Once in a blue moon.

There's nothing worse than an audio-only podcast kicking off with news of a photograph. It's normally an image from web of a galaxy or nebula in deep space that's too beautiful to feel real, but not today. Today we're talking about an image taken of our moon, and it was captured during a first of its kind manoeuvre that is creating a juicy spin. Today is August 20, 2024, I'm Alice Carruth and this is T-minus. ESA's juice makes the first-ever lunar Earth flyby. RFA experienced an anomaly during an engine hot fire. Planet has signed a new contract with NATO, and our guest today is Dan Murray, Executive Director of the Office of Operational Safety at the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation. Dan will be chatting to Maria Valmarzis about the licensing process for launch and re-entry vehicles to stick around for the second part of the show. We're kicking off this Tuesday's Intelligence Briefing with a juicy update. The European Space Agency's JUICE spacecraft, which stands for Jupiter/IC Moon Explorer, returned near Earth overnight. It's executing a double world first, the first-ever lunar Earth flyby, and the first-ever double gravity assist manoeuvre. The spacecraft is executing a braking manoeuvre that will take juice on a shortcut to Jupiter via Venus. It will change juice's speed and direction to alter its course through space, saving the spacecraft's fuel consumption by using gravity. Air controllers guided the spacecraft past the Moon, capturing an amazing close-up of the Earth's natural satellite in the process. This successful flyby of the Moon slightly redirected juice's path through space to put it on course for a flyby of the Earth today. Juice is expected to reach Venus in August of 2025. From that moment on, the energy boost will begin, with juice being whizzed up by Venus and then twice by Earth before heading on to Jupiter, where it is expected to arrive in 2031. Over to the UK now, and Rocket Factory Aursberg, known as RFA, experienced an anomaly during an engine hot fire at Saxiford, SP in Scotland. RFA were testing a first stage of their rocket when it caused an explosion. The testing was being held ahead of a scheduled first flight from Saxiford, SP on the island of Unst, which was expected later this year. Most importantly, no one was injured during the explosion. A spokesperson for Saxiford, SP released the statement saying, "This was a test and test campaigns are designed to identify issues prior to the next stage. We will work with RFA to understand and learn from the causes and support them as they move forward in the next phase of their preparations." Most alarmingly were the comments on social media about the explosion. I saw calls to stop public funding to the space industry and complaints about the impact the explosion would have on the environment. I hope the UK uses the opportunities to educate the public on why space is important to them in their everyday lives, and that this is the kind of anomaly that's better to have happened now than during a launch. And staying with the UK, the UK's Space Command's first satellite successfully deployed on the SpaceX ride-share mission last week. The TIC spacecraft can capture daytime images and videos of the Earth's surface and will strengthen the UK's intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities. The TIC is the first satellite to be fully owned by the UK's Ministry of Defence. It was designed and built in the UK through a £22 million contract awarded by Defence Equipment and Support to Surrey Satellite Technology Limited known as SSTL. SSTL received the first signals from TIC a few hours after liftoff, confirming the successful deployment of the spacecraft. The Italian Space Agency's Iperadrome 0.0 satellite was also launched on the SpaceX Transporter 11 mission last week. The Iperadrome spacecrafts are being developed by Commercial Consortium including, and I do apologise for my mispronunciation, Centro Italiano Riccacce Aerospeciali, also known as CIRA, and Caeso Italia. Teranor Batole's Tyvek International is responsible for the satellite hardware and software development assembly integration testing and launch integration service. The contact has been established and the Tyvek International team is now working on the commissioning of the vehicle. The Iperadrome 0.0 mission is focused on validation and demonstration of key technology, specifically the proximity operation algorithms, the inspection cameras and the propulsion system. Planet Labs have signed a new contract with the NATO Communication Information Agency known as NCIA. NCIA's Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space Programme will use Planet's SkySat high resolution satellite data to support NATO missions. Planet will provide imagery for use with detailed tracking and analysis of foreign military capabilities and activities, monitoring of military infrastructure, detecting movements, assessing threats effectively, filling missing intelligence gaps and helping provide an unclassified common operational picture between allies. Over to the US now, and CIRA space has been selected to participate in the Space System Command's Space Domain Awareness Tools application and processing known as TAP, Lab Apollo Accelerator cohort 4. The team will be working on AI and machine learning capabilities to proactively detect potential dangerous events that could threaten friendly satellites in orbit. By joining cohort 4, CIRA space will work in parallel with other companies to address the key challenges in space defence. CIRA space has shared its financial results for the second quarter and provided a business update. The company launched its LizzieSat 2 and 3 spacecraft during this quarter. CIRA space reported total revenue for the quarter of approximately $930,000, a decrease of $440,000 compared to total revenue for the same three months that ended in 2023. CIRA says this decrease was primarily driven by the timing of fixed-price manufacturing milestones and delays in satellite contract payments, which are expected to recover in the second half of the year. And the US Space Agency has selected the winners of the Deep Space Food Challenge. NASA has awarded a total of $1.25 million to three US teams in the third and final round. NASA says the teams delivered novel food production technologies that could provide long-duration human space exploration missions with safe, nutritious and tasty food. That concludes our briefing for today. You can read more about all the stories we've mentioned by clicking on the links in our show notes. We've included two additional stories in there, one on securing space against growing cyber threats and another on the Polaris Dawn mission. Hey T-minus crew, if you're just joining us, be sure to follow T-minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. Also, 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'd love your help as part of the T-minus crew. If you find T-minus useful, please share so other professionals like you can find the show. Thanks folks, it really does mean a lot to me. Our guest today is Dan Murray, Executive Director of the Office of Operational Safety at the FAA Office of Commercial Space Transportation. Dan spoke to Murray of our masses and started off by telling her about his role at the Federal Aviation Administration. I'm with the FAA's Office of Commercial Space Transportation. We're one of several lines of business within the FAA. We serve as regulators in this instance to the commercial space transportation industry. And the way we go about doing that is by issuing licenses for commercial companies to launch or reenter other vehicles or to operate a site. My Directorate is one of two within our Office of Commercial Space and that's the Office of Operational Safety. We execute the licensing process from its very beginning to its very end. Our other Directorate is our Office of Strategic Management and that's where we have our rulemaking, our policy, our tool development, innovation, those sorts of things that support the execution of our licensing process. Dan, can you help me understand in the context of space what the FAA licenses and then maybe if you could walk us through actually the application process for a launch and reentry license? So we license the operations of launch and reentry vehicles and the operations of launch and reentry sites. They're more commonly known as spaceports but within our regulatory regime we call them launch and reentry sites. We also have another authorization that's voluntary, actually two other authorizations that are voluntary. It's called an experimental permit and it's an authorization of the launch under specific circumstances and we also have something called a safety element approval and that is an approval we give for a system or a process that can contribute to the overall licensing process. We've actually been doing this for quite a while now. Our office has been around since the 1980s. We've been in the FAA since the mid-1990s and we've licensed just recently a big milestone for us, our 800th operation. Now what that means is that companies have come to us over time and they have indicated to us that they have a need for a license to conduct a launch or reentry or both or an operator site. That's pretty top level at the beginning, just trying to understand expectations, timelines, particularly innovative aspects of whatever it is that they're looking to do. So we introduce them to the regulations. Generally the companies go off at that point and start gathering information to start assembling their application. At that point we transition from initial discussions into what we call pre-application consultation. So this is a back and forth between the company and our office as they start to assemble their application and prepare to formally apply. This can go on for weeks, months, even years and it's largely dictated by the pace the company wants to move at. At the end of our pre-application process, they should be ready to formally apply and we should be ready to review that application to see if we can accept it or not. That can take weeks, months or even years to get to that point. We start evaluating it and that starts a clock, an evaluation clock that we have. For a license it goes 180 days, meaning that in no more than 180 days we have to make a determination from the point where we accepted that application. And at this point it's not just that we're checking that it's there, we're checking the quality. Does it really demonstrate compliance to the requirements or doesn't it? In the event that we find out that it doesn't, we have a couple of options we can exercise. One is a process called tolling. That means we stop the clock. We have recognized that there's something that's missing that we were expecting to have been there and we kind of call a time out and we go to the company and say, "Hey, we recognize this is missing or it was incomplete and we need you to come back and address that course." Once they have done that, meaning they've submitted something back to us to close that gap, we take a look at it. If it looks like it's on the right track, we'll restart the clock. So when we take on an application, we're committing to make a determination, but it's not always a positive determination. It doesn't always mean that you're going to get the authorization you're seeking. There are circumstances where that just doesn't happen because the requirements can't be met because the company just struggles to get us what we need, etc., etc. And so at that point, we would go through the denial process. What that means is we're no longer going to look at that application. We're handing it back to the company. We're telling them what was wrong with it to the degree that they can go back and reassess their work and see if there's an opportunity to overcome the issues with it and perhaps reapply to us in the future. But if we don't have to go down that route, we can make a positive determination and we issue a license. When they do that, we're not done with them. We have safety inspectors and compliance monitors that we send out to the site where the operation is taking place. They sit with the operator in their control room, their facility, and they are present to make sure that as the operator uses that license, they're doing it in accordance with the way they represent it to us that they would. We spend a lot of time doing applications to licenses. It's a good half of our work really right now. And again, that's to update the license to allow the company to do something different than what they had originally proposed to us. A license is good for five years. And after that point, they have to come in and renew it. So they'll-- or up to that point, they'll come in and they'll tell us they want to renew it. They want to keep using it. And we go through a process for that as well. Dan, that was a very thorough answer. I really appreciate that. And I also wanted to say, I noticed how collaborative the whole process starts from sound to finish, which surprises me a bit. I didn't realize that it was that much dialogue going in both directions. It really is. We're fortunate, in some cases, that we have applicants who come in and they've really reviewed the material. They understand the regulations. They have a dedicated team who takes on this work and does it as part of their overall preparation for getting to their operation. And that part works pretty smoothly. But they're still back and forth, checking status, exchanging information, that sort of thing. Sometimes we get companies to come in and they haven't gone their homework. They haven't looked at the regulations. They're not prepared. Initially, at least, there's a lot of back and forth on that. But we try our best to send those folks off and say, hey, go look at this stuff that we've prepared, come to one of our workshops and ask some questions and basically come back when you're ready. But there's definitely dialogue there with us and the applicant. On top of that, there's generally dialogue with other agencies. It could be because an operator is planning to fly from a federal range. So that's a site that's operated by, say, the Space Force or NASA. So there's obviously some dialogue there to make sure we're all on the same page. Also we conduct an environmental review as part of our licensing process. And there are agencies who have responsibilities with regard to the National Environmental Policy Act. And we work with those agencies to make sure that all those requirements are met, too. So very collaborative process across the whole spectrum of activity. So when something does go wrong, when there is a mishap or an anomaly, what is the process there? Because obviously there's got to be an investigation. So how does that work? So as I mentioned earlier, we have safety inspectors who are present with the company during the operation. They're monitoring very closely what's happening. They are in the room to hear what the operator is seeing and hearing themselves and seeing in their data. And when something unplanned happens, they're all there to kind of see it as it happens. We understand how the mission is supposed to progress. And oftentimes, as you said, it doesn't exactly work out that way. Sometimes it's very spectacular. There's no question it didn't go well. There's an explosion or a fireball or something like that. Other times it's a little more subtle. The rocket got something to space, but maybe it didn't put it right where it was supposed to go and just about everything in between. And so our safety inspectors are present and they're gathering information as they're there. So we see something that's not going according to plan. And there is a potential for whatever happened to have an implication on public safety where you declare a mishap. We say, something happened here. There was a potential for public safety to be jeopardized. We are going to start gathering information immediately and then initiated investigation in order to determine what happened. In that process, from the instant that something happens through hours, days, even weeks after we're gathering information, there's a potential that we gather information along the way that shows us that, yes, it didn't go according to plan, but what happened didn't have anything to do with public safety. At that point, it would no longer be a mishap. The company would go off and work that for their own mission assurance purposes, but our license would remain in effect and they could proceed to launch when they're ready. Alternatively, we declare a mishap and sure enough, we do see something that looks like it had implications on public safety. At that point, the investigation proceeds and it goes until it identifies the root cause or causes of what happened and until the investigation identifies the corrective actions that need to be put in place to prevent reoccurrence. In that time, to the degree that there are open safety issues, the rocket doesn't fly. We're not suspending the license or revoking the license. It's simply not going to be exercised while the investigation is going over. We hear from time to time, sometimes in the media, that a rocket is grounded. That's more of an aviation term. We don't have fleets of rockets like there are fleets of certain types of aircraft and we don't ground, but what we do do is we hold onto the license while the investigation proceeds. There's a chance that the investigation can again demonstrate that safety was not in jeopardy with what happened. At that point, we can issue a return to flight, even though there perhaps is more work that needs to go on to either close out the investigation or for the company to take steps that are required again for mission assurance. We have done that a number of times. We just did that recently with the Falcon 9 that we declared a mishap. We worked an investigation at that point. We were able to recognize that there was an opportunity for the rocket to safely return to flight, even though there was more work to be done in the investigation. We notified SpaceX that they could safely return to flight under their license while they continue to close out material. We've done that from time to time. We recognize that once we're confident that safety is being taken care of, allowing the company to do what it needs to go back to taking on business is in everybody's best interest. When we conduct these investigations, it's important to note that we generally let the companies lead them. We go to SpaceX, for example, or any other company. When we say, "Hey, there's needs investigation. Your company has already told us how you would go about investigating something like this that's part of their license application, is they submit to us a plan for how they would do this." We tell them, "Go off and start executing your plan." We participate at that point. They're leading the investigation, but they're doing it under our oversight. It proceeds at the pace that they want it to proceed to. We have the opportunity to invite others to participate as observers. We can pull in NASA. If NASA has an interest in what's happening, we can pull in the Space Force or the NTSB. Sometimes they will come to us and ask to be observers in these investigations. Those will proceed. There's generally a lot of meetings and a lot of information that is exchanged back and forth. What ultimately resolves and closes out the investigation is what we call MISCAP report. That the company completes and files with us. We review. If we accept it, meaning that we agree that they have found the root causes and that the corrective actions for the aspects that our safety implications have been effectively addressed, then we close the MISCAP. We'll be right back. Welcome back. We've seen a dramatic increase in brands using space for marketing in the last few months. The LA Galaxy Soccer Club - that's real football to all of us outside of the US. Transformers New Movie Trailer. Columbia Clothing. They're just a few of the brands that have used space for product placement recently. And today we're adding another, although this one seems to be for a good cause. Doritos. Yes, as in the brand of tortilla chips, is the latest to jump on the zero gravity trend. They're partnering with Polaris Dawn, the next all-commercial space mission, which is due to launch next week to support St Jude's Hospital. Doritos have launched the cool ranch zero gravity chips in a special glow-in-the-dark packaging. The company's replaced the dust-based flavour with oil-based coating to keep the flavour that customers know and love on the chips. The chips are also made in minis, designed to be eaten in one delicious bite. Together, these space-friendly modifications reduce any snacking debris that could affect the space module. Smart choice Doritos. So as I mentioned, they've updated the look of the chips, gone are the bags, the limited edition chips are packaged in space-approved tins for flight with special glow-in-the-dark packaging. The chips will be joining the Polaris Dawn mission in space and fans can get a hold of the limited edition snack merchandise and special space-approved packaging by making a donation to St Jude's through the Doritos website. We do like space for a good cause. Polaris Dawn, as I mentioned, is expected to launch on August 26th. . That's it for T-minus for August 20th, 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's Associate Producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our Executive Producer is Jennifer Iben. Our Executive Director is Brandon Kaaf. Simone Petrella is our President. Peter Kielpie is our Publisher. Maria Var Marzis hosted today's interview and I'm Alice Carruth. Thanks for listening. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. [BLANK_AUDIO]