[MUSIC] We were noting that things are a little quiet right now in the world of space, because as Florida goes, so does a lot of space activity. And understandably with Hurricane Milton coming Florida's way, the space coast is very quiet. So to our listeners across Florida, we're all thinking of you and wishing you all the best. [MUSIC] Today is October 9th, 2024. I'm Maria Ramazes, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] NASA selects Momentus for launch services. XD Lynx, Argo Space Corps, and Fortius close funding rounds. Advance Space's capstone mission gets extended. And our guest today is Lou Hawthorne, CEO at Nanotics. Lou is developing a potentially transformative medicine for space and Earth called Nanauts. It has really incredible potential, and we think you'll all appreciate hearing about it, so stick around for the second part of the show. [MUSIC] It's a bit of a slow space week as we noted with a historic hurricane bearing down on Florida, with Falcon 9 still under investigation and everyone preparing for the IAC in Milan next week. So bear with us on today's Intel briefing as there's going to be a lot of short mentions today. And we're starting with Momentus, who have been selected by NASA to provide launch services for future agency missions through its Venture-Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Ride Share contract, also known as VADR. Momentus, for those not familiar with the company, provides satellite buses and in-space infrastructure services, including in-space transportation, hosted payloads, and other in-orbit services. With this new contract, Momentus will have the opportunity to play a crucial role in broadening access to space by delivering satellites like Class D, CubeSats, and other risk-tolerant payloads to a variety of orbits. No further details were shared about the timing for the first launch service. And we've got some funding news now starting in India. XDLinks Space Labs has announced the successful completion of a $7 million seed funding round. The Hyderabad-based startup says it plans to use the funding to accelerate XDLinks' mission to develop satellite technology and push the boundaries of space exploration through innovation and cost-effective solutions. The company is currently preparing for the launch of its next major project, Elevation 1, which will feature the world's first miniaturized space-grade e-band payload. It's scheduled to launch aboard SpaceX's Transporter 12 mission. Elevation 1 is the first commercial mission designed to demonstrate e-band communications with digital modulation. Space Transportation Company Argo Space Corps has completed its seed funding round, raising $7.9 million. This brings the company's total funding to $12 million to date through a combination of venture capital and cyber contracts from the United States Space Force and NASA. Argo plans to use the funds to accelerate the company's progress in creating in-space mobility and logistics architecture with a focus on developing and building the first Argo Space vehicle for launch in Q4 2025. And 3D metal printing company Forteus Metals has secured an additional $2 million in their seed plus funding, bringing the total raised in the financing round $5 million. The company works with the US military and NASA, as well as several defense primes and commercial space companies, to produce wire-based additive manufacturing. Advanced Spaces, CIS Lunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment Satellite, also known as Capstone, has been awarded an extension of the mission program. The program completed its original 18-month mission for NASA this spring. The mission extension includes a base period to continue nominal mission operations to further demonstrate CIS Lunar Autonomous Positioning System experiments and to perform feasibility analyses for higher priority experiments in support of NASA's technology needs. The Capstone mission has been operating at the moon for over 670 days, performing critical navigation and operations experiments in CIS Lunar Space. NASA's Nancy Grace-Roman Space Telescope has been put through its paces at the Goddard Space Flight Center. A piece of the observatory called the Outer Barrel Assembly took a spin in the centrifuge to test the parts ahead of assembly. The same parts will next go through thermal vacuum testing together to ensure that they'll withstand the temperature and pressure environment of space. Then they'll move to a shake test to make sure they'll hold up against the vibrations they'll experience during launch. Lots of tests there. Towards the end of next year they'll be integrated with the rest of the observatory. And now if you're looking to submit your ideas on lunar logistics, disposal of CIS Lunar debris, or looking to make space more accessible for all, then we have news on three RFIs for you. First, NASA's seeking proposals for innovative architecture solutions that could help the agency land and move cargo on the lunar surface during future Artemis missions. NASA has published two white papers outlining lunar logistics and mobility gaps as part of its Moon to Mars architecture development effort that augmented an earlier white paper on logistics considerations. NASA expects proposing companies to consider these publications which describe the space agency's future needs for logistics and mobility. Second, the UK Space Agency is soliciting proposals for a report that supports the UK Space Agency in developing CIS Lunar regulatory policy regarding UK mission disposal options and contributing to the Interagency Space Debris Coordination Committee's development of CIS Lunar space debris mitigation guidelines. Proposals must be submitted for that one by the end of the month. And third, the European Space Agency is calling for proposals for research to be conducted by astronaut John McFall. Now McFall is the first ESA astronaut reserve to be selected with a physical disability. ESA is soliciting research proposals from member states for science focused activities including payload development that could be carried out on the ISS during a potential future flight of John McFall not earlier than 2026. The European scientific community is encouraged to leverage the unique environment of the ISS research facility also taking advantage of the unique opportunities presented by John McFall's physical disability. More details about all three calls for proposals can be found by following the links in our show notes and you'll also find one additional story in the selected reading section today from the financial times asking quite simply will space tourism really take off? Hey T-minus crew if you find this podcast useful please do us a favor and share a five star rating and a short review in your favorite podcast app. That'll help other space professionals like you find the show and join the T-minus crew. Thank you for your support we really appreciate it. [Music] Our guest today is Lou Hawthorne CEO at Nanotics and you know it's not very often that I'm left speechless by an interview but this one was a little nay very outside of my lane and I can really see the implications of it all not just for space but for all of us here on planet earth. Here is Lou telling me more about his company and his vision. I'm the founder of a company called Nanotics which is developing a new class of medicine which is called Nanots and Nanots invert the drug paradigm of the last 2000 years because rather than adding molecules to the body which is what all drugs do Nanots actually capture and clear molecules from blood that are essential for different diseases and we set out to design this to fill huge gaps in earth medicine but it actually solves certain problems in space medicine as well. That sounds so cool I just like that pitch is so neat because that sounds completely sci-fi but it's real. All right so I have some basic familiarity with space is really hard on humans that are in space you know it's a very uncompromising environment causes a lot of health issues the longer they're out there that's sort of my very rudimentary understanding. Can you help me understand what kind of issues you know space explorers are dealing with? Sure so space is in many ways just an exaggeration or amplification of the stresses on earth. I mean microgravity is kind of unique but radiation is something that we're all subjected to it's tumorogenic, pro tumor. It's also pro inflammatory and inflammation is actually good when it comes to pathogen control the inflammatory molecules that the immune system uses to destroy bad cells, virally infected cells that's good but only when they're delivered focally against a bad cell but when they're elevated systemically that's a driver of inflammatory diseases on earth and in space as well and these can range from chronic diseases like arthritis, psoriasis and so forth up to and including fatal acute inflammatory conditions like sepsis. People think of sepsis as like an infection it can be triggered by an infection but it's actually a massive immune system over reaction and it's a real problem on earth but also it's such a problem on earth that actually sepsis actually kills more people than all forms of cancer combined and it's a problem in space too in fact one of the Apollo 13 astronauts developed sepsis in space and almost died so it's already a known problem. Wow I didn't realize there was an issue in space too so the technology that you all are developing maybe technology is not the right word for it. I'm so out of my lane here please excuse me. No actually it is it is a technology this is an engineered virus-sized particle and it's it's different than conventional medicines. What it is is it's a silica particle so silica is in everything grown in soils just quartz it's biocompatible. On to this virus-sized silica particle we we coat it with capture agents. These are molecules that have specific binding affinity for certain molecules that are drivers of disease. For instance in sepsis we would put in capture agents against the inflammatory cytokines that cytokine just means signal molecule of the immune system so we would put in capture agents against these these cytokines and then on top of that on this particle we add the secret sauce which is a porous shield. What that means is that the soluble targets we want to take out will diffuse through the shield and get captured but the shield prevents any interaction at all with cells and this is a vital key difference from drugs. When you put a drug into the body it might interact with a pathogenic disease causing soluble target but there's lots of biochemically identical membrane targets that are serving an essential function. Drugs can't distinguish between a soluble and a membrane target. This problem comes up again and again in biology, in medicine. Bananats, the technology we've developed, they were built from the ground up specifically to distinguish soluble pathogenic targets from the membrane form of that same target which is performing an essential function. My goodness. What's the delivery mechanism for something like this? I mean is this something that say a crew is going up to a space station, any space station, and they have something with them? Like is this a pill? How would this work? Yeah. So one of the key things to keep in mind in space medicine. First of all the diseases that are likely to arise. Cancer and also inflammatory disease are going to be a much bigger problem in space than they are on earth. Our platform addresses both of these but secondly in space you have very little medical infrastructure. You can't take all the equipment, all the diagnostic devices, and all of the medical expertise that you would have access to on earth. So you need something that can be delivered with a very simple device and based on analytic processes that are also very simple and can be handled by astronauts. So nanots, that's what we call our platform tech. It's a nanot because it negates a target. So it's a nanoparticle that negates hence the nanot, like the not function in computer science. So the idea is you measure the target in the astronaut blood. That's just a blood, that's just a drop of blood in an existing analytic test device and then that tells you, and this is something different from drugs, because our targets, because we deplete targets, our targets are actually pre-existing the therapeutic. They can be measured in blood, then we inject the nanots and that just requires that the astronaut be able to do an IV injection. And then 30 minutes later we can actually measure the target again to confirm that the endpoint, the initial endpoint of target depletion has been achieved. That's not possible with a drug. So it's very much the way astronauts think. Astronauts usually are both pilots and engineers and so they are trained to measure and respond. So this therapeutic, you measure the target that's elevated in blood, which is a driver of disease. You inject the appropriate nanot, it depletes that target very, very quickly and deeply. We can deplete any target in blood by greater than 95% in less than five minutes post-injection. And then they can run that diagnostic again, take another drop of blood and confirm that the endpoint of target depletion has been achieved. That's just absolutely amazing to me and as you alluded to, lots of utility here on Earth as well. I'm just like, "Oh, that sounds great. When do I get that?" So I guess a question on how development is going, testing and development. Where are we at in the timelines there? We're collaborating with Mayo Clinic and with MGH in Boston and we're preclinical, but we've used nanots against tumor-generated immune inhibitors to profoundly suppress tumor growth in humanized mice. So the mice have both human immune systems and they also have human tumors. And nanots suppress tumor growth in a mouse model of triple negative breast cancer, which doesn't respond to basically any treatment. Nanots worked great and I think they're going to be very effective at suppressing tumor growth on long-duration spaceflight. We're also collaborating, in addition to Mayo Clinic, we're collaborating with MGH. We're also planning collaboration on the sepsis front and on MS, which is a neurotoxic neurodegenerative disease. And all of these are possible because we're going after the molecular roots of disease. So many very different diseases that look very different clinically are actually driven by a relatively small set of signals or signal inhibitors. Cells talk to each other all the time and a lot of that information in disease goes bad. So we actually take out bad information flowing between cells and then the immune system sorts out the disease. Sorry, this has really blown my mind. Is this not usually the kind of conversation I have? I don't usually get to talk about things like this and I'm just imagining an astronaut just thinking, "Space medicine is a very new field. I mean things have been going on in it, but this sounds completely transformative. I'm just trying to keep my brain in the space line for a minute here. Have you talked to any astronauts that have said, "This is very exciting tech." I imagine this is something that they would be looking forward to having in their toolkit, so to speak. So the neat thing about the Space H program, which is a collaboration of Starburst, NASA, Trish, Microsoft Federal, and various other organizations that are working on the frontier of medicine for use in space. One of the cool things about this program is we meet several times a week, three to four times a week for one to two hours each time. And there's regular guests, which include people working at NASA or Johnson Space Center, various other groups that are very knowledgeable about the challenges, the health challenges that astronauts face. It tends not to be astronauts that we meet with, it tends to be the administrator's task with keeping astronauts safe. And I think there is a lot of enthusiasm for what we're doing. We're pre-clinical and every smart person withholds final judgment on a new medical tech until you're in humans. But it's working great in animals. Before we close out, I want to give you the floor. If there's anything you wanted to mention to our audience that I didn't know to ask about, that you wanted them to know, please go right ahead. I lost my beloved stepfather to sepsis and I lost one of my beloved mentors, who was an endocrinologist, which is the science of cell signaling to cancer. So the diseases we're tackling for me and for my team, they're personal and these are diseases that touch all of us. So they're really, they're personal for all of us. Yes, we have to raise a ton of money. Yes, we have investors. They want to get their money back. But I think for everybody, the goal is to reduce suffering of ourselves, our loved ones, and even people we don't know. Just humanity in general. That's our goal. [Music] We'll be right back. Welcome back. And our last item today is a bit of a tech PSA for our listeners, wherever you are. But especially for those of you who are recovering from storm damage or may be expecting a hurricane to bear down on you imminently. If you have a Google Pixel 9 series or an iPhone 14 or later, you likely have the ability to message emergency services even if power is out and cell service is down. That's because these newest Google and Apple smartphones have satellite messaging capabilities. Google's Pixel 9 series has satellite messaging capabilities specifically for emergency services called ESOS. And similarly on iOS 16.1 and later, newer iPhone users can message emergency services via satellite using what Apple calls its emergency SOS. And again, on newer iPhones, iPhone 14s and up, that are also running iOS 18, you can message anyone via satellite, not just emergency services. So being able to talk to first responders is of course a baseline need. But sometimes you also want to let family and friends know that you're doing okay. And in that case, iOS's messages via satellite is pretty handy. There have been a lot of stories out of Haleen's Wake in North Carolina about how this capability has been useful, so we wanted to pass that along to you all. I can only begin to imagine how busy people are cleaning up after Haleen or quite literally batting down the hatches right now before a huge storm like Milton. If you are able to and feel comfortable doing so, checking your phone's satellite messaging capabilities and potentially updating your phone so it has them could also be part of your prep. Be safe. That's it for T-Minus for October 9, 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 this podcast. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. N2K's strategic workforce intelligence optimizes the value of your biggest investment, your people. We make you smarter about your team while making your team smarter. 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 Kilpie is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmausis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. T-Minus. you [MUSIC]
