[MUSIC] While most of us in the space industry have a pretty good sense of how space impacts our jobs and everyday lives, are we doing enough to promote the future of space outside of our industry's bubble? How do we bring that awareness to the people who are educating tomorrow's workforce? These are some of the questions I'll be tackling today in my chat with Mark Wagner. But for now, let's get into the stories that are making the headlines, shall we? [MUSIC] Today is September 4th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasus and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] Atlas Space raises $15 million. Research on the ISS studies early cancer detection. Sierra Space completes acoustic testing on its shooting star module. And today's guest, as I mentioned at the top of the show, is space educator and author Mark Wagner. He's gonna share with us why we need to be empowering and educating educators today about the importance of space to prepare the workforce of the future. Don't miss that chat in the second half of the show. [MUSIC] It's Wednesday, let's dive in. Atlas Space Operations has raised $15 million in its latest growth investment round. The ground station as a service and ground software as a service provider operates the largest US owned and operated global federated ground network. The Atlas network comprises over 50 antennae across more than 34 ground stations and provides for Leo, Mio and Geo orbits. The $15 million investment led by New Space Capital will enable Atlas to meet industry demand and manage the rapid growth that it is experiencing. The University of Notre Dame is leading a series of experiments on board the International Space Station to revolutionize early cancer detection. The research demonstrates how bubbles formed in microgravity can significantly enhance biosensing technology by concentrating microscopic substances more effectively than on Earth. The just completed third experiment launched to the ISS in early August on Northrop Grumman's 21st Commercial Resupply Services Mission. It builds on the team's earlier ISS National Lab sponsored research. This most recent investigation successfully introduced laser heating to refine bubble behavior, increasing the concentration of particles collected, which is by the way an essential step towards detecting early cancer biomarkers and other trace elements in blood. I did not know that, that's very cool. These advancements could dramatically improve the sensitivity of biosensors, opening the door to earlier and more accurate cancer detection. Wow. Sierra Space has successfully completed acoustic testing on its Shooting Star cargo module at NASA's Kennedy Space Center. The test was a first of its kind to be conducted inside the Space Systems Processing Facility and replicated the intense acoustic stresses that Shooting Star will need to withstand during a Vulcan Centaur rocket launch to the International Space Station. But there is no planned schedule just yet for its inaugural launch. CalMorris Inc. and ExoSat have announced a partnership to advance space debris removal operations. The partnership will enable both companies to offer comprehensive active debris removal solutions, addressing the growing challenge of orbital debris. The non-exclusive agreement allows for mutual service offerings, technology coordination, and client referrals based on orbital capabilities. Both firms will collaborate on grant opportunities and development efforts, aiming to conduct integrated missions by 2028. The Space Flight Laboratory has been selected by NuView to produce a small satellite that will demonstrate the capabilities of the world's first commercial space-based LiDAR constellation. Florida-based NuView is building a constellation of satellites that will provide continuously updated 3D elevation data for the entire Earth's land surface using the company's onboard laser scanning LiDAR technology. Space-based LiDAR will capture 3D surface measurements more efficiently and cost-effectively than traditional airborne models, especially in remote areas for applications related to environment, agriculture, infrastructure, forestry, cartography, and archaeology. The Mr. Spock mission, and yes that is its name and that's SPOC. Okay, the Mr. Spock mission will serve as a technology demonstration for NuView's constellation. May it live long and prosper. It's rare that we go on for long in this show without mentioning a thruster issue with the spacecraft. Not a thruster, it's a valve. Well, today it's a thruster and today it's the turn of Beppi Colombo. The joint European-Japanese spacecraft, which launched in 2018, is set for a Mercury flyby late today, Wednesday, September 4th. But unfortunately, thruster issues mean the probe faces a delay before entering orbit around Mercury as planned. The vehicle is unfortunately no longer operating at full power due to a glitch that it experienced in April of this year. The Beppi Colombo spacecraft was due to reach Mercury in December 2025, but that arrival has now been pushed back by 11 months to November 2026. That is orbital mechanics for you. UTEL/SAT have announced that they're working to integrate one web low-worth orbit connectivity services into soft banks offerings in Japan. The multi-year partnership will enable SoftBank to deliver communication services to customers, including corporations and government entities, notably providing momentum for SoftBank's satellite communication services. It will directly interconnect with SoftBank's closed network called SMART VPN for additional security communications. The scope will initially target the Japanese market with potential to expand the Japanese customers in other territories. And congratulations to Clay Mulry, who has just been announced as the new CEO of AIAA. Clay is currently serving as president of the International Astronautical Federation, and he will join AIAA effective October 1st, succeeding Dan Dumbacher, who previously announced his retirement effective September 30th. And that's it for our Intel briefing for today. As always, you'll find links to further reading on all of the stories that we've mentioned. If you check out the selected reading section of our show notes, there's three additional articles in there for you today. One is an interesting report from ours, Technica, on Relativity Space. That's a really interesting read. Another one's a call for students to apply to the Conrad challenge. And the third is an announcement on a new service from Viasat. Hey T-minus crew, if you are just joining us, be sure to follow T-minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. Also, if you could do us a favor, please share the intel with your friends and co-workers. So here's a little challenge for you. Now that we've dusted off after Labor Day, maybe by this Friday, show three friends or co-workers this podcast. A growing audience is the most important thing for us, and we would love your help as part of the T-minus crew. So if you find T-minus useful, please share the show so other professionals like you can find it. Thank you so much for your support. Our guest today is Space Educator and Author Mark Wagner. Mark spoke to me about the importance of educating educators about opportunities in space, which is an issue we talk about a lot on the show. To kick off our discussion, he started by describing the problem of space education in the classroom today. Space education is largely absent from classrooms today, but it's critically important, not just to say the future of humanity, but also to solving some of the biggest problems in schools today. I'd like to share a few statistics around this topic, which is especially post-COVID, student disengagement is the biggest problem in schools. Kids had emergency distance learning and there's this real sense of like, well, why do we have to sit in chairs for six hours a day? One of the prime measures is chronic absences. So absent more than 10% of the time. So in New York City, post-COVID, chronic absences are about 30% of kids, which is a roughly triple what they were before COVID. And hand in hand, there's a similar problem with teacher burnout. So in LAUSD, for instance, 70% of teachers report a burnout and a desire to leave the profession. And we're seeing that across the country, teachers are just burnout even several years in the wake of COVID. There's a lot on their shoulders. But there's also research to show that a tremendous majority of kids are interested in space. So Wakefield Research in partnership with UNICEF did a study in 2022 at 500 American families across demographics and they found 93% of U.S. kids are interested in space. So this is not a boy thing or a girl thing or an elementary and secondary thing or a black or white or rich or poor or any other demographics like kids are interested in space. That's a huge number. You don't have 93% of anything when it comes to public policy, right? And I have grad students who've done similar surveys or with their own students or their own network and they come out with like 85% of kids are interested in space. It's a huge, huge number anyway you cut it. So how do you re-engage kids in school and re-engage kids in STEM topics in particular, you tap into their natural interest in space. So now we're talking about not just this mission-driven preparing kids for humanity's future. Now we're talking about solving the biggest problems in schools today by tapping into kids' interest in space and teaching them about what's coming up. And I think I don't want to gloss over either the idea of preparing them for the growing space economy because listeners of your show have probably heard similar statistics but several years ago, statistics came out about the space industry now as a $400 billion a year industry. They were projecting a trillion dollars by 2040. About a year ago, the newer projection was a trillion dollars by 2030. And so we're talking about a growing, rapidly growing trillion-dollar industry and that's not even counting whole new industries like asteroid mining or space solar power, both of which are projected to be trillion-dollar industries, multi-trillion-dollar industries. So are we properly preparing our kids for that? And we don't just need scientists, engineers, and astronauts. We need marketing people and HR people and computer scientists and you name it, right? We need artists. Like if you look at say a SpaceX broadcast, how many jobs are involved with, say, designing the UI to communicate that information and the broadcasters and the editors and the... They are the best at that. It is really something. Yeah. And somebody's writing the score. There's really a whole production element to it. And I was lucky enough working with Space Prize Foundation to do an interview series. And it was mostly women because we were focused on empowering young women in that project. But women from all across the space industry. And we talked to scientists, engineers, astronauts, but we literally talked to a spacecraft into your designer and we talked to people doing space student and flight suit design and what they called zero G-fashion design. Like we talked to space historian. We talked to space lawyers. There's really sort of any kid that wants to be involved, whatever their strengths and interests can be involved. And on the flip side, even if they're not in the growing space economy, which is much bigger than just aerospace industry, but they probably are going to need to know what sort of developments are coming out of space. 100%. Yep. If you're working for a sneaker company, you better understand what lightweight materials are coming out of space. You better understand, hey, what if your shoe is talking to Starlink and knows where it is and is part of the Internet of Things and talking to GPS. Like, how are you going to incorporate those developments into your field and your industry? And it's not unlike, I see a ton of parallels with where education technology was 15 or 20 years ago, where we literally had to convince teachers that teaching kids about the Internet was a good idea. And now it's really clear. It doesn't matter if your kid's going to be a graphic designer or what they're going to like, they better know how to use the Internet in their field. And I think we're, over the next 10 to 15 years, we're going to see a similar change. I mean, we're already seeing it, but where space is affecting every industry. Even today, just something like GPS is affecting everything from how we get around to how we get food to who we date, like very fundamental human activities. That's right. Yep. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it's amazing. It's, that paradigm shift is incredible. And I know for me, as a space interested child, I was like, well, I don't want to be an astronaut. I'm too chicken for that. So I guess there's just no path for me. So I just kind of ended there. And I wonder, especially as we educate our educators and help them understand the future that is here, but also in development as space technology really does pervade everything. Is it an educational gap also with teachers who maybe just don't know all this stuff? Because certainly a lot of my peers don't. I just wonder, how do we reach that out to them and let them know? Like, these are options that are going to be, your students will be dealing with in a good way, but you know, it'll be there. Yeah. Those are huge questions. And that's really where my education technology career was also. Is, you know, if you want to see change in schools, you really are going to have to inspire and empower educators and education leaders, right? And when you break that down, like inspiring and empowering somebody is about raising their awareness around what's possible and getting them excited about it. And then leaving them with the sense that they can be a part of it and they can do it, right? And so that comes back to what I was saying before about raising teachers' confidence to talk about these things. First of all, we've got to raise their awareness that they're even happening, right? I would say, I don't have any sort of scientific evidence of this, but a huge percentage of teachers would probably not be able to tell you what a Falcon 9 rocket was or that it could land vertically. Yeah, I think a lot of people still are very, it's NASA. That's it. Yeah, and that's it. It begins and ends there. Yeah. And even then, this significant portion of people that wouldn't be able to tell you that the space shuttle took off like a rocket and landed like an airplane, or landed like a glider, right? So just raising awareness of like, what have we done and what are we doing and what's coming is a huge part of it. And then being able to give teachers the resources they need to confidently go back to their classroom and share these things with their kids. So that could be very tactile manipulatives. It could be a 33-foot giant map of the moon, like the Aldrin Family Foundation has. It could be programs like SLU, in terms of giving kids access to remote telescopes. There's tons of great initiatives, or it could be much, it could be standards aligned to lesson plans that they could use to teach the things that they're already held accountable for, for instance. So depending on what their needs are and what their teaching context is, those kind of the resources they need to be successful might be very, very different. But I think the short answer to your question is like, how do we get teachers to this point? And how do we sort of affect this change? It may be my bias in the lens I'm seeing things through, but ultimately that comes down to professional development. You can't adopt a program and expect it's going to be used without helping teachers understand how to use it. And this is a big ask where we're raising awareness around all these scientific missions that are in progress, and then how do they turn around and use it with their kids? What can they use? How do they use it? What are the best ways to engage kids? And so on. It's a significant professional development undertaking. But I will say it is similar to what we saw when we started bringing computers in the classroom, or internet in the classroom, or school districts going Google. There was a significant professional development hurdle, but it's largely overcome in the last decade or the years before COVID even to the point where everybody was on a Chromebook and Google classroom or whatever they had during COVID. I used to work in cybersecurity for quite a while, and my daughter last year came home with like a how to stay safe on the internet handout that was a great explainer. I was not prepared for her school to be giving her that. I was thinking like, I would have to, she's a little too young to be on the internet, but just told just general things. And the school had that. And I was really impressed that they were there already. I wasn't expecting that. So I'm just imagining maybe one day we'll be there with something space related. I don't know what specifically, but that would be great. Well, if no, if I were to look into my crystal ball, and I talk about this all the time right now, to anybody that will listen, I think that is the 10 to 15 years that are ahead of us is, you do get this sense working in schools that nothing ever changes and everything is cycling like the tides. But when you stop and look at it, there has been real progress when it comes to technology in schools and the internet and schools and things like that. And I think like what I'm seeing right now is very, very like what I was seeing in schools in say 2013, where the most innovative schools are starting to be really interested in how to prepare their kids for the space industry. And they're starting to host events around it. And they're starting to share what they're doing. And I think over the next couple of years, we're going to see that spread significantly. And we're going to need kind of the ad hoc programs that are working for the go getters right now are going to need to be scalable and something that you can get more and more teachers on board. And but I do think in 10, 15 years, we're not going to have to be convincing people to teach kids about space. It's going to be a no brainer like, Hey, whatever industry you're going into, you better know what's going on. We'll be right back. Welcome back. NASA's prefire mission has captured and returned its first data. The polar radiant energy in the far infrared experiment or prefire has revealed crucial insights into how Earth's polar regions are responding to climate change. The prefire instrument, launched aboard a commercial satellite earlier this year, is focused on understanding the heat emissions from the polar regions, which play a critical role in regulating our planet's climate. This data is gathered through observations of far infrared radiation, which is a type of energy emitted by Earth that influences the temperature and energy balance of the atmosphere. Until now, scientists lacked detailed information on the far infrared emissions from the polar regions. Prefire aims to fill that gap by continuously collecting data on far infrared radiation, which is responsible for nearly 60% of Earth's total emissions. The mission's findings will help improve climate models by offering a more precise understanding of how polar heat is absorbed, stored, and released. This is especially important as the polar regions are warming faster than other parts of the planet. By providing a clearer picture of these processes, prefire help scientists predict how rising temperatures may affect sea ice, snow cover, and permafrost, all of which are critical components of the Earth's climate system. The mission's data will also assist in refining predictions about future climate scenarios, particularly concerning the Arctic and Antarctic regions. It can help policymakers and scientists make more informed decisions to address climate change's impact on polar ecosystems, weather patterns, and global sea levels. By offering new insights into the energy budget of the polar regions, prefire provides an essential tool for understanding and mitigating the effects of climate change. We here at T-Minus will continue to keep an eye on the data coming out from prefire's mission in the years to come. That's it for T-Minus for September 4th, 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 Carruth, 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 Kilpey is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Vermazes. Thanks for listening, we will see you tomorrow! , T-Minus! [BLANK_AUDIO]
