65 years ago today, then-US President Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 into law, creating NASA. It took a few months before the new agency was able to open its first offices, but today really marks the birthday of the US Space Agency. So happy birthday, NASA! Here's to 65 years of wisdom and a few extra wrinkles and gray hairs. Age happens to the best of us, my friends. Today is July 29, 2024. I'm Maria Varmausis, and this is T-Minus. Maria says they will have an astronaut on the ISS in the coming months. US fails to pass financial year 2025 appropriation bills. Rocket Lab is ready for Mars! And our guest today is Mike Cassidy, CEO of the newly established DeOrbit USA. We'll be talking about his plans for the new subsidiary, so stick around for the second part of the show. Happy Monday, everybody! Let's find out what's making headlines in space this week. We're kicking off with news out of India. India's Minister of Science and Technology and Earth Sciences told members of the Lok Sabha, India's governing body, that an ISRO astronaut will be going to the International Space Station sometime after August. ISRO has signed a space flight agreement with Axiom Space for a joint mission to the ISS, which could see a Gaganyatri astronaut head to the ISS as part of the Axiom-4 mission. Yes, Gaganyatri. That is a word that is for one of the crew from India's planned first human space flight mission called Gaganyan. ISRO selected four Air Force pilots for the mission, all four crew members trained on a space flight basic module in Russia during the pandemic, and are currently undergoing training at ISRO's astronaut training facility in Bengaluru for the Gaganyan mission, which is scheduled to launch in late 2025. According to Axiom, the Ax4 mission is expected to launch no earlier than this October. In addition to getting the first ISRO astronaut on the ISS, India has made moves to build on the success of the recent Chandrayaan-3 mission. Last week, the Finance Minister announced an investment to the equivalent of $135 million as part of the country's national budget to support space technology. India is expecting to expand the space economy by five times in the next ten years. The new funding is expected to assist more than 180 government-recognized space technology startups in India. Over to an update on funding in the United States now, and it's not the outcome many had predicted or hoped for, the US House leadership decided to send everyone home last week for the summer recess a week early when it became clear that they didn't have enough votes to pass the remaining fiscal year 2025 appropriations bills. So they left on Thursday and will not return until September 9. Among the bills that didn't make it to the floor were the Commerce Justice Science Bill that funds NASA and NOAA, Financial Services General Government that funds the FCC, and Transportation HUD that funds the FAA, and its Office of Commercial Space Transportation. The Defense Bill is the only space-related bill that's passed so far. It's never pretty when politics are involved. Redwire Space has signed a memorandum of understanding with Consolidated Safety Services, known as ISS, to jointly pursue future task orders under NASA's 478 million Research, Engineering, and Mission Integration Services 2 contract to support the International Space Station. Through this MOU, the companies will compete for task orders to provide spaceflight hardware, ground hardware and software, engineering services, payload facility integration, and research mission integration operations services for the ISS program. Space Communications Company CZM-Astro has been selected by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center to develop critical navigation technology for future lander missions. The contract tasks CZM-Astro with delivering advanced radio units compatible with NASA's Lunanet Augmented Forward Signal Standard, also known as AFS, to support ground testing of future surface navigation networks. AFS, which is a special signal system that helps spacecraft find their way around, aims to provide communication and navigation services for missions on and around the moon, similar to how GPS operates on Earth. CZM-Astro expects to deliver radio units to NASA within one year. We mentioned on Friday's show that SpaceX's Falcon 9 was finally able to fly again, and the workhorse of the industry was back on the launch schedule as quickly as possible. SpaceX held back-to-back launches over the weekend to catch up on the two weeks of missed launch opportunities. The company completed its 300th booster reflight during the launch of the Starlink-10-4 mission, which added a batch of 23 Starlink version 2 mini-satellites to its constellation. The Starlink-10-4 mission was the 51st dedicated Starlink launch of the year, and just hours after that mission from Cape Canaveral in Florida, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9, this time from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. The Starlink-9-4 mission transported 21 Starlink satellites, including 13, that feature direct-to-sale capability. Climate Data Company First Street has closed its series A funding round, raising $46 million. First Street offers software as a service to allow users to create high-resolution models to quantify risk and economic impacts at property level. The company plans to use this new funding to increase their global data coverage and build out their new SAS solution. And the International Space Station Research and Development Conference, also known as ISSRDC, kicked off today at the Marriott Copley Place in Boston. The event includes panel discussions with industry leaders, keynotes addressing topics pertinent to the space community, panels highlighting compelling opportunities in the Leo economy, lightning talks with space innovators, and valuable networking opportunities. And by the way, I will be attending the conference this Wednesday, August 1st, so if you're going to be there, send me an email at space@n2k.com, and we can maybe chat or we can just catch up on the conference floor. I would love to hear your story and say hi. And that's it for today's Intel Briefing for this Monday. As always, you can find further reading in our show notes or at space.n2k.com. Hey T-minus crew, every Monday we produce a written intelligence roundup. It is called Signals and 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. That's all signal, no noise. And you can sign up for Signals and Space in our show notes or at space.n2k.com. Today's guest is Mike Cassidy, CEO of the newly established Deorbit USA. And I asked Mike to tell us more about himself and how the Deorbit USA branch came to be. I'm a serial entrepreneur. I've done five startups previously as CEO and co-founder. They're all high tech. One was an internet search engine. One was a computer telephony company. The last one was an Ion Thruster company. And now I'm on to my next startup. Yes, a very familiar name, but a really good one. So yeah, Deorbit USA, this got a lot of us really excited when we heard about this. So this has got to be very exciting for you. Tell me more. The origin story for this is there were five of us in US who are pretty experienced aerospace engineers. We wanted to create a satellite bus company. We think there's a big opportunity for satellite buses, whether it's for commercial communication satellites or for defense satellites. We think there's a big opportunity. At the same time, Deorbit in Europe was looking for more of a US presence. I wanted to expand the US presence. And Deorbit has a very successful track record. They've flown 13 times and all 13 have worked, which is great. And our US team, we had no flight heritage. So we knew that every time we bid on a proposal, customers would say, "Well, you sound like a great team, but you don't have any flight heritage." So we thought we'd put the two together and then we'd say, "We've got 13 successful flights and we've got this great US team." So that's kind of how it came together. That makes a lot of sense. That flight heritage is such a gotcha. It's so hard for companies to break through that. So what a smart strategy on your part. That makes a lot of sense. So tell me a bit about the vision for Deorbit USA. I mean, I imagine it's very closely aligned with, what do we want to call it, Deorbit? The mothership, the group. Yes, sorry. Yes. Well, I mean, it's aligned, but it's not doing the same thing. I mean, Deorbit has a lot of sort of orbital transfer vehicles and they deliver other people's satellites and they have some sort of edge computing projects where the US team is 100% focused on satellite buses. Not the payload, we want to make the bus because a lot of people already have the payload. Commercial communication satellite vendors, they've got their antenna and their electronics for mass communications systems. They just want a bus. Similarly for some of the defense projects, they have an observation satellite or a signal intelligence payload and they just want a bus to take it there. And that's what we're focused on the US. That makes a lot of sense. So yeah, tell me about your US operations. Are you all located? Like are you spinning up new locations? Tell me more. We're in Boulder, Colorado. Oh, nice. Yep. Yeah. Aerospace is just booming in Colorado. Lots of aerospace companies. So of course it's great infrastructure there for testing infrastructure, for making electronic boards for talent acquisition. So yeah, it's a great location. That's fantastic. Yeah. And again, the news came out about D-Orbit USA. It's still pretty new. So I imagine you all are really ramping up right now. So again, I really appreciate you talking to me when things must be extraordinarily busy. I'm curious about the long-term vision. So you mentioned satellite buses. That is a very smart strategy, as you said, especially with a lot of folks who already have their payload ready to go. Do you think that's going to also be like long-term? Are you going to grow beyond that? Or do you know what the path is? I mean, I like focus, focus, focus. If you sort of look at all the startups I did, we tried to be laser focused. I mean, I think the market for satellite buses is looking great. I mean, if you just look at any of the industry reports of how many satellites were launched in 2015, 2017, 2019, 2023, or whatever, just keeps going up and up and up. I think Starship is very exciting addition to the mix. I was down at the Starship 4 launch in Texas. That's the one where the fins were kind of burning off on the way down, but it made it all the way down. Loved launching that deal. It did. It did its landing burn, and we were all jumping up and down excited. And I think the potential for lowering the cost to orbit for more satellites are allowing larger satellites and larger payloads is just going to make the demand for satellite buses go up even more. And the potential that Starship is going to unlock for the space industry, and as I imagine, especially for companies like the orbit USA, huge. I do think the potential is big. When they talk about Starship, it could potentially reduce the cost per kilogram significantly further than it is already. It also could allow for larger-sized payloads. Some of the sort of antenna sizes some people want to put up today are pretty large, hundreds of square meters, and also larger solar cells, hundreds of square meters can give lots of power. So I think that Starship will potentially even increase more satellites and more satellites going up. And of course, the orbit USA is, we think space is booming. We think there's going to be lots of demand for satellite buses, and that's why we sort of form this company now. Yeah. Well, Mike, thank you again for taking the time to talk to me. I want to make sure I give you a chance to leave us with any parting thoughts or anything you want the audience to know about orbit USA before we conclude. I think the team is really exciting. We have people who are one of the lead designers of Starlink, SpaceX Starlink, one of the lead designers of the One-Web satellite, one of the lead designers of the Amazon Kuiper satellite, and we've coupled that with the orbit Europe's great flight heritage, 13 out of 13 successful flights. And I think that combination gives us a really good position. And we want to move fast. We want to be flexible with our customers' needs. We're already talking to more than 10 different potential constellations who are interested in what we've got. So the future is so bright, I got to wear sunglasses right now. It's looking good. [MUSIC PLAYING] We'll be right back. Welcome back. Did you happen to catch the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics? It was a multi-hour affair, so I understand if maybe you weren't gripped by watching boats slowly work their way down a choppy sand river in the rain. But did you happen to notice that space played a little role in the festivities? At one point, the Olympic flame went up in a hot air balloon, and that hot air balloon is a tribute to the Moncalfier hot air balloon that was the first to take humans into the air back in 1783. And that's also the inspiration for the cauldron that's holding the Olympic flame. In an imaginative animation, that hot air balloon keeps going up and up and up and up until it goes into space, and it flies by the little princess asteroid B612, maybe. And then it even goes past the International Space Station. No big surprise in my space-loving household, but that little cameo was a big hit with us, especially my kid. And speaking of the Olympics and the ISS, the crew aboard the ISS right now actually had their own mini Olympics up there, complete with their own improvised flame. And actually, on fire, of course, it was a flashlight with colored paper on the end. Gotta hand it to them for the stage craft. That is super cute. The crew did a torch relay with handoffs around the ISS, and weightlessness makes the handoff more of a gentle toss. Lots of clips of the astronauts limbering up, hydrating with globules of floating water, doing their best takes on gymnastics, and even a discus throw. You gotta dig Butch Wilmore really putting in an effort to throw a duct-taped shot-foot ball. And then there's this whole new weightlifting category we definitely will not be seeing in Paris. Human weight weightlifting with Tracy Dyson powerlifting a bar with Butch Wilmore on one end and Mike Barrett on the other as the weights, complete with her raising them both over her head and then fake slamming them as the barbell down onto the floor with Butch and Mike just kind of blissfully floating away. It is all pretty goofy fun, and you can tell the astronauts really went for the gold on the visual gags. Ha-ha, yeah, I know. And they very, very nicely closed out the video with a kind message for all of the Olympians. Over the past few days on the International Space Station, we've had an absolute blast pretending to be Olympic athletes. We of course have had the benefit of weightlessness. We can't imagine how hard this must be to be such a world-class athlete doing your sports under actual gravity. So from all of us, aboard the International Space Station, to every single athlete in the Olympic Games. Godspeed! That is it for T-Minus for July 29th, 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 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 app. Also, please fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com, where privilege 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 Kilpey is our publisher, and I am Maria Varmasas. Thanks for listening, we will see you tomorrow. 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