This morning we saw a perfect touchdown and I promised you're listening to the right podcast and I am not suddenly switching to American football. No this touchdown was the return of the Soyuz MS-25 crew in Kazakhstan. Today is September 23rd 2024. I'm Maria Varmasas and this is T-minus. The Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft and crew return to Earth. 193 countries agree to the UN pact for the future. OSC says tracks is due to launch in one week. And our guest today is Courtney Stodd from the Beyond Earth Institute and we're going to be talking about their annual summit, the Beyond Earth Symposium, which is coming up in November. So stick around for the second part of the show to find out more. Happy Monday everybody! And just before 8am Eastern time today, the Soyuz MS-25 spacecraft made a parachute-assisted landing in Kazakhstan. The capsule returned three crew to Earth from the ISS, and that would be NASA astronaut Tracy C. Dyson along with record-breaking cosmonauts Nikolai Chubb and Oleg Kononenko. Now Chubb and Kononenko both hold the record for longest single spaceflight, spanning 374 days, covering nearly 6,000 orbits of the Earth. And Sunday saw a handover ceremony on the ISS with NASA astronaut Sonny Williams assuming the commander position on board the orbiting lab. There are currently nine people on board the ISS, and that number will increase by two after the launch of the SpaceX crew 9 mission, which is scheduled to launch this Thursday. Fingers crossed. And this next item is an interesting development in the area of geopolitical norms in space, as heads of state from 193 countries recently agreed to the United Nations-proposed Pact for the Future. And part of the pact notes the importance of the peaceful uses of outer space and the need to address active debris removal, space traffic and space resources, and encouraged a fourth United Nations conference on the peaceful exploration of outer space in 2027. The pact says nations will strengthen international cooperation for the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes, and reaffirmed the importance and adherence to the 1967 Outer Space Treaty. Richard DeBello, director of the Office of Space Commerce, presented at AMOS in Hawaii last week and updated the audience about the traffic coordination system for space that's often better known as TRAX. The system is due to launch in just over one week from now, beginning a transition from the Defense Department that will run through next year. DeBello's talk highlighted the program's development milestones, architecture, capability rollout, pathfinders, DOD collaboration, and role in global space situational awareness coordination. The initial rollout will be a minimum viable product that will look similar to what they get today from the Defense Department and its space TRAX system. The Office of Space Commerce will incorporate revisions and new capabilities into TRAX throughout the next year. And also announced at the Advanced Maui Optical and Space Surveillance Technologies Conference, better known as AMOS, was NASA's new Space Sustainability Division. Deputy Director Pam Melroy told attendees that the U.S. space agency received the required approvals from Congressional Appropriations Committees the previous day for the reorganization that's required in order to create the new division. We expect more details on this division in the coming weeks. The U.S. House plans to vote on a new continuing resolution bill this week to fund federal agencies with funding that would run through December 20th after the first attempt to pass a resolution failed last week. Government funding runs out on September 30th, and this week will be the final week that both chambers will be in session until after the November elections. The bill is likely to be considered on the House floor on Wednesday, and tomorrow the House is also expected to take up the 2024 NASA Authorization Act. Moving outside of the United States now and Spanish Group Global Portfolio Investments has invested 10 million euros in Sateliot, becoming the lead investor in Sateliot's Series B round, which amounts to 30 million euros in total. Sateliot says it will allocate these funds to continue developing its technology and to the deployment of its satellite constellation. Sateliot launched its first four satellites for its constellation August and plans to begin to provide service in Q1 2025. The company says it has already secured more than 250 million euros in contracts with more than 400 clients in more than 50 countries around the world. IBM has announced a new AI Foundation model for a variety of weather and climate use cases. The model is available in open source to the scientific, developer, and business communities. The model was developed by IBM and NASA with contributions from the Oak Ridge National Laboratory and offers a flexible, scalable way to address a variety of challenges related to short-term weather as well as long-term climate projection. This model was pre-trained on 40 years of Earth observation data from NASA's Modern Era Retrospective Analysis for Research and Applications, version 2, also known as MARA 2, and it is available for download on the website Hugging Face. Yes, that is actually its name. The US Space Forces Space Systems Command and US Space Command have awarded Astronis a $13.2 million contract with $3.3 million of SSC funding to add military KA frequency compatibility to their next generation Omega satellites. This jointly funded strat-fi, which stands for Strategic Funding Increase, will have support from Space Systems Command, Space Works, and other venture capital sources. The targeted mission impact for the Astronis project is to significantly enhance the resiliency of tactical satellite communications for the US Department of Defense and US Space Force for assuring beyond-line-of-sight connectivity across warfighters, sensors, and weapons systems in contested space and radio frequency scenarios. The targeted mission impact for the Astronis project is to significantly enhance the resiliency of tactical satellite communications for the US Department of Defense and the Space Force. This is to assure beyond-line-of-sight connectivity across warfighters, sensors, and weapons systems in contested space and radio frequency scenarios. SpaceX's Starship is fully stacked at Starbase in Boca Chica and is ready for its next test flight, pending regulatory approval, and those last words are very important there. The Federal Aviation Administration has been accused by SpaceX of slowing down progress, with the company sharing on their website that, and I quote, "We continue to be stuck in a reality where it takes longer to do the government paperwork to license a rocket launch than it does to design and build the actual hardware. This should never happen and directly threatens America's position as the leader in space." We're not going to comment on that, but we will say that this isn't slowing Elon Musk's launch ambitions. The SpaceX founder took to his social media platform X to share that the company plans to launch about five uncrewed Starships to Mars in two years. He went on to say that if they all land safely, then crewed missions are possible in four years. Did you catch the images over the weekend of the recovered Super Heavy booster from Flight 4? It truly looks like something out of a sci-fi movie. Well, let's see if it becomes sci-fi reality. And that's it for today's Intel Briefing, but fear not, there are links to further reading on all the stories that we've mentioned in the selected reading section of the show notes. You'll also find a Financial Times piece on U-TelSat exploring partners to fund Europe's space-based network. Hi, T-Minus Crew! If you would like daily updates from us directly in your LinkedIn feed, be sure to follow the official N2K T-Minus page over on LinkedIn. And if you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do here, we are @t-daily on Instagram. And that's where we post videos and pictures from events, excursions, and even some behind-the-scenes treats. Links are as always in the show notes for you. Hope you'll join us there. Today's guest is Courtney Stodd from the Beyond Earth Institute. Courtney started by telling you more about the organization. On the ground, we have a lot of great people. We focus on the policy regulatory, even the technical challenges associated with human beings migrating on a permanent basis off the planetary surface. Even though some people may feel that's long away, I'm here to tell you that it's actually more near-term than you might imagine. Absolutely. There's a symposium to bring people who are interested in these kinds of discussions, who are, I would say, even at the forefront of these discussions, coming up. Am I selling that correctly? You are selling it correctly. And I want to also do a call-out to T-Minus, which was a very critical sponsor supporter of this symposium. So we do a lot of webinars. We do them about every month or every other month on a whole host of topics related to space settlements. But we have started an in-person space symposium. And the one coming up in November 12th and 13th, that's a Tuesday and Wednesday in Washington, DC, is our third in-person symposium. And let me brag on it for a second. I have attended hundreds of conferences. I've had the honor of speaking to many. What I think makes us unique is that we are actually focused on very pragmatic solutions. So we have some very talented young people from some of the leading schools, universities, and others who are just starting their professional career, who are volunteering their time on various working groups focused on a number of topics, including the economics and financing of these large-scale settlements, the SIS Lunar Economy, that is to say the economy orbiting around the moon or on the moon, what's involved with that. Huge thing right now, especially. Reliability, health, and safety fundamental when it comes to people in space. And where we go with commercial space stations, the International Space Station, which your listeners have paid huge King's ransom and taxpayer money for, is coming to a net at some point. Right now the date is 2030. There are those who suggest it may extend its life a few years longer. But at some point, we're going to have to look at what that next step is. And NASA has been funding various commercial habitat alternatives. So we'd like to have a paper that's focusing on what the feasibility of those models are. And then we'll also bring those topics I just mentioned into the Space Imposem integrated into the program. And we try to have a curated audience. And these are not only enthusiasts and advocates, and we invite everybody has an interest in this topic to please come, but also thought leaders from academia, the government industry to come together and have a very fulsome engagement with the speakers. It's also meeting about a week or so after the election in the United States. I'm looking at the agenda. And given, again, it's a symposium and not it's not a trade show. It's a symposium. So discussion sounds like the name of the game there. It's very much so. And we hope that with the working papers that will be distributed to the audience with the discussions between the speakers and the audience, that we'll have some very practical inputs for the transition teams that will be emerging in the wake of the election. We are very blessed to have the Italian ambassador, the very talented ambassador, Zappia, is our honorary chair this year. And that should convey to the audience that we're trying to have a global scope, a global perspective. It is no longer a U.S. dominated space club. It's wide open. And you just have to take a look at the success India had landing its lander on the moon, for example, and of course, the Chinese as well. We'll have senior people from NASA. One of our sponsors is the talented Michelle Hanlon, who's executive director for the Center for Space Law at the University of Mississippi. Had the pleasure of speaking to her. Yeah, she's great. And she also led successfully the effort to get this rather fractious fraught Congress to actually agree on something, which was to protect the heritage sites on the moon, including power 11, which certainly is very, very important. And for those of you out there who are fans of for all mankind on the Apple TV, I am one of them. Yes. And I'm going to provide an extraordinary series that actually confronts a lot of the political and social topics associated with humanity, exploring space, developing space. Ron Moore, the showrunner. Oh, my God. He's coming in person. He's going to be part of a fire side chat. So people have a chance to meet him. And I had the I am a massive fan of his in case you. He's coming and he'll be on the first day on the 12th. And I had the chance with Steve Wolf, who's our co-founder, president to talk to Ron Moore and he has everything you would expect. By the way, for those who are Star Trek fans and so forth, his heritage goes back. Maria is one. I am one. I'm pointing to myself because I love Deep Space Nine and next generation. And that's where he got his tea. I love that. Yeah. And Battlestar Galactic. Yeah. All that good stuff. The great thing about that, and I had the showrunner for the expanse come to our first symposia. Now we do focus on what's real and what's pragmatic, but we find that talented people like Ron Moore have been grappling with the stories and narratives. The how do you present this in a cinematic way? But in doing so, they have to confront the real human stories and challenges. The expanse deals with prejudice and racism and other things that we, I always like to say, but don't leave the good, bad, and the ugly behind as we go beyond the carmen line. And these wonderfully talented storytellers are able to take the venue, the cosmos, and show how we humanity will be grappling with those issues. And so people like him bring a very important perspective. The latest season of For All Mankind really was quite a mirror to what's going on now and the discussions that are happening right now, which was just fascinating. It's been a lot of the coffee table discussion in both my household and even at work. Yes. Where I'll just like, every episode that would come out, we'd go, this is remarkably similar. And you can tell someone's done a lot of really good research and really knows their stuff. I'm such a good scandal. So if nothing else, Ron Moore should be a draw. The other one is a real interesting individual. And I believe that once people get more exposed to him, they'll see what a rock star he is. Dr. Chris Mason, who among other background in biochemistry and so forth, is a professor of genomics. And I believe associated with Cornell, I believe, but he wrote a book, a very wonderful title, The Next 500 Years, Engineering Life to Reach New Worlds. And I happened to stumble across him on a YouTube session and he blew me away. I don't know about the rest of you, but my biology chemist teachers are not exactly standup acts, but he manages the combined incredible insight, articulation with a self-deprecating sense of humor that makes his remarks extraordinarily compelling. So he will be one of our future speakers as well. It has quite a thesis. And we'll also bring together some ambassadors from a diverse collection of countries that also are looking to develop their mission in space. So we're trying again to be as inclusive as possible, make clear that, yes, the US is a leader in space, no longer the only one. And they will be speaking Mandarin and Hindi and other languages, Japanese, name it. Some African countries are emerging in India. We need to be inclusive as a humanity. This is where the symposium in November is grappling with. How do we together take our baggage, good, bad and ugly? And under what rules of engagement, what norms, how we're going to enforce policy, you know, in other worlds. And again, we think it's not too early to begin to focus on that and ensure that whatever the outcome of the US election, we don't lose the momentum that we've had so far with ensuring our presence in Earth orbit and hopefully beyond. We'll be right back. Welcome back. NASA's Watts on the Moon challenge has found its two winners. And that's Watts as in the unit of power, W-A-T-T, and not a question about the nature of lunar regolith. And the goal of the Watts on the Moon competition was to help kickstart technology development for power, transmission and energy storage that will be needed for long-term moon missions. Four teams competed for the lowest TESM or total effective system mass calculation. And you want a highly effective system with the lowest possible mass because transporting weight to the Moon is extraordinarily expensive. Power system prototypes had to operate in a vacuum chamber for over six hours of simulated daylight and 18 hours of darkness with a remote user over two miles away. Not unlike the real-life conditions such a solution will be in one day on the Moon. In all the simulation to put these prototypes through their paces ran for 48 hours. And the first prize winner was Team High Efficiency Long Range Power Solution. Not a very elegant name, but it's also shortened to Team Helps from UC Santa Barbara. And they won the $1 million grand prize for their prototype, which had the lowest mass and highest efficiency of the entire competition. Second prize went to Space Startup Orbital Mining Corp, earning them a cool half a million dollars. And both Team Helps and Orbital Mining Corp's winning work are encouraging steps forward toward helping lunar crews one day easily survive and operate through a long lunar night. And that's it for T-Minus for September 23rd, 2024, brought to you by N2K CyberWire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. And we'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like the show, please share our rating and short review in your favorite podcast app. Also, if you could please fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com, we would really appreciate it. We're 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 Karpf. Simone Petrella is our president, Peter Kielpe is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Vermazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. T-minus. [Music] [Music]
