SpaceX’s Falcon 9 experiences another mishap.

It's not very often that we talk about a string of bad luck for SpaceX, but here we are. After delaying Polaris Dawn for a second day due to bad weather this time, they're now dealing with the aftermath of a first stage crash. They say these things come in three. Could this be the start of another mishap investigation? Today is August 28, 2024. I'm Alice Carruth and this is T-minus. SpaceX's Falcon 9 first stage crashes on a drone ship. Astrobotic shares a post-mission report on Peregrine. Luna outposed an ASU to collaborate. And our guest today is analog astronaut Martina Demoska. Martina will be talking to Maria about blazing the path as the first Baltic female analog astronaut and setting up a legacy so that others can follow. It's a great chat, so stick around for the second part of the show. Happy hump day all! And what a hump in the road SpaceX hit in the last 24 hours. Late yesterday they made the call to delay the launch of the Polaris Dawn mission due to unfavorable weather, but decided to go ahead instead with back-to-back coast-to-coast launches for Falcon 9 rockets carrying starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit. The first flight took off from Florida seemingly without a hitch. That was until the first stage broke apart while attempting to land on a SpaceX drone ship stationed several hundred miles north-east of Cape Canaveral. SpaceX shared on the social media platform X that quote, "After a successful ascent, Falcon 9's first stage booster tipped over following touchdown on a short full of gravitas drone ship. These are assessing the booster's flight data and status." It did a little more than tip. The video of the landing showed more flames than usual around the base of the rocket as it neared the deck. It also seemed to be coming in at a faster speed. A landing leg immediately collapsed on touchdown and the booster, obscured by fire and smoke, fell over the side of the landing barge into the Atlantic. It was the first stage B1062's 23rd and what turned out to be the final launch and landing, a new reuse record and maybe the limitation of what SpaceX's Falcon 9 boosters can do. The landing mishap ended a string of 267 successful booster recoveries dating back to February 2021. It of course caused the second plan launched to be cancelled. The question now remains of what now? Does this mean another mishap investigation for the Falcon 9 and if so, what knock-on does it have for the Polaris Dawn mission? The FAA is aware an anomaly occurred during the SpaceX-style-length Group 8-6 mission that launched from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on August 28. The incident involved the failure of the Falcon 9 booster rocket while landing on a drone ship at sea. No public injuries or public property damage have been reported. The FAA is requiring an investigation. As background and investigation is designed to further enhance public safety, determine the root cause of the event and identify corrective actions to avoid it from happening again. The FAA will be involved in every step of the investigation process and must approve SpaceX's final reports including any corrective actions. A return to flight for the Falcon 9 booster rocket is based on the FAA determining that any system, process or procedure related to the anomaly does not affect public safety. In addition, SpaceX may need to request and receive approval from the FAA to modify its licence that incorporates any corrective actions and meets all other licensing requirements. Astrobotics have released a post-mission report seven months after their lunar lander mission failed in its objective of reaching the moon. Astrobotics' Peregrine Mission 1 launched aboard the United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket at Cape Canaveral on January 8. Post-launched, the Peregrine spacecraft successfully activated its avionics and power management system. It established communication with Astrobotics' Mission Control Centre via NASA's Deep Space Network and commenced spacecraft commissioning and operations. According to the report, it was during this commissioning phase that Peregrine's propulsion system was activated and this involved pressurizing the fuel and oxidizer tanks with helium, oh yes that pesky helium again, from the pressurized tank by opening two pressure control valves - PCV1 and PCV2. Upon opening and closing PCV2, helium - pesky helium - began to flow uncontrollably into the oxidizer tank causing a significant and rapid over-pressurization of the tank. The tank then ruptured and subsequently leaked oxidizer for the remainder of the mission. So it's a valve issue and a helium problem. That sounds very familiar. Astrobotics says its next landing attempt using a much larger spacecraft will include fixes to prevent a similar failure. Luna Outpost is joining forces with Arizona State University School of Earth and Space Exploration to form the Luna Dawn Science Council. In April 2024, the Luna Dawn team, led by Luna Outpost, was awarded a NASA-Luna Terrain Vehicle Services or LTV contract. Luna Outpost says it's driving innovation by assembling a top-tier science council to ensure the LTV delivers maximum scientific value. This team of experts from academia and industry will guide the mission to elevate the quality of Luna science throughout the LTV's decade-long operation on the moon. AJ Jema, CTO and co-founder of Luna Outpost says, "It will take the best and brightest minds to create not only the first but the most scientifically viable off-road vehicle for living and working on the moon's surface. ASU's dedication to unlocking new scientific frontiers and extensive global reach make them a natural leader of the science council. Drawing on the expertise of these individuals will ensure the greatest scientific and exploration potential as we develop our LTV with unparalleled technical capabilities. Good luck to that team." Spire Global's name has been popping up in the headlines for all the wrong reasons of late. We mentioned the other week that many legal officers were looking to sue the company after the New York Stock Exchange deemed them not in compliance with listing standards. Spire is requiring additional time to prepare and complete its financial statements for the three and six months ending in the last quarter. An audit of Spire's finances found that the company's previously issued consolidated financial statements for the annual and interim periods within the fiscal years that ended on December 31, 2023 and 2022 and for the quarter that ended on March 31 this year will need to be restated. The company is working to complete its review and these restatements as soon as they can and to file the form 10Q within the six-month period provided by the New York Stock Exchange. Spire is expected to make a subsequent announcement to schedule the date and time of its earnings release and conference call for the second quarter and six months that ended on June 30, 2024. Stoke Space has been selected for a four and a half million dollar award by the DIU or Defence Innovation Unit to prototype a solution that will enable responsive and precise point-to-point delivery of cargo to, through and from space. Funding for the contract comes from DIU's Noble Response Space Delivery Project, which is designed to fund the advancement of commercial solutions for responsive and precise point-to-point delivery to orbit, between vehicles in orbit and to precise locations on the Earth. With this award, Stoke's design and architecture can be readily tailored to a dual-use system that delivers defence effects directly from Earth to unconventional orbits as well as from orbit to the Earth's surface. Intercontinental Exchange, better known as ICE, has announced that ICE Benchmark Administration, known as IBA, is collaborating with Scotland Space Intelligence. The two companies are launching the ICE Commodity Traceability Service, which will be known as ICECOT. ICECOT is a technology platform designed to facilitate the continued frictionless trade of physical cocoa and coffee by automating the process of submitting, storing, validating and sharing due diligence information mandated by the European Union's deforestation regulation known as EUDR. The regulation is designed to reduce the EU's impact on global deforestation and forest degradation by requiring proof that specific goods entering or sold in the EU are deforestation free and lawfully produced. Space Intelligence's geospatial mapping capabilities will be integrated into the ICE COT, clearly indicating areas in cocoa and coffee producing countries that have been deforested post December 31, 2020, and that are not eligible for production of EUDR-compliant goods. Over to Asia now, Tycom subsidiary Ipstar has signed an agreement for satellite capacity with Hughes Communication India. Ipstar India will provide satellite capacity services to Hughes in India via Tycom's satellite network. This will enable Hughes Communication India to enhance its satellite broadband, mobile backhaul, maritime and satellite IoT services to meet the growing and varied demand for satellite services in the country. Tycom is in the process of obtaining regulatory approval under the new space policy from the Indian government. Florida-based Orbit communication systems has secured a $6 million contract with an unnamed Asian integrator to supply advanced satellite communication systems for a naval military platform. These Ocean TRX 7 mil systems will be delivered between 2025 and 2030, providing continuous satellite connectivity across multiple frequencies for a leading global fleet. And that concludes our briefing for today. We've included three great reads for you in the selected reading section of our show notes, one on Spaceport Cornwall, who have formally signed a memorandum of understanding with the National Drone Hub operator, Hullship. Another covers the joint statement following two days of comprehensive dialogue on space between the US and Japan, and the third is an announcement from Viasat on the appointment of a new CFO. 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 in your favorite podcast app. It will help other space professionals like you find the show and join the T-minus crew. Thank you, we really appreciate it. [Music] Our guest today is analog astronaut Martina Demoska. Martina was included in AIAA's Diverse Dozen during this year's Ascend conference and talked to Maria about representing her home nation on the global stage. I am an analog astronaut, the first female Balkan analog astronaut. There's somebody from Greece who was a female analog astronaut that I've connected with him before, but I'm the first female Balkan analog astronaut and the first in Macedonia and many other countries, a central Greece. So I did serve as a commander on the Lunaris-Celine mission. We've served on ESA's funded July startup and astronaut interplanetary agency APISIS mission together with Ales Boboda, the ESA astronaut reserve. We've also been a part of the NASA-supported UND ILMA with my crew. So I have so many missions behind me and I'm also a senior NASA ambassador with suborbital space flight certification. So I had so much training like a certified non-escooba diving certificate for my year-long diving in Germany in freezing temperatures and in lakes, but also a lot of like credentials and passing pre-eliminary tests, pre-eliminary education until I came to this mission. So yeah, that's just one notch under my belt for more experience in the sector. I tried to work as much as I can to, again, grasp every opportunity. So these missions span from the US to Spain to Poland. It's the bulk of life of trying to belong. I get it. I'm very fascinated by analog astronaut missions. I think what you all do is not giving enough praise and attention, quite honestly. I'm not just saying this because you're my guest. I've spoken to other analog astronauts and I think it is just really, really cool work and it's very important work and it gets overlooked. So could you tell me a bit about what your mission was like? What you did as an analog astronaut? Yeah, so every mission is different. So for example, in UND Ilmach, we had a different habitat than we had in Abysses and otherwise. So we were in a cave in Spain. We were really isolated. It was really secluded and cut off from everybody that's not a researcher/analog astronaut. In Poland, we had a World War II bunker now actually remodeled into a space habitat. So it's really different from habitats to experiments with some of the experiments that were a part of. They were launched on the ISS and were the baseline, for example. So think about our missions as this really structured life where every hour is calculated for you and you have a bunch of research to do that's really important for the space agencies involved, for the organizations and universities involved, and for the researchers and the PhDs. So you're not only this test subject that has to have a really strict schedule where we have to do a lot of work, but you also contribute to other lives and impact their careers. But your mission is there to test things before flying them to space. So if you have any particular interest of which one you'd want me to tell you more about, it's really interesting. One is unique, but there's also underlying things that are quite similar to each other as well. Okay, so tell me about, yeah, I've got several to choose from. Tell me about the time you were in a cave. Let's start with that one. I'm fascinated by that. Yes, so when we were with Astroland and Chalice, we were in a cave in Katambria. Hopefully I'm not butchering that. We were in this habitat that was looking like the Mickey Mouse from above. So you had the dome and that two years that were our sleeping quarters. And we did a lot of research from flying our drone and inspecting the cave and the microbiome because they have a really, really interesting microbiome that's growing on the walls. And it's really interesting to actually look at what it is, observe it and just do some science with it and gather some of the samples. But we did so much, obviously, physiological research, so much cognitive research. We've donated so many things like your usual, your blood, your samples of your skin and how bacteria develop. We've tried to do UV long trees. So we had a lot of aspects there. But we had a quite interesting crew. We were a diverse crew, three women and three men. And it was quite a challenge because we were really deprived of so many things. We were deprived from sunlight. We only ate freeze-dried food. And on some days, we only ate emergency bars. We had a limited quantity of water. We did not shower. It was quite a robust mission and quite challenging for me because you're there with a real astronaut and you're learning a lot from them. But the bar is really high. The fidelity of the mission is really high. But the team was quite amazing in a way that they took care of everyone in their own way. It was quite an amazing mission and it was quite transformative to me personally. And I did grew a lot. I seen in that mission what a good team is. What it means to actually be a part of a team who will be there for you. Like I've learned how to make my voice heard. I've learned how to learn from the best. It was quite a comprehensive mission. Wow, that sounds incredible. How long were you doing that specific mission for? Was it a few days, a few weeks? How long was that? Yeah, it was a few days. But we had also pre-flight and post-flight. But it was amazing. In that training, we did learn how to climb for the first time. I mean, I did. People were experienced climbers before, but it was my first time learning how to climb. It was a lot of fun activities that we have to learn before and post-mission. That was quite amazing. Wow, oh my goodness. When I look at your resume, your bio of all the things you've accomplished already and that you are also still, you're finalizing your masters right now. Is that correct? Am I getting that right? Yeah, the International Space University. I am trying to find my internship to finish. So I finished all of the modules successfully. I did my research. It's just, again, trying to find that internship that's not going to be exploitative, meaning it's going to pay for you to be there. And pay for you doesn't mean $150 per month. It means somewhere you can actually go and live and not dab into your savings. It has to be a living wage. So many of our internships are quite exploitative in the space sector and meant for just dealing with the elite because they're not paying you. So when you're coming from nothing, you cannot just sustain yourself living abroad in a really expensive country without exhausting everything you have or just financing yourself. It has to be a really well-compensated internship somewhere, but where I can also legally belong. Those two things are really hard to find. So that's what's stopping me to graduate. I have to both find an internship that pays me and an internship where I can legally work as somebody coming from Macedonia. So it's a lot to take in. Well, we're putting out the call with you to folks who are listening. Martina will have her information in the show notes because I think it's very important that you call out those things specifically because you're right. Those are incredible barriers that are very unfair in the space industry and they really are excluding a lot of extraordinarily talented folks like yourself. These are the kinds of things explicitly that need to stop happening in order for the industry to grow in the way that we know that it needs to grow. So thank you for calling that out because it needs to be said. When you complete that internship, wherever it may be, do you know what you want to do afterwards? Is there a long-term path that you'd like to follow? So several things. First and foremost, I'm a social entrepreneur. I've actually found the International Space Alliance. It's an NGO that's there to make access for space exploration available for underrepresented regions and underprivileged communities. So that's because of necessity. I had to make something established like that to help everybody in need. So it's also existing both in the Balkans but in California too so we can apply to separate grants and actually make some movement and be present worldwide. I do want to develop International Space Alliance to the point where we can actually have serious space involvement in the Balkans. We've been doing so much through it. We've been everywhere from the US to Europe to Latin America to India to Africa to the Balkans with so many initiatives behind us and partnerships. But it's there to make people aware of their potential and find them a niche towards space and just develop those regions that might need some push but also hopefully to fly a lot of people commercially into the space sector. That's a separate niche that will need some time to actually be developed. But why not? I do believe in commercial space. I'm a fan of new space and I hope we do that and make it happen. We'll be right back. Welcome back. We're going to close things out with the opening of the Paris 2024 Paralympic Games today. What's that got to do with space? Once I hear you say, "Well, European Space Agency Reserve astronaut John McFaugh is also a Paralympic Bronze Medalist." He has proven that the sky isn't the limit, even for those with disabilities. His journey from the Paralympics to space exploration is fueled by determination and the lessons learned from competitive sports. McFaugh's involvement in ESA's fly study is paving the way for astronauts with prosthetics to one day reach the International Space Station. His story is a testament to perseverance, showing that with effort, the universe truly has no bounds. And certainly that's the takeaway I get every time I watch the Paralympics. You can read all about his story by following the link in our show notes. And with that, we wish the 2024 Paralympians in the 22 different events strength, speed and perseverance as they compete this year in Paris. That's it for Team Miners for August 28th, 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 really like to know what you think of our podcast. You can email me 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 optimises the value of your biggest investment, your people. We make you smarter about your team, while making your team smarter. 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 Jen Iban. Our Executive Editor is Brandon Kauff. Simone Petrella is our President, Peter Kilpe is our Publisher. Maria Valmarza is our host. She'll be back in tomorrow. And I'm Alice Carruth. Thanks for listening. [Music] Team Alice. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]