[SOUND] Mining on the moon, it's a concept that's slowly moving from the domain of sci-fi to sci-possible, if not increasingly, sci-imperative. And if I were to quiz you on what we'd wanna mine on the moon, some of you might say, well, there's water, so we're gonna need some of that. Some others of you might say, let's get those rare earth metals used in modern electronics. And those of you who are more energy focused might mention helium three. Those are all valid answers, of course, but thanks to what Changa Five, apparently found, there's now a new contender for precious materials to be found on the moon. [MUSIC] >> Today is June 26th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasus, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] China finds few layer graphing in moon samples. Blue Origin and ULA raise concerns over SpaceX operations. Collins reportedly backs out of its spacesuit contract. And our guest today is John Galloway, aka Das, who is the director of operations at nasaspaceflight.com with a chat recorded at last week's Spaceport America Cup. Don't miss it in the second half of the show. [MUSIC] Happy Wednesday, everybody. Let's get into our Intel briefing. And while China's Changa Six lunar mission just made it back to Earth yesterday, and the samples have been handed over to researchers, our top story today is something actually from its predecessor, Changa Five. A story published yesterday by CGTN is sure to peak the interest of our material scientists out there. A joint research group across several academic and scientific institutions in China, studying the Changa Five lunar samples, say that in one of the samples, they found flakes of naturally occurring few layer graphing. Don't confuse this with naturally occurring graphite. Here on Earth, anyway, graphene is something we have to make. And few layer graphene is an especially fragile nanomaterial, highly sought after for use in specialized applications, including sensors, supercapacitors, and batteries. And right now, making graphene in any form is a resource intensive, read expensive process. The discovery of this material naturally occurring on the moon, likely formed from a mix of volcanic activity, solar winds, and meteoric impacts, means scientists can try to take cues from the natural phenomenon that made it to manufacture graphene more easily and inexpensively here on Earth. And very likely, this discovery will spur future moon explorations to find out more about how this graphene formed. And from that story on the moon, now on getting there. You might recall that the Federal Aviation Administration opened the floodgates recently asking for public input on the environmental impact statement on the proposed federal actions to issue a vehicle operator license to SpaceX for Starship to launch out of the Cape. In news that made all the SpaceX fanboys big mad on the internet yesterday, public comments of concern to the FAA were made by both Blue Origin and ULA. Blue Origin says that the Starship and SpaceX's super heavy are expected to have a greater environmental impact than any other launch system currently operating at Kennedy Space Center and calls for the FAA to cap the rate of launches to limit that impact. Blue also wants the government to invest in more infrastructure at the launch facility to allow for other operators to avoid the impact of the increase in launch cadence. Elon Musk, for his part, his response to the calls while he took to his social media site X to slam the concerns saying that it's quote, "not cool of them to try and impede SpaceX progress" and posted, to other words, Sue Origin. I'm sure this is not the last we're going to hear of this tit for tat. And it doesn't look like the spacesuit saga on the ISS is going to be rectified anytime soon. NASA had selected Collins Aerospace to develop the next generation spacesuits for spacewalks, but reports are suggesting that the company is backing out of the contract. Collins and Axiom were both selected by the US Space Agency in 2022 for the new suit contract, which was worth up to three and a half billion dollars. NASA designated Axiom to work primarily on a suit for the moon and the Artemis program, with Collins developing a suit for operations in orbit, such as space station servicing. Collins got an initial $97 million under the program for ISS suit development. The current spacesuits used on the ISS were developed by Collins over four decades ago and have, as you might remember, recently become problematic, causing a series of delays to scheduled spacewalks. Neither NASA nor Collins have confirmed the rumors of the contract termination. The weather held off yesterday to allow the launch of the fourth and final satellite in a series of advanced weather satellites for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. The geostationary operational environmental satellite known as GOSE-U lifted off on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket from launch complex 39A at NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Mission managers confirmed at 10.18 p.m. that the spacecraft's solar arrays successfully deployed and the spacecraft was operating on its own power. The satellite will benefit the United States by providing continuous coverage of weather and hazardous environmental conditions across much of the Western Hemisphere. And hot on the heels of yesterday's story of NASA being sued by a family in Florida after space debris fell through their home from the ISS, it's been confirmed by the US Space Agency that the debris found on a trail in North Carolina is part of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule. Parts of the capsule were found throughout the mountains of North Carolina and in residence yards in the region. The largest was around the size of a car hood. The debris is from SpaceX Crew Dragon's hardware that re-entered the atmosphere in May 2024. Over to India now and Pixel has signed the landmark 350th IDEX contract with the Ministry of Defense at a ceremony in New Delhi. Awarded as the first ever IDEX Prime Space Satellite Grant under the mission of Defense Space Challenge, this contract empowers Pixel to develop miniaturized multi-payload satellites for the Indian Air Force. Received as part of the Spark grants by IDEX, this contract will initiate Pixel's efforts to develop small satellites of up to 150 kilograms for electro-optical infrared, synthetic apgeoradar, and hyperspectral purposes. Pixel says the contract will enable innovation in space electronics, allowing for faster and more economical deployment, ease of manufacturing, scalability, adaptability, and less environmental impact. The European Space Agency is making positive moves to ensure that it meets its commitment to zero debris in space by 2030. Three major European Space Industry players each signed a contract with ESA to develop large, low-Earth orbit satellite platforms that conform to zero debris standards. Airbus Defense and Space, OHB, and Telus Alenia Space will design and develop zero debris platforms for large LEO satellites as a first step towards building zero debris production lines. During this first phase of the contract, each Prime contractor will develop the satellite platform to the system requirement review level, which is expected to take about 18 months. In phase two, the companies will team up with further technology suppliers to integrate new solutions and get their platforms to the level of a preliminary design review that evaluates and tests various practical aspects of building the design. Spain's Ceteliot has successfully integrated its satellite communication stack with Leaf Spaces Ground segment as a service network. This milestone is crucial for the upcoming Transporter 11 mission by SpaceX, during which Ceteliot will launch four new 6U satellites to further global 5G IoT connectivity. And that concludes our roundup of today's intelligence briefing. Head to the selected reading section of our show notes to find links to further reading on all the stories that we mentioned throughout the show. AET-Mine is crew. If you find this podcast useful, please do us a favor and share a five-star rating and a short review in your favorite podcast app. That'll help other space professionals just like you to find the show and join the T-minus crew. Thank you so much for your support. We really appreciate it. Our guest today is John Galloway, better known as DAS, Director of Operations at nasaspaceflight.com. T-minus producer Alice Carouse cut up with John at the Spaceport America Cup in New Mexico, where he and his NSF team volunteered to support the live stream of the competition. My name is John Galloway. That part's easy. A lot of people call me DAS as my online name back from the time when you don't tell people your real name online for safety's sake, right? I have been doing a lot of different things over the course of my life, but most recently I've really been into the live video and STEM outreach and that's where I think I want to stick. So, professionally I used to be a computer programmer. I was a solutions architect for a consulting company and I made ERPCRM systems for people, which is not very exciting as exciting as I try to make it sound. But I went from that to doing a STEM outreach on Twitch as a sort of fun thing and that turned into an actual career that I could pay the bills with and I went from doing STEM outreach on Twitch to running video for nasaspaceflight and now I am one of the owners of nasaspaceflight. So, for people that lived under a stone for quite some time and haven't heard of nasaspaceflight, which are very few in the space industry, tell us what does nasaspaceflight do? So, NSF is an independent media organization, been around for 17, 18 years and it started reporting on shuttle. So, Chris Bergen was the founder and he is sort of on a joke or on a whim made a website, a forum where people could come and talk about space shuttle and that grew into writing official articles about space shuttle, then writing articles about NASA and then when the shuttle program got shut down, started covering everything else and so now NSF covers all of spaceflight, like everything that happens in spaceflight. So, we've got teams all over the United States, we do international coverage as well. If it happens and it's related to space, we are usually there to share it with people. Excellent. Now, funding for nasaspaceflight is definitely interesting. If anyone's ever watched the live feed, they've probably seen that you guys make callouts to people to support you. How do you get your funding? So, it's all organically self-funded. We're not owned by another big media organization that's writing the checks or anything like that. We make our own money from YouTube advertisements and merchandise sales. That's amazing. So, you must have quite a big network now of support because I know you're now working quite closely with Rocket Labs. Could you tell us a little bit about that contract that you're working on? So, Rocket Lab actually stole two of our photographers. Jack and not stole. Temporarily borrowed is the right way to say it. Jack Byers always out here at Spaceport doing some of the rocket tracks for the student rocket launch, but this year he got a better offer from Rocket Lab who sent him out to New Zealand as one of the photographers for their 50th flight. Max Evans is out there as well. So, we are down two of our normal rocket trackers because they went out to watch that 50th flight of Rocket Lab. So, you mentioned Spaceport America, which is where we're at this week. You're here to support the live stream of the Spaceport America Cup. Could you tell us how you got involved in that? Randomly sent an email a long time ago. So, when we were doing STEM outreach, we did a lot of outreach with the United Launch Alliance, ULA, right? And so, in 2016, we had actually taken some old school stream equipment up to Colorado Springs to help them stream their intern rocket launch. Well, the next year in 2017 was the inaugural year for Spaceport America Cup and ULA had come down, I believe, to support that and introduced us to the media team down here at Spaceport. And so, we said, "Hey, you're doing this awesome student rocket launch competition. Can we come live stream it?" Spaceport said, "What? Why? Why do you want to do that? Well, we want to share this with people. There's so much work that the teams do. They do so many cool engineering challenges and we want to come share it with people. Well, how much does it cost? What? No, we're not going to charge you for it. We just want to come and do it." So, it was just one little camera backpack. Me and my friend Art, who's here helping as well, came out and we would go and watch the Rocks launch. Then we would go and walk around and talk to the students and we'd go and watch the Rocks launch again. But we literally just sent an email saying, "Hey, can we come share this with people? Just give us access and we can show people all the cool things you're doing." That's amazing because, obviously, you've made a career out of live streaming rocket launches and now you're volunteering and giving back to the community. I just have to ask though, what's your favorite that you've been part of so far? Favorite event? Event, yeah, rocket launch. Oh, geez. I don't have any specifically favorite rocket launch. We were there for the first Falcon Heavy and it was very high energy because it was a group of eight of us and we had all the live stream gear. We were there on the side of the causeway doing it but it was sort of not official. We called it Rogue Launch Coverage and we had a ton of fun with it. We were yelling at the rocket, "Go baby, go!" and everybody must have been looking at us like, "What's going on?" But the feedback, that video is still on YouTube. In the feedback we got from that video was so refreshing. It was, "Wow, we love to see people so excited about this. This is crazy. These guys are nerds but they're my type of nerds." It was almost like a sea change. It wasn't bad to be a nerd, really excited about a rocket launch. It was awesome to be a nerd and so getting that sort of feedback from that first, that's probably the first big launch we live streamed, that was really an impetus that kept us going and kept us sort of staying who we are and sharing the launch experience the way we do because we don't script out things. We're not like, "Now we'll read from slide three and tell you, you know, we are very much a rocket enthusiasts. That's where we all came from and we love to share that excitement and energy with people." Most recently I watched you at the Starship launch that happened down at Boca Tica and you guys have got quite a following when it comes to down there. Quite a bit. Yeah. I believe you guys were also involved when there was concrete that was flying off around. Can you tell us a little bit about the experience of being able to now live stream from Boca Tica and cover that? Well, that was a big thing. When we first saw SpaceX investing in that area, we said, "You know something? They're probably not just going to give up on this. They're probably going to make something out of Starbase." So we invested in Starbase as well and we actually purchased properties all around Starbase and set up camera sites so that when there's a launch or a big high-profile test, we have fixed camera sites that we can use to share that on the live streams. And so every time they have not even just the launches but they'll do a static fire, they'll do a wet dress rehearsal, we'll cover it, we'll tell people what's going on. We have live feeds from all different angles and it's really just a great way to keep the community involved and informed what's going on out at Starbase. As for the big launches, we sort of go all hands on deck when there's a Starship launch. There's a ton of interest for it. Everybody wants to see what's going on. So we'll do a marathon stream. We hold it a Starship stakeout at first. Where is it going to launch? Or not? We don't know, but we're going live 10 hours before launch and we just hang out. We talk to people, we answer questions from chat, we show them the history of the site and all that different stuff. But it's almost like a festival. Every time they're going to launch one of those things and where they're covering it live. I love that. And I love the fact that you guys, like you say, are just a load of, and I mean this in the nicest possible way, a load of nerds. They'll just love to watch rocket launches and you've made a whole thing out of it. What launch are you looking forward to most this year? Because there's a lot coming up really. I look forward to every single launch that happens. I know that's a cop-out answer, right? Really, geez. But every time there's a launch, even if it's a Starlink, 10-3 or whatever, and people show up and they ask questions and they're engaged and they're learning about what's happening, every single launch has the opportunity to reach more people so that they become excited and engaged, right? Now of course the big launches like Artemis launches, Starship launches, a crew launches, that sort of stuff, those naturally gather more attention so more people get involved with those. But if I had to pick one, it sounds like Starship might be coming back towards the launch pad at some point in the future. Yeah, very soon. Very soon we will see if they can get clearance to have that thing come back towards the land because previously they splashed it down in the ocean, but in Flight 4 they splashed it down in a seemingly controlled enough manner that they may be going for bringing it back to the actual launch pad and try to catch it with the chopsticks. Wow, that would be quite amazing to see. That's gonna be crazy. So maybe the right answer is I love all the launches, but the one thing that you don't see, that you've never seen before, is a rocket coming back and getting caught by the tower that it launched from to be used again. So probably a lot of paperwork involved with that, but we'll see. We'll be there to see what they get done. I feel like you reach kind of the non-traditional space audience with NASA spaceflight. Do you feel any responsibility to try and get them to understand why space is important and why there's so much money going into it here in the US particularly? Absolutely, and responsibility is I guess one way to put it to the way I think about it is a lot of people just don't know, right? They're not plugged in, they're not a rocket nerd or whatever, and it's just that nobody's explained it to them in language that sort of maps to their understanding or their experience, right? So one of the reasons that we are the way we are, you know, we have a ton of fun with it. We're very enthusiastic, I think people would agree with that at some point, but we try to make it so that other people can understand, and they even understand, feel how we feel about it, right? Like we're so excited, it's so interesting, there's so many challenges that can be solved, there's so much opportunity for up-and-coming STEM generations and stuff like that. The people that are watching the streams now might be the people that are riding the rockets to Mars in less years than you might think. Yeah, that brings us all back to this though, doesn't it? You giving back in coming back to the Spaceport America Cup, and I hope you come back in future years as well. I've come out here for every single one that's been out here, and I don't intend to stop anytime soon. We'll be right back. Welcome back. And for our final story today, the GOES YOU, NOAA's Final GOES R satellite headed up to orbit yesterday, marking nearly 50 years of the Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite, or GOES, series, keeping a close eye on Earth's weather from geostationary orbit. The GOES R series is expected to be in service through the 2030s, after which the next generation of NOAA satellites, the GeoXO, will start to phase in. But enough about the future for a sec, we're talking about one of the OGs of EO here. GOES started getting fantastic Earth observations in 1975, with the very first picture of North and South America from a GOES satellite in brilliant black and white, beaming back to Earth from GOES 1 on October 25, 1975. In the intervening decades, the GOES series has had its eye on everything from storms and hurricanes to wildfires, solar flares, lightning flashes, atmospheric rivers, runaway icebergs, volcanic eruptions, and even the launches of other satellites. NOAA has a fantastic blog post with some of the very best images in video the GOES series has captured over its incredible history, and NOAA is taking a very well-deserved victory lap here, and I for one say they absolutely deserve it. We've got a link in the show notes for you for the blog post of NOAA's cool Earth imagery. Go on over and enjoy! [Music] That's it for T-minus for June 26, 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. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. N2K's strategic workforce intelligence optimizes the value of your biggest investment, your people. We make you smarter about your team while making your team smarter. 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, Maria Varmasus. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. T-minus. you [MUSIC]
