SpaceX has really set the gold standard for launch in the last few years. The company has surpassed other launch providers by annual vehicles launched and continues nearly year-on-year to set vehicle flight records. And today it's going to be adding another to the record book, an all-civilian spaceflight which has already reached an apogee higher than any human has travelled since the Apollo program. Not bad SpaceX, not bad at all. Today is September 10th 2024, I'm Alice Carruth and this is T-minus. SpaceX launches the Polaris Storm mission. iSpace forms a lunar advisory board, MDA space to build antennas for SWIS-12 satellites, and our guest today is J. Deloni, managing director of Leaf Space US. J will be talking to Maria Valmarz is about ground segment as a service, to stay with us for that chat later in the show. In the early hours here in the US, SpaceX's Falcon 9 lifted off from Florida carrying an all-civilian crew that plans to conduct the first privately funded spacewalk. There's been a lot of hype leading up to the launch of the Polaris Storm mission, which has been rescheduled three times in the last few weeks. The crew, led by billionaire entrepreneur Jarek Isaacman, plans to spend five days in orbit testing out SpaceX technology that they say could be crucial for future deep space exploration. The spacecraft ascended to 745 miles above the Earth's surface, eight orbits into the mission, the crew Dragon's thrusters are expected to boost the apogee up to 870 miles, a record altitude for a piloted Earth orbit mission. Dragon will then descend to a cruising orbit of about 435 miles above the Earth. That 870-mile altitude is higher than any human has travelled since the NASA's Apollo-Lunar program came to an end in the 1970s, and more than three times higher than the International Space Station. Dragon has initiated a two-day pre-breathe process to prepare the crew for their upcoming spacewalk this Thursday, September 12. That 45-hour process aims to boost oxygen levels in the cabin, while slowly decreasing air pressure to help remove nitrogen from the crew's bloodstreams. The planned spacewalk will be conducted by Jarek Isaacman and SpaceX crew trainer Sarah Gillis. They plan to take turns spending about 15 minutes each just outside the ship's forward hatch early Thursday to put new SpaceX design suits to the test. The day after the spacewalk, flight controllers plan to test a new laser link with SpaceX's constellation of star-linked satellites to relay communications to and from Earth from Leo. The laser is mounted in the lower trunk section of the crew Dragon. We're going to be closely monitoring this mission over the next five days, and we'll be bringing you updates throughout the week. EyeSpace has formed a lunar advisory board that includes respected leaders in the space industry. The inaugural EyeSpace lunar advisory board includes former Director-General of the European Space Agency Jean-Jacques Dorein, Yoshinori Komiya, former Director-General for Space Affairs for Japan's Minister's Secretariat of the Cabinet Office, Tamoya Thomas Okunero, former Senior Vice President of Commercial Business at SpaceX, and Alan Stern, former NASA Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate. The board is expected to provide critical insights and recommendations to executives with EyeSpace's three international business entities in Japan, Luxembourg and the US on issues related to business strategy, policy, technology, national security and socio-economic assessments. Canada's MDA space has been contracted by SWISTA 12 to provide antenna systems for three of the company's humming SAT satellites for geostationary orbit. The satellites will be deployed as part of the MRSAT 8 program to provide safety services and support advances in emergency tracking. MDA space will also design and configure the packaging concepts that are required on the GeoSmallSAT platform. China has shared plans for its TM-1 three-mile sample return mission set to launch in 2028. The mission aims to bring back rock and soil samples from the Red Planet by 2031, making China the first nation to achieve a robotic return of Martian materials to Earth. Tai-En Wen III will involve two spacecraft, one to land on Mars and collect samples, and another to retrieve them and return them to Earth. The goals of the missions include searching for signs of life and studying Mars' geology. China says it plans to collaborate internationally to ensure planetary protection and joint research on the samples. And staying in China, the country's space agency landed its unmanned space plane on Friday. The spacecraft was launched in December of last year atop a Long March 2F rocket. Its mission was not shared publicly, and the capabilities of the space plane remain largely unknown. Chinese state media reported that the vehicle will pave the way for more convenient and affordable round-trip methods for the peaceful use of space in the future. The European Space Agency's cluster spacecraft Salsa has completed its re-entry successfully concluding its mission. It was the first deorbit of four cluster space science satellites performing a first-of-its-kind targeted re-entry over the South Pacific. The European Space Agency has set the goal of reducing debris from their missions to zero by 2030 through measures like deorbitating spacecraft at the end of their missions. And speaking of clusters, a new space cluster group has been announced in the United Kingdom. The West of Scotland space cluster will be a new hub for space activity in the region. With companies such as AAC, Clyde Space and Spire Global forming the foundation of the hub, the region produces more satellites than any other in Europe. The West of Scotland space cluster incorporates industry, universities and colleges as well as economic development and support organisations aiming to capitalise and expand on existing regional strengths in space technologies. The iLaunch Trailblazer programme has announced a new partnership with Deloitte Australia, connecting regional research and development with international organisations to develop and commercialise Australian space technologies. The new partnership plans to build the iLaunch Global Pathfinder programme to extend to a larger international market. According to the press release, this expansion will open opportunities for Australian research and businesses, effectively propelling their research capabilities onto a global platform. And the European Space Agency has carried out the first 3D metal printing in space aboard the International Space Station. The metal 3D printer built by Airbus was transported to the ISS in January. It was installed onboard the ISS Columbus module in May of this year and the printer door was sealed by ESO astronaut Andreas Moggesson before the printing process began. Print operations were overseen by the French Space Agency CNES from the Control Centre for ISS payloads. Two operators from Airbus and CNES ensured that the process ran smoothly. After months of tests, astronauts were able to retrieve the first samples in late August. That concludes our briefing for this Tuesday. Check out the links in our show notes for further information on all the stories we've mentioned. We've also included an announcement from Rocket Lab on their new Chief Operations Officer. Hey T-minus crew, if you're just joining us, be sure to follow T-minus Space Daily in your favourite podcast app. And also do us a favour, share the intel with your friends and co-workers. Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday please show three friends or co-workers this podcast. A growing audience is the most important thing for us and we'd love your help as part of the T-minus crew. If you find T-minus useful and we really do hope you do, please share so that other professionals like you can find the show. Thanks, it really does mean a lot to our team. Our guest today is Jay Diolani, Managing Director of Leaf Space in the US. Jay spoke to Maria about GroundSegment as a service and started by explaining what that entails. One person placed it really succinctly that satellites are up there in orbit and you are communicating with them. But there needs to be a link where all that data can come down to Earth from the satellite. And that's where GroundSegment comes in, which essentially serves as a backhaul or feeder links as they also call it technically speaking. There's a bunch of antennas and as the satellite passes through or over GroundStation, it communicates with the GroundStation antenna, gets commands from it, downlinks all the data, onboard data to the GroundStation so that it can be processed further. And this data can be anything. There's a number of applications, Earth observation, Internet of Things, Narrowband or Wideband satellite communications, whatever. But the gist is the GroundSegment is comprised of mainly large antennas, large dishes that communicate with the satellite and then bring all the data down and then pass them on to the customer. These antennas are usually quite expensive, not only to procure but to install and maintain around the world. So the GroundSegment as a service concept really takes the capex out of it and converts it into an OPEX equation for the companies, for the satellite operators. So what the GroundSegment as a service providers do is they procure these antennas, they deploy them, they operate them, maintain them and then sell the antenna capacity to the satellite operator. So the satellite operator is a satellite operator, they just focus on launching their own satellites. They do not have to worry about the GroundSegment and they pay the GroundSegment service providers for as much capacity they utilize on their network. So for them, it really becomes, they don't have to invest additional resources, additional capex into infrastructure that is not of primary nature to their business model. It's a must have because they need to bring the data down. So having GroundSegment as a service, now they can streamline the cost structure and then focus on their core business, which is launching the satellites and specific payloads on them. That makes sense. Yeah, traditionally I would imagine it was a sort of a bundled situation. You needed to have all these things sort of lined up in place before you could move ahead with your mission and now, especially with the huge proliferation of satellites we see in all sorts of sectors, but just the sheer number that we've got, I can't imagine, I mean, capacity for on the ground is definitely always a concern. It's a growing concern and I imagine that this approach can help really alleviate that where, you know, if you're launching a satellite or a series of satellites, you don't have to also figure out, you know, how you, as you said, to have that investment for a GroundSegment. But yeah, I'd love to get your thoughts on that capacity question because that is something that I know is a really pressing issue is trying to figure out, you know, who you can downlink to, I think. Right? I mean, so how, what are your thoughts on that? You know, there's several facets to that question. So I'll answer it in three ways. One of them is, you know, we cannot install ground stations or antennas anywhere around the world where we want. You know, there's countries that are embargoed. There are regions that have extreme weather conditions where, you know, installing an antenna, providing connectivity to it, to providing power to it is almost impossible. So there's only a limited number of countries where we can install the ground stations. Second is the coverage. The real, I would say, benefit of using GroundSegment as a service provider is the GroundSegment as a service provider is focused on, you know, setting up as many antennas throughout the world globally as possible. So the more the regions, the better the coverage, the more opportunities there are for the satellite operator to maintain contact or have contact with these antennas and be able to command the satellite or download the data. And the fresher the data, the more importance it has, they can set up the data to pre-tune it. Now, having said that, the third part is regulatory challenges. You know, if they were to deploy their own antenna, South Africa as an example, right? Now, they have to get permissions from the South African regulator to operate the antenna. They have to deal with that additional overhead and burden, which leaves space as a GroundSegment as a service provider alleviates that burden as well. Because we, where we deploy our antennas in different regions, we also obtain regulatory authorizations so that our customers can start operating on those over those antennas right away as soon as the antennas operational. So we take that burden off of the customer. And that's been one of the biggest pain points for all us, for all our customers launching satellites. Absolutely. So I can imagine the flip side of using a service that is not solely dedicated to a mission would be tasking or scheduling. So my understanding is you all have a really interesting solution around that. I would love to hear more about that because that one, I imagine is a big question for a lot of folks. Yes. And so, so, you know, right from the start, what we have done is we have defined our architecture natively in a software defined fashion so that it's configurable. And since every customer of ours, there is, I would say that, you know, every mission is different. Every mission's requirements are different. Like, for example, if there's an Earth observation provider, they may need a pass every orbit. If there's a new provider, which has, we're just launching a technical demonstration satellite, they only may need one or two passes per day. And they may only need a backhaul or bandwidth of like, say, less than, you know, 20 Mbps, for example, or the observation might need a really high data really downlink. So we need to comply a little bit, all these different requirements and be sure that the ground station can satisfy these requirements for all our customers. And you see there's different types of missions going up now. Earth observation, remote sensing, there's orbital transfer vehicles, which can do maneuvering between orbits. There's technical demos, there's narrow band satellite communications, there's wide band satellite communications, wide band as like very high ultra high data rates. There is a new crop of satellites going up that are involved in rendezvous and proximity operations, RPO operations, as well as in space manufacturing is becoming a new, you know, target as well. So each of these missions are so specific in their requirements from the ground segment. We look at all these, all these requirements, we collect all these requirements from different customers, we collate them, we come up with different capabilities, different feature sets and being natively software defined allows us to do that quickly. So we have in house software development guys that develop or enhance our software defined radios that are residing on the ground station because every satellite has a different radio on board, as different communication requirements, having the software defined radios on our ground stations allows us to, you know, configure them on the fly in real time. The other aspect of being software defined is we have an automated network scheduler which runs on the cloud and automatically schedules, contacts or visibility as you call it across all our ground stations. Currently we have 26 ground stations or 17 locations and we are expanding at a very rapid pace. We closed our series B last year, it was around $40 million US dollars. Congratulations. Thank you. Thank you. It's been a big help for us to be expanding our network. The number of satellites on our network is just increasing and handling or providing the capacity or the service to all these satellites is only possible through our automated scheduling platform that we have been operating. It has, you know, we have a patent on it as well, allows us to, allows us to snap new, new satellites right in, have them interface or utilize the ground stations without much of a lift on our side. You all mentioned Zero Trust security architecture and that makes me happy as a cybersecurity person just to see that get a good mention. Again, given you all are very software focused also that makes a lot of sense that you can bake that in. I imagine that's also a serious requirement given that you work with a lot of different customers to have that security baked in. Increasingly, yes. Cyber security is becoming a big, a big part of our offering as well. And we are actively, you know, actively looking at what needs to be done on the, on the cybersecurity side. So we, we have an inherent, inherently we have a Zero Trust architecture. So even if, you know, we get had the customer's data is still protected. And we are looking at different standards across, across Europe and North America as well. I saw 27,000 one and in Europe and then missed 800, 171 in the US. So we are in the process of getting those certifications, compliances. So that's, yeah, we don't know that as well as a big, big requirement of especially the defense. And defense requires us to be compliant with the standard. So also our customers who are, who are serving the defense. We'll be right back. Welcome back. NASA's Artemis program plans to return humanity to the moon in the coming years. But there are still parts of the project that aren't quite ready for what's to come. So how do you solve problems with your ambitious space programs? You crowd source, of course. NASA has used competition to drive innovation to produce products and programs that create new ways to solve the space agency's biggest problems. Cure the NASA lunar navigation challenge, which should really be challenges. For challenge one, NASA is seeking an orienteering aid that will help the astronauts navigate on traverses away from the lunar lander and return back. While there was similar devices available to the Apollo astronauts, NASA is looking for new and unique solutions. Devices must be accurate, easy to use, and be able to be used on the moon surface by an astronaut wearing pressurized gloves. If your solution is one of the best, you could be eligible for a share of the $15,000 prize purse. For challenge two, NASA is looking for assistance on getting to and mapping the bottom of Shackleton crater. The design must work in the extreme conditions of the lunar south pole and Shackleton crater, map the crater, characterize and quantify what's in the crater, and send the data back to be used for future missions. If you can solve this challenge by describing your design concept in detail, you could be eligible for a share of the $30,000 prize purse. In addition, there is $5,000 in prize money to be distributed among the solutions from both challenges that show exceptional achievement. So if you've got some solutions, you best get the ideas to NASA before the deadline of November 25th. Happy problem solving. That's it for T-minus for September 10th, 2024, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. We privilege 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'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 Ibum. Our Executive Editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our President. Peter Kilpey is our Publisher. Our Interview Host was Maria Valmarzis and I'm Alice Carruth. Thanks for listening. . [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
