I don't have to explain to fellow space geeks that space technology is doing some amazing things for those of us firmly on spaceship Earth. But I always think that we, the space community, could do more to explain to others outside of our bubble about the cool breakthroughs going on in space to do exactly that. So here's a use case for you. A new study in DeGroeter's journal of applied deodesse suggests that earthquakes may betray their impending presence much earlier than previously thought through a variety of anomalies. And get this, they can be detected using satellites. Researchers have long known about earthquake precursors, but it's been difficult to definitely identify a pattern of so-called red flags that could indicate an impending earthquake. That's where satellite data is key. They use satellite data to monitor a variety of physical and chemical parameters within the ground, atmosphere, and the layer of charged particles that exist above it, a.k.a. the ionosphere. Researchers found that by reviewing data collected ahead of previous earthquakes, there were striking anomalies such as electron density and electron temperature changes at one to five days before the earthquakes. The research concluded that studying these phenomena could pave the way for earthquake early warning systems, but they will need to assess other earthquakes in the future to more fully understand these patterns. Isn't science amazing? So here's a mission for you this week. Share this with a non-space person. Now they will know that we could possibly prevent death and destruction with early detection from space. Visit for T-minus for June 17th 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 that we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send me an email to space@n2k.com. We're 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 more at n2k.com. This episode was produced and presented by me, Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben. Our executive editor is Brandon Kaaf. Simone Petrella is our president, Peter Kelpie is our publisher and our host Maria Van Marles will be back later this week. Thanks for listening. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
