[MUSIC] Things have been a little quiet lately at Kennedy Space Center since the crew 9 launch, all thanks to the grounding of the Falcon 9. But the quiet is soon to be shattered. ULA has rolled out the Vulcan Centaur, and we're sure the heavy lift will be disrupting the piece later this week. [MUSIC] >> T minus, 20 seconds to LOS, we're open aboard. [MUSIC] Today is October 1st, 2024. Happy October everybody, I'm Maria Varmasus, and this is T minus. [MUSIC] ULA rolls out the Vulcan Centaur ahead of its second launch. Astrobotics Griffin Lunar Lander completes testing with the Deep Space Network. China shares its new lunar space suit design. And our guest today is Jean-François Morizour, CEO of CHI Lab. Jean-François will be talking to me about the first optical communication test of the Coronos satellite. So stick around for that chat. [MUSIC] >> Happy Tuesday everybody, let's get into it. The countdown is on for the second ever launch of United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur, as yesterday the rocket slowly rolled out to Space Launch Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral for its scheduled Friday launch. This upcoming launch is CERT 2, and it's the second launch that needs to be successful in order for the Space Force to certify the rocket for ongoing use, hence CERT 2. Before then though, the rocket needs to complete several final tests, including its wet dress rehearsal. And then the Vulcan Centaur will only have demo and inert payloads aboard. The Friday launch window is scheduled to open at 6 AM Eastern time, as always, weather permitting. The Deep Space Network managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory successfully completed end-to-end test communications with Astrobotics Griffin Lunar Lander. The test demonstrated the lander's compatibility with space to ground communications that will occur during Griffin Mission 1's journey to the lunar surface. The Griffin Lander continues its assembly and testing at Astrobotics headquarters, and it's currently scheduled for its launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, in 2025. The European Space Agency has wrapped up final tests on the HERA spacecraft one week ahead of the launch window opening, and HERA will perform a detailed post- impact study of the target asteroid Dimorphos, the orbiting moonlet of the binary asteroid system known as Dinimos. Now that NASA's dart mission has impacted the moonlet, HERA will turn the grand scale experiment into a well-understood and repeatable planetary defense technique. HERA has now been filled with propellant and, as a next step, awaits encapsulation within its launcher fairing. The China Man Space Agency has shared the design of the nation's space suit for lunar landing. The lunar landing space suit was released during the third space suit technology forum in southwest China's city of Chongqing. The Chinese Space Agency said that the first public appearance of China's lunar landing space suit shows the many achievements of China's manned lunar exploration mission. Planet Lab has renewed a 12-month contract with the federal police of Brazil for its global daily monitoring over threatened rainforests. The contract has a seven-figure value and was formalized through Planet's partner, Escongeo Spatial. The contract, by the way, has been very successful to date. But when using Planet's satellite imagery, Brazilian public agents have reported collecting nearly $3 billion from fines, seized goods, and frozen assets related to illegal logging and mining. Australia's iLaunch Trailblazer project is funding research into epoxy resins used in space manufacturing. Along with three partner universities, University of Southern Queensland, the Australian National University and the University of South Australia, iLaunch will work with Adelaide-based green innovation company Change Climate to explore the suitability of a bio-epoxy resin for the manufacture of sustainable and highly durable composites for aerospace applications. Change Climate's Bioxy Bio-Epoxy Resin is the world's only bio-based epoxy resin made from 100% renewable resources. Pretty neat. The United States Space Force has renewed a Ciber Level 3 contract agreement with Virtualityx, an AI decision intelligence application company. Through the agreement, Virtualityx will continue deploying its integrated readiness optimization workforce product. The application enables USSF commanders and staff to develop situational understanding of past, present, and future operations based on defense readiness reporting system data, mission essential task assessments, and combatant command requirements. And Rochester Institute of Technology has been chosen to lead research for the United States Space Force. The university has been awarded over $9 million for the United States Space Force University Consortium Space Strategic Technology Institute 3 research to look into advanced space power and propulsion. The University of Michigan will also be a leading institution here and will focus on advancements in solar technology, thrusters, and novel power approaches. Congrats to both RIT and UMICH. [MUSIC PLAYING] And that concludes today's Intel Briefing. You'll find links to further reading on all the stories we've mentioned in our show notes and over at space.ntuk.com. Hey, T-minus crew. As a little reminder for you, we here at NTK are having an annual Get Together on Wednesday and Thursday. And so we'll be publishing special episodes on those days in lieu of our normal daily Intel briefings. Tomorrow, T-minus producer, Alice Carouse, will be sharing her report from the NASA social event and crew nine launch. And Thursday, I'll be sharing some cybersecurity tips for you as we dive into Cybersecurity Awareness Month, putting my old cybersecurity hat back on. We'll be back to our regular daily T-minus show on Friday. And if you'd like to stay updated with the daily headlines in the meantime, we'll be sharing big news items for you over on LinkedIn. So go and find us at NTK T-minus on LinkedIn. ♪ Today's guest is Jean-François Morizour, CEO of Kylab. Jean-François started by telling me more about his company. What Kylab does is we sell turnkey ground stations and our job is to make sure those things are available. So they are not a demo. This is not something you do in the lab and university. It's something that is a product. So you can actually get it by it and make it work. And so we qualify that with satellites. We've had this link with a satellite from the concentration. It was part of the French Ministry of Defense program called Kyronos. And within that program, we were able to transmit information from the satellite to the ground, transmit light and lock it. And get information there. We've also been able to test different scenarios and combine that with the information from Kyronos. Basically say, "Yes, this ground station is qualified and it can be used as a way to build an infrastructure on." We're proud of that because a few people actually did demos and very, very good teams all around the world. But these are demos, usually academic in nature. And so the objective is a bit different. We've got this commitment to deliver something to our clients. And this commitment includes something that keeps working, even if you don't have a few PhDs working around it. And that's kind of what's important for us. It means that people can rely on this and say, "Okay, now I can deploy that. I can use that as part of my architecture." A lot of people think about all this crazy architecture with space and we contribute to that. There are some incredible, fascinating technical challenges with what you all overcame. Can you talk about those a bit? Because I find optical comms just so fascinating, but it's so neat just watching it at the point that it is right now. So tell me a bit about how you all overcame those technical challenges. This is a question of tracking first. So there's a ground, there's a satellite, and you have to make sure they track each other so that you can see the other one and you point roughly in the right direction. And then there's a question of pointing. So once you know where it is, point the actual laser to it. So it's even narrow. The laser kind of challenge is that it's quite narrow. So there's coarse pointing, so that you point the laser in the roughly the right direction. And the fine pointing, that's linked to receiving a signal from the other hand. And then you've got something called a lock. So lock means that both sides are like, "Okay, I'm receiving something, I'm optimizing for that." And vice versa. And so this is kind of the big thing. So being saying, "Okay, I've got a ground lock," means you've got the means, the infrastructure for the communication. And then on top of that, you will have a modulation. So you can send information through, turn on and off the signal. And so, or you can have other kind of modulation. And so within the different programs, some of them we're able to demonstrate a lock. And that's, I think, the very key element. And then sometimes we're also able to demonstrate modulation, transmission of that, which is, and then you get the data from that, a modulated signal. So this is very, it's amazing moment because you have to do all those things. And one of the challenges is the atmosphere. The atmosphere is a layer of air that makes it challenging to go through. There's an absorption, of course. So the signal is weaker than what you would have in space. But beyond that, there's also the fact that the light interacts with the air. So it's actually very tiny, but it's big enough to actually matter. One of the examples is, you know, when you look at the horizon and you see this kind of, you can see this kind of blurred images far away. So imagine the same thing as the satellites. - Yes, especially when it's hot. - Exactly. So this kind of dispersion is something that you need to work on. So you need to compensate for turbulence, basically, in order to get it to work. And that's a big challenge in the whole scheme of doing this kind of communication from space to ground. I think this is also why it took so long to get... Like today, it's quite surprising that you've got satellite to satellite links that work really well and that are really deployed. And it's kind of almost industrial scale, at least what you see it's styling. And then at the same time for the set to ground, there's like, okay, yeah, there's a lot of things to be done, but it's still not at the same level of deployment and, you know, basically the number of ground stations that are around. - You all were the first to do this. So congratulations. I mean, that's not a small accomplishment at all. That's really quite amazing. So I just wanted to congratulate you. That is quite an accomplishment. And I was also reading that the time scales involved were also quite compressed, which I'm sure added quite another layer of difficulty on top of an already fascinating challenge. - Yeah, so the French DOD, they wanted this kind of special program where they were working with kind of new space entities. So both N-Syn Labs on their side and K-Labs on our side. N-Syn Labs is providing the satellite and the platform and they were able to launch it really fast. And that was really impressive. And they did an amazing job on this and the program management on this was top notch. It was really difficult to do because there was also constraints on the launchers and stuff like that. And at the same time, we did the ground and then getting to have an optical ground station that is reliable enough, that is not a demo, that's something that people can buy and leverage for other kind of missions. This was also a challenge and so this was compressed. This is what new space is about. You take a risk, a risk in calendar, risk in investment. There's a private money in it, also not just government funding. And in the end, you've got a result. And then this creates a new capability that people can rely on. - Yeah, and I was reading on Breaking Defense, that's the great website and I was reading your interview with them about both the ground station and the terminal on the satellite are off the shelf now. Or can you explain a little bit more? Maybe I misunderstood. - Yeah, no, no, that's right. The idea is that you can purchase those. So we don't do the terminal, it's not our job. And I'm not supposed to talk about the terminal supplier, but what I can tell you is there are today a lot of terminal suppliers that are off the shelf terminals and they are compatible with our ground station. And so typically you can buy some from a T-SAT, from Mineric also, from CSCI, Kaki. They're providing some for the SDA. You can only, well, I think is moving into that direction also. Skyloom definitely, they do a very good job on this. So a lot of people are working in this field to provide those terminals. And yes, these are completely off the shelf. Okay, it's still space stuff. So it's like off the shelf with, you still need engineers to actually know what you're talking about, but it is a product. It's, yeah. And the ground station today, we've sold, we've got seven under contract. So yes, it's also off the shelf. We, it's still, you know, there's still like, it's not as mature as what you've got for satellite links. But we are happy that we won and we've been selected for few large contracts where basically they were looking for this kind of turnkey solutions. This is, you know, something that has been just the, you know, you, I'm not providing you with a demo, I'm providing you with something that needs to work. Yeah, absolutely. It's, again, we're at a very fascinating time in this technology. And again, that you all have successfully deployed it. So the timeline, the next maybe five, 10 years or maybe even more compressed than that 'cause we are talking use space. What are you seeing in terms of how this is gonna be more broadly deployed? Yeah, I think the, what we are seeing today is that people are factoring that in. So they say, okay, I was, where are we on the ground? And yes, it's something that can be used for. I can use now. What we see is hybrids. So people are they gonna use, include some optical capabilities within the RF radio ground network. I think this is gonna be the easiest one. We see some of the drivers being coming from sovereignty security because a laser has benefits. You don't need spectrum. It's also difficult to jam, very difficult to intercept. And so that side, you know, how can I communicate in a very difficult radio environment? Can I make sure that it's gonna be very difficult to jam my receivers? Can I make sure that, you know, it's okay, it's gonna be difficult for people to know I'm communicating on all that stuff. This is a big driver and the geopolitical environment is not going in pushing in that direction. But on the other hand, you also have people that say, okay, optical is a way to get much more capacity. Today, one of the big challenge, for example, with observation is once you take a picture, you can take multiple orbits to actually download it. Maybe not a picture, but like a picture package. And there are some, you know, some companies where it's like, okay, I need eight hours, nine hours to bring it down because it's so rich. And you know, you need that rich. - Yes, the data. - Yeah, the details and the information, you need that because that's what your client needs. But the client would prefer it to get it in two minutes or like in one hour. - Of course. - Yeah, and it's like, okay, some information might not be that timely. Think agriculture information. You can get, you know, it's okay if it's nine hours later. But military information, you want it faster than later. You know, it's better. So this is kind of, you know, it's a situation where we see a drive to get to optical. So I think this is where we see kind of things moving into. It's going to be amazing. We had some clients that came in and said, "Oh, we will need so many ground stations." Like, okay, guys, first, let's be real. When do you need that? Are you sure about it and all that stuff? But I think it's this start of something new in this field. And if you look down the line, longer term, you are able to unlock the idea of a telecom operator from space. So today, telecom operators are on the ground and they benefit from optical fibers. Okay? And at some point, capacity, if capacity becomes easy to access through space, you can imagine, you know, having a routine access through satellite rather than to the internet, rather than going through fiber and copper. That's kind of a new thing. It probably won't be for, you know, somebody who's already connected to fiber like you and I, but for somebody who's, you know, in a remote location and a mobile environment in countries where you don't have fiber network, that can be a game changer. And I think that's something that, you know, we are grasping, you know, it's going, it's in the near to mid future, hopefully the nearer the better. Yes, absolutely. And it's a great point you just made about, you know, assured access to the internet for folks who don't have that, especially via satellite, that optical can play a strong role there. And I don't know if people have been thinking about that, but that it does and will play a huge role more than it already does. Yeah. I think optical as a gateway, yes. I believe that for access, it's probably going to be a, still going to be a point to multi-point, so that's radio is always going to win on this. But the gateways can provide, you know, having optical for gateways, where high capacity gateways actually allow you to free up radio spectrum. So instead of consuming radio spectrum for your gateway, you actually have, okay, using all the radio I've got for my users, maybe some users will get optical, maybe, but most of the users will get, you know, a bigger chunk of radio, because most of the, you know, all the gateway, all the things beyond the satellite are, you know, going down with optical, or at least optical is taking a part of that load. Yeah, and it's relieving that stress, well, the metaphorical stress on the spectrum. Yes, absolutely. That makes a lot of sense. Well, that, we live in exciting times, John, from Swah, I really like this, this is very cool. Exactly, I agree, 100%. (upbeat music) We'll be back. Welcome back. You know, I'm that person who will happily spend all day at an art museum, and my art history book collection is much to my husband, Shagrin, always growing. So when I saw this headline today, I did a double take. Here's the headline, beneath the brushstrokes, Van Gogh's sky is alive with real world physics, says the American Institute of Physics. I'm sorry, but what? Yes, Vincent Van Gogh, or Van Gogh, depending on how you want to pronounce it, painter of many gorgeous sunflowers, and most famously of Starry Night, his work was studied recently by researchers who specialize in marine sciences and fluid dynamics based out of China and France. And their peer-reviewed study, published in the American Institute of Physics, Physics of Fluids Journal, looked at the painting Starry Night, and specifically analyzed Van Gogh's whirlpools of brushstrokes in the sky that give his paintings that unsettling, but beautiful appeal. And it ends up upon very close inspection of those whirls measuring the variance between the dark swirls and the light swirls, aka the brightness of the paint, as well as the brushstrokes scale and shape. It ends up, those swirls actually match incredibly well, the actual turbulent flows in the atmosphere. And they match so much so that Van Gogh's work actually aligns with something called Colm McGurlough's law, which is used to predict atmospheric movement and scale according to measured inertial energy. And here's a little bit according to the study's excerpt. This result suggests that Van Gogh had a very careful observation of real flows, so that not only the sizes of the whirls and eddies in the Starry Night, but also their relative distances and intensity follow the physical law that governs turbulent flows. So it's not some weird hyperbole to say, Van Gogh's sky whirlpools follow the laws of physics. Apparently they're almost an accurate model of atmospheric dynamics, specifically cascading energy and turbulence. I don't think I would have believed it if someone had told me this either, but it seems this group of researchers wanted to prove this long debated theory once and for all. All of us nerds of science and art really appreciate it. (upbeat music) And that's it for T-minus for October 1st, 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 Battrella is our president, Peter Kilpie is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll be back to our regular T-minus programming on Friday. (upbeat music) - T-minus. - T-minus. (fire crackling) [MUSIC]
