[SOUND] Say what you will, but it's not easy working for a government agency. You have all the responsibility of spending public money on programs with the added strain of being fully transparent about everything that you're doing. And sometimes things go wrong. And sometimes those things involve commercial entities who want to protect proprietary information, their reputation, and their shareholders. Well, Hugh, NASA, and Boeing and their possible mishap with the Starliner, and the PR disaster that continues to unfold. [MUSIC] >> T-minus. >> 20 seconds to L-O-N, T-minus. >> Open aboard. [MUSIC] >> Today is August 14th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmausus, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] NASA provides a Starliner update. Progress 89 is ready to launch supplies to the ISS. Florida universities collaborate on space research and development. And our guests today are students Felix and C.Me from ETH Zurich. They are working on projects for ARIS. And what does that all mean? Well, we'll explain everything later in the show. [MUSIC] It is Wednesday, let's take a look at our Intel briefing. Last week, the US Space Agency held a very long overdue media call to provide an update on the latest with the Starliner crew flight test. NASA were quickly told that they needed more updates for transparency by the participating media. So it came as little surprise to anyone when they announced a weekly update for today. Would NASA share a return date or announce an extension to Sunny Williams and Butch Wilmore stay? Nope, not today. They were clear in the opening remarks that they would be providing status, information only. Two eye rolls from the disappointed participants. NASA still says that they have time to decide on the fate of Starliner and they floated yet again. The idea that Butch and Sunny may indeed be up on the ISS for a total of eight months. Quite the difference from their intended two week stay. NASA is expecting to do a flight readiness review at the end of next week with an update on whether they'll be bringing the Starliner home with the crew on board in the week that follows. So as for today, no new news. Please hold and enjoy the elevator music. [MUSIC] Of course, all the delays with the return of the Starliner capsule are having the biggest impact on who else but the crew. Sunny and Butch's health continue to be closely monitored. They've undergone vision and hearing tests and even vein scans while on the ISS. NASA says that they remain in good health and good spirits while the teams work on the fate of their mission. And the International Space Station is waiting on another cargo resupply mission. Roscosmos' Progress 89 spacecraft is due to launch this evening on a Soyuz rocket from the Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan. The spacecraft is expected to autonomously dock with the ISS over the weekend. The spacecraft will be carrying nearly three tons of food, fuel, and supplies for the Expedition 71 crew. Moving on from the ISS, Florida Tech is joining forces with the University of Florida, Emory Riddle Aeronautical University, and Florida A&M University to create a consortium called the Center for Science Research and Technology in Space, or CSTARS, to advance research in the space manufacturing sector. More than 50 aerospace government and industry partners have provided letters of interest in collaborating with CSTARS. The National Science Foundation awarded the consortium an $80,000 seed grant to launch the planning process and seek corporate sponsors and partners. And staying with Florida universities, a team from the University of South Florida's Institute of Applied Engineering have flight-tested their technology's ability to collect data about surface features, such as rocks and craters, to generate an accurate topographical map for landing navigation and hazard avoidance. This technology could ultimately allow for low-cost, fully-autonomous landing on the Moon, enabling rapid exploration and, eventually, the establishment of an outpost for astronauts through the availability of safe drinking water and the ability to create oxygen and rocket fuel. That is super cool. Crossbow has successfully completed the preliminary design review for the Large Solid Rocket Motor Program. This is the second major technical review for the Crossbow Program, demonstrating design maturity and reduced risk for critical technologies. The Large Solid Rocket Motor Program is part of a public-private partnership agreement with the Naval Surface Warfare Center Indian Head Division. The next step is a critical design review, which Crossbow says is on its schedule to meet. Germany's Marble Imaging in partnership with Scanway SA have signed a contract with the European Space Agency to deliver a submeter-resolution telescope payload for the Marble Earth Observatory observation satellite. The optical payload will fly on the first Marble satellite planned to be launched in the first quarter of 2026. ESA's PhyLab Invest Office is funding the development of the submeter-visible near-infrared imager and a high-resolution shortwave infrared imager. ESA's Marble Constellation aims to offer daily global coverage to support precision agriculture, urban planning, infrastructure development, and climate monitoring. Over to the UK now. Wireless connectivity company Arkangel Lightworks has been selected for the 2023 Eureka Global Stars Japan Program. This program is a collaboration between Innovate UK and the new energy and industrial technology development organization known as NIDO. In collaboration with the Japanese company Infosteller Incorporated, Arkangel Lightworks aims to develop and showcase new optical communication technologies through this R&D project that will contribute to more capable ground station services. The aim of this partnership is to develop the world's first ground station as a service platform that offers both radio and optical services for satellite missions. First manufacturing company Hadrian has acquired supply chain software company Datum Source. The acquisition closed on July 8. Terms of the deal were not disclosed. Datum's software is used by aerospace companies like Muon Space and Impulse Space for their internal procurement operations. By acquiring Datum, Hadrian can address supply chain challenges further upstream. Hadrian will maintain the Datum brand for its software product, which will be called Datum Source. Space commercial space startup CAS Space has been conducting testing on components of their rocket Connecticut 2, also known as Lijian 2. The company, which is majority owned by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, is preparing for a planned launch next year. CAS Space plans to begin recovering and reusing the rocket's first stage and boosters by 2028. And a huge congratulations to Robert Sproles, who has just been announced as the new CEO of ExoLaunch. He spoke to Robert back when he was in the role of CTO in April. Robert succeeds Dmitri Sternhardt, the company's founder, who has led ExoLaunch for nearly a decade. All the best in your transition and congratulations again to you, Robert. That concludes our briefing for today. Head to the selected reading section of our show notes for links to further reading. And we have included an announcement from ViyaSat on its new LTCH service and a story from Radio Free Europe on the Kazakh-China relationship and space cooperation agreement. Hey T-minus crew, if you find this podcast useful, please do us a favor and share a five-star rating and a short review. That will help other space professionals like you to find the show and join the T-minus crew. Thank you for your support, everybody. We really appreciate it. [Music] Our guests today are students Felix and Simi from ETH Zurich and a big thank you to Julian Montez who introduced us to Project ARIS, a non-profit association with the aim to provide students with hands-on project work in space. ARIS stands for Ambition and Swiss Pioneering Spirit and I'll let Felix explain more about the organization. So ARIS in general is just the top organization behind all of our projects. So we have like multiple different teams and regions we want to cover. It's basically all surrounding students-based flight. So that's what we are based on. And then we have three big parts which first of all is rocketry, which both Simi and myself are part of. Then we have the direction of satellites. So we have one team there doing some really great work for building a satellite which will hopefully actually launch into orbit. And then we have another one which is robotics, in this case a UUV. So unmanned on the border vehicle. This is IC Moon. So this is what it's concepted for. Right now we're going to test it first in Zurich Lake and then they are hoping to test it in the Arctis as well. But at the end it's designed to explore IC Moons around planets in our solar system. Yeah, that is extremely exciting. That's all very cool stuff. Okay, so just a few small things that ARIS has got going on. So that is an amazing array of things that as university students that you all can have access to. What have been some recent highlights for you all that you've been working on? My name is Simi Vespi. I am currently studying mechanical engineering at ETH. And I've only been an ARIS member for officially for about three months. However, we've been working on our project for quite a while longer. And we're still in the early steps of it. So we've just passed our PDR. That's our preliminary design review. And our critical design review is coming up. The biggest highlight so far was just getting to see how far we've gotten from concepts to plan and starting execution already. And it's really fascinating. And I'm super stoked about everything that is to come. How much detail can you get into on what you're actually building right now? I'd love to hear a little more about it. Okay, so as Felix already mentioned, in ARIS we have different kind of projects going on. You may see a theme there's for the rockets is always Swiss people or like known figures. And for engine, for the engine project of ARIS, it is usually a Greek name. So we have Prometheus, Helius, Perseus now. And the idea is we're building a rotating detonation rocket engine. That is maybe a little, maybe a foreign concept. So rotating detonation rocket engines differ from conventional rocket engines in the sense that they use detonation instead of deflagration. Deflagration just is the term for regular combustion, you would say, I guess. So the point being is with that in a different combustion, you have a lot more potential for efficiency. So the thermal efficiency can be a lot higher. And why that is so important is because for conventional rocket engines, we're kind of reaching the limit when it comes to how much you can still improve on them. So we're in like the last couple of percentiles of actual improvement when you look at Raptor engines like a full flow stage combustion cycle or some of the Chinese engines, the RS-25, the Space Shuttle Lane engines. All the engines that are flying right now are really top of the line and there's very little room for improvement unless you invent like a new alloy. But for RDREs, it is really, there's a lot of potential there in so many different areas. They have the potential to be lighter, smaller, more efficient. They also boat themselves extremely well for altitude compensating nozzles. Some of you may know those as aero spikes or cluster plug nozzles. That's also a cool benefit of those. And also at the stage where we are right now in the world, there have only been two flights of an RDRE and one of them was of a six kilogram rocket. So like extremely small sounding rocket, only 400 meters apogee. The other one was as a payload as a second stage of the Japanese Space Agency and they fired it for six seconds. So what I'm trying to say is we're still in the infant stage of this technology. NASA is working on it. There's just so much potential in it. And there's always been a dream of mine to work in a propulsion and increase like our capabilities when it comes to launching used space exploration. So I do believe that this technology is the way forward and I'm super excited to play my teeny tiny part in the development of that technology. Oh, I can hear that in your voice, that excitement and I mean developing a new paradigm, not easy. I mean, as you said, like you're at the very beginning stages of figuring, you know, sussing that out and that is a fantastic journey to be on. So I mean, what an exciting challenge to be taking on that sounds really, really cool. I imagine these things are always never without risk, but the reward potentials are also just really, really amazing. Felix, is there anything that you wanted to add to the conversation here? Because we, you know, the, this is a really cool. I mean, our RDREs are just a really, really interesting technology. And again, this is the first I've heard of them and it makes sense given that they're still pretty, pretty new on the scene. So that maybe when it adds something. So super inspiring project there, which is like you said, in this infant steps. And I think we have a chance here as a student project to really make an impact globally on the industry. If we can succeed here and if we can develop something here, that's going to be like a step for, for all industries as well. And that's really the strength of a student team where you can experiment a little bit more because it's a highly experimental engine and we just have the capacity to experiment. So that's amazing. That is amazing. So everybody keep your ears out for what's going on with Project Perseus. Go ahead, see me. Yes. If we succeed in building an RDRE, we would be the first students in the whole world to do so. So it's a cool avenue for us to push like the boundaries of audience and push the envelope a little bit. There's a lot of cool industry partners in Switzerland, but you do need to provide them with innovation. And then another thing maybe when we talk about RDREs, the naming of it, it's really a mouthful. So you usually say RDRE, but in the past it's been called RDE, rotating detonation engine. The reason why I'm saying that is there was some confusion because this phenolon can actually be used for airplane engines as well. You can maybe check out Venus Aerospace. They have been focusing on implementing rotating detonation as a way of hypersonic travel. Yes, I've spoken with them before. Yeah, I was going to say something about what you're telling me is familiar, but not in the context that we're talking about. So yeah, that's cool. Yep. So the craziest thing about all of this technology is first of all, it's such an innovative and has so much potential, but it doesn't only have potential in one field. It has potential in the field of aerospace, in the field of launch vehicles, in the field of deep space propulsion. It even has certain use cases where you could use it for internal combustion engines. So it's really like a whole package deal. Wow. All right. So we might be using one in a car. Who knows? Wherever this goes, it's probably a good idea to spend some time or some resources into the technology. That is really fascinating. Y'all are students doing this. I mean, that is not to discount at all what you're doing. It's just amazing that you are doing something this cutting edge. And that is actually really the best time to be doing it, I feel, is when you're a student to be really pushing those boundaries and proving these incredible ideas. So I just love hearing about this. This is very interesting. All right. So we have project Perseus, and we've talked a bit about Aris as well. You mentioned project Nicolier. Can somebody tell me a bit more about that? Felix, is that you? Yes, exactly. That's me. So I'm leading project Nicolier right now. I think we are a very ambitious student team as well with a lot of interesting stuff. We are tackling the whole space flight from a little bit other direction. We try to reuse the rockets to reduce costs, but also have a good ecological footprint as fast as possible with space flight. And we're using a little bit different approach. So our main system is a guided recovery system, but it's a parachute-based. So we launch our rocket and we fire it up. We use the sounding rocket, so it's approximately three kilometers, which doesn't sound too impressive itself, but this is a challenge. When the interesting part becomes after the air purge, so after the highest point of the rocket's flight, and that's where the parachute opens and we let the computer do its stuff, and we have a steerable parachute, which is called a ram-mare in the industry. It's a parachute like a paraglider would use it as well. And yeah, we steer it using electromotors and we have different flight patterns. And our goal is to have it targeted approach so that we can fix one position and the rocket's going to land there. And that's really exciting. And we're in a little bit different project stage compared to Perseus. So Perseus is still at the start. It started with a very exciting project and we are nearing the end now. So we started last year. We did all of this in a year. So we really designed, tested, and in September we're going to launch the rocket itself. And yeah, we've had two drop tests already with our system. So on the drop test, we hang it onto a helicopter so that we can fly up there and test the guided recovery without launching the actual rocket, which yeah, we have a huge testing in Pineda where and so far everything has been successful. We're super excited about all the other steps we've made already and our guided recovery works to the extent which we've tested it right now. And now we're going to go the last step until September and then we're going to have a guiding rocket. It's really exciting. We will be right back. Welcome back. It is not every day that we get to talk about comic book superheroes and space, but you know you're onto an amazing idea when you get to name it after a very green and somewhat mad DC superhero. NASA's human lander challenge, also known as Hulk, yes, the big green guy, is now open and accepting submissions for its second year. The US space agency is seeking ideas from college and university students for evolved super cold or cryogenic propellant applications for human landing systems. Anyone else think they named it after the wrong DC character? I mean, like Polar Boy, Ice Maiden and Blizzard are surely more on theme. Anyway, if you want to Hulk out, the 2025 Hulk competition calls for teams to develop innovative solutions and technology developments for in space cryogenic liquid storage and transfer systems as part of future long duration missions beyond low Earth orbit. Cryogenic or again super chilled propellants like liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen are integral to NASA's future exploration and science efforts. The temps must stay extremely cold to maintain a liquid state. Current systems can only keep these substances stable for a matter of hours, which makes long term storage particularly problematic, say that five times fast. So it is a big problem and hopefully there's a superhero team out there that can solve it. You can find out more about the Hulk challenge by following the link in our show notes. That is it for T-minus for August 14th, 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 Iben, our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilopie is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We will see you tomorrow. [Music] Team Alice. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
