Astronauts waiting in the wings.

(air whooshing) You know, I'm sure you've been there. Picture it, you're at the airport, sunny blue skies and gentle winds, very ready to go home from your long trip. But your flight's delayed and delayed and delayed due to bad weather at your destination. Not fun. And that is what's happening to crew eight on the ISS right now. They're still waiting for the all clear to go home. But at least while they're stuck there waiting, you can't beat the view. - T minus. 20 seconds to Al-O-I speedrun. Open aboard. - Today is October 22nd, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasus and this is T minus. (upbeat music) Crew eight is still waiting to return to Earth. Japan approves two new astronauts. China prepares for a crew change over on Tiangong Space Station. And our guest today is Daniel Faber, CEO of OrbitFab. We'll be discussing OrbitFab's latest partnerships and the next steps for launching a gas station in space. (upbeat music) - Happy Tuesday, everybody. We're kicking off today's Intel Briefing with a where in the universe update on the NASA SpaceX Crew Eight mission. Yes, you might have forgotten about them too, but the four person team has been left on the International Space Station for several weeks. While waiting for their splash down to Earth. NASA says weather conditions near the multiple splashdown sites off Florida's coast have remained unfavorable for the return of NASA's SpaceX Crew Eight mission from the ISS. Forecasts remain marginal for an undocking later today and tomorrow, Wednesday, October 23rd. If weather conditions improve, NASA and SpaceX will target no earlier than 9.05 PM Eastern time tonight, October 22nd, for undocking from the orbiting lab. And based on the current forecast, conditions are expected to improve as the week progresses, great news. The Crew Eight mission launched on March 3rd, 2024, carrying Roscosmos Cosmonaut Alexander Grubenkin and NASA astronauts Michael Barrett, Matthew Dominic and Jeanette Epps. They were due to originally return off the coast of Florida on October 7th, but Hurricane Milton pushed back their plans. We wish the team a safe flight when they eventually get the green light to come back home. Japan has officially approved two new astronauts. Since being selected as candidates by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency, aka JAXA in February 2023, the pair have engaged in basic training, including piloting a plane, health management in outer space, and electrical engineering. The two astronauts are Makoto Suwa, 47, a former disaster prevention specialist at the World Bank, and Aiyu Yoneda, 29, who served as a surgeon at the Japanese Red Cross Medical Center. And both Suwa and Yoneda plan to move to the United States to enhance their knowledge and skills in space activities. Japan is seeking to become the second country after the United States to land an astronaut on the moon. It's expected that Makoto Suwa and Aiyu Yoneda may join future Artemis missions. Staying in Asia now, the China manned space agency says the Shenzhou-19 crewed spaceship and a Long March 2F carrier rocket have been transferred to the launch area earlier today in preparation for takeoff in the coming days. The Shenzhou-19 spacecraft will carry a new three-man crew to the Tiangong Space Station. And China launched a new satellite from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center on a Long March 6 carrier rocket earlier today. The rocket carried the Tianping-3 satellite into a preset orbit. And according to Chinese media, the satellite will be mainly used for ground radar equipment calibration and radar cross-section measurement. It will also support imaging tests for ground optical equipment and detection and monitoring tests of the low-orbit space environment, as well as services for atmospheric space environment surveys and orbit prediction model correction. NASA has selected a crew of four research volunteers to participate in its simulated mission to Mars. The crew will live within a habitat at the agency's Johnson Space Center in Houston. In the mission, which starts on November 1st, we'll see the crew step into the 650 square foot human exploration research analog facility, HERA, at JSC. Once inside, the team will live and work like astronauts for a mere 45 days. The crew will exit the facility on Monday, December 16th after simulating their return to Earth. The four volunteers will carry out scientific research and operational tasks throughout their simulated mission, including raising shrimp, growing vegetables, and walking on the surface of Mars using virtual reality. Intuitive Machines has selected the Cobalt-60 heat source from Ultrasafe Nuclear Corporation, also known as USNC, for their Air Force Research Laboratory, Space Vehicles Directorate, Joint Emergent Technology, supplying on-orbit nuclear power, low-power mission application contract. Wow. Did you get all that? It's also known as just Jetson. The Jetson low-power contract, which was awarded in 2023, is developing a new spacecraft concept and design which uses a compact radioisotope power system to provide electrical power. The system will use a Cobalt-60 heat source from USNC to heat a sterling cycle dynamic power conversion system, which in turn will provide electrical power for on-orbit mobility, thermal regulation, and payloads. Think Orbital has been selected for a Sibir Phase II contract by Spaceworks to develop X-ray Inspection Technology for spacecraft. The Colorado-based company says their technology will enhance space domain awareness and strengthen national defense capabilities. After two scrubs, Blue Origin's uncrewed new shepherd verification test is now scheduled for launch tomorrow, Wednesday, October 23rd, from Van Horn, Texas. The NS-27 mission will fly 12 payloads, five on the booster, and seven inside the capsule, and we'll bring you more once that mission is finally complete. The Swedish Space Corporation, known as SSC, has signed a Launcher Tracking Service Agreement with India's Skyroot Aerospace to provide ground station tracking services for the latter's Vikram-1 launch vehicle. The agreement enables Skyroot to use SSC's expertise in ground station infrastructure for the commercial launches of its Orbital-class launch vehicle, again, the Vikram-1, in 2025. SSC will support the launches from its ground station at the Western Australia Space Center near Perth, and this new agreement follows a memorandum of understanding previously signed by SSC and Skyroot on using the launch facilities at S-Range Space Center in Sweden, and SSC Connect Global Ground Station Services. And you know, we're hitting that time of year where we're getting flooded with financial updates. Two of the legacy companies in space have recently shared their third quarter reports. So let's start with Lockheed Martin, who have reported $1.6 billion in net earnings in the third quarter of 2024. The legacy defense and space company also reported a record backlog of more than 165 billion. And not to be outdone, RTX has reported their results for the quarter with sales of $20.1 billion across their defense, aviation, and space divisions. For those not keeping up, RTX is the parent company of Collins Aerospace, Ratten Whitney, and Raytheon. The company also reported a backlog of $221 billion across commercial and defense customers. Whew, that is a lot of money, and that concludes our briefing for today. We've added two additional stories to the selected reading section of our show notes. One is that NASA has selected two teams to advance life sciences research in space. The second is a congratulations to Revimbo Samangah on being recognized as one of two 2024 IISL Young Achiever Award winners. Congratulations, Revimbo. Hey, T-Minus Crew, if you're just joining us, welcome and hi, and be sure to follow T-Minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. Also, if you could do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday, please show three friends or coworkers this podcast. That's because a growing audience is the most important thing for us, and we would love your help as part of the T-Minus Crew. So if you find our show useful, and we always hope that you do, please share T-Minus so other professionals like you can find the show. Thank you so much for your support, everybody. It means a lot to me and all of us here at T-Minus. (upbeat music) Our guest today is Daniel Faber, CEO of OrbitFab. Daniel will be our deep space guest for Saturday's episode, and for today's chat, I asked Daniel to explain OrbitFab's business proposition. (upbeat music) So I get excited about this 'cause this is my business, and I think other people do because it's space, but let's face it, at the end of the day, we're pumping gas. That's why we deliver gas. It's a tried and true business model. It's a valuable business model, but it's not the most exciting business model on earth. We're just trying to move that business model into space. But the first thing we needed was a convention, an interface because no satellites had a gas cap that could be refueled in Orbit. Now, if they have valves, they fill the satellites up with, but then they shut them tight, then they shut another cap on top of that, and then they lock it down with wire, and they're effectively welding the gas cap trap. Imagine buying a car with a welded gasket. That's what everyone's been doing. - Why would anyone want to reopen it, right? (laughing) - Yeah. - That's great, yeah. - So that was the first thing we had to do was figure out, well, can we just build a gas cap and get everyone to use it? Or could we do robotic surgery on the satellite and put fuel into it? And NASA's been trying the OSAM-1 mission to do robotic surgery. And the discovery of that was it is hard. It is expensive. They spent a billion and a half trying to get that work. It was gonna take another billion dollars to get it going. We decided we'd try the other path, which was to build a gas cap and get everybody to take it, which means we can't refuel the legacy satellites. But what we can do is work with these tow trucks, with these satellite servicing companies. They can take the gas cap. They can go around to all the other satellites and work with them. And when they run out of fuel, come back and get fuel from us. So they can do life extension by attaching and taking over like a jet pack. They can do a bunch of other things. Maybe even someone will figure out the robotic surgery. That's great. We'll resupply them with fuel. And so that was always our assumption. But to get to that point where we could build the tech, we had to figure out what it should be. And we ran into all of the usual problems of product design, where I have a bright idea and my customers don't care how smart it is. They care that it's pink, right? They care about something I hadn't even thought of. And when you get to docking two satellites together in space, turns out that's kind of complicated. And there's a lot of things you haven't thought of unless you've tried to do it before. Orbital mechanics, who knew that was complex? Oh, it's not just orbital mechanics. It's the plasma dynamics. It's the thermal. But it's the optical environment where you've been in this big void and all of a sudden you've got reflections. Right? Everything interacts. Magnetic fields interact, electrical fields interact in ways that are completely not intuitive. Like, humanity doesn't have enough experience in this. It's not that the space environment is any weirder than, say, a boat on the surface of the ocean. It's just that we have a lot more experience with boats on the surface of the ocean. And we have to learn all of that now in space. And we've only had 50 years of operating and not really a lot of assets up there, to be honest. So that's what we had to get over. So we just went and did it. We'd put two payloads on the space station and we transferred some water backwards and forwards. We actually offloaded the water into the space station, became the first private company to resupply the space station with water. NASA threw the book at us because, firstly, transferring any fluids on space station is dangerous. If it gets out, you can drown an astronaut. Like, they can't brush the water away because the surface tension will bring it straight back. And you can't yell for help if you're under an inch of water. So that's pretty dangerous. And then we actively pumped the water into the water bus. And if we over pressurized the water bus, it could spring a leak. And they might have to evacuate. I imagine the water going everywhere in space. They don't do that, right? So NASA said this is a catastrophic level hazard. It'll take you two, two and a half years to work it out. And we're a startup company. So we did it in four months because we had to. We made friends with everybody. We figured out what they meant, what was real, what were the requirements like, what's the safety implications. We solved those. We took the risk that we were getting ahead of it and we were building the thing before they'd signed off on it. If they'd have said, no, that just won't work, we would have to start again. But we took that risk because we didn't have the choice. And we were able to, like we had people on the team who'd launched things to space station. We got ahead of that. And so we were able to build something that would work. And they said, OK, it's safe. Even at the few times when they said, this doesn't follow the letter of our requirement, but it does achieve the intent of the requirement. So they signed a waiver. Those are so important. So that's why we did that in four and a half months, like so much quicker. And I think we broke speed records of getting something up to station, especially something that complex. So then we launched the first fuel depot. And this is a really small minimum viable product. The first time we had our RAFTI interface on it, our gas cap, we put that into space. That was a six month development program. Again, not intending to actually build anything that would deliver fuel, we're intended to learn at the highest possible velocity. And by having done that, we could go to prospective customers and say, here is RAFTI. This is the gas cap. We've flown it in orbit. Therefore it's got flight heritage. It's TRL9. Why don't you buy them? And they said, because they suck. And we said, well, why does it suck? And they gave us a long list of reasons why it sucked. And they were right. Not what you're one here, but yeah, okay. At least it's honest. We already knew it sucked. We used it to fuel on the ground and we'll fuel in hydrogen peroxide. High purity hydrogen peroxide is dangerous. It'll take your head off. You've got to be careful with it. So we had to go through all that safety in the most critical point, which is when there's people around. So we'd found out things we wanted to fix. The customers came back with a list of the same kind of things we'd found and a few more. And within two months, we turned around the new design and said, here's your design. Here's something that takes every single box. And they loved it. We turned the critics into champions. But that's how we built RAFTI then to be the best, not only the best refueling valve, we wanted it also to be one of the best docking interfaces and to be the best fill drain valve on the ground and to replace those valves they currently use. It's the same size, weight and cost. So it's a drop in replacement. Make it an absolute no-brainer. The amount of engineering that takes is insane. And the result is something with six parts that looks really simple. You would not believe how hard it is to build something simple that has to do such a complex job. That's how we got to RAFTI. Now it's flight qualified, it's shipping. The active side, the nozzle is going through flight qualification. Everything is lined up. So we're now ready to deliver this fuel to the government. We're on contract next year. So super excited. That is very exciting. And you've mentioned what an incredible engineering challenge that is. This feels like a good time to ask a CEO question about your team, the people that you want to be, who are working at your company and who you're looking to hire. What does it take to be like an excellent member of the OrbitFab team? Well, the first question we asked, what have you built? Right, I love grads who are just coming out of university who could say, well, I built this thing and it didn't work, right? I gave it to somebody else to use and they told me it sucked. Every time you build something and give it to somebody to use, they'll tell you it sucks. Just take that as a given. But to have lived through that process and to have somebody have used your widget in anger, be it some software or for marketing folks, like have you done designs that have actually gone out to the public or something like that? What have you done? Do some extracurricular activities. Those students are more valuable than somebody who's just even got top grades but never got outside the classroom, right? Spent five years in industry working on the thing they're given. No, give me someone who's just taken the ball by the horns, right? Decided they want to build something, gone out and done it, and failed three times and succeeded half, right? That experience is what we're looking for because we need to move quickly, right? We need to be doing things that are innovative and outside of the box. Now, there's a flip side of that. We're working for the government and there's some national security assets. We've had to get Rafty accepted and it now has been accepted for use on DOD satellites, which means it has to be reliable. So I've got to take those young, innovative people that haven't learned bad habits yet, people that haven't got stuck on the bureaucracy and put them together with people that know why the rules exist. They know why flight qualification looks like it does. And that's a challenge. To put those two together, it's a bit like oil and water, right? Move fast and break things, move slow, make it reliable. Well, how do I move fast and make it reliable? That's the key to putting together this team. And it took us a while to get that team together. Right now, they're crushing it. We delivered, I think 25% of the things we delivered to customers this year were actually due next year. So getting ahead of that schedule is a testament then that the team is amazing. I couldn't be more proud. I walk in every day and just say, "I'm over to work with these people." I can tell from the way you describe them too. I mean, it just, it sounds like it would be an amazing place to work. I mean, what you all are building right now is already so innovative and way ahead of, I think, where most people even thought we would be. But you've got to have a grand vision that you all are building towards. What can you tell me about that? You say we're ahead of where we're going to be. 25 years ago, when I was at undergrad, I decided like, let's get humans off this rock. This will be the most important thing for humanity, the most important thing for life since we crawled out of the oceans, right? Let's do that. It might even happen in my lifetime. I wrote down a list of industries I thought could pay for the first permanent jobs in space. And I decided I'd chip away at asteroid mining 'cause the only other thing on my list was tourism. I've since added like entertainment content and manufacturing and orbit. There's a few others. So my list has got longer. That's good, but in first year undergrad, that was it. And I basically spent my whole career sort of hunting around how to get asteroid mining economic and how to create the bustling in space economy. So in that context, what we're building with OrbitFab is the industrial chemical supply chain. It's the material supply chain in space that does not exist in. It starts with fuel. It starts with gas stations in space because that's what people want to buy. But people are also going to want to buy air, water, 3D printer feedstock, minerals to grow plants, construction material, different chemicals for their in-space manufacturing. At some point, we're going to unlock the material in the asteroids because we have a supply chain to take that in. I want OrbitFab to be the biggest customer of asteroid and moon mine material. We will own the refineries, the storage and the distribution. And I want to do it all to build things in space. We'll probably end up selling some things back to Earth as well, but that's secondary. This is a business that is built to sell things in space to build and manufacture in space. That's the heart of what OrbitFab is doing. We'll be right back. (air whooshes) Welcome back. If you have a moment to go down a Wikipedia rabbit hole, look up space advertising on there. And I bet you'll find as I did that there have been a lot more ads filmed in space than you previously thought. There was even a late '80s space version of the Kola Wars, if you remember those. I guess it beats Tang. So with the flight of the all-commercial crew aboard the Polaris Dawn mission, doing the first commercial crew EVA, again, emphasis on commercial there, did you think anyone was gonna miss the advertorial possibilities up in space? No, absolutely not. We're talking about capitalism after all. The folks over at collectspace.com, who are amazing at tracking this sort of thing, have an exclusive 15-second clip from Doritos, the tangy, triangular, tortilla-esque chip. It ends up that Doritos sent a special, safe for space version of their snack up with a Polaris Dawn crew. And all four crew enjoyed the chips in zero G, on camera, of course. So now Doritos can join that Wikipedia entry for having their first space advertisement. What makes the space Doritos space safe, you ask? Well, I'm sure you were curious. They're smaller than the originals, making them very easily bite-sized so they don't get crumbs everywhere, which is no good in space. And instead of using powder-flavoring, the space Doritos have an oil-based coating instead. It's thrilling, I know. But hey, Doritos are a Frito-Lay company, which means they are owned by PepsiCo. So is this a continuation of the Kola Wars? Balls in your court, Coca-Cola. (upbeat music) That's it for T-minus for October 22nd, 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 Iban. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpey is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Varmasas. Thanks for listening, we'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music) - T-minus. - T-minus. (wind blowing) (whooshing) [BLANK_AUDIO]