Safety over Starliner.

Imagine telling your loved ones that you're going away on a work trip for just a few weeks, only to return eight months later. That's the fate of NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams. NASA has, understandably, opted for safety first and won't be risking a crude re-entry of the Starliner capsule. What does Boeing have to say about all this, though? No one knows, as they missed Saturday's announcement. Again. Today is August 26, 2024. I'm Maria Varmausis, and this is T-Minus. Starliner to return to Earth uncrewed. Butch and Sonny to stay on the ISS until February. Blue Origin targets October 13 for the inaugural New Glenn launch. And our guest today is Chris Rose, director at Sent Into Space. And Chris will be telling us all about how his marketing firm ended up specializing in space campaigns. It's a really great story, so stick around for the second part of the show. Happy Monday, everybody. It's been a really busy weekend of space updates, so let's dive into today's Intel briefing. NASA announced on Saturday that Starliner test pilots Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams will not return on Starliner, but instead will stay on the International Space Station until February 2025 as part of the Expedition 71/72 crew, and return to Earth on a SpaceX Dragon along with two other crew from the Crew 9 mission. Starliner itself will return to Earth uncrewed. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson got right to that news in the Saturday press conference, which was full of NASA representatives only. No one from Boeing was present. Issues relating to helium leaks and the spacecraft reaction control thrusters, which NASA and Boeing have been studying since the Starliners launch, have not been resolved with a level of certainty that meets NASA's safety and performance requirements, the agency says. The uncertainty and lack of expert concurrence, says NASA, prompted NASA leadership to move the astronauts to the Crew 9 mission. The uncrewed Starliner is now expected to return to Earth autonomously in early September, and aboard the SpaceX Dragon, Crew 9 will now launch to the ISS in mid-September, with only two crew members aboard, instead of its full four-member complement. The Dragon will have two Dragon spacesuits set aside for Butch and Sonny for their return flight home. Blue Origin have announced that despite the media rumors of complications at their factory in Washington, they are set to launch their heavy lift, New Glenn, no earlier than October 13. The rocket is slated to take off from Launch Complex 36, where the space company has invested more than a billion dollars on reconstruction work. Blue Origin officials plan to launch New Glenn with payloads for Amazon's Project Kuiper, broadband satellite constellation, NASA, Telsat, and U-Telsat. Company officials are also seeking certification to fly Space Force national security missions. And Blue Origin's New Shepherd is expected to launch from Van Horn, Texas on August 29, carrying another six passengers to the Karman Line. And we'll bring you more on that later this week. Northrop Grumman has secured a contract from the US Space Force to build the second site for a radar capability that is designed to facilitate object detection and tracking in geosynchronous orbit, providing space domain awareness for the United States and its allies. The sole source contract is worth a potential $200.2 million and covers the design, testing, and integration of the Deep Space Advanced Radar Capability Site II, which will be based within the European Command Area of Responsibility under a partnership with the UK. Firefly's Blue Ghost Mission 1 lander is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Initiative and is integrated with 10 scientific instruments and technology demonstrations that will all help pave the way for humanity's return to the moon. NASA's funding new studies to better understand how to best support the health and performance of crew members during long-duration spaceflight missions. Hmm, wonder why that is. The awardees will complete the studies on Earth without the need for samples and data from astronauts. The 11 selected proposals originate from 10 institutions, and the cumulative award totals about $14.6 million. Slim, the plucky lunar probe that could, has finally come to the end of its mission. The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, better known as JAXA, concluded operations of the Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, or Slim, after being unable to establish communication with the spacecraft during the operational periods from May to July, following last contact with the spacecraft on April 28th this year. NASA has shared a portion of the asteroid Bennu sample collected by the agency's OSIRIS-REx mission with Japan's Space Agency. JAXA's portion of the Bennu samples will be housed in the newly expanded clean rooms in the extraterrestrial sample curation center on the JAXA Sagamihara campus. JAXA will now work to create an initial description of the sample, including weight measurements, imaging with both visible light and infrared light microscopes, and infrared spectroscopy. The sample will then be distributed through a competitively selected process for detailed analysis at other research institutes. Moving over to India now, and India launched its first reusable hybrid rocket over the weekend, the Rumi-1, developed by the Tamil Nadu-based startup Space Zone India, carried three CubeSat payloads and 50 Pico satellites that were aiming to gather data on climate change. The vehicle was launched into a suborbital trajectory using a mobile launcher. Loft Orbital has announced a new venture with Abu Dhabi-based Marlin Space. The companies are forming OrbitWorks, which would be the Middle East's first private space infrastructure company. OrbitWorks aims to produce commercial, low-earth orbit satellite constellations. The joint venture has an initial investment of over $100 million and aims to produce up to 50 500-kilogram satellites annually. Construction is due to begin on a new manufacturing facility. OrbitWorks has secured components for its first 10 satellites, the first of which could be launched as early as the first quarter of 2026. The U.S. National Science Foundation has awarded researchers $38 million to support STEM workforce development. Researchers at organizations in Maine, Mississippi, New Mexico, Puerto Rico, and Rhode Island have received funding through the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research, which promotes the development of research competitiveness among 28 targeted states and territories. The awards aim to enhance research facilities, form new networks, support workforce development, and accelerate economic growth in parts of the United States that have historically received less funding for scientific research. And the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Fisheries has issued a launch operator license to Andoja's spaceport. You can read more about that and all the stories that I've mentioned in today's show in the selected reading section of our show notes. Hey, T-minus crew, if you would like daily updates from us directly in your LinkedIn feed, be sure to follow the official N2K T-minus page over on LinkedIn. And if you're more interested in the lighter fare of what we do here, we are @t-minusdaily over on Instagram. And that's where we post videos and pictures from events, excursions, and even some behind-the-scenes treats for you. Links are in the show notes. Hope you'll join us. Our guest today is Chris Rose, director of Sent Into Space. Chris's marketing firm specializes in using space for all of its marketing campaigns. And I started by asking him to tell me more about how he got started. At Sent Into Space are the world's first marketing-focused space agency. We began 13 years ago, and originally we were a test platform for technology that was designed for use in space. So a lot of our early work was focused within the CubeSat industry. Essentially, we were a fast turnaround, relatively cost-effective way of getting that technology into the space environment, back down to worth again, and then back to the manufacturing question. And so a lot of that work didn't really have a requirement for high-end visuals, which did very quickly become our predominant focus, as you can probably tell. Because within a few short years, we were kind of operating a bit like a PR firm in a lot of ways, because people were exploring our services as an advertisement platform, whether that's a company who wants their latest product in space, or perhaps they have a wider international campaign, a certain element of which is space-related that they want to explore with us. And over time, we started to do a lot more work within the movie industry or music videos for artists. What a client needs us for relative to their ambitions to do something in space, be it marketing-focused, experimental, ruggedized testing. We're essentially a fast turnaround and cost-effective way still of exploring that unique environment. That's such an interesting pivot. I have to say, one of the things that often comes up in my conversations with space industry folks is trying to show the value that space can bring in ways that are maybe a little unorthodox that we haven't figured that out. You all are a shining example of that, of figuring out a really cool way to make space work in an industry where maybe people hadn't thought about doing that before, because what you all do is so neat. You've been doing this a while. You must have some favorites of the cool projects that you've done. Can you run me through some of those? Absolutely. Yeah, listen, there's this sort of hierarchies of memories here. There's this stuff that I remember because it was so stressful, and there was a lot of pressure on that project, and the activation opportunity was very complex. We had one go at it, and we'll talk about some of those. And there's some that was just like, we're just so proud to be able to say, wow, one moment that comes to mind was for the Samsung Galaxy S24. To be perfectly transparent in the early sort of infancy of our service proposition, we would do a lot of projects which were extensions of a thing on a stick, not to sort of compartmentalize what we did too much, but essentially we were utilizing our existing systems to say, hey, your product could be drifting high above the earth in space, and this could be an incredible brand, consciousness raising opportunity for you. But what we pride ourselves in now so much more than that is activating discussion-worthy feats in space. So our clients, fan base or consumers, when they get back to work on Monday, they're saying, did you see what Samsung did in space rather than did you see that Samsung went to space? And the Galaxy S24 project that we worked fairly heavily with it was a good example of that. So it was a real moment in time for us because at the end of that project, we were literally in Times Square looking up and Samsung being the giant that they are, taking over the whole of Times Square with our results. And what an incredible moment that was to see all our content that had taken such a long time to achieve through the design, the development, the execution, what our payloads were going to do and how they were going to do it. To see them actually showcased in such a way was a real cool moment for us personally. But that project, that kind of encapsulates why a client might want to use us. In that case, the client here is Samsung. They're releasing a new handset and what is one of the biggest boasting points for that product? It's Zoom capability. It's famed for Zoom. So they want to not only showcase that this phone is rugged, resilient, the weather-harsh environments, which we don't want to lean into too much because at the end of the day, we don't want to be saying this is a phone that's designed to be able to survive the harsh environments of space. But it's a great flex for it without going into too much detail to show it functioning high above the Earth in space. The phones had this incredible capability of zooming in from long distances. So you can already tell where we're going with this. We're going to send the phones into space, have them zoom into areas of interest, in this case, areas of natural beauty around the US, Grand Canyon, Sedona National Park, all these incredible places, LA, Coastline, and take the phone into space and just let the performance of the handset do the talking and zoom in. We had some shots and we were blown away by the capability of that phone. So I have to ask, that is a technical feat. You're sending objects way, way, way, way up, but then you're also interacting with them, you're getting them to do things. That sounds like a very interesting project to be working on. Can you tell me a bit about that? It's a lot of fun and every project is very different. What we're trying to do is to maximize the storytelling opportunity within the launch. Then we work backwards from, okay, well, if this is what the objective is visually, technically, creatively, what sort of launch vehicle do we need? How are we going to hold this safely, securely? What angles are we going to shoot it from? How are we going to ensure that this doesn't become physically compromised because of the low pressure or temperature? Is the champagne going to explode too early? So there's a lot of ground-based testing, but ultimately we're designing and developing that launch vehicle that gives us, firstly, a fantastic branding exercise in the BTS for the client, but also is able to execute the feat. There have been a lot of really cool missions that you all have done where it's just like, sometimes it's just like, it's so beautiful and it just makes a lot of sense when you see it, but if you had explained it to me in the abstract, I would have gone, I don't know why, but when I see it, it's like, oh, that makes sense. I have to imagine a lot of your conversations with your clients are probably like that, where they maybe they're just like, do they know that they want to just send something into space or why, or do they just come in with like a, that would be cool. And you kind of lead them from there. A good question. I think you're quite right, actually, with the latter. They come to us with, often with an objective that we are doing this thing or we are part of this campaign or we have this anniversary, whereupon we have an overarching narrative that is somewhat space related. So it might be that Nike are releasing the go anywhere shoe and we want to truly demonstrate that this is the go anywhere shoe. So we're going to send it into space kind of a bit more tenuous because that's not a space related product, but it's, it's the, or it might be that, you know, this stroller, which is actually a project we did that was for, they escaped from it. Come to be in a moment. But the stroller was designed to be as lightweight as possible, you know, easily stowed in an overhead compartment on a plane, the lightest stroller you can imagine. So much so, the thing's going to drift off into space if you're not careful. And then much more on the nose sort of marketing objectives where we have, you know, Samsung Galaxy, you know, or also the terminology or the aesthetic of an existing campaign is heavily space related. So what better way to demonstrate that than by exploring its performance capabilities or something like that in the natural environment of space? Because like you say, the view does a lot of the talking for us. It's very beautiful. It's very provocative and evocative. So, you know, it's a great staging point to showcase a product on the world stage quite literally. I imagine when the clients see the results, they must just, it's got to surpass their expectations every time. We like to think so. And I think there is a lot of prior conversation and development work with the clients. So they are sort of part of that conversation from start to finish. So we'll sort of design the craft and what it's going to look like. And then ultimately, we are any good launch ready, so to speak, once they've signed off the feature setup. So here's what it's going to look like from the various cameras and different angles. And here's a shot of the activation opportunity happening in testing scenarios. But having said that, we're seeing, you know, once it's in the majesty of space, you've got a real pronounced curvature of the earth and blackness of space and reduced. I mean, just like shooting at a high frame rate, so you've got them beautiful striations of light just sort of glancing over the top of that product. It is quite powerful. And for, I mean, we're not desensitized to it either. We've been doing this for 13 years, over a thousand flights. And every time we see a powerful result, you know, it's a real wow moment for us. I'm glad to hear that. Because I was just, I can imagine you've seen it a lot of times, but it can't get old. That's so gorgeous. I have to just say, we started at the beginning, you mentioned that you all sort of pivoted into this. And I feel like I should have probably maybe asked a little bit more about that, because I think that's just so fascinating. Maybe any words of advice for other companies that are working in space right now that are maybe thinking of some kind of a pivot that might be a little unorthodox? I think my advice certainly wouldn't be limited to the space industry if I had any. And if I even considered it should be respected. But my advice is certainly along the lines of how we operate day to day. We're always wanting to push the barriers of what we do. I think that's so important for any company. It doesn't matter if you make shoelaces or you make spacecraft. Essentially, we're always looking at ways to not just increase the performance or the aesthetic of what our output deliverables could be. So when we started out, we were more of a test platform. We broadened our horizons to be more of a PR marketing focus, which allowed us to entertain such a broader demographic of clientele. From different industries, we do ruggedized testing, say for like Panasonic Toughbox, who want to show that their technology really is the toughest. So we're going to get their laptops that are not just functioning in space, but also survivor, punishing crash land to earth from 38 kilometers above the globe. Or it might be that we're doing something more artistic with a revelation opportunity for maybe a literal piece of artwork, who knows. And I guess going back to my advice, so to speak, putting that in their speech box, that always comes from not resting on your laurels and looking for that continued development opportunity. [Music] We'll be right back. Welcome back. And as I mentioned at the top of the show, Cyni Williams and Butch Wilmore are not coming back to earth until February. And that is quite a lot of time to kill. But of course, it's no vacation. So what exactly are Butch and Cyni doing up there in low earth orbit before their return home? Well, unsurprisingly, they've been keeping quite busy aboard the International Space Station. There's always plenty of work to do up there. So Butch and Cyni are working side by side with the Expedition 71 crew, taking on a number of operational tasks to keep the ISS in fine working order, as well as a number of many scientific experiments aboard the floating lab. Gardening is a fine hobby to pass the time with, and in space, it's no exception. Of the many experiments keeping the two astronauts busy lately, one of them has been giving them an opportunity to test their green thumbs. The Plant Water Management Investigation is a series of tests that Butch and Cyni have been running to try and figure out how best to water plants in space. Just think about it for a second. Microgravity makes watering challenging. And there are a bunch of different methods that you could use to get water to the plants, but which one is best in microgravity for optimal plant yields long-term? If we're going to have astronauts living and working in space for the long-term, we can't just take anything as simple as plant watering for granted. Finding out the best way to do it is just one of those kinds of questions we have to get an answer to. Good thing Butch and Cyni have plenty of time ahead of them to figure it out. [Music] That's it for T-minus for August 26, 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 that 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 review in your favorite podcast app. Also, please fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com. We're privileged 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 Peltman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilby is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Varmausus. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]