NASA’s ML2 under scrutiny.

Another day, another sleigh for the NASA Office of the Inspector General. Oversight is a good and necessary thing, and this time the critical eye of the OIG has turned its sights to the Artemis Mobile Launcher II project. And it's not just the cost overruns that are raising eyebrows, it's the feasibility. Today is August 29th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmausis, and this is T-Minus. The OIG report criticizes overruns on NASA's ML2 project. Blue Origin's New Shepherd launches six passengers to the Karman Line. Millennium's CEO joins Firefly. And our guest today is David Alexander, director of the Rice Space Institute. He'll be speaking to T-Minus producer Alice Karuth about supporting Space Workforce Development and the Houston Space Port later on in the show. It's Thursday, everybody. Let's get into our Intel briefing. NASA's Office of the Inspector General has released a scathing report on the U.S. Space Agency's management of the Mobile Launcher II project. The report examines NASA's efforts to develop Mobile Launcher II, also known as ML2, a platform for the Space Launch System Block 1B rocket at Kennedy Space Center. Unsurprisingly, for a federal program, ML2 has faced significant cost and schedule overruns. Initially estimated at $383 million with a delivery of March 2023, the project's cost has ballooned, or should we say, skyrocketed, to over $1 billion, and completion is now projected for October 2027. The report finds evolving design requirements, underestimation of technical challenges, and contracting inefficiencies as contributing factors for the overruns. NASA's management approach is also critiqued for lacking sufficient oversight and risk mitigation strategies. The report makes several recommendations to NASA, urging improvements in project governance, risk management, and contractor performance evaluations to prevent further cost increases and delays. Bechtel National is the prime contractor on ML2 and is responsible for ML2 project management, architectural and engineering designs, technical integration, fabrication, construction testing, commissioning, and quality control. The findings raise concerns about NASA's ability to deliver the ML2 on time for planned lunar missions under the Artemis program, which could be jeopardized without corrective actions. A Blue Origin New Shepard rocket headed up to the Karman Line early this morning, taking six crew to space successfully. NS-26 lifted off shortly after 8 a.m. Central Time this morning, marking the eighth human spaceflight for the New Shepard program. Inside the flight was NASA-funded researcher Rob Furrell, who conducted an experiment on plant genetics and microgravity for NASA during the flight. Rob's part in the mission marks the first time that NASA has funded a researcher in any commercial suborbital space crew. And speaking of the Blue Origin's New Shepard, do you want to fly on the suborbital flight? Are you an Indian citizen? Well, good news then, this story is for you! The Banjay Asia Entertainment Company is teaming up with the Space Exploration and Research Agency to run a nationwide hunt for one extraordinary Indian citizen who will take a seat on a future Blue Origin New Shepard space mission. The hunt will be the basis for a new TV show and aims to capture the drama, disappointment, and joy as the shortlisted individuals participate in challenges to test them ahead of the spaceflight. We feel like a live feed at Boeing or SpaceX would capture just as much drama at the moment to be honest, but good luck to all the participants. And speaking of Boeing, the CEO of Millennium Space Systems, Boeing's satellite manufacturing subsidiary, quietly stepped down from the company in recent weeks. Millennium Space, which focuses on building small satellites for defense and government clients, has been operating under Boeing since its acquisition in 2018. And its former CEO, Jason Kim, has now moved over to Firefly Aerospace. This morning, it was announced that Kim would be the new CEO of Firefly, effective October 1. Congratulations, Jason! The U.S. Air Force has awarded Outpost, a $33.2 million contract, to develop a scalable Earth return vehicle for hypersonic testing and reentry missions. The contract is a four-year strategic funding increase, also known as a stratify contract, from the Air Force Venture Program's AFWORKS. Outpost's vehicle will be designed to safely return payloads from space to Earth, focusing on scalable technology for rapid testing. This project aims to support hypersonic vehicle development and other defense-related space activities. The first launch is set for the end of 2026. There's new malware that's specifically targeting the space industry out there. And for more on that, let's hear from our colleague Dave Bittner at the Cyber Wire. The Iranian hacking group APT33, also known as Peach Sandstorm, has intensified its focus on space-related infrastructure, alongside other critical sectors, according to new findings from Microsoft. Active for over a decade, Peach Sandstorm is notorious for its aggressive cyber espionage, particularly through password-spraying attacks. Recently, the group has developed a sophisticated multi-stage backdoor named TICLR, which allows them to remotely access and control victim networks. Since April of this year, Peach Sandstorm has targeted space, satellite, and defense sectors using TICLR to infiltrate these high-stakes environments. Microsoft reports that the group also manipulated victims' Azure cloud infrastructure, gaining further control. Additionally, the hackers have been using fake LinkedIn profiles to conduct intelligence gathering in the space and satellite industries. These actions underline a significant and evolving threat to global space infrastructure, with Peach Sandstorm demonstrating a persistent interest in disrupting and exploiting this critical sector. Thank you for that, Dave. And it's finally happened. NASA has assigned everybody's favorite overachiever meme astronaut, Johnny Kim, to his first space station mission. Kim will serve as a flight engineer and member of the upcoming Expedition 7273 crew. He will launch on the Roscosmos Soyuz MS-27 spacecraft in March 2025, accompanied by cosmonauts Sergey Rizhikov and Alexei Zbrytsky. The trio will spend approximately eight months at the space station. NASA is expanding its Human Exploration Rover Challenge, also known as HERC, to include a remote control division and is inviting middle school students to participate. The competition is scheduled for April 11 and 12 next year at the U.S. Space and Rocket Center near NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. The competition details have been released with guidelines for the new remote control division, which NASA is calling "Very Clever Rover," which stands for Remote Operated Vehicular Research. Check out the link in our show notes for more details. And while you're in the selected reading section of our show notes, we've included two additional stories for you to enjoy today. One is detailing South Africa's plan to release a national astrotourism strategy, and another article is outlining U.S. Department of Defense awards for national STEM education and outreach programs. Hey, T-Minus Crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership or recruit talent, T-Minus can help. We'd like to hear from you. Just send us an email at space@n2k.com, or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. . Our guest today is David Alexander, Director of the Rice Space Institute. And David spoke to our producer Alice Carruth about what the Rice Space Institute is. The Rice Space Institute is a lot of different things. Before even I came to Rice, I've been at Rice for 21 years. There was a merger between the old Space Physics and Astronomy Department and the Physics Department. And in that merger, our department became Physics and Astronomy. But the Space Physicists wanted to keep the long heritage going. And so a colleague of mine, Professor Patricia Rice, created the Rice Space Institute. And mostly what she was working on was outreach to do with Magnetospheric Physics because that was her research area. She's won awards for it. She's been a very strong advocate for outreach and a very good purveyor of it. In 2011, I started an initiative called the Rice Space Initiative where we were trying to form much stronger connections with NASA, which of course is in NASA Johnson Space Center in Houston. And I did a number of different things. As a result of that, what we ended up doing was asking Pat to be the Associate Director for Public Outreach. And she is still to this day. And then I became the director of the Space Institute. So part of that was to create, we have a Space Act agreement with the Johnson Space Center. So we do joint activities on education in outreach and so on. Ever since that time, since I think January 2011, we've been running a public lecture roughly once a month, which is now sponsored by the Houston Space Port. And so we have these monthly lectures with all sorts of people talking that from people who have walked on the moon to people who are studying what would happen if we found life in another planet, all these different things. What we do mostly is try and find opportunities for both our students and our faculty, particularly the Institute of Rice University. There's a few of them are fairly small moment moment operations. They're supposed to help foster multidisciplinary research across campus. So that's what we're trying to do. And on the education side, we have a professional science, masters in space studies that we manage as well. It's very multifaceted and I love that about it. And you've just mentioned something that I think is really important is that you've got this really great workforce initiative to work as a pipeline to places like Houston Space Port. Could you talk a little bit about that relationship, how that developed and what it is you're hoping to achieve by working with Houston Space Port? We're very fortunate to because live in Houston, right? So there's a lot of space activity here, however you slice it. In the past, it's been primarily focused on NASA, with the home of human spaceflight. Rice University's had a long connection with NASA on that front. But things started to change as you know, in the space industry where NASA's engagement with companies, with industry, kind of changed a little bit. We had the commercial cargo program, the commercial crew program, now we've commercial lunar program. And part of that spurred its national push for commercial space ports instead of the government space ports. And Houston, being a big city, has three airports. Two of them are very heavily used for international travel. And the other one was Ellington Field. And it's called Ellington Field because that's where it was when it first started as an airfield about a hundred and a hundred years ago. And it was essentially an underutilized resource. And so the idea was to try and create what became the 10th commercially licensed spaceport in the United States. I joke, my good friend Arturo Machuka, he's the director of the spaceport. He came to talk to me. So my joke is I've been involved with the Houston spaceport since day two, not quite day one. And we built up that relationship over that last maybe 10 or 11 years. So when I say we, the mayor appointed me on to the board of the Houston spaceport development corporation to sort of look at the development of how we utilize the spaceport. But the key thing is we, there's not just the connection to industry and the growth and the creation of jobs, but we very much wanted to create an educational component. We have I think called the Ed Center at the spaceport and that is for training technicians. We spent about 18 months with the industry trying to work out what the correctional want to look like. That's run by San Jacinto College. And so that's an excellent program where basically a lot of the students in that program get internships with companies like intuitive machines, which have been in the US a lot lately. The spaceport's now home to intuitive machines, Axiom space, Collins aerospace, NASA's there, the T38's flyer. There's a lot of stuff happening in the spaceport. And what we've been doing is working to see if we can, we can bring in more of the local universities. And we're fortunate to be in a big city where rice is essentially downtown, but there's University of Houston and Clear Lake, Texas Southern University. And then if you go a little bit further, a few of Texas A&M and they are kind of key partners in what we're trying to do in the state overall. So it's always been a part of the relationship to bring in the educational side. And hopefully we'd like to create an aerospace institute located at the spaceport with participation from at least the local universities, if not more broadly. And then have those, have that research, have that education kind of await most firmly to the industry that's set to. And you did mention that you were appointed as part of the mayor, but you've been appointed to a few things in the state of Texas to really help develop this industry. One of which is the Texas Space Commission that just recently was announced. And I believe it's part of that is the Texas Aerospace Research and Space Economy Consortium. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, it's a bit of a full, so tarsec. In fact, what so one of the things that we've been very active in over the number of years is trying to get the state to step up a little bit more. Obviously, we're a very energy focused state. And so a lot of the emphasis had been on the energy industry. But again, with the growth of commercial space, not just across the United States, but across the world, those competitors, Florida and Alabama, Colorado and so on. And so the state, and again, with good Greek credit to the leadership of Chairman Greg Bonin, who's head of the Appropriations Committee and the leaders up at Texas A&M University, with a little bit of help from Rice and others. But they really got this going. And so the state decided to invest $350 million into developing capabilities to raise the state's profile when it comes to, particularly, commercial space. Obviously, we have NASA here. So that's a big jewel in the crown. And so to do that, that's a little complication is that the Rice Legislature meets every two years. So it's a two year budget. But of that, in addition to that support, that funding support, they wanted to create a couple of organizations to help spearhead that strategic thinking for the state. One of them, as you mentioned, is the Texas Space Commission. It's a nine body commission, which is, I mean, I'm really very happy. Yeah, you always worry with some of these political appointments. There's always some political aspect to it. But really, everybody's a space leader. Everybody on the Texas Space Commission is a very highly regarded leader in the space community. Many of them from industry. In fact, most of them from industry. The other body is, I think, as you mentioned, the TARSec. And there's a nine body executive committee. And that's where I'm representing Rice on that committee. The C&M is represented and the University of Texas system is represented specifically. Everyone else on that executive committee is from industry. And the idea is to combine the large scale direction for the state with the research component, the research and development component, and what can we, as a subset, if you like, of this body help provide that kind of flood of ideas into what the next budget cycle should look like. So, for example, specifically, I don't think this is emphasized enough. The nine of us are an executive committee, but the consortium that is in the name is essentially everybody in the state. Is any entity that has something to contribute. Obviously, we're focusing along the educationalists and research establishments, but also includes industry partners too. So the hope is, we're just getting going, but the hope is that that combination of people and ideas and the input from interested parties across the state will really galvanize what we do and really expand what we have to offer in the state of Texas. I feel like you just answered my last question, but I'm going to throw it to you anyway. What is it you're hoping that all of this academic partnership that you're going to be doing with the industry builds for the state of Texas and for your students in particular? Well, I think it's even bigger than that. I mean, it's always good to focus on your own university, your own students, your own state, but as you know, and many of the things that you've done and people you've talked to, we need a lot of people. We need a lot of ideas if we're going to do what we hope to do in space. And we just want to be part of that. And part of that is not just the state being a big player in this, but the university and our students come looking to get connected to space, whether it be through NASA or some of these new activities. So I feel quite privileged to be part of it. And especially now, I mean, there's a lot of other things we won't have time to touch on, but it's not just the spaceport and the Texas Space Commission, but also NASA, Johnson Space Center has created this thing called Exploration Park so that they can engage more broadly with the commercial industry. So that's all happening here, a lot of it in Houston, but happening here in Texas. And so really, if you're interested in space at all, it's a really exciting place to be at the moment. It's always been exciting, but it's particularly so now. And that's being reflected in the number of, we have a number of different international delegations come through here on a regular basis, looking to either connect or emulate what we do. And that's an exciting, that's exciting. That provides all the opportunities for new ideas to get engaged, to educate, and then to connect with other people, not just locally, but around the country and around the world. So it's kind of exciting to just be part and in the mix of that a little bit. Now, of course, we have to do something meaningful with it. And that's what we're all hoping to do. And that's where not just what we do in the next few years, but how we prepare the pathway for those young people coming into the industry. We just hosted the International Space University's summer program here at Rice with, I think, 35 countries represented, 156 students, which I think is the biggest one they've ever had. And just the sheer thrill that they bring to the table and the sheer enjoyment and the passion that they bring in thinking about what they can contribute to space going forward, it just makes it worth it. It's one of these trilogies of being at university. You know, there's challenges ahead. There's always the issues with funding and all these other things. We want to be sustainable when we do this. Lots of different things. But as I always say, a big journey starts with the first step. And I think we're making some of those first steps here. We'll be right back. Welcome back. We love sharing stories of new tech on this show that can revolutionize space travel and potentially have uses here on Earth. Well, a breakthrough technology has been developed that can transform moon dust into drinking water. And a team led by Professor Zhang Chang Wang at Ningbo Institute of Materials Technology and Engineering of the Chinese Academy of Sciences have discovered a method to extract water from lunar regolith by using a process that involves heating the dust and releasing oxygen, which is then combined with hydrogen to produce water. This innovation could significantly reduce the need for water transport from Earth, making lunar missions more sustainable and enabling astronauts to use local resources for survival. The technology not only supports lunar exploration, but also paves the way for future missions to Mars and beyond. By harnessing resources available on celestial bodies, space agencies can lower mission costs and increase the feasibility of extended stays on the moon. But don't go chasing waterfalls on the moon just yet. This process could extract up to 50 kilos of water from one ton of lunar soil. Yes, keep in mind that your standard water barrel stores about 160 kilos of water, so 50 kilos of water from one ton of regolith, well, I mean, every drop helps, and it could be useful for growing food for sure also. The ability to generate water on the moon could further be used for producing fuel and oxygen, contributing to the broader goal of establishing a self-sufficient human presence in space. That's it for T-Minus for August 29, 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 was produced by Alice Karuth. 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 Kilpie is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. (upbeat music) - T minus. - T minus. (wind blowing) [MUSIC]