[MUSIC] And what a week it's been. We've run the gauntlet and been forced on the roller coaster ride of late with human spaceflight. Starliner has been a disaster to say the least, sorry, but it's true. SpaceX can't launch anything until it figures out why booster 1062 crash landed. But at least Blue Origin had a successful tourism flight. We've got some updates on Starliner's return and details on who will be joining Sonny and Butch for the next expedition on the ISS coming up in the show. >> I feel like I need to brighten the mood with one of my bad dad jokes. So here it goes. >> Please. >> [LAUGH] >> What's the sun's favorite beer? >> The sun's favorite beer is a something light. >> It's a Corona Maria. >> My God, I'm sorry, that word has traumatized me. So I blocked it from my mind. [MUSIC] >> 20 seconds to ALOS, [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC] >> Today is August 30th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasas. >> I'm Alice Carruth and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] >> NASA selects intuitive machines for a fourth clips mission, Starliner to return to Earth on crewed on September 6th. SpaceX crew nine revised ahead of its September 24th planned launch. >> An Alicia Segal from NSF will be bringing us the Space Traffic Report. Taking a look at the space launch news from the week that's been and a look ahead at the week to come. [MUSIC] >> Happy Friday everybody. Let's unpack today's Intel briefing, shall we? And we're kicking off with an announcement from NASA that selects intuitive machines for a fourth mission to the moon. NASA plans to send a new set of science experiments and technology demonstrations to the lunar South Pole in 2027. As part of the agency's latest commercial lunar payload services initiative or CLIPS delivery award. Intuitive machines will receive 116.9 million US dollars to deliver six NASA payloads to the moon for this mission. Joel Kerns, the deputy associate administrator for exploration science mission director at NASA headquarters, added that this marks the 10th CLIPS delivery NASA has awarded. And the fourth planned for delivery to the South Pole of the moon. By supporting a robust cadence of CLIPS flights to a variety of locations on the lunar surface, including two flights currently planned by companies for later this year, NASA will explore more of the moon than ever before. Intuitive machines' second CLIPS mission is planning to deliver NASA's first on-site demonstration of searching for water and other chemical compounds later this year. NASA has set the date for an uncrewed return of the Starliner capsule, Boeing Starliner is set to depart the ISS no earlier than September 6th. With the current schedule shared, the capsule will undock at 6.04 PM Eastern on September 6th and land under parachute six hours later in White Sand Space Harbor in New Mexico, just outside of my backyard. This announcement follows the decision to return the Starliner crew test flight without NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams, who are planning on staying on the ISS until February 2025. And NASA has announced the two astronauts that will be joining Sonny and Butch on the ISS as part of the Expedition 72 crew. NASA astronaut and Space Force Guardian Nick Hague and Roscosmos cosmonaut Alexander Gorbanov will launch no earlier than Tuesday, September 24th on the agency's SpaceX Crew 9 mission to the ISS. This is a change from the previously announced four man crew due to the decision to return the agency's Boeing crew flight test uncrewed and launch Crew 9 with two unoccupied seats. Get all that? The two other astronauts previously announced as part of the Crew 9 launch, who are Zena Cardeman and Stephanie Wilson, are eligible for reassignment on a future mission. Hague and Gorbanov will fly to the space station as commander and mission specialist, respectively. That mission's launch date is dependent on the resumption of Falcon 9 launches along with the Polaris Dawn mission. Falcon 9 is currently unable to launch while SpaceX and the FAA review what caused the first stage booster to crash land earlier this week. Commander of the Polaris Dawn mission, Jerick Isaacman, took to the social media platform X to share some updates on the mission and to apologize to those who travelled to see the launch, which was obviously scheduled for lift-up on Wednesday. Isaacman shared, quote, "The primary factor driving the launch timing for the Polaris Dawn is the splashdown weather within Dragon's limits. Unlike an ISS mission, we don't have the option to delay long on orbit, so we must ensure that the forecast is as favorable as possible before we launch. This may mean a longer wait for the Polaris Dawn mission even after Falcon 9 is cleared to resume flights." That's a bummer. ABL Space System CEO Harry O'Hanley shared that the company has been forced to make layoffs after exhausting all other options to keep the rocket company afloat. O'Hanley shared a letter that was sent to staff on August 29th, explaining the reasoning behind the reductions. ABL has suffered setbacks following an explosion during a static fire test that destroyed its second RS1 rocket. With this move, ABL aims to reset its cost structure to be more sustainable and provide the program time to iterate and mature with the technology. The Federal Aviation Administration plans to release a revised, draft-tiered environmental assessment, or EA, for SpaceX's proposal to increase the number of launches and landings of its Starship super-heavy vehicle at the Boca Chica launch site in Texas. After releasing the initial draft in July, the FAA became aware of allegations that SpaceX violated the Clearwater Act. The FAA was unable to confirm the accuracy of certain representations in SpaceX's license application. As a result, the FAA chose to postpone public meetings until these matters could be resolved. The revised draft EA will be accompanied by an additional public comment period and public meetings, or previous comments received on the draft EA, as well as the forthcoming revised draft EA will be given equal weight and will be taken into consideration. Lone Star data holdings have announced a new partnership ahead of their next lunar mission with Applied Sciences Lab and AI Tech company, Valkyrie. Valkyrie's knowledge graphs will be included in Lone Star's payload, which is scheduled to land on the moon in late 2024, on board intuitive machines's IM2 mission. This mission will test the operations of Valkyrie's graph database and the viability of using this technology on astrophysics data stored on board by the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. Cell service provider Verizon is teaming up with non-terrestrial network communications group Skylo to launch a commercial directed device messaging service. According to the press release, starting this fall, customers on certain smartphones will have access to emergency messaging and location sharing, even when terrestrial cellular network is not available. Coming next year, Verizon will offer the ability to text anywhere via satellite for customers with select devices. And the Air Force Research Lab is seeking feedback on a draft request for proposals for a potential five-year, $499 million contract to provide research, engineering, and technical management support for the development, integration, experimentation, evaluation, and demonstration of space technologies. AFRL is looking for pitches for space systems and hardware integration for novel experiments, or SHINE, in definite delivery and definite quantity contract as a total small business set-aside program. The government will use the single award SHINE IDIQ contract to procure engineering and technical support in five functional areas, which are mission and space system development, flight experiment prototyping, assembly, integration, and testing, flight experiment operations, ground system development, and program support. Questions and comments on the draft solicitation are due by the end of next month. And you can find more details about that draft and further information on all the stories mentioned throughout the show by clicking on the links in the selected reading section of our show notes. There you'll also find a story on Frank Rubio's response to Sonny and Butch's extended stay on the ISS. I bet he knows all about that. Oh, yeah. Hey, T-minus crew, tune in tomorrow for T-minus Deep Space, our show for extended interviews, special editions, and deep dives with some of the most influential professionals in the space industry. And tomorrow we have Martina Dimosca talking about her creating her own pathway into the space industry from the Balkans region. Check it out while you're enjoying your long Labor Day weekend in the United States, enjoying the bank holiday weekend in the UK, or using the extra time off to pack in preparation for moving houses like I am. Either way, you don't want to miss it. Good luck with that. [MUSIC PLAYING] The Space Traffic Report is brought to you by our partners at nasaspaceflight.com. LSC/ACEagle brings us a look at the space launch updates from the week that's just been and a look ahead to the week to come. We believe it's going to get a little bit quiet now if our conine is grounded, don't you think? I'm Alicia Siegel for NSF, and this is your weekly Space Traffic Report for T-minus Space. This week we started off with what at first seemed like an ordinary Starlink launch. On August 28th at 748 UTC, Falcon 9 lifted off from Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida. The rocket delivered eight Starlink V2 mini satellites and 13 direct-to-cell satellites into low Earth orbit. This was the 23rd flight of booster B-1062, and it became the first booster to fly that many times. But immediately after it touched down on the deck of SpaceX's drone ship a shortfall of Gravitos, things clearly didn't go as planned and flames quickly engulfed the booster's engine section. This was followed by a landing leg strut snapping and the booster tipping over and exploding. And with that, B-1062's storied career came to an abrupt end. SpaceX is still investigating the anomaly, so not much is publicly known about the cause of the issue. In a statement provided to NSF, the FAA reported that it's requiring SpaceX to perform an investigation. But this doesn't necessarily mean that Falcon 9 can't fly until that investigation is completed. As we saw with previous anomalies, SpaceX can request a so-called public safety determination and prove that the public was never in danger. If the FAA agrees, SpaceX can then resume flights. So there is a chance that the return to flight happens sooner rather than later. Jared Isaacman, commander of the upcoming Polaris Dawn mission, claimed on social media that the cause of the failure is "well understood," which suggests that the investigation may in fact not take that long. And hey, fun fact, Isaacman has a personal connection with this very booster as he flew on it during the Inspiration 4 mission. Regardless of the landing outcome, the booster still successfully delivered a batch of Starlink satellites into orbit. And with this launch, SpaceX has now launched a total of 6,938 satellites, of which 588 have re-entered and 5,764 have moved into their operational orbit. We also had the launch of Galactic Energy's Series 1S, the sea-launched version of the Series 1. Lift-off occurred on August 29 at 522 Universal Time from a sea-launch platform on the Yellow Sea off the coast of China. The mission was dubbed "On Your Shoulders," and it carried six remote-sensing satellites into a sun-synchronous orbit. Wrapping up the week, Blue Origin launched its NS-26 mission. On August 29, New Shepherd lifted off from Blue Origin's launch site in Van Horn, Texas, carrying a crew of six into space on a suborbital trajectory. The passengers on this mission were Nikolina Elric, Rob Furl, Eugene Grin, Eman Jahangir, Carson Kitchen, and Ephraim Rabin, all in their first spaceflight. Furl was the first NASA funded researcher to conduct an experiment on a suborbital space mission. He performed an experiment to study how plant genes react to the transition from and to microgravity. The results of the experiment will later be studied in a lab alongside a control experiment that was performed on the ground at the same time by Furl's co-investigator, Annalisa Paul. This was the 11th flight for New Shepherd's Booster Tail 4, which landed successfully on the landing pad afterward. Going into next week, we'll have the final flight of the European Vega rocket on September 4. Lift-off is scheduled for 150 UTC from the ELV site in Europe's spaceport in French Guiana. The payload on this mission will be the Sentinel-2C Earth Observation Satellite. We were also supposed to have a few Falcon 9 launches next week, including the Polaris Dawn mission that was supposed to launch last week and delayed multiple times due to technical and weather-related issues. But until we get more information from SpaceX or the FAA, we just don't know much about the upcoming schedule for the Falcon launches. Whatever happens, we'll keep you posted. I'm Alicia Segal for NSF and that's your weekly Space Traffic Report. Now back to T-Minus Space. We'll be right back. Welcome back. There is still so much about our own planets working that we still don't know. We do know that our planets got an amazing magnetic field that protects us critters here from all sorts of cosmic nastiness, allowing the kinds of conditions that helped life to flourish. Pretty significant, our magnetic field. And if you've ever taken a high school physics class, you know that when you have magnetics, you've also got electricity. Electromagnetism, two sides of the same coin. Changes in the magnetic field can create electricity just as changes in an electric field can create magnetism. So it seems to logically follow that if our planet has a magnetic field, surely it's got some kind of electric field too, right? Well, that has been the hypothesis for over 60 years. And thanks to findings from the 2022 NASA endurance mission just published in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists have been able to successfully measure our planet-wide electric field for the very first time, proving its existence. This field called the ambipolar electric field causes a steady stream of atmospheric particles to escape from our planet's ionosphere up and out into space from above Earth's poles. This phenomenon has been known for quite a while and dubbed polar wind, but the mechanics of behind how and why polar wind happened was theorized to be the ambipolar field but couldn't be confirmed. So enter the 2022 endurance mission. It launched from Svalbard in Norway just a few hundred miles from the North Pole. And just by flying suborbidly for around 19 minutes, endurance was able to measure changes in electric potential at high altitude. It was, drum roll please, a whopping half a volt. I know, tiny, right? But endurance project scientist Alex Gloser, who co-authored the research paper that was just published in Nature, says that while half a volt may seem like nothing to us, it's enough to exert a force more than 10 times the force of gravity on hydrogen ions, which easily whips them up and out into space at supersonic speeds. Without polar wind, these and other particles would not reach such great distances out and away from Earth, so it's a fascinating question. What would life have been like on Earth without this phenomenon? Would it even have been possible at all? So thanks to this mission, the long suspected existence of the ambipolar field on Earth officially exists. And now with this new knowledge, we know that we should be looking for similar fields on other planets too. We're just beginning to learn how this field might have influenced Earth, and it'll be fascinating to see how it might work on other worlds too. That is absolutely amazing. I learn something new every day. Yeah, this is a big one. That's it for Team Miners for August the 30th, 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 our podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com. We are 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're 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. Thank you for listening. Have a great weekend. . [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
