The bright spot in a lot of space industry news lately, financially anyway, tends to have defense tied to it. In today's top stories certainly continue that trend. Both Northrop Grimman and Millennium Space Systems have new contracts with the US Space Force for missile warning satellite systems and hefty award amounts to match. Today is October 24th, 2024. Northrop Grimman and Millennium Space awarded contract extensions from the USSR. Blue Origin's new vehicle launches from Van Horn. SDA selects 19 companies for Halo. And I'll be talking to Steve Wolff from the Beyond Earth Institute about their upcoming symposium. And Steve has some special announcements about the lineup this year at Beyond Earth Symposium, and he'll be sharing a special T-minus listener code to get 20% off the ticket price for entry, so join us for that chat and that code. Let's dive into your Thursday intel briefing. The US Space Force has awarded Northrop Grimman a $1.8 billion contract extension for the production of two advanced missile warning satellites. These satellites are part of the Next Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared Program, or the NextGen OPIR, designed to enhance detection of missile threats from the Northern Hemisphere. Northrop Grimman's satellites will be placed in highly elliptical orbits and are slated for launch in 2028. The contract extension follows a successful design phase, transitioning into manufacturing and integration, making the total contract value $4.1 billion in all. And in hand with that award, Northrop Grimman released its third quarter 2024 financial results today demonstrating continued growth in its aerospace and defense technology sectors. And Millennium Space Systems, which is a Boeing company, has been awarded a $386 million other transaction agreement with the US Space Force Space Systems Command to deliver an additional six missile track custody, or MTC, satellites in support of its resilient missile warning and tracking medium Earth orbit BIPOC-1 program. Ground space systems will deliver two planes of satellites, or 12 MTC satellites in all, plus their associated ground systems and missions operations. The spacecraft will carry a Boeing-provided electro-optical infrared payload with an advanced sensor technology for high-resolution tracking and custody capability from medium Earth orbit. After two previous scrubs, Blue Origin launched an uncrewed new shepherd mission from Van Horn, Texas yesterday. The NS-27 verification flight tested Blue's new human-rated vehicle, which is aimed at enabling expanded flight capacity to better meet growing customer demand. The new crew capsule is named RSS Carman Line, and the vehicle features technology upgrades to improve the vehicle's performance and reusability, an updated library, and accommodations for payloads on the booster. NS-27 carried 12 payloads, five on the booster, and seven inside the crew capsule. Payloads include new navigation systems developed for New Shepherd and New Glenn, two different LiDAR sensors for the Lunar Permanence Program, ultra-wideband proximity operations sensors flying as part of a NASA TechFlights grant with Blue Origin's Space Systems Development Group, a commercial payload that is a reproduction of black monoliths from 2001 as Space Odyssey, and postcards from the company's Club for the Future program. This space development agency has selected 19 space companies to join the hybrid acquisition for proliferated low Earth orbit pool, also known as Halo. Now Halo is an acquisition approach to solicit and rapidly award prototype demonstrations and experimentation to support future tranches of the proliferated warfighter space architecture. And Halo is modeled after an indefinite delivery and definite quantity approach, where each member receives an initial agreement valued at $20,000 to defray administrative and travel expenses and is then eligible to compete for future Halo demonstration prototype orders. And the 19 companies include AST Space Mobile, Capella Space, Firefly, Impulse, and Turian. And the full list can be seen by following the link in our show notes. The American subsidiary of UTelsat Group has reached a partnership agreement with Iridium Communications to provide Iridium Certis and Iridium Satellite time and location services to U.S. government customers. UTelsat America and OneWeb Technologies will now offer an enhanced global navigation satellite system resilient low Earth orbit KU band L band solution by adding Iridium Certis and Iridium STL services to its portfolio of government services. And finally, NASA astronauts Matt Dominic, Mike Barrett, Jeanette Epps, along with Roscosmos Cosma Alexander-Rebenkin are heading back to Earth. Their Dragon capsule undocked from the forward-facing port of the International Space Station's Harmony Module last night. And the crew are expected to safely splash down off the Florida coast in the early hours of Friday, a.k.a. tomorrow morning. The Republic of Cyprus is the latest nation to sign the Artemis Accords and commit to the responsible use of space for humanity. That makes Cyprus the 46th signatory, say that five times fast, to join the coalition. Nekodimas Damianou, Cyprus's deputy minister of research, innovation, and digital policy, said as we embark on this exciting journey, we reaffirm our commitment to a safe and responsible space exploration, as well as our strong belief in the importance of international cooperation in ensuring space is utilized to the benefit of all humanity. Cyprus, as a European Union member state, is capitalizing on its geostrategic location between three continents and aspires to play an integral role in the international space community. Space Robotics Company Geetai's Intworm-type robot arm has successfully passed all tests and achieved technology readiness level six, following an integrated test conducted in a thermal vacuum chamber. The test was held in a simulated lunar south pole environment, and at the lowest temperatures, the environment reached negative 140 degrees Celsius. That is mighty cold. The Geetai Intworm-type robot arm successfully performed continuous Intworm-type locomotion for 29 hours, covering a distance of approximately one mile. Pretty cool. L3Harris Technologies and Palantir Technologies have announced a strategic partnership to propel advanced technology development and accelerate L3Harris' digital transformation. The companies say they will work together on defense and space platforms to enable new levels of capability and resilient connectivity across the joint all-domain network, ensuring that warfighters can make more informed decisions faster to protect US and allied security. And we're keeping that financial train going, as Honeywell has also supported their third quarter financial results. The company reported third quarter year-over-year sales growth of 6% and organic sales growth of 3%, highlighted by strength and defense, what else, and space, along with their commercial aviation and building solutions divisions. And that concludes our briefing for today. As always, everybody, you'll find links in the selected reading section of our show notes to further reading on all of the stories that we've mentioned, and we've also included two extras for you, just in case you want some extra credit. Guests are on SpaceX, just completely by coincidence. One's on their carbon emissions, and another is on tackling their space junk. Hey, T-minus crew, every Thursday we sit down with industry experts in a segment called Industry Voices, all about the groundbreaking new products, services, and businesses emerging around the world. Every guest on Industry Voices has paid to be here. We hope you'll find it useful to hear directly from businesses about the challenges that they're solving and how they're doing it. And today, you'll hear from Steve Wolf about the Beyond Earth Institute's symposium, which is coming up this November 12th and 13th. Visit space.n2k.com/beyondearth to learn more. T-minus is excited to be partnering with the Beyond Earth Institute on their annual symposium coming up this November 12th and 13th. Not only will I be in attendance at the symposium in Washington, D.C., but I'm really excited to share that I've also been invited to interview Ron D. Moore, who is screenwriter and television producer extraordinaire, best known to us geeks for his work on Star Trek, the Battlestar Galactica reboot, Outlander, and most recently, for all mankind. Can you tell I'm really jazzed? I am really jazzed. And I spoke to Steve about the theme of this year's Beyond Earth Symposium, and I asked him to share a little bit about what participants can expect. The theme is at the crossroads, committing to a permanent future for humanity in space. It's really multi-level, you know, in one sense. It's we're at the crossroads because we have probably one of the most consequential presidential elections coming up. And you know, that's consequential for space as well, even though the Biden administration has largely followed the policies of the previous Trump administration. There's still a divergence attitude towards that. So it's going to, so there will be a transition. There will be transition teams that will be selected. And one of our first panels that we're going to have is a panel of people who were senior policy people have been on presidential transition teams for NASA, and they're going to get into a deep conversation about what that means. We'll have representatives from both political affiliation. So that should be interesting dynamic. But moving beyond that, we are very much in a transition into our capability for humans to access and live and work in space. We just saw Jared Isaacman, who did the first commercial spacewalk. And Jared is going to be joining us. He's going to be joining us virtually for a conversation about that and his vision for the future for humans in space. And you know, a very near term is the commercial space stations that are going to take over for ISS. And this is an important conversation because we, even though we're committed to this, committed to commercial space stations in Leo, there's so much work to be done. And there's big questions about whether NASA is sufficiently funding this effort and committed to it over the long term. Even just recently in Milan, there was conversations that, well, maybe we can have some kind of a gap between the ISS and humans in space, or maybe we're not going to always have NASA astronauts up there and so forth. So we're already seeing, you know, the vergence of policy here, which is, to some, is concerning. And we should be taking a close look at that. Okay. So you've covered a lot already here, but are there other areas of transition that you're focusing on? The biggest transition we're looking at is towards the lunar surface and the resources that are there and the resources beyond that in the asteroid belt. But most immediately is the next big step is getting back to the moon. We're all excited about the Artemis mission, but there's huge pressure and interest in saying, no, we're not just going there. We're going there to stay this time. And what does that mean from an economic standpoint? How do we establish ourselves and establish the lunar sphere, if you will, in an economic context that's sustainable over the very long period of time? And NASA, the administration, the international community has been wrestling with this. What do we mean by a CIS lunar economy? And even as we all know, there are dozens of missions that are planned to go to the lunar surface where we're going to dig into this question of, you know, the U.S. and its allies are no longer the only game in town. China is a huge question mark. And there'll be a lot of discussion around that. Matter of fact, one of our speakers will be Greg Autry, who was recently a co-author to book Red Moon Rising, where he raises this question and really advocates for U.S. leadership. You know, there's no question that China is going there. And there's no question that we're going there, too. Hopefully we're going there ahead of them. But we want to -- however we do it, we want to. We want to do that in a way where, yes, there's competition. Competition is healthy. But we want there to be peaceful, right? We much more should be looking towards finding common ground as we do that, even as we're competing. So in that vein, we are -- and this is -- I'm announcing this to your audience. It has not been announced yet. But we have a commitment from the Chinese embassy that they will be providing a senior diplomat who will be addressing our conference and talking about their lunar program and what their intentions are. And so ILRS, thank you so much. And you know, and it's exciting. A lot of dynamic going on. I mean, a lot of countries are signing up for the ILRS. Most recently, UAE just recently signed up with them. So there's this alignment going on. I think that the choice of -- this is very basic, but calling it a symposium is a very smart choice of words there. Because that is -- it comes across very clearly from looking through the agenda and listening to what you've been describing, that this is very much meant to be that gathering of minds and conversation. And for those of us who often wonder where a lot of these conversations happening, where are people figuring out and sussing out the, you know, these interesting details, it's an event like this, which is very fascinating to me. So that's really cool. We want to stretch this conversation. We certainly want to stretch it in terms of lunar development. So there's a certain term called missions of record, right? So the missions of record means these are -- this is what's on the table right now that NASA, for example, NASA is looking at. And most of the conferences really stay in that domain, right? And we're trying to stretch that conversation beyond that, to force a thinking on things that go beyond that. So for example, we have a -- we're going to have a fascinating conversation on something called lunar development cooperative. Now if you could imagine, we understand economic free trade zones on Earth, you know, countries that might have more restrictive policies might have a free trade zone, just to allow free trade to happen and helps with the overall economic vitality of that country. And if we could take that same kind of thinking to the moon and identify a region of the moon, we're going to say, okay, this is going to be -- we're going to develop a similar kind of economic zone on the moon. And interesting fellow, Michael Castle Miller is the architect of this plan. His background is in building economic zones. He's done it for dozens of countries around the world. And that's the expertise he's bringing into this, which is -- which, you know, is endemic that if we -- you know, we're bringing all of our skill sets into space. And sometimes we forget that. We think, oh, these are just technical problems. Well, there's more than the technical problems. It's the organizational structures that will help to drive this development. It's a way for us to expand beyond, well, what will a -- what will an economic region on the moon kind of look like, right? If we're going to get there, we need to start really envisioning all the components of that. And along those lines, we, you know, we have a space architect, someone who recently came off of working with Blue Origin, has worked with architectural firms. He's done some interesting work about developing architectural habitats on the lunar surface. And he's now working with Beyond Earth and has helped us to conceive of large-scale habitats on the lunar surface. And he's looking at it from what is the -- what are the technical requirements? What are the, you know, the TRLs, limitations, you know, levels that we need to get to? And it just -- again, it's that kind of thinking that takes us out of, you know, these very limited habitat, you know, small habitat thinking for space and trying to expand it to a large extent. It's an interesting cross-pollination. Yeah, I see that. Yeah, it is this -- it is this arc of saying, okay, we have to deal with -- there are some near-term issues that we've got to be -- that we've got to deal with, and then thinking outwardly in terms of stretching our mind to consider other bigger possibilities. But we do want to -- we do want to come down to Earth. We do want to -- so to speak -- we do want to be very pragmatic in terms of understanding that there are challenges. And we'd have a very interesting panel that's going to be headed up by Karen Shenowick, who is a leading consultant. She teaches at Georgetown. She spent many years at SpaceX when they're a government affairs team. And she's going to be heading up a panel that's going to be asking, you know, what are the -- your listeners are very aware that there's still a big conversation on this topic of mission authorization and how is the U.S. government going to handle novel space activities and, you know, that are coming online. So we -- you know, it's changing very rapidly, and from manufacturing to in-orbit transfer to, you know, human habitation in space, commercial habitation. And so there's a lot of open regulatory and policy questions around that, not the least of which is, you know, what agencies are going to have the primary authority around that. After, you know, at least five years, we still have not got -- settled on this, if you will. And it's not going to be settled on this administration. And so it's going to really be up to the next administration. So therefore, that's an important part of the conversation as well. So you see, you know, you see overall, Maria, overall we're looking at -- we're very grounded as to where we are today. We take a very much of an approach, okay, you know, where do we want to be 50 years from now, 100 years from now, and really trying to work that pathway from where we are today into the future. We'll be right back. Welcome back. There's a minor event coming up in the United States in two weeks. Just an election, nothing special. But it has a few folks in the space industry asking, how will the future presidential administration change the status quo? No matter who is incoming in the United States presidential race in 2025, there will be a lot of space-related issues that policymakers will need to address. And to kickstart those conversations now, again, agnostic of whoever is president, the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at the Aerospace Corporation has focused a series of papers on 20 major issues across three areas of special concern, strengthening leadership and competitiveness, catalyzing commercial space, and charting future value. And their series of papers is called Space Agenda 2025, and we have a link to the landing page for all of the papers in our show notes for you to use and peruse. Even if you're not in the thrilling world of policy and political decision-making, I know, right, it's still a fascinating read to see where U.S. national priorities in space could align. Definitely check it out. [Music] That is it for T-Minus for October 24, 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'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 Petrella is our president. Peter Kilby is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Vermazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-Minus. Oh, my god. [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]
