Current events and geopolitics being what they are, national security, no matter what nation you belong to, is getting a lot of financial focus. We're seeing that in private investment firms around the world who are continuing to invest serious cash in companies, especially in aerospace, whose missions align closely with national security interests. So with today's news, let's follow the money being invested in the aerospace industry. Today is July 11th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasas and this is T-minus. VC's AE industrial partners and Alpine Space Ventures close big funding rounds for aerospace investments. Crossbow raises $70 million to develop solid motor programs and hypersonic vehicles. And our guest today is JD Dice, director of task operations at Agile Space Industries. Let's take a look at our Intel briefing for today. And today we're learning that private equity firm AE industrial partners is closing its third private equity round with $1.28 billion in total financing, going to five organizations and three add-on investments across the national security, aerospace, and industrial services industries. Of the five organizations who have already begun receiving investments from this fund, York Space Systems and Firefly Aerospace are the two aerospace firms receiving investment. AEI says their investments target companies like Firefly and York Space because of their strong growth potential in order to scale up critical national security supply chains and suppliers to meet ongoing and increased demand. And it's not just AE industrial partners making headlines for raising capital for aerospace. Munich-based Alpine Space Ventures have closed a $184 million funding round, making them the largest first-time VC fund dedicated to space globally. The VC's limited partners include major institutions like the European Investment Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund, and others. Alpine says that the new capital is earmarked for no more than 10 to 15 investments, five of which have already been made, with check sizes up to $5.4 million. Around 70% of the fund is earmarked for European companies, but the firm says it is interested in investing on both sides of the Atlantic. Alpine Space Ventures portfolio already includes US-based satellite manufacturer K2Space and German satellite builder Reflex Aerospace. And staying with funding news, Crossbow Systems has raised over $70 million in a Series B funding round. The company says it will use the funding to accelerate the development of its hypersonic capable vehicles and its solid rocket motor programs. Crossbow also plans to complete its Luling, Texas, Gigafactory campus and expand its engineering and R&D facilities across New Mexico. Crossbow's CEO and founder Jason Hundley says this expansion addresses both critical industrial base and defense needs in the United States. Booz Allen Ventures has made an undisclosed investment in an early-stage commercial space technology company called Quindar. Quindar focuses on automating and democratizing satellite operations. Booz Allen says this investment is aligned with the firm's velocity, leadership and technology business strategy and highlights the urgency of integrating mission-critical technologies across the space domain to increase awareness, security, automation and data collection for decision advantage on a global scale. Booz Allen's $100 million corporate venture capital arm has made strategic investments in early-stage companies developing dual-use commercial technologies. This is the second space-focused investment made by Booz Allen Ventures since its inception in 2022. Deorbit is claiming its presence in America by opening a subsidiary, Deorbit USA. The Italian-based space logistics company has announced the joint venture with US space veterans Mike Cassidy, Mark Krebs, Miles Gazzik, Danny Field and David Harrowar. Deorbit USA will focus on satellite bus design, manufacturing and sales. Deorbit says it chose to create this joint venture in the United States in response to forecasts for the space industry, which suggests a significant growth from an estimated $546 billion at the end of 2023 to over $1 trillion by 2030. Autonomous Vehicle Company Guidant has received a Space Florida Israel Innovation Grant to support the development and implementation of a leading-edge system architecture leveraging non-geostationary satellite technology. This grant will fund the development of Guidant's autonomous vehicle communication by establishing a reliable and redundant connection with remote monitor and control centers. NASA's Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy has embarked on a week-long visit to Japan and the Republic of Korea to underscore the critical role of international cooperation in advancing space exploration and technology development. Melroy will engage with ministers and other senior government officials in both countries, including leaders from JAXA and CASA, to strengthen partnerships and highlight civil space cooperation. And that concludes our Intel briefing for today. Check out the links in the show notes for further information on any of the stories that we've mentioned in the show. We have also added an announcement for the next launch window for Rocket Lab's 51st Electron Launch and a story on an Indian firm building space habitats. Those stories and more can be found on our website space.ntuk.com. Hey T-minus crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership or recruit talent, T-minus can help. We'd like to hear from you. Send us an email at space@ntuk.com or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. Our guest today is JD Dice, director of test operations at Agile Space Industries. We talked about the importance of testing and I asked what facilities Agile Space offers. We have two test stands. One of them is older, Sunshine is what it's called. They're all named after mountains so we have Sunshine and Animas. Their first one was built to be torn down on trailers so it's always custom-modded trailers that you could tear down, take to Mojave, set back up and test. We don't do that anymore. That's what we use to test for external only. Once we started doing our internal design development, we test our own stuff. So it all stays here in Durango, which is awesome. We're at 6,000 feet here so our altitude systems get some efficiency bunk from that, from being higher altitude, which is great. But that's not the reason they did it. It's mostly because it's beautiful here, but we just get the added benefit of having the altitude system. We have maintaining those two stands is the big part of the job and getting through the testing campaigns. I think right now we're testing four different kinds of thrusters and we're alternating them on the two different stands. They're all hypergolic in some way. So they either use a hydrazine or a monomethylhydrazine and then usually mix that with an oxidizer, like a MOM3 or a nitrogen tetraxide effectively, like an oxidation level of a nitrogen. And then we run them through the test stands, which are moded gas systems, which are just really big rockets. They're big cold gas thrusters that help simulate the vacuum of space. So we test all these things in a vacuum to some extent because the heating profile is a lot different. When you're in space, there's no convection. There's no way for the heat to get out except through radiation. And if people are testing that stuff atmospherically, what you do, you don't really get a good idea of how much heat soap vacuum might get into the system or the vacuum start. So we use our test stands are set up like a two-stage moded gas system. So we have massive nitrogen storage. We have a 6,000-gallon liquid tank and an 11,000-gallon liquid tank. And then we pump that through a vaporizer setup. So it takes the liquid gas, our liquid nitrogen turns it into L2 to liquid nitrogen. And then we pump up tube trailers and ground storage to 2,500 psi, pretty high. And then we just let it rip. The whole thing just blows down through a regulation system that fires through our altitude system. And it acts like a big venturi. So it sucks all the air out. And the thruster that we're testing can fire into a cell and have all the nitrogen actually take all of the gas from the exhaust out of the thruster and still maintain a vacuum. And usually those are like 0.1 psi. So in the vacuum, so a few hundred thousand feet, which is pretty good. NASA and some of the hard vacuum stuff, they're testing in a microtour. We're at like five tour, which is still pretty good. You just explained something. I've always wondered how that worked. I'm just like, how do you do that? It's a basic question, but that's been something that people ask me. And I'm going, that's something that you just explained it. Thank you. I've been wondering that for a while. It's a basic, like to me, it's really cool. And there's not a lot of people that do it. White sands does it, but they use steam generation. And so like their system, it can run for longer, but they can't turn it off. So you start a chemical steam and that system is the same thing, right? Except for the mode of gas is steam. And then they can get like a benefit out of the momentum by taking the water out. So they push steam through at high speed and then they have a condenser that then recovers the mass of the water and then can help speed that flow up. We don't use chemical steam here for a few reasons. One of them is it's really difficult to power it. It takes a large amount of power to heat water, but then also you can't turn it off. Ours is a nitrogen system that has a gas blocker and a bunch of other kind of valving. So we can turn it on and do like a five millisecond pulse and then turn it off. So we have a startup period of like 10 seconds, do a pulse, then let it, let it shut down. And so it's like 20 seconds total. And there's a five millisecond pulse in there with a steam generation system. You just turn it on and then you route the mode of gas over the thruster. And then the thruster test is done. You route it away from the thruster, but you're still generating mode of gas. And so it's like $200, $300 a second that they'd be generated with a nitrogen system. We can just turn it off. It's still pretty expensive, but we can just turn it off. Maybe a test fails and we need to stop it or we need to reevaluate and stop it. But yeah, the mode of gas system, you could turn them on and off and kind of flow through it. But like we are capable of pushing one stand right now is pushing 25 pounds of nitrogen a second. The other one is doing about 40 pounds a second, but it can do up to 100 pounds a second. Is that the newer test stand? Yeah, I was gonna say it's gotta be the newer. That's the new test stand, Animas. Yeah. So Animas is, we just commissioned that in March. It's wild, right? Yeah, we built it. It was an atmospheric test stand, which means it just had a thruster sticking out the back of the connex and we just fired it outside. And it always looks cool. It looks great, right? It always looks great. Atmospheric testing looks the best. But atmospheric also has a lot of issues with it, but we took that atmospheric stand in May of last year, moved it over to a new site and then built a whole altitude system and finished it by March. It's a huge stand. It's got a 100 foot by 110 foot concrete pad. We've got two tube trailers parked on it that are 146 standard cubic feet of gas and then a big ground storage tank, big 11,000 gallon nitrogen storage. And then that blows through, right? And it's got two containers, like shipping containers laying one direction and then on top of that, orthogonal to those two, is the top container. And that's where the cell is. And that height allows us to have that altitude system. And that's got the fuel storage is there, the mode of gas, nitrogen is there, and the propellant storage is all there on that one site. Yeah, that's the newest one. And it can do instrumentation channels up to a megahertz. Primarily what we do is like a couple hundred kilohertz, but we can do down to a megahertz or up to a megahertz, I guess. I mean, who you all are testing for, the kind of testing you're doing and also the kind of applications. I mean, it's got to be pretty wild cutting edge stuff, given what you all can do. Yeah, exactly. So we've got all the additive stuff in-house here so we can make our own, we can make other people's thrusters, slap them together, depending on how quick they need to be if it's a really rigorous program or like a dev campaign. I mean, we did one clean sheet design, two test stand in like six to eight weeks, I think. So clean sheet thruster design, we built it, we fabbed it, we got it on the test stand, we hot fired it. And that was for a client that I think had some extra money towards the end of quarter four, and they just needed to get through it. And so they turned us on in like November and we hot fired before Christmas. Wow. So the company name is really apt is what it sounds like. Yeah, yeah, yeah, for sure, for sure. Yeah, we ripped through stuff pretty quick. Like I said, right now we've got four thrusters that we're trying to test on the two stands right now. And the test team's only, there's only seven of us. There's seven people out there and we, you get to have a lot of fun. A lot of your reflections have been really cool about sort of the nature of test. And I feel like that's so valuable also for people who are, you know, either making a lateral move into that world or thinking about it themselves or maybe just people who are in it already. And I don't know if you like words you want to share with them or people or I don't know. I mean, something that I say around here a lot is like test you must all the time. Like you can't, you can't do anything without testing. No matter how much you get into it, you know, analytically, if you throw the best CFD at it, you do the best, you know, kind of sample work or even prototype testing. Like until you actually try it, you never know. Like until, until you actually take an empirical measurement, everything is, is not for sure. And I've seen that at big primes like Boeing, I've seen it at Raytheon and I've seen it here. Like I don't know how many times I've had someone come to me and say like, oh, this is going to work. It's going to be fine. Here are all the reasons why it works. Here are all the peers that it's been reviewed by. Here's, you know, somebody with a PhD who says, yep, you're totally gravy. No problem. And then you go and you put it through its paces and it blows up or it doesn't blow up, but something weird happens and, you know, say we have a regen channel and it doesn't work and it burns. And they, you know, they were like, oh, I didn't know about that one thing. So generally the advice I ever give to any engineer is always plan to test it. Test, test, test. Right now, space is really moving towards a very risk tolerant approach. You know, get more into space, get more into space. And there's some of that like test in space mentality, which I'd love to do. Like I'd love to build a test stand on the moon. And then I can really test in a vacuum. But you know, the clients and everybody needs to know that they've got a plan on testing. And one thing I kind of teach all of our junior engineers or even just people that are new to it is plan on a few like, you know, design cycles and plan on having to go through and have learnings. You're going to find something you didn't know before and you don't know what it is, but you can still plan to learn something you didn't know. And then your schedules become a little bit more realistic and you don't have like the morale slam when you all of a sudden you're like way behind schedule. That's generally, you know, I've got a test and you got a plan for learning. We'll be sharing my full conversation with JD on Saturday's Deep Space episode, by the way. So stay tuned for that one. And we'll be right back. Welcome back. It is no secret that we are big fans of the James Webb Space Telescope on this program. I mean, you don't have to be a space geek like me to get excited about the images captured by this amazing instrument. Take the latest picture that looks like a diamond ring hovering in space. No, the universe is not asking us to go steady. The image is actually of a distant quasar and you would be forgiven if you don't know what a quasar is. It is an extremely luminous active galactic nucleus. An active galactic nucleus is powered by a supermassive black hole with a mass ranging from millions to tens of billions of solar masses surrounded by a gaseous accretion disk. Wrap your brain around that one. In this instance, the ring like halo has been generated by a monster black hole at the heart of a young galaxy that shoots out powerful energy jets as it gobbles up enormous amounts of matter. This quasar, previously known to scientists, is named RXJ1311231. Why can't they not give it a similar name? And it is located about six billion light years from Earth in the constellation Crater. The quasar's circular shape is the result of a phenomenon known as gravitational lensing in which the light from a distant object, such as a galaxy quasar or supernova, as it travels through space-time. It gets curved by the gravity of another massive object located between the distant object and the observer. As a result, light appears to bend around the middle object, even though it is traveling in a straight line. The image is, of course, stunning. So you know, for an audio only podcast, we really hate that you cannot see the image right now that I am describing to you. So please, when you have a moment, go and check out the link in our show notes and tell us what you think. [MUSIC PLAYING] That's it for T-Minus for July 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 preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. 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 Kilpey is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Varmasas. Thanks for listening. We will see you tomorrow. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-Minus. 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