(air whooshing) There's a lot of FOMO or fear of missing out going on right now. And I don't know about you, but I can't log on to social media at the moment without being bombarded by space images. Some of them are of the A3 comet as it streaks across the horizon at sunset in a once in a, oh, I don't know, 80,000-year display. And others are from some of our favorite space folks who are all hanging out without me at the IAC in Milan, Italy. Surely I'm not missing out on that much, right? (air whooshing) - T-minus, 20 seconds to L-O-I, 20 minutes to open aboard. (air whooshing) - Today is October 16th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasus, and this is T-minus. (air whooshing) China outlines a new roadmap for space. Axiom and Prada share their new space suit, Inspire and Mission Control to explore AI in space. And our guest today is Dan Barstow, Education Mission Specialist at the Association of Space Explorers. And Dan has created a series of stunning videos that marry images of the Earth from space with music and artists. We'll be diving into his work on Deep Space this Saturday, but first we're gonna give you a teaser of our chat in the second part of today's show. (upbeat music) Happy home day, everyone. Let's get into Wednesday's show. Buried under the mountain of space news that we plowed through yesterday was a very bold announcement from China at the International Astronautical Congress being held in Milan, Italy this week. The China National Space Administration, China Manned Space Agency, and Chinese Academy of Sciences released the National Development Program for Space Science. And their plan laid out how China aims to become the leading space power by 2050. It's a pretty bold ambition, we're sure you'll agree, but entirely believable with how much emphasis China has put on developing its space programs in recent years. The roadmap has been laid out in phases from now until 2027, from 2028 to 2035, and then another phase from 2036 to 2050. Wang Qi, director of the CAS National Space Science Center, told reporters in Beijing, and I quote, "We will strive to achieve the three-step strategic goal formulated in the plan. That is, China's space science will enter the first echelon in 2027, be among the world's leading countries in key directions in 2035, and will become a world space science power in important fields by 2050." China's plan identifies five scientific themes to guide the development of space science missions, and those include habitable planets, biological and physical sciences in space, the Sun Earth Panorama, space time ripples, and the extreme universe. Leaders say that they will add up to eight new missions to their schedule in the immediate future to launch their national space ambitions. Axiom and Prada shared the flight design of the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit, spacesuit also known as Axiomu, which will be used for NASA's Artemis III mission. And yes, I said Prada as in the devil wears, Prada fashion house. The Axiom Prada spacesuit is created to provide increased flexibility, greater protection to withstand the harsh space environment, and specialized tools to accomplish exploration needs, and expand scientific opportunities. Using innovative technologies and a flexible design, Axiom says these spacesuits will enable more exploration of the lunar surface than ever before. Matt Ondler, Axiom space president, says the Axiom space Prada partnership has set a new foundational model for cross industry collaboration, further expanding what's possible in commercial space. We're disappointed to not see more bling, to be honest. Spire and Mission Control plan to launch a mission to explore the power of artificial intelligence in space. The persistence mission is expected to showcase how AI can be reliably used onboard satellites over a long period of time to generate actionable insights in real time. Spire has agreed to build and operate the LIMR-6, which is a 6U satellite with an optical payload that will provide images of the earth for analysis by Mission Control's onboard AI algorithms. The Canadian Space Agency is providing financial support to Mission Control, so it can demonstrate how its AI technology can advance on orbit processing. The satellite itself is scheduled for launch no earlier than 2025. NASA has contracted Sierra Space to develop, get this, a trash compaction and processing system, and test it aboard the International Space Station in late 2026. This trash compaction system is being developed to handle waste management, storage and water reclamation for long duration missions, including crewed missions to the moon and to Mars. It could effectively reduce the volume of trash generated by astronauts and recover nearly all water and trained in the trash for further use. Hmm, trash water. Last week, Italy and the United States held their first bilateral space dialogue in Rome ahead of the IAC conference this week, aiming to deepen space cooperation for the benefit of the peoples of both countries and the world. Italian and US officials exchanged information on respective national space policies, including Italy's forthcoming space law, as well as the United States Space Priorities Framework. Both countries resolved to strengthen the coordination of national security space activities with other allies and partners around the globe, including by leveraging innovative commercial space capabilities to ensure access to critical space-based services and improve space demand awareness. Following the government-to-government discussions, both sides held a commercial roundtable on the margins of the IAC, which brought together dozens of private space companies from each of the two countries and highlighted existing partnerships. And also on the sidelines of the IAC and Milan, Estonia signed the Artemis Accords and became the 45th nation to join the US and other signatories, agreeing to the safe, transparent and responsible exploration of the moon, Mars and beyond. Making the most of the European travel opportunity who can blame him, NASA administrator Bill Nelson will visit Romania and Bulgaria beginning Thursday. Both countries have already signed the Artemis Accords and during his travels to both countries, Nelson will discuss the importance of international partnerships and collaboration in space, including the transatlantic relationships with NASA. And also at the IAC, what else but the IAC this week, the UK Space Agency signed a contract with Goonhilly Earth Station to provide deep space communication services to the UKSA and international partners from its satellite Earth Station in Cornwall. The new agreement will help expand existing UKSA capabilities, unlock new and emerging markets and support the growth of the fledgling lunar economy. It'll support Goonhilly to provide more services to international agencies and companies to help them cope with the increasing global demand for deep space communications. And the contract is task-based and worth up to an initial two million pounds this financial year. And the UK also plans to collaborate with Canada on the Red Wing microsatellite space domain awareness mission which is scheduled to launch in 2027. Red Wing will track objects in congested orbits with improved sensors and provide near real-time tasking in response to evolving space events. According to the UKSA, this international research cooperation between the countries provides the opportunity for joint collaboration and for developing prototype infrastructure and data processing architecture. Staying in Canada, Maritime Launch and Reaction Dynamics have announced the next steps in their continuing collaboration with the signing of an agreement for future orbital launches from Canada. Under the terms of the MOU, Maritime Launch and Reaction Dynamics will work towards a Pathfinder mission that will enable a first ever orbital launch of a Canadian vehicle from Canadian soil on the coast of Nova Scotia. Vyassat has demonstrated direct to device satellite connectivity in India for the first time. Vyassat is currently working with its partners including Indian telecommunications provider BSNL to power the expansion of satellite services on consumer and IoT devices across the world. The South African National Space Agency, SAMHSA has signed an agreement with NASA for participation in international space programs. This partnership solidifies SAMHSA's inclusion in NASA's Global Lunar Exploration Ground Sites Program known as LEGS. And we'll see the establishment of a NASA antenna facility at the Matgees Fondtine site, also known as MTJ. The agreement outlines the collaborative responsibilities for the funding, development operation and maintenance of the NASA antenna facility at MTJ. And NASA views spacecraft tracking services from the Southern Hemisphere as a critical component of the Artemis program. (upbeat music) That wraps up our Wednesday Intel Briefing, another packed day, huh? Head to the selected reading section of our show notes to dive deeper into all the stories that we've mentioned in today's show. And we've also included another link for you to an announcement by L3Harris on a new appointment to their board of directors. Hey T-minus crew, if you find this podcast useful, please do us a favor and share a five star rating and short review in your favorite podcast app. That'll help other space professionals like you to find the show and join the T-minus crew. Thank you for your support everybody, we really appreciate it. (upbeat music) Today's guest is Dan Barstow, Education Mission Specialist at the Association of Space Explorers. Dan has created a series of stunning videos that marry footage of the Earth from space with music by many different artists. And I started by asking Dan how he came up with the idea for this work. - Music is a game changer for Earth science education in my opinion. I think it's an important domain and it sounds peripheral, it sounds sort of whimsical, but in fact, it's really quite profound. I often did public talks where I showed these photographs and movies taken by the astronauts. I mean, they take millions, millions of photographs and hundreds of hours of these incredible videos. And I would use them as kind of lecture aids and explain about plate tectonics or hurricanes like we just had in Florida. But the words, people listen and they say, okay, it's a science lesson. Well, one day I was at home working, I manage an archive of these photographs from my home office here. And I was just working with them and enjoying watching it. And I was listening to music and I thought, wow, this music is really connected. I think it was a Bach classical music piece that maybe is a cantata or something. And the harmonies of the human voices align so well with the harmonies that I saw of Earth, the cloud patterns over the mountains or the rivers flowing or growth areas and then night flights. And it just, it occurred to me that this is really a powerful idea. I spent a lot of time, when I heard that you were coming on to speak with me, spent a lot of time on the earthmusictheater.org website, really, really soaking it in all these beautiful, beautiful videos. I mean, I don't need much convincing to look at any views from the ISS, for example. I kind of would love a direct IV drip of that into my veins, I just love it. The music choices are so, so stunning. And there's a really gorgeous variety. It elevates something that is already so sublime. It really is quite incredible. And I completely agree with you that it really, especially when doing outreach, it's so important to incorporate the arts. Well, let me give you a couple of examples for your audience as well. Sure, yeah. We release one new or feature, one new movie every week. The one we did this week is the Dona Nobis Pachim. Now I'll say that we have a whole, I'm talking classical, Western classical a bit here. We really cover the gamut of indigenous, natural sounds, whale songs and so on. But just this example was a really powerful one. During the COVID era, I mean, we're still kind of in the tail end of it, but there was a national, an international conference that had to cancel, it was going to feature some people singing a Bach piece, the B Minor Mass. The end of which is this really glorious Dona Nobis Pachim, this really uplifting, soaring music, and they couldn't do it. But instead they said, wait a minute, let's do a global performance. They had performers all over the world, singing, playing the organ, playing different instruments, and then did the complex work, especially a group of the Bach Fest organizers, they coordinated these voices, and I heard it and I thought, wow, this needs the visuals. So we combined that. Now it's the nightlights of showing how we're all connected with the music and the voices from all over the world showing how we're all connected. And it was just, it's a really a magnificent piece. All of these, by the way, are for free on the web at earthmusictheatre.org. So another example, there's a, Steve Thomas is a master with electric guitar and also some digital work with the sounds afterwards. And he's able to make this really sort of ethereal, floating music that as you're watching Aurora or something else, it just covers the gamut. I love that you mentioned how much thought is put into also what imagery to use with the music because that web effect of the lights at night is so stunning with that piece. And you were mentioning also Steve Thomas' guitar scapes, a completely different vantage point with just the clouds and that bifurcation. It's just, it's completely different. It's not all the same kind of viewpoint. And it is such an effective, I just admired a lot. If you can't tell, I just think it's really beautiful. - No, I appreciate your enthusiasm. And I, you know, this is not music. This is not sort of bland music that you accompany while you're looking. The music is in many ways even more powerful. The visual views are so compelling. By the way, these are the, they're all in 4K, beautiful, glorious views. There's such a variety. We're truly trying to build a love for earth. And in fact, I have to say that the purpose of this is for both the heart and the mind. Certainly with the mind, you see things and all right, beautiful, okay, now I'm looking at this. Where are we in the world? There's always a globe showing where you are. But more importantly, it's the heart. You're listening to this. So here's, we release a new one every Friday. The new, the one going out today is called Pathway to Center. And it really is coincidentally, it's a flight over a hurricane. Now I'll say that, you know, our hearts go out to the people devastated by these two recent hurricanes. And we have to think about the danger of climate change, the impact of that and so on. But how do people survive through these experiences? The woman who plays the harp for this, she said that she's gone through stress in her life. And she found this music that she plays, she thinks of it as kind of like a spiral that you go in and you get deeper into some dark, deep, troublesome area. And you pass through it and then you find serenity as you leave and get out of this storm. And it's sort of metaphor, but literally we're flying over hurricane and it's, you fly over the eye, it starts with you don't see anything. And then these wisps of clouds and then you get over the turbulence of the hurricane and the eye and then you pass through it. And so we're sort of hoping that this gives people strength. That's her wish, the musician, that this gives people strength as they go through their own struggles. Oh my goodness. I, that is a metaphor I've used often in my life also then. I think of a nautilus shell, but hurricane is a nice, a really powerful and very salient right now way of interpreting that. Tell me a bit about working with the musicians on this. So sometimes, yeah, that's gotta be a really great experience. Tell me a bit about that. Yeah, you know, it's a really sort of a three way partnership here of creativity. One of the partners is the astronauts. 'Cause I mentioned we're this, the association of space exporters is the astronauts. In fact, interestingly, many of the astronauts are actually musicians. Katie Coleman from Massachusetts, where we both live. She played the flute in space. Chris Hadfield did this classic guitar of drown control to Major Tom. It was epic. Yeah, I've seen by millions of people. Yes. But the astronauts are the visual artists. The way they do this, that's imagine yourself in the space station. You're weightless. You have lots of tasks you need to do, managing experiments. But you always find time to float over to the cupola. It's like a glass bottom boat. You look down at the earth below 45 minutes day, 45 minutes night as you go through a 90 minute orbit. And you say, you know, this view coming up in an hour is gonna be really spectacular. So you set up your camera in the window and you have to take this movie as you fly over. Then NASA downloads those. And I have access. I have the full collection here. So the astronauts themselves are contributing the visual art. They love this earth music theater because it's part of how they share their experience with the world. Then the musicians have their part. Now, typically like Dr. Nicholas Gullis is a classical guitar player. He watched, essentially he did a few orbits of earth. He watched some of these movies, but in silence. Then he said, what does this make me feel like? And there were a few recordings that he had. We worked with either live or recordings, typically recordings that we then back and forth between the musician and I'm mostly in the movie maker. There are others as well, but I do most of the movie making to try to align them. We can adjust the speed of the flight. We can pick different sections. And we try to say, how does what you're expressing musician, like Laura, Zair, the harp, she wanted this hurricane. So I looked through the archives and found one that seemed to be just her message. And then we go back and forth and then say, yep, here we are with this movie. And we'll be diving deep into Dan's work more on Deep Space this Saturday. (upbeat music) We'll be right back. Welcome back. The European Space Agency set our hearts racing when it shared the first page of the Euclid Great Cosmic Atlas. This first chunk of the map, which represents just 1% of what it will be looking at and all is a huge 208 gigapixel size mosaic. And it was revealed at the IAC by ESA's director general, Joseph Oshbacher. Euclid is mapping the universe in a mission that will span six years to create the largest 3D cosmic map ever captured. The first mosaic contains 260 observations made between March 25th and April 8th, 2024. Yeah, just two weeks. And in that time, Euclid covered 132 square degrees of the Southern sky in pristine detail. That first 1% image already contains around 100 million sources, stars in our Milky Way and galaxies beyond. And yeah, need I say it, it's stunning. ESA shared a video of the mosaic that also is really breathtaking. The video starts from a vast cosmic panorama containing some mere 14 million galaxies. And then it dives into a series of zooms that bring you into a view of a swirling spiral galaxy in a final image enlarged 600 times compared to the full mosaic. If this is just a taste of what's to come, then we cannot wait to see the final map when Euclid completes it in the coming years. Yeah, I'm already nerding out about it. (upbeat music) And that's it for T-minus for October 16th, 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. 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 Kilpey is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. (upbeat music) - T minus. (upbeat music) (thunder rumbling) [BLANK_AUDIO]
