We've got lots of headlines to run through today with news coming out about ESA's plans in the UK and their first para-astronaut. But first, let's extend a hello and welcome to Florida to SLS. The Space Launch System rocket's core stage has arrived at Kennedy Space Center ahead of the Artemis-2 mission. It was good if it's a barge in. Today is July 24th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasas. This is T-Minus. ESA to expand its presence at the Exat in the UK. John McFall cleared to fly as ESA's first para-astronaut. Stark Hatcher has closed its $12.25 million seed round. And our guest today is astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. Jonathan works on the Chandra Space Telescope and we will be hearing more about that on our Deep Space Chat on Saturday. But today, we'll be talking to Jonathan about his work tracking space debris. Happy hump day, everybody! We're continuing the theme this week with news coming out of the FarmBurough International Air Show. The European Space Agency used the event to unveil new plans to expand its presence in the UK. ESA and the UK Space Agency shared plans to build on the success of the European Center for Space Applications and Telecommunications, also known as EXAT. ESA says it plans to grow its UK workforce to 200 people at EXAT by 2030. The space agency's plan to explore the potential for a space quantum technologies laboratory and the further development of activities related to in-orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing. UKSA also announced five new projects worth £2.1 million to help tackle key skills gaps identified by the UK space industry. The funding will boost the availability of training programs, courses and other learning interventions that can break down barriers to opportunities within the industry. And staying with ESA News, British Paralympian John McFall has been cleared to go into space after a two-year feasibility study. McFall made history by becoming the European Space Agency's first para astronaut when he was selected in November 2022. The study concluded that his prosthetic leg will not stop him from carrying out all his duties as an astronaut. Way to make space for everyone! The UK Space Agency has awarded £300,000 to UK teams developing technologies to purify ice frozen in the moon's soil to make human habitation on the lunar surface viable. The funding is part of the joint UK/Canada £1.2 million international prize from the Aqua Lunar Challenge. Ten teams will receive £30,000 each to develop their technologies before a winner and runners-up are announced in Spring 2025. Space Energy Generation company Starcatcher has closed its $12.25 million seed round. Starcatcher says with this funding, the company's position to help eliminate power constraints on space operations through the construction of its Starcatcher network in what they are calling the world's first space-based energy grid. Starcatcher's immediate focus will be on validating and demonstrating its power-beaming services for customers beginning with ground demonstrations followed by an on-orbit demonstration in late 2025. KBR is the latest aerospace company to report its Q2 financial results. Company says its recent agreement to acquire LinnQuest has bolstered KBR's business. The company's backlog and options as of June 28 totaled $20.1 billion. KBR was awarded $2.1 billion in bookings and options in Q2. RTX's Raytheon has signed a contract with Avio to initiate and progress the development of critical, solid rocket motors for defense applications. The contract furthers the systems engineering work required to mature these solid rocket motors into a production-ready state. The contract aims to mature potential rocket motor solutions for domestic and international customers. Collins Aerospace is moving its manufacturing facility. The Aerospace and Defense Company is relocating to a new site in Selatar Aerospace Park, but staying in Singapore. Collins says the move represents a significant investment of $250 million and will bolster the company's capabilities and commitment to innovation and excellence in the aerospace industry. ISRO, otherwise known as the Indian Space Research Organization, carried out the second experimental flight for the demonstration of an air-breathing propulsion technology. The propulsion systems were mounted on either side of an RH560 sounding rocket and launched from Satish Dalwan Space Center in Sriharikota. ISRO says the flight test achieved satisfactory performance of the sounding rocket, along with successful ignition of the air-breathing propulsion systems. Germany's Morpheus space has opened the first mass production facility for space systems in Dresden. The facility, which the company is calling "reloaded" will initially manufacture 100 units of Morpheus Space's second-generation electric propulsion system. And Blue Origin have announced the crew for their next mission on the new Shepard rocket from Van Horn, Texas. The date is still to be announced. You can read about the people heading to the Carmen line by following the link in our show notes. You'll also find three additional stories in our selected reading section today. And the first is an announcement from Spyder Oak on their latest testing. Another is announcing SES Space and Defense's award to provide SATCOM for the US Army. And the final introduces Dr. Angel Smith as the new Executive Director of the SmallSat Alliance. AT-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 will help other space professionals like you to find the show and join the T-Crew. Thank you so much for your support. We really appreciate it. In his day job, Jonathan McDowell is an astrophysicist with the Science Data Systems Planning Group in the Chandra X-Race Center. But it's his out-of-hours work that attracts probably the most attention. Jonathan has become the leading voice in the US for tracking space debris. I have for decades been chronicling the history of the space program and maintaining the website with the list of all the rocket launchers and all the satellites and figuring out what they do and trying to provide an objective and global view of humanity's push into space both with people and robots. And I find that a lot of the coverage, particularly in the US, is very US-centered and is very -- NASA talks about NASA, but it doesn't talk about non-NASA stuff and so on and so on. So, I felt there was a gap in both being objective and being global. Many people may also know you by your handle, Planet 4589. That's -- as soon as I see that handle anywhere in an article, I'm like, "Oh, I know who this is." My first question is, "How do you do all this?" You have in your bioorbital police and you are the source of information. When all these different bits of debris were falling, like in Saskatchewan and whatever, I knew. I said, "Unless you have verified it, I don't know what it is." So, how do you do all this? Well, for a start, I depend very heavily on the work of the US Space Force and other agencies and on amateur observers who collect orbital data. My special skill is in putting it all together and doing some math to interpret and tie the strands together. And so, part of it is that I've been doing this for 50 years since I was a teenager. When an obscure old satellite comes up, "Oh, Cosmos 1408. Oh, I know that one." And so, it's having the information sort of at my fingertips, having a mental map of all the stuff that goes on, having the math skills to do some relatively simple orbital mechanics to tie what people are saying to what's actually happening. And having about 100,000 lines of code, of C code that I use to kind of do various tasks and automate various tasks. And everything I do is optimized, so it takes me the minimal amount of time to deal with something because I do have another day job, right? So I've got it down to a fine art where 95% of everything is automated, and then I can go in and run a specialized program to kind of flood up, for example, the ground track of a re-entering spacecraft over Canada and do that very quickly because I already have the code canned and I know what to do to make that plot. And so, it's really all about people make fun of my website because it's so nice to have your website. No, unironically, I love it. I'm glad. Yeah. And I think it's, you know, the younger generation, right, they're like, well, you know, you're barely using CSS. I mean, I ended that a few years ago before then it was really 1994 type web stuff. But the thing is that a lot of it is generated by C code and updated. And so I could, or, you know, on the Jonathan Space Report itself, you know, it's actually created a text file that I type in and as I type it appears on the web. And so none of this, you know, intermediary. And all of that is like just making it really, really fast for me to get the content out there. If you want pretty, if you want pretty, my data is CCDY, it's creator commons. You can copy the data and put a pretty interface on it to make yourself happy. But I don't have time to make you pretty. I don't. I'm not surprised it's automated. I would never imagine that was all manuals. That would be, I think, impossible or just to be fair, the actual list of 60,000 satellites, each line there is typed by hand. At some point, yes. At some point since the 1980s when I was doing this. So it's not all of it. There is a lot of manual, but I kind of just, what do I do and what do I not do? Yeah. So yeah, I imagine you must have many anecdotes over the course of years of how your information has proven helpful to people, not just random, it was like me going on Twitter and going, oh, what was that? I mean, you were cited all the time. And again, and this is not your day job. It's just amazing. Any, any anecdotes come to mind because I'm just really curious. Well, for example, there was the time when this space demand lost a European astronomy satellite for a few months and they were putting out extrapolated positions for it. And then the asteroid observers found a new object in Earth orbit. Oh, this isn't an asteroid. We don't want this. And I figured out that it was actually this integral astronomy satellite and it had made a maneuver and Space Force hadn't noticed it made a maneuver. They were still looking for it in the old orbit and issuing data as if it were still in the old orbit. And so I was, I was able to put the right people in touch for the right people and, and, and clear up the error. So there's a few like that. There's been a few cases where again, things that were originally cataloged as asteroids and then they maneuvered. You know, I was able to figure out which, which lost spacecraft. It actually was. So, so that's some of the stuff that's most fun. And then, you know, it's, it's, you know, I get informal contacts from various bits of the government who go, yeah, we can't say it, but we use your stuff. So that's, that's very gratifying. And I think people like to be able to quote my open source stuff, even if they have insider knowledge that they're not allowed to, they can at least quote me, you know, so, so that helps. You've got an audience right now. I'm sure you're used to it, but if there's anything that you wanted to say to the audience before we close out, the floor is yours. Anything you want to mention? There's a couple of things that I'm, I'm really pushing on right now on the space side. One is the risks associated with uncontrolled reentries. And so we've seen that with the dragon trunks crashing down. We see that with the piece of the ISS that hit the house in Florida. And I, and I think we really need to, to look at the regulation of these, these reentries. And so if you know, let's, let's not do that. Let's bring them down under control, even if it costs a little more money. The other thing I'm really pushing on is regulation of deep space activities. So we're entering a new era in space exploration where the frontier is moving out. And the frontier used to be kind of low earth orbit and beyond that, you know, only the superpowers played. And now the frontiers moving out to the asteroid belt and everyone from developing countries to startup companies is going to be sending stuff to the moon and Mars. And it's going to become just part of the general playground, but it's much less regulated than earth orbit. And so we need to require things like make public your trajectory, you know, say what you're doing, say, you know, have some kind of flight plan, right? And it's in the public domain so that, so that this transparency, again, go back to this open source thing. Right. Let's have some transparency in the process here. And the commercial companies don't want that, of course. They want to do things like I want to go to an asteroid, but I'm not going to tell you which asteroid I'm going to. And yes, space is big, but no, let's, let's, let's at least have a public flight plan. So I'm, I'm, I'm making that argument in various forms. And the other area that I think people should know about this is, and that plays into both of those other two ones is the development of the commercial space activity in China. Because we hear a lot about, you know, space acts and commercial stuff in the U S, but China has really made a shift in the last five years or so towards lots and lots of startups that are not, you know, associated with the government. They're really going capitalism in a big way. And so you have all these new players that are not then used to the norms we have. They're not going to send their, their identifications of which satellite they are to the U S space force because, you know, China. And so we need some better international way of coordinating space activities that, that brings the Chinese commercial sector on board. And that's absolutely critical to safe use of space, sustainable use of space in the decade to come. We'll be covering Jonathan's work with the Chandra mission in our deep space episode coming out this Saturday. We will be right back. Welcome back. NASA's Chandra mission went to space 25 years ago yesterday. And while the more spectacular visuals from Hubble and Web might more easily grab our attention, Chandra has been plugging away all this time, completely blowing astrophysicists minds. And that is because Chandra revealed to humanity all sorts of information that we could never have seen from Earth before. Chandra is an X-ray telescope. We can't see X-rays in space from Earth based observatories as our atmosphere absorbs those X-rays. So to see this high energy radiation, we have to have basically X-ray specs in space. And the X-rays we can observe reveal things that we had never been able to see before, like remnants of supernovas, neutron stars, black holes, formations of dark matter. There is honestly a lot that we can only see with X-rays. And a lot of it reveals new information to us about how galaxies and galaxy clusters are formed. And in turn, again, with X-ray observations, we get more and more clues into the nature of how our universe was formed, how it's still changing, and how planetary systems evolve over time to even potentially harbor life. No big deal, right? Unfortunately, the recent news is that NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory, the most powerful X-ray telescope ever built, by the way, might be getting its budget slashed so drastically that it would lose almost all of its dedicated staff, effectively mothballing this observatory. You can no doubt see how that news has been met with a lot of unhappiness in the world of astrophysics. Especially as the astronomers working with Chandra Daily say, "The observatory is 25 years young in good working order with plenty of years left in it. The coming weeks are especially crucial if Chandra is to be saved. And if you are a U.S. constituent, you can advocate for this great observatory and its continued funding. There is a grassroots effort to make that happen. It is at savechandra.org. Savechandra.org gives a handy overview of the current funding situation for Chandra and how you can advocate for this mission to your congressional representatives." Okay, one more time. Savechandra.org. That's it for T-minus for July 24, 2024, brought to you by N2K Cyberquire. 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 and 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 Karooves, 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 Ivan. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president, Peter Kilpie is our publisher, and I'm your host, Marie Ovarmazes. Thanks for listening, we'll see you tomorrow. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
