Most people met me in the space industry when I was working at a spaceport. Launch and re-entry facilities also known as spaceports are vital to the industry but are often overlooked and understated for their relevance. The Global Spaceport Alliance likes to remind us that entry to space starts at the spaceport, so it's always exciting to hear of new developments at launch sites, especially when there's international collaboration. Today is August the 22nd 2024, I'm Alice Carruth and this is T-minus. Voyager space to provide technical support for spaceport Nova Scotia. China kicks their satellites into lunar orbit. Scout space and Dawn Aerospace are partnering on an SDA mission. And our guest today is Jason Aspiotis, Global Director of In Space Data and Security at Axiom Space. He'll be talking to Maria Varmasas about Axiom Space Station and the infrastructure the company is building with partners AWS to develop Enterprise IT in orbit. We're kicking off this Thursday's Intel briefing with some news out of Canada that will hopefully shape launches in the years to come. Maritime Launch Services has selected Voyager Space as the first owner-authorised representative for the next phase of development for spaceport Nova Scotia's launch support infrastructure. Yes, an American space company working in Canada. How is that so? Well, Canada and the United States finally agreed on the Technology Safeguard Agreement or TSA earlier this month. The TSA facilitates cross-border cooperation in space technology, including launching US launch vehicles and satellites from Canada and the development of the associated speciality support equipment. Hurrah! So back to the agreement. According to the press release, Voyager will bring its decades of commercial spaceflight engineering, manufacturing and operations capabilities to provide engineering design, development and build-up of select portions of the launch site on behalf of Maritime Launch. Voyager will work alongside Maritime Launch to analyse launch client requirements and integrate them into the current site layout. This partnership between Voyager and Maritime Launch Services is expected to accelerate the development of Canada's first commercial spaceport Nova Scotia. We see big things on the horizon. Chinese engineers have reportedly recovered two experimental satellites five months after they were left in limbo when the launch rockets upper stage did not fire properly. The satellites were launched on March 13 on top of a Long March 2 sea rocket but did not reach their lunar destination. The vehicles dubbed DRO-AMB have now been moved into their designated lunar orbit. A researcher told the South China Morning Post that the recovery was achieved by getting the spacecraft to fire their engines in a series of paragreek "kicks" aimed at the closest point to the Earth, increasing velocity and extending their reach. The satellites are aiming to test laser-based navigation timing technologies between Earth and the Moon. Scout Spaces announced a new flight partnership with Dawn Aerospace to demonstrate a novel very low-Earth orbit space domain awareness capability. This proof-of-concept mission called Morning Sparrow will fly on Dawn Aerospace's suborbital spaceplane platform MK2 Aurora. Scout signed a flight agreement with Dawn in August, covering this initial demonstration and a series of future flights. The first mission is scheduled to fly in November 2024 out of New Zealand. The European Space Agency is letting us all know to keep our eyes on the skies on September the 8th. The first of four satellites that make up ESA's cluster mission will re-enter Earth's atmosphere over the South Pacific Ocean uninhabited area. ESA says this targeted re-entry is the first of its kind and part of the space agency's efforts to ensure a clean end to the cluster mission going beyond international standards. The cluster mission has been studying the Earth's magnetosphere for 24 years. Without intervention, the four cluster satellites would have re-entered naturally in a less predictable manner and potentially over a more densely populated area. By targeting the satellites' re-entries, ESA has taken the opportunity to ensure cluster's demise doesn't contribute to the rocketing amount of space junk in orbit around the Earth. And speaking of ESA, their third European service module known as ESM-3 for NASA's Artemis-3 mission has departed from the Airbus facility in Bremen, Germany. It will soon leave Europe on its way to the United States. The module is a true representation of international collaboration. It was manufactured in Italy, assembled in Germany, and built with components sourced from over 20 companies across more than 10 European countries. The module will now make its way to NASA's Kennedy Space Centre port aboard the transport ship Canopy, a journey that will take approximately 12 days across the Atlantic Ocean. The UK space agency has awarded a total of £2.5 million for satellite data pilots to benefit citizens and businesses. The 10 selected pilot programmes have been awarded grants of up to £400,000 each. They will trial new solutions that use satellite data and services to support transport, logistics and financial services. The trials will combine terrestrial data and technologies such as AI, quantum, machine learning and geospatial data with satellite data and services and provide deeper analysis to develop insights and present new solutions to UK customers. TrustPoint has been awarded two Director Fays, two contracts by Spaceworks with a combined value of $3.8 million. The contracts are aimed at advancing the company's GPS-independent ground control segment and developing an advanced position navigation and timing security application. These contracts hope to address critical challenges within the Department of the US Air Force. And SpaceX is now targeting August 27 for the launch of the Polaris DAWN mission. It will be the first of the Polaris programme's three human spaceflight missions designed to advance the future of spaceflight. No further explanation was given for the slip in the launch date. That concludes today's briefing. Head to the selected reading section of our show notes for further information on all the stories I've mentioned throughout the show. I've added two additional ones in there for you today, an announcement from creators on the autonomous jet that could transfer over into the space industry and an investment announcement from QOLIS Corporation. Haiti Miners crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership or recruit talent, T-miners can help. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at space@intuk.com or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a programme to meet your goals. Our latest AWS in orbit episode is getting released this weekend. Episode 10 explores building opportunity with Axiom Space, Enterprise IT technologies on orbit and mission control from anywhere. Here's a little snippet of Maria's conversation with Jason Aspiotis, Global Director of In Space Data and Security at Axiom Space. I have the pleasure and honour really to work on some really interesting projects revolving around the Space Station we're building. Axiom's building the world's first commercial space station, the ISS retiring. That's something that obviously is part of our plans and we will be in sync with ISS as they finalise their "retirement plans" and we have a plan ourselves and how we do it as smoothly as possible. That's just part of the transition from government-built, government-owned, government-operated, human-rated large-scale infrastructures now, commercially operated, privately-owned, privately-built infrastructure like what we're doing. Ultimately, it does come down to economics and economic order of things. A space station that's commercial wouldn't have been possible 20, 30 years ago, but now is the right time for it. Yeah, it makes so much sense. When we think of space stations, I think about the crew. Axiom has many private astronauts have already been to the ISS thanks to Axiom. I'm thinking about the impact of a commercial space station, Axiom's space station and future private astronaut missions and even international collaborations. What would that look like? Would things change significantly? Would they be similar to now? Do we know what that vision would be? Yeah, what we're finding out with the private astronaut missions that we're doing, we've done three thus far. We have a fourth one coming up and obviously a lot more to come, especially when we have our commercial infrastructure in place because we are using the ISS for these precursor missions. Part of what we're doing that is to learn as a company to do routine commercial, do you have a space flight? That's an important piece of us just growing as a company. We've done three and continue to do that because it's great learning, but also the other piece of that is unlocking new demands and new use cases for human space flight that in some of it is going to continue to be government, of course. NASA is going to be a perpetual driver of human space flight, so our key partners like ESA, JAXA, etc. But there's also emerging governments and countries that have tremendous amount of interest in how they get to be part of this human evolution and growth in the space domain. And a lot of these countries are investing in satellite capabilities, all the kinds of things where there's space, but they also have an interest in growing their human space flight programs because they see the synergies between the two, right? There's a lot of things that connect all of them, the transportation, the infrastructure, the competencies, all the logistics associated with larger satellites and larger humans and having all that operate in a safe way in space. There's a lot of commonality between all those two. And it's all part of the same economy, right? A space based economy. So as a space based economy grows and becomes more international and goes from, I don't know, I guess it's almost half a trillion dollars per year by now, and it grows to 1 trillion, 1.5, 2 trillion in the next few decades, more and more countries obviously want to have a piece of that pie. So what we're seeing is a lot of interest from countries around the world, large, medium, small, that want to be part of this economic transformation. And as the economy grows, they want to have a piece of that. So we're glad to think we're helping them have a part of this and grow their programs through this alternative way that otherwise wasn't available given human space, like what's sort of a government-focused program where you had some key government players, NASA, etc., but others couldn't easily participate. So we're helping make that more of a reality for those countries. You've mentioned about the different kinds of applications that are going to be happening aboard Axiom Station. This is going to be a tremendous technological lift for lack of better term. And I mean, what is the IT infrastructure for something like this look like? I mean, that's got to be really something that's perhaps never been seen before. It's got to be something, a new territory for lack of better term. So when we think about IT infrastructure, enterprise IT infrastructure, it spans really three main segments, right? One is what we're doing on the ground as part of our company, engineering teams, business operations teams to design, build the space station and also the markets that we're developing as part of the space station. So that's one large domain or umbrella of a domain. The other one is sort of how you communicate command and control with the space station securely on the ground. So this is sort of the mission control center type infrastructure. That's pretty common with NASA and human space like programs and also satellite constellation projects and infrastructure, right? They all have sort of a mission control function. That's going to be very important to us. And then there's the space based sort of domain, right? How you do communications and information assurance and capabilities on the space station to support irrational, the support, the research you have going on to support your manufacturing projects. And then one of the big use cases, right? The orbital data centers, right? As part of the space station and how that is providing a scalable IT backbone in support of the future of mesh network in space, right? You could have hundreds or someday thousands of satellite spacecraft connected to orbital data centers and in orbit cloud services. Mission control ground station, building that new for your needs, that's got to be a really fascinating challenge to take on. What is that looking like? How are you building that out? So the ISS has done, has allowed that work for us in a way because right now our mission control center is leveraging a lot of what the ISS has done to provide mission control for the space station. So what that has allowed us to do is sort of leverage what the ISS has done, build it for our needs, but now have the ability to sort of iterate it and optimize it with cloud capabilities. So as we converge to building a mission control center for our space station, it's the best of both worlds where we're leveraging what we already know works and it's done well from a, I'll say, traditional mission control perspective, but also leveraging the cloud and those kinds of capabilities where they're needed and where they actually provide an advantage. A couple of advantages is redundancy, right? You no longer are confined to sort of physical mission control center. You can have redundancy in the cloud that enables you to have an iron cloud approach to operation continuity, right? So if there's a hurricane, God forbid, heading to Houston, you don't worry about it because you can go to your cloud instance of mission control and operate your space station that way. It's also about connectivity and ability to remotely access policy of space station, which is beneficial as we look at expanding the user base, right? Because the entire user base is not going to be in Houston at any particular physical location on the ground, right? So if we want to expand our space station to be used by companies, universities and other kinds of research or government institutions in the US, the same Europe, the same in Asia, other parts of the world, the cloud really opens up the ability to have multiple users accessing the same physical facility in space, but through a seamless sort of interconnected framework that's underpinned with the cloud that allows multiple people, multiple users around the world to access part of our space station, right? So it does become really important as we look to expand the user base and the users for the space station across the world to have cloud-like capabilities supporting how you do mission control and communications from the ground and space station. We'll be right back. Welcome back. There's been a lot of chatter about what Sunny Williams and Butch Wilmore are up to while their stay on the International Space Station has been extended, until when we still don't know. Fear not though, Sunny at least is remaining in good spirits and is back to her old habits of running in microgravity, this time the Falmouth Road Race. The Falmouth Road Race is held annually in Cape Cod. Sunny Williams gave the command to start the wheelchair and women's divisions of the race remotely through a video call. Then she suited up in a harness and started the race for herself on a treadmill on the ISS. Sunny is a Massachusetts native and has previously run the Boston Marathon well on the ISS, so this isn't a new habit for the veteran astronaut. I'm assured by our executive producer, Jen, that on Earth the race is very hilly, not something that can be easily replicated on a treadmill in microgravity. Sunny says this race is amazing, it raises so much money for the local community. If you watch the video or see the images she's posted on social media, then you'll see she's making it look very easy. Bravo, Sunny. That's it for Team Miners for August 22, 2024, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. We've privileged that N2K and podcasts like Team Miners 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, and we have to say a massive congratulations to Elliot as he's just welcomed his first daughter Aurora to the world. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben. Our executive editor is Brandon Carr. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. Maria Valmarza has hosted our interview, and I'm Alice Carruth. Thanks for listening. [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
