Florida Man Sues NASA.

A spent battery pallet from the ISS did not just gently go into that good night. Some of it punched a hole through a house in Naples, Florida. So who could blame the homeowners, who have filed a claim against NASA, for them to repay damages to their property, among other things? Let's be real, if space debris rained down from the sky to Yorubaude, narrowly missing one of your kids, yeah, you would sue too if it happened to you. Today is June 24th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmausis, and this is T-minus. NASA's getting sued over space junk. Space debris rains down in China. Japan's inspective raises over $43 million and a new funding round. And our T-minus producer, Alice Karuth, will be bringing us the results from the 2024 Space Port America Cup, leader in the program today. So stay with us for that update. Happy Monday, everybody! Let's get into our intel briefing. A Florida family is suing NASA for damages after their home was hit by space debris made by a spent battery pallet that was released from the ISS in 2021. You might remember some of this story from this past April. The roughly 1.6-pound piece of debris basically went right through this house, puncturing the home of the Otero family, through the roof and the subfloor. And its impact was just a few feet away from where the family's 19-year-old son was sitting. If you need more of a refresher on what happened to complete with the audio from the debris's impact, our episode 247 from April 2, 2024, gets into more detail. Luckily, no one was hurt by the space debris impact, but the house certainly needed repairs. And the claim filed by the Otero family against NASA is not only to recover the costs from the property damage, but also for business interruption damages, emotional and mental anguish damages, and the cost for assistance from third parties required in the process, in other words, legal fees. Mika Wynworthy, the legal representative for the Otero family, said this in a statement. This space debris claim is historical in that it involves a real-life example of the consequences of space debris surviving to the Earth's surface, how NASA responses claim will form the foundation upon which the legal landscape in this field will be built. And for those of you more familiar with space law, the Space Liability Convention, which would hold NASA accountable for damages in an international situation, does not apply in this case because the damage occurred within the United States. So instead, the Otero family's attorney filed a federal torts claim act negligence claim against NASA, and the attorney added this, "Here, the U.S. government through NASA has an opportunity to set the standard or set a precedent as to what responsible, safe and sustainable space operations ought to look like. If NASA were to take the position that the Oteros claims should be paid in full, it would send a strong signal to both other governments and private industries that such victims should be compensated regardless of fault." And speaking of debris falling from the sky, an incredible video was shared over the weekend of a piece of space debris falling onto a village in China. If you haven't seen the images, then we suggest looking them up because it is unreal and honestly quite scary to see what it looks like to see a rocket part falling from the sky spewing yellow smoke into a village. We can only assume that the images and the videos taken are from the booster of the Long March 2C rocket that launched on June 22 from Shichang. Witnesses took to social media to say that they heard a loud explosion after the debris crashed into the ground. A now-deleted government notice shared online reportedly told residents to leave their homes and other buildings an hour before the launch and scatter out into more open areas to observe the sky. They were then warned to keep away from the debris to prevent harm from "toxic gas and explosions," according to the notice. The videos and accounts cannot be independently verified, we should note, and the Chinese government has not released a statement about the event nor has it responded to any media requests. After last week's news that Rocket Lab signed a 10-launch deal with the satellite company Sinspective, the Tokyo-based company has announced new investment. Sinspective have raised $7 billion, which amounts to over $43 million, in a series C funding round. The synthetic aperture radar company aims to have a constellation of 30 satellites in space by the end of the decade. Sinspective says they will use the new capital to develop, manufacture, launch and operate their SAR satellites, prepare mass production facilities, develop satellite data solutions, and expand globally. Just a few small plans then. North Korean hackers have been linked to a new malware campaign targeting aerospace and defense companies. The campaign, which has been referred to as "Nikki," uses job description lures to deliver a multi-stage attack that ultimately installs a powerful backdoor on victim systems. The backdoor gives attackers remote access and the ability to execute commands, download additional payloads, and exfiltrate sensitive data. Companies in targeted sectors are advised to be on high alert and implement robust security measures against sophisticated phishing and malware campaigns. And we've seen sensational headlines claiming definite delays and stranded astronauts after Boeing and NASA released the news that they were postponing the return of the Boeing Star liner capsule until early July. However, we like to try and remain a little more grounded here at T-minus. In reality, the Starliner capsule has experienced faults with their thrusters and multiple helium leaks and the team understandably wants to collect data on those issues before the crew return to Earth. The service module, where the thruster issues happen to be occurring, burns up on reentry and they would no longer be able to study the system or make adjustments once that happens. So in the meanwhile, Sonny and Butch remain in good spirits. We're still more concerned about their wardrobe, if you know you know! And speaking of delays on the ISS, Spacewalk 90 got cancelled again this morning, this time due to a spacesuit cooling unit, Waterleak. The leak was found in the cooling umbilical unit on the NASA astronaut Tracy Dyson's spacesuit. Dyson and Mike Barrett set their suits to battery power at 8.46am ET and opened the hatch to the space station's "Pwest" airlock before reporting the water issue. Over to Europe now, and the first Arian 6 rocket to launch into space went through its last full wet dress rehearsal in French Guiana last week. The run-through provided a sneak peek of what's to come, stopping just a few seconds before engine ignition. Vsays G. Pilchen, Arian 6 launcher project manager, said in the press release that the wet dress rehearsal is the very final milestone before launch, allowing teams to fine-tune the delicate operations required up until liftoff, using the real rocket's actual flight hardware and software for the first time. And we should note the vehicle is scheduled to actually launch on July 9th. And speaking of Europe's spaceport in French Guiana, Spain's PLD space has announced an investment of 10 million euros in a launch complex at the Guiana Space Center. PLD space is aiming for its first launch of its Miura 5 rocket at the end of 2025. If PLD space is able to meet that deadline, the launch will make them the first non-institutional launch operator that will go into orbit from the ESA spaceport. Paris-based space startup Skynape has raised $3.1 million. The funding announcement comes just months after two former loft orbital directors established it. Skynape aims to bring the simplicity of mobile phone connectivity to low-orbit satellites and the constellation sector. The company is aiming to establish worldwide service for satellite operators to connect their satellites using its hybrid network of ground antennas. The funding will go into setting their mission in motion. Firefly Aerospace has announced that its Alpha Flight 5 mission, called Noise of Summer, is scheduled to launch no earlier than June 26th. Alpha Flight 5 supports Firefly's Venture-class Launch Services Demo 2 contract with NASA that serves to validate the capabilities of launch vehicles that support a new launch class and provide more access to space for small satellites and spacecraft. The mission will deploy the eight payloads selected through NASA's CubeSat launch initiative, providing U.S. educational institutions and nonprofits with low-cost access to space. And that concludes our briefing for today. Head to the selected reading section of our show notes and click on the links to find out more information on all of the stories we've mentioned throughout the show. And we've also included a link to UNUSA's new gender mainstreaming toolkit for the space sector. Don't know what that means, neither do we, but we're going to check it out anyway. And also, there's an announcement from AST SpaceMobile on a new board member. Hey T-minus crew, every Monday we produce a written intelligence roundup. It's called Signals in Space. So if you happen to miss any T-minus episodes, this 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.n2k.com. Our ardent T-minus listeners know that last week was the Spaceport America Cup and our one and only T-minus producer, Alice Grewith, was there covering the whole thing, seeing all the excitement. So Alice, welcome back. Tell me about it. What was it like? It was really hot. Unsurprisingly, it was an incredible, incredible event. It's the largest one they've had today. This event has been going on since 2007, I believe, not earlier. So it's quite a long time of running this through the IREC into Spaceport America Cup. It came to New Mexico in 2017 and now has run for the last several years in New Mexico. And I've been involved since 2018 and it was just amazing. 122 teams from around the world came to New Mexico to launch over a three and a half day period. Not all of them did manage it. It always goes out to those teams that have that last minute issue that goes on. But that's real life and it's a really good opportunity for them to see how things work from the whole process of designing a vehicle all the way through to launching and recovering it and then finding out at the end of it how well they did. Yeah, and then the weather also is always that wild card. What's that joke that everyone who's into launches a minor meteorologist because the weather was better than last year but still challenging this year, right? It's challenging every year. The New Mexico is obviously notorious for being high desert, hot, dry heat. But on top of that, we get the monsoon weather coming around late June. But this year was a little bit early again. So day one, they had a Hibub rolled through. It was a 200 mile wide Hibub that rolled through the region, managed to knock out all the infrastructure that had been put into place to keep this team safe and secure from the sun. So Thursday morning, they were scrambling to get that all back into operation before people came back onto site. Then wind cancellation came in. So Thursday afternoon by one o'clock, they had to shut the range down because the winds were over 20 miles per hour sustained winds. So we couldn't be able to launch that point. And then on Friday, we had rain, which is a really rare occurrence in New Mexico. It rained? It rained. Which isn't normally a massive issue for launching, but that meant the cloud cover was particularly low. And because of the fact that it's run by Tripoli that has very stringent rules about launching into clouds, the students had to wait till the rain passed. And so there was only about a four hour window then. Saturday morning on the other hand was perfect. Clear blue skies, great weather. So they managed to get everything launched off in the end. So yeah, incredibly they got over 112, I think launches all together over that three and a half day period. That must have been just like one after the other, just sort of an assembly line of rockets at one point. What was that like when you were out there? You know, it's a lot of trial and error. The people that put on this event at the Experimental Sounding Rocket Association are all volunteers. Actually, they do work in the industry and do this as a full time job. Some of them have got very little experience outside of, you know, doing this as an amateur hobby, shall we say. But they've got this down to a fine art now. They know it's better to get them all lined up on the rails together and then launch them in a five to 10 minute sequence knowing when the sky is clear, they can just get them through rapidly. So yeah, they were very well prepared for exactly what was going to happen. And they managed to get them on the rails and up and launch really quickly and hats off to the people that organized this because they make it look really easy. But it's a lot of hard work behind the scenes, a lot of preparation, a lot of time and a lot of lessons learned every year that they come back and improve things for the students because that's what it's all about. It's about making sure these students get access to launch. Yes. Let's talk about the students then. So before we get into who won and all that good stuff, you were there, I mean, it was several, you were there like basically a week. I mean, not just the days that you were on camera, which you did great by the way, just even the days off camera too. You were there a whole long time. So you got to know a lot of these teams. You made friends. I mean, you have really cool stories. Tell us about some of these teams that you met, like these people that you even knew before, just best buddies now. Yeah, some of them are students that have been there year after year and are now coming to graduation and they're handing over the legacy of learning from what they've done in past years. I met them for the first time and that's always really exciting. I always adopt the British teams because I know how difficult it was coming from the UK to this really dry, high heat. So I'm always the one that's running around saying, "Make sure you stay hydrated and keep yourself doing well." But this year we had teams from Turkey, Algeria, the Philippines, Thailand, Brazil, Australia, New Zealand and I was absolutely blown away by how well they did, not just to get to the point of being able to come and launch, but to get their stuff over because it's such a difficult thing to get into the US, get their visas lined up, be prepared and they all kept incredible spirits the whole way through the week. They were supporting each other, they were doing everything they can to support the people that were launching. They very much were part of the team spirit and I think they recognized that very much so in the awards ceremony. There were a couple of awards for not only supporting people within your team, but supporting the event as a whole and I think that was really incredible to see. So when that Hiboub ran in, I was telling the team earlier that 120 places were set up underneath these great infrastructure tents to keep them out of the sun under the shade. The Hiboub came in and took it down to only 20 spaces left. So there were teams that volunteered their time to turn up early the next day to help get those structures back in place and they were then really well recognized at the end of the awards ceremony. And there were actual rockets being launched. And all of this, there were a lot of rockets launched. So tell me, do you remember who all the winners are? Because there was a lot of different winners. I don't want to put you on the spot if you need to get notes. No, I wrote it all down because you know you're right, there are so many different categories and I really am just going to focus on the 10K Cots, which is the commercial off the shelf, the 10K SRAD, which is the student research and development and then the 30K categories. So the 10K Cots winners were Istanbul University, whose first time launch is out here, incredible work that they did. Turkey is having a year. Yeah, they really are. I mean, they had five teams. They were doing so well on such a great attitude the whole way through. 10K SRAD was won by the University of Maryland. The 30K Cots was by the University of Canterbury from New Zealand. And then the 30K SRAD was the University of Minnesota Twin Cities. And I just want to have a quick shout out to the teams that we spoke to ahead of time, which was BYU that won the Best Payload Challenge and Best Video. So they really put a lot of marketing effort into what they were doing and actually came runners up in the 10K Cots category. So congratulations to BYU. And the Best Visual Telemetry went to WPI. So really great that we spoke to both those teams ahead of time. They both did really, really well. And of course the final, the Genesis Cup, which is the overall Cup winners trophies, is a collective judging choice. So it's not just about who got the most accurate. It was about everything, attitude, the way they did everything, the whole performance. And they chose the University of Maryland College Park. So congratulations to that team. And hopefully we'll get them on later this week to talk through how they won and what they did to make sure that they were the top winners. Oh, congratulations to them. That's on to everybody, really. I mean, not to be too apollion, but you got that far. That's pretty amazing. Any favorite moments, Ella, so it's probably hard to choose some, but do you want any, any things that really stand out on a personal level? On a personal level, I was part of the live stream team this year and they did such an incredible job. There's a lot of volunteers behind the scene that, again, don't do this as a full-time job, put a lot of effort into planning the whole thing, making sure that when there was downtime, knowing that there could be problems with weather and the range closing down, that there was plenty of activity going on to keep audiences interested. And they got about 1,500 people, even on down times when the range was completely shut down, but there were still people that were tuning in, finding out what was going on. And so hats off to them because they made it look easy. They made it seamless. They really put so much into it this year and they've learned from every year and I just know that next year they're going to come back bigger and better. And if you haven't seen the live stream, go check it out on the website. Soundingrocket.org is the experimental Sounding Rockets web address and you can go on to their YouTube page to find out more. And again, these are all volunteers that give up their time, that pay for themselves to come to New Mexico, to come and do this for well over a week of putting this whole event together, making sure these students get support to be able to launch. And they're just amazing. Every year I'm blown away and this year I took my kids and my husband out to the event and they were also equally blown away by just how much effort went into this and just how rewarding it was for the teams that were involved. So thank you so much for letting me be part of it and congratulations to everybody involved. [Music] We'll be right back. Welcome back. It has been a really fun year to be an enjoyer of pretty things happening in space, what with the unexpected auroras and the total solar eclipses. Undoubtedly in a few decades we'll hear from astrophysicists who will point to these events as the moment they knew that they wanted to study the cosmos. And there is an upcoming cosmic event due to happen very soon that is going to make a lot more baby astronomers. T Corona Borrealis or TCRB is due to go Nova as soon as this summer. Every 80 years TCRB has a recurring Nova. It isn't going to light up the night sky or anything super dramatic like that. But once it's Nova occurs for about a week it'll look like we have a suddenly new super bright star in the sky. But it'll just be TCRB repeating its 80 year cycle. When it happens and I should note it has not happened yet in the Northern Hemisphere you'll be able to see TCRB tucked into the Corona Borrealis constellation basically on a straight line between the stars Vega and Arcturus. In the good news for anyone else like me who can see almost no stars in the night sky because of light pollution Vega and Arcturus are extremely bright and are often the only two stars that I can easily see at night personally. So the TCRB Nova when it happens should be easily visible between those two stellar guide posts. And if you are blessed with darker skies you'll want to find the U-shaped Corona Borrealis constellation which is next to the constellation Hercules. And TCRB's Nova is a regular occurrence because TCRB is not a single star but a binary system a white dwarf slowly pulling hydrogen away from a dying red giant. Over time that hydrogen builds up enough to cause a big bright thermonuclear explosion that graces our skies as a spectacularly bright light. And then the process starts again. It is a regular recurrence unlike a massive dramatic supernova that big final boom that can happen with some stars when they die. And there is a widespread belief that the star beetle juice is likely to go supernova soon. But temper your expectations for that one because that's on the cosmic scale where soon means sometime in the next 1000 years. So maybe don't wait up for that one. That's it for T-Minus for June 24th, 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 short review in your favorite podcast out. Also if you could fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com we would be so grateful. 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 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 Iben. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Varmazes. Thank you for listening. We will see you tomorrow. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]