Another big pay day for ULA and SpaceX.

A little PSA before we dive into business. Tonight, folks across Canada, Alaska, and even some of the more northerly lower 48 US states may get to see the northern lights between 10pm and 2am, as Noah says a coronal mass ejection or CME that erupted on Sunday will be hitting us around that time. But it's a G2 or a 2 out of 5, whereas the one that many of us experienced in May was a 5 out of 5. So temper those expectations, but good hunting to all you Aurora chasers. Today is July 23, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasas and this is T-minus. ULA and SpaceX secure $1.76 billion in contract modifications from the DoD. NASA selects who other than SpaceX for Noah's JPSS4 mission. Tim Peake joins Axiom. And 25 years ago today, Colonel Eileen Collins became the first woman to command a space flight. Colonel Collins will be talking about her career trajectory and what she has experienced as an Air Force pilot and as a NASA astronaut later in the show. Let's dive into our briefing for Tuesday, shall we? And we're starting with some contract modification news. Not normally a headline story admittedly, but when we're talking about contract changes that amount to nearly $1.8 billion, then you get our attention. SpaceX and the United Launch Alliance have secured $1.76 billion in contract modifications from the US Space Force to provide launch services under the second phase of the National Security Space Launch or NSSL program. The Department of Defense says the modifications awarded by Space Systems Command are for launches planned before fiscal year 2027. ULA, which is a joint venture of Boeing and Lockheed Martin, booked a potential $1.1 billion award, bringing its contract's total estimated full value to $4.5 billion, and SpaceX has awarded a $661 million contract modification, increasing its contract ceiling amount to $4 billion. Just a spare change, huh? The two mega-launch companies had received the original orders in October of last year, and they included 21 Launch Service Mission Agreements for fiscal year 2024 from SSC under the NSSL phase 2, which is awarded in August 2020. And staying with contract news, NASA has selected again, who else but SpaceX, on behalf of NOAA, to provide launch services for NOAA's Joint Polar Satellite System, or JPSS-4, mission. The spacecraft is part of the multi-satellite joint NASA/NOAA JPSS program. This mission is the next satellite in the program, which began with the SWAMI National Polar Orbiting Partnership. The contract is a firm fixed price agreement with the value of approximately $112.2 million, which includes launch services and other mission-related costs. The JPSS-4 mission is currently targeted to launch in 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Space Launch Complex 4 East at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. Over to the UK now, and the latest news from the Farnborough International Air Show. Axiom Space has announced that British astronaut Tim Peake will join their team as a strategic advisor. Peake will be tasked with supporting the development of, and strategy behind, a potential all-UK human spaceflight mission with the Houston-based company. The UK Space Agency and European Space Agency are calling for new proposals for the ESA Earth Observation Program in Cubed 2. Interested UK entities are invited to submit proposals that look to develop innovative and commercially viable products and services that generate or exploit the value of Earth Observation imagery and datasets. More details can be found by following the link in our show notes. The UK Space Agency is investing £65 million in groundbreaking innovations that could boost UK leadership in space technologies and applications through its National Space Innovation Program. It plans to support projects designed by British organizations with the potential to accelerate the development of new space technologies and services. As part of that program, Biologic Technologies has partnered with the UK Space Agency to adapt its precision bioprocessing platform to a configuration that's suitable for microgravity operation in low Earth orbit and space environments. We should note that the funding was issued under the previous UK government with the announcement delayed by the general election. The Swedish Air Force is studying the feasibility of launching a satellite from its sob-grippen fighter aircraft. The service's STELLA study, which was launched by its space division in conjunction with the country's Defense Research Agency, is inspired by the potential need for a responsive launch capability driven in part by the country's newly published Armed Forces Space Strategy. The study is being led by a Swedish university, the KTH Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm. The research suggests that an air-launched rocket could enable satellites weighing up to 2 kilograms to be launched from an adapted grippen. Scientists from the Institute of Physics under the Chinese Academy of Sciences have found a hydrated mineral with up to six molecules of crystalline water in a lunar sample brought back by the country's Chang'e 5 mission. According to a new study, the water molecules weigh as much as about 41 percent of the total mass. The mineral structure and composition closely resemble those of a mineral found near Earth's volcanoes. China says that terrestrial contamination or rocket exhaust is not the source of the discovered hydrated minerals. Over to financial news now, and Q2 financial results are starting to drift in. Two big names in aerospace reported in the last 24 hours. We'll start with Lockheed Martin, which closed the second quarter with net sales of a mere $18.1 billion. Net earnings in the second quarter of 2024 were $1.6 billion, so a happy healthy profit for them overall. Moving on to communications giant Iridium, the company reported a net income of $32.3 million in Q2. Iridium reported second quarter total revenue of $201.1 million, which consisted of $152.5 million of service revenue and $48.6 million of revenue related to equipment sales and engineering and support projects. So again, no surprises that they're doing well this year. But not every space company is experiencing that level of success. ABL space systems have announced another major setback to their rocket development. The company shared on X this quote, "After a pre-static fire test on Friday, a residual pad fire caused irrevocable damage to RS1. The team is investigating the root cause and will provide updates as the investigation progresses." This news follows the 2023 launch failure of their RS1 rocket from Kodiak Island in Alaska, which also ended in a fire. We hope this doesn't mean the end for ABL. And that concludes today's Intel Briefing. As always, you'll find links to further reading in the selected reading section of our show notes. There you will also find an article from Space Systems Command about their approach to AI. Hey T-Minus Crew, if you are just joining us, be sure to follow T-Minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. And also if you could do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday, please show three friends or coworkers this podcast. A growing audience is the most important thing for us, and we would love your help as part of the T-Minus crew. If you find T-Minus useful, and I say it every week, but really, we really hope you do, please share this show so other professionals like you can find it. Thank you so much for your support everybody. It means so much to me and all of us here at T-Minus. . Last year I had the privilege and pleasure to speak to former NASA astronaut Colonel Eileen Collins about her book "Through the Glass Ceiling to the Stars, The Story of the First American Woman to Command a Space Mission." Today, July 23rd marks 25 years since Colonel Collins became the first woman to command a space flight. She shared with us her career trajectory and what she has experienced as an Air Force pilot and as a NASA astronaut. I have a very clear memory of reading a article on the Gemini astronauts in a magazine. I was sitting at my desk. I was in fourth grade, and I saw pictures of these men, very cool guys that were dressed up in their flight suits and their pressure suits, and the story was about what are astronauts. And I'm a little kid thinking, this is exactly what I want to do. Unfortunately there were no women astronauts back in those days, but I'm a little kid, and I thought, well heck, I'll be a lady astronaut. That's what I'm going to do. This was filed away in the back of my mind, but years later when I was in college, you know, I was still reading about pilots, and there wasn't a whole lot written in books on the space program back in those days. So I remembered that those astronauts were pilots, they were test pilots, they were engineers, and I was trying to pattern my dream job after what they had done. And it was 1976 when the Air Force first selected women to go to pilot training, and then in 1978 NASA selected the first women to be space shuttle astronauts. And I was in college at the time, and that's when it became real to me, that this is something I can actually do, and I buckled down and I got serious about doing the things I needed to do to make that my life. I was an explorer, and my family lived on the outskirts of our town, Elmira, New York, but we lived in government subsidized housing. We lived very close to other families, and there were other children in the neighborhood. I just happened to be really of the kids I hung around with, I was the oldest. And since we lived near the edge of town, there was a lot of land to explore, so I would gather up the neighborhood kids, and we would climb trees, we would make forts. We did some stuff that we shouldn't have done, I mean, back in those days, parents didn't know what their kids were doing. I mean, it's a different world today. I would never let my kids out of my sight. I was crawling all over the neighborhood, and we also had our enemies. There were some kids on the other side of this government subsidized housing that didn't like us, and we had some confrontations with them that were a little bit nasty, but you gotta remember, I was seven through 12 years old when all of this was going on. And I learned to be, I want to say, I think I learned some leadership skills there. I learned how to defend my little sister against the bad girls on the other side of town. And I learned that there were actually mean people and there were dangers in the world. My mother would take us to the library, and the books that I brought home were mostly in the realm of science. It was a little bit harder to find books on airplanes, but as I got older, I did find the flying section of the library. And I was probably middle school, high school, and some of the books that I remember reading back in the early years were, one of them was The Stars at Noon about Jackie Cochran, who started the Women Air Force Service Pilots. And I would still recommend that book today. She came from nothing, and she became very rich and famous, and she was the first woman to go faster than the speed of sound. So that was one book that really inspired me. I read a book called God is My Co-Pilot, and it's a story about the American pilots that flew in China during World War II. If you remember, China was our ally back in World War II. And then from there, I found more and more books on flying, whether it was fiction or nonfiction, and I really got into history. And I started reading a lot about the military side of flying through the wars over the years. So I grew up in a small town, but it's a site of Harris Hill. And Harris Hill is the glider field, and the National Soaring Museum is located there. And this is gliders. So the tow planes take the gliders up and release them, and the gliders would fly. I was a kid. My dad took us to the airport. We'd watch them take off and land. My dad also took us to the commercial airport where we'd watch the airliners take off and land. I want to say it was cheap entertainment. And we'd get the root beer over at the A&W root beer stand, and that's what they were known for back in those days. And we'd go out and watch the airplanes fly. And that was a really special time for my family to do things like that. And I decided I wanted to be a pilot. So the Air Force decided in 1976 to allow women to become military pilots. And it was a test program. Now I was still young and in college when the first groups went through. So they selected 10 women. It was a very competitive program, but it was nationwide. Those 10 women went to pilot training in Phoenix, Arizona. And I heard about this in the news. I started following it. And I said, well, this is what I want to do. My senior year in college, I'm an ROTC, which is the Reserve Officer Training Corps. And I might track to be commissioned as a second lieutenant. And the job they had set up for me, back then we called it strategic air command. And I was going to be a computer systems design engineer. I was going to work in missile targeting. I mean, that's what the Air Force can't be set up for. This is back during the Cold War. And it was 1978. Well, this test program then opened up to women just graduating from college. So I became eligible. In previous, you had to be on active duty. So now the younger women, I was 21 years old, were now eligible. So my professor of aerospace studies sent my name in. And there were about 100 women from around the country. And eight of us were selected. This to me was a massive dream come true. I mean, this was a huge turning point in my life when I was selected for this program. And of the eight of us, four went to Arizona where the other women had trained. And four of us went to Vance Air Force Base in Oklahoma. And we were the first four women to ever go through pilot training there. The turns that I spent at Vance as one of the first women to ever train there, I wrote a whole chapter on it in my book because there were so many interesting stories that happened and how the men accepted us and some that didn't accept us. But it was to me just a dream come true because now I'm 21 years old and I'm flying jets. And I went solo in jet aircraft. The T-37 and T-38 at the age of 21, it's a huge amount of responsibility to give to somebody at that age. At that point, I was a college graduate, but I was living my dream. And I'm not going to say it was easy because I was studying constantly because not only did I want to get my wings, did I become a pilot, but I was part of a test program. And I wanted other women to have the same opportunities as me. And if we had failed, then those other women, they would have shut down the program. And the women younger than me wouldn't have had the opportunity. So we were doing it for ourselves as well as other women. [MUSIC] I was first put in leadership position back in the Air Force. I found that I was a little bit of an autocrat. I think that maybe I was trying to do too much as a "leader." Part of it was I knew people were watching me because I was a woman in a man's world and I thought that I needed to be more decisive and more anzoned. Turned out that didn't work. I actually had people pull me aside and say, "You know, I mean, maybe you don't need to tell me all that you're telling me. I think, you know, it's okay to let me make my own mistakes." That happened to me a couple of times and I started thinking, "Okay, I'm going to listen to what they're saying." And I think as the years went by, I became less autocratic, mean, less throwing out my ideas and recommendations, telling people what to do. And I became more of a listening type leader. I was there to provide confidence to the people that are working for me. And through my, not just my words, but through my actions and the way I carry myself, in the way I look people in the eye, in the way I listen to them. And my decision-making skills were needed when there was conflict. And I had to learn to let people do their job, let them make their own decisions, let them have their own authority over what they're doing and they will be more interested and they'll be happier in their job and they will be more productive. If there is a conflict somewhere in an office or somewhere between, you know, some of the groups that work for you, I encourage them to come to me and I'll help them resolve the conflict. And so I found that later in my career, the skills I needed were to be a good listener, to be humble. So my people were willing to come to me. I didn't want to be intimidating them. Sometimes I think if you're like one of the few women or even the only woman in charge in your office, you feel pressure to get out there and perform. You really just need to be there and provide confidence. That's what mothers do. And that's what teachers do. My mom, which she was a great mom, but she made mistakes. So I would think about what my mom do that I liked and didn't like. And you know, in the sense of being a strong woman, not trying to be a guy, but trying to just be who you are, but yet being a strong woman. And I found that the guys really, the men that worked for me really liked the leadership style of I'm there. I'm in touch with my management. I can resolve problems. And please come to me because I don't want to be, I will never intimidate people. I'll never say to somebody, oh, you should know that. You know, where you asking me that for? You should know that. I mean, I know people that do that. And I think that's a weak leadership style. So I think that's the type of leader I became towards the end of my career. And I wish I had known that when I was younger. So I'm very procedural. So the biggest diversity to me was making mistakes. And I would just crucify myself when I would make mistakes. And this was something that I had to get under control. And I think I learned this through doing simulations in the space shuttle program. We would train our crews under a lot of stress. And if the crews were doing great, I say, you need to make it harder because I want to see how my crew handles their mistakes. Well, we developed a four step process of dealing with mistakes. And so very procedural. So you make a mistake. This can be terrible, right? Especially if you're flying in space, it could mean the loss of the mission, but it could even mean loss of lives. So we developed a four step process of dealing with mistakes. Number one, you admit your mistake to yourself or to whoever needs to know. Number two, you fix it. Number three, you eventually do something to prevent that mistake from happening again to you or someone else. And then the fourth is you move on. And I think that move on is very important. I wrote the book because I wanted young people to learn from lessons I learned, mistakes I made throughout my life, but also the excitement and how wonderful it was in my careers in the military and at NASA is an astronaut. And I wanted to document that portion of history of the space shuttle program. So from a human point of view, so people would be able to read it someday and remember, you know, what was it like to be a space shuttle astronaut? [Music] Many of you might know that today has a second big 25 year anniversary and that would be for NASA's great observatory, the Chandra X-ray telescope. We'll be marking that occasion twice this week, both on tomorrow's show and Saturday's Deep Space episode with an interview with astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, group lead for the Chandra X-ray Center Science Data Systems, and also you might know him as Planet 4589, the go-to voice on tracking space debris. [Music] We'll be right back. [Music] Welcome back. About those coronal mass ejections or CMEs I mentioned at the top of the show, those lovely light shows are just one effect that we experience on Earth. CMEs cause geomagnetic storms, which we often refer to as space weather, and those storms can cause problems for satellites on orbit and equipment on the ground like power grids. There is a lot we still do not know about space weather and CMEs, and a lot of researchers around the world are working on improving humanity's understanding of CMEs, as well as our ability to predict them and mitigate their effects on our infrastructure. Researchers studying CMEs include those at the UK's Aberystwyth University, and they presented new findings of theirs at the Royal Astronomical Society's National Astronomy Meeting last week. They have been looking closely at active regions on the sun and what conditions in those solar active regions are needed to then cause a CME to occur. With these findings, we may now be able to predict a CME before it even happens, and what speed it will travel at, meaning when it will hit us and how hard. If you crudely imagine ribbons and flares rising off the surface of the sun in an active region, apparently at a specific critical height, the magnetic field at that active region becomes unstable and then yields a coronal mass ejection, which is a big eruption of magnetic field and gas. Solar physicist and lead researcher of this study at Aberystwyth, Harshita Gandhi, says, our findings reveal a strong relationship between the critical height at CME onset and the true CME speed. This insight allows us to predict the CME speed and, consequently, its arrival time on Earth even before the CME has fully erupted. That is super, super cool. Are you sure I say super hot? That's it for T-minus for July 23, 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 am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. Good luck with the Aurora out there. See you tomorrow. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]