Eulogy to a comet.

[MUSIC] In case you don't tend to peruse our show note extras, yesterday we included a link to a new video tour inside the Tiangong Space Station, complete with English subtitles in case your Mandarin's not up to par. It's notable as we don't often see much from the inside of the Tiangong. And the tour is only a few minutes long, but it definitely looks more modern and perhaps even a bit more comfortable compared to the ISS, which is understandable as the Tiangong's only a few years old, compared to the decades on the ISS. That'd be a stretch to call any of it luxurious, but still, not a bad spot for the upcoming Shenjo 19 crew to call home. [MUSIC] Today is October 29th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasus and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] China prepares to launch the Shenjo 19 crew. Spire Global and Aurora Tech to partner on a NASA study. Advanced Space gets a NASA Ciber Award. And our guests today are Brianna Base and Ryan Davis. They'll be telling me about their new paper on designating space as critical infrastructure. Stick around to find out about their research later in the episode. [MUSIC] Let's dive into our Intel briefing for this Tuesday, shall we? And we're kicking off with Space News out of China. The country is scheduled to send its next crew to the Tiangong space station on Wednesday morning, with the Shenjo 18 crew currently in orbit, returning on November 4th. The Shenjo 19 crewed spaceship will be launched at 4.27am on Wednesday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwest China. The three-person crew plan to spend approximately six months on board the Tiangong space station. And among the Taikonaut team is flight engineer Wang Haoze, who will be the third Chinese woman to go to space. 34-year-old Wang is currently China's only female flight engineer. And Wang told the press in China, "I want to fly around in our space mansion and experience the joy of weightlessness. I want to diligently complete every task and protect our space home. I also wish to roam through the depths of space and wave to the stars. Above all, I want to catch a glimpse of my motherland that nurtured me." The Shenjo 19 mission marks the fourth crewed mission in the development phase of China's Tiangong space station and the 33rd mission of the country's manned space program. A total of 86 space science research and technological experiments will be conducted during the mission, with the focus on biological and physical space science, one of the five major scientific themes outlined in China's newly released medium and long-term development plan for space science from 2024 to 2050. SPIRE Global has been awarded a concept study contract by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory to develop space-based capabilities for a wildfire early detection warning and active monitoring system. SPIRE will partner with Aurora Tech, which is a leader in space-based thermal intelligence to design a comprehensive and scalable solution. Under the contract, SPIRE and Aurora Tech will develop a low-cost orbital solution for monitoring wildfire prone areas in the United States. NASA has awarded Advanced Space, a Sibir or Small Business Innovation Research Phase 1 project, to develop mission architectures and requirements for customizing a low-cost rocket transfer stage. The transfer stage will deliver small spacecraft into non-traditional orbits and provide PNT and communications relay services for the deployed small spacecraft. The project will be managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama and will define modular mission architectures and connobs that match launch vehicle and transfer stage capabilities to the deployment of a primary payload to its destination orbit. We started off last week on the show talking about the latest IntelSat satellite made by Boeing that had experienced an anomaly back on October 19th. It was later reported that the spacecraft had come apart and that the US Space Force was tracking at least 20 pieces of debris. Well, that number is significantly off, according to XO Analytics. The Space Domain Awareness Company says it is tracking not 20, but 500 pieces of debris from the IntelSat 33E's recent breakup in geostationary orbit. XO Analytics Chief Technology Officer Bill Therrien told Space News that, quote, "The size of the debris we are tracking ranges from small fragments, roughly the size of a softball, to larger pieces up to the size of a car door." We still want to know who is responsible for clearing up the junk. And if that story doesn't already sway you, it seems that space junk is becoming big business. Austrian company Impact Space Expedition and Exploration Global Corp, also known as IC, has launched a US-focused subsidiary, ICUS. The move is part of IC's strategy to meet the growing demand for space domain awareness solutions within the US commercial and government sectors. The new subsidiary aims to help government and commercial clients address space security challenges, such as collision avoidance and space traffic management, with advanced AI-driven capabilities. Proteus Space has selected GOM Space North America to provide over $250,000 in critical components and related expertise to support its upcoming ESPA satellite mission. This ESPA mission will deploy the world's first ever AI-designed satellite. And the mission itself, which is scheduled for launch in October 2025, will carry four payloads from government research partners and the UC Davis Center for Space Flight Research. Special Aerospace Services, also known as SAS, has acquired Concordia Technologies, an Alabama-based company renowned for its expertise in missile and hypersonic weapons defense, sensor design and evaluation, and modeling and simulation technologies. According to SAS, this strategic acquisition underscores the company's continued commitment to advancing national security space initiatives and bolstering its position at the forefront of cutting-edge defense technologies. And engineering company LIDOS reported financial results for the third quarter, reporting revenues of $4.19 billion, up 7% compared to the third quarter of last year. And you can read that full financial report, along with details on all the stories that we've mentioned in today's show, by following the links in the selected reading section of our show notes. Hey T-minus crew, if you are just joining us, welcome and be sure to follow T-minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. Also, if you do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. Here's a challenge for you. By Friday, please show three friends or coworkers this podcast. Growing audience is the most important thing for us and we would love your help as part of the T-minus crew. If you find T-minus useful, please share it so other professionals like you can find the show. Thank you for your support everybody. It means a lot to me and all of us here at T-minus. [Music] Our guests today are former Vice Roy Fellows, Breonna Bates and Ryan Davis. They've written a research paper on space as critical infrastructure, an in-depth analysis of US and EU approaches. And we will link to it in our show notes for you so you can read it. And I started off by asking Breonna why they approach the subject. [Music] The topic of designating the space sector as a critical infrastructure sector in the US is a pretty hot topic for a number of reasons. One of them being that in the last two congresses, the Space Infrastructure Act has been introduced and that would point and have the Secretary of Homeland Security issue guidance for designating the space sector as critical. And this would include figuring out what the scope of the space sector is and what the sector risk management agency would be. This act hasn't really gotten too far in Congress. It's only been introduced, but we saw this and we thought that it was a very interesting topic. And we already know that space is critical. It's talked about as being critical. It just doesn't have that designation yet. So in our paper, we wanted to look at how the US and EU have previously in the last decade or so, or actually two decades, defined and designated critical infrastructure and seeing what criteria is really there to decide if a sector deserves that critical designation. And from that, we were able to extrapolate five criteria, which we could go into more detail in a moment about what it means to be critical. And we applied those to the space sector and we found that the space sector really does meet those criteria for being critical and really for all intensive purposes should have that designation. Excellent. Yeah, those five criteria, I would love to hear more about those. Is that Ryan, do you want to take that one? Yeah. So the five criteria points that we focused on, again, kind of extrapolating based off of the legislation that we reviewed, both US and EU, were national security, so a sector's influence on the resiliency and risk to national security applications and functions, economic impact, public health and safety, societal functioning, and the interdependency and interconnectedness, which is something that we definitely recognized that the space sector provides all of these different applications that all, I would venture to say, other critical infrastructure sectors rely on to function. Yeah, I was going to say, check, check, check, check, and I forgot how many checks I'm doing, but yes, as you were listening to, I'm like, yeah, that is an easy, easy understanding on those five. So what would be the benefit if space got that official designation within the United States, I'm presuming we're talking about, of course. Yeah, so there's some tangible things that would happen and there's also some signaling. So if you designate a sector's critical infrastructure, it gets a sector risk management agency, so that agency would play a big role in coordinating and collaborating with DHS and playing really that middleman between the space industry and the government for talking about prioritization, collaboration, and some coordination of sector-specific activities. It also just generally really helped to clarify government's role and responsibility in protecting the space industry and I think importantly facilitate that collaboration between government and industry just generally have greater resources and greater information sharing. I also think it sends an important role to adversaries that we recognize space as critical infrastructure and if you target it, we're considering it to be that you're targeting some of the systems and functions that are really our most vital for our national security and economic stability, etc. So I think it's a combination of actual tangible resources and collaboration and coordination, but also that signaling that we're taking it even more seriously. Kind of bouncing off of that as well, I'd like to also point out the instant response component. Some of what I've kind of seen out there is that there's kind of a little bit of a sense of confusion for some space sector entities on who do they contact if there is an incident, whether it be them being targeted by some type of threat actor or another type of disruption caused by space weather or something like that, who is to go to. So kind of having a designated entity for coordinating that would definitely help with that process. Yeah, it's a great point. I've been the fly on the wall for some exercises where that has come up and that has always been one of the big pain points that is mentioned is nobody's quite sure, who do you call? Who's the 911 for space emergency? It's not, it depends and it depends on the, it depends on the very frustrating answer in an emergency. I don't have to tell you both that. So it is an interesting situation. And I'm sure in the examination that you all were doing in the course of writing this paper, you were looking at the detractors of this position. And for people that go, the positions are numerous for why people feel like this is not a necessary thing. But can you give me a run through on maybe some of the common reasons why people would say, actually, let's not do this and what maybe your counter to those would be? Yeah, so I think the main thing that comes up is that because space is so interconnected with all these other sectors, all already designated critical sectors, that there could be some redundancy if it is itself designated as critical because there are aspects of the space sector. Little pieces of it that are already going to be covered. For example, space sector services play a big role in the defense industrial base. So any initiatives to just to secure the defense industrial base is also going to help secure those space systems. What I would say to that is from there you're relying on initiatives to kind of piecemeal the security of the space sector. And I think it would be better to designate the space sector as critical. And if there are some redundancies and duplication of efforts, then that's something you can handle later on. Better to secure the entire sector and deal with some redundancies than just being relying on this piece by piece security of the sector. We don't want to miss anything. The security of the space sector is very important and it provides a lot of the critical national security and economic stability function. So I think ensuring that those are secure, putting that as the number one priority and then if you have to fix some of the redundancies later on, I think that would be that's the better avenue. I would say too, one of the major benefits of a sector being designated as critical is the access that it gets to resources for prevention, protection, response and recovery and response to the different threats that they're facing within the threat landscape. And so if there are kind of all of these different regulations for all of these different sectors and you're trying to piecemeal it together, how truly how holistic is your approach? Are you really actually addressing everything if now your prevention, protection, response and recovery is also piecemeal? And I realize this has been a very US centric conversation. We're all in the States, so it makes sense. But you also looked at the EU and what the EU has done or is doing. I know nothing about what the EU has done here. So can someone give me an outline there? That would be I'm fascinated. Yeah, so absolutely. So actually four of the pieces of legislation of the 10 that we looked at were EU centric. We're focusing on some of the legislation they've put out between 2006 and actually 2022. So really some of the recent efforts. For example, we talked about the CER directive and the NIST two directive. I won't go into their big names, but like for example. We can Google those. Yes. Yeah, I would Google them. Yes, so the CER directive extends coverage to 11 different sectors. And actually one of those sectors is space. And it's looking for the member states to really kind of come back with the lists of the entities and services that fall into the space sector. So they're recognizing that space is critical and they're starting to think about their putting space as one of those sectors on their list. Because again, the EU and the US, we have different different critical infrastructure sectors, a different number, which we go into kind of why that is and why we think that is in the paper. But so in the US, we have 16. The EU currently has their list of 11 sectors. And then the NIST two directive that I mentioned, that's really broadening the cybersecurity of the critical infrastructure in the EU. So very interesting because overall, the legislation we looked at spanned over two decades. The first legislation we looked at was the 1996 executive order by Bill Clinton. And then all the way to about two years ago, the most recent being the NIST two and CER directives by the EU. So we really spanned about two decades of legislation when it comes to critical infrastructure. My goodness. So I mean, the discussion of space is critical infrastructure has been around. Is this a matter of political will at this point? People often say that space is sort of famously bipartisan. But it's interesting to me that this hasn't really gone anywhere, although a lot of people are pushing for it. What do we think needs to happen or what do you think the resistance is? You know, I think part of the resistance is kind of fear over regulations, you know, fear that there's going to be too much government oversight. You know, I would counter with, you know, there are a ton of regulations that aren't necessarily sector specific related to different cybersecurity initiatives and things along those lines that, you know, companies and different entities are already required to follow. And I think to kind of the commercialization of space where it's increasingly dual use, where there's military and civilian infrastructure kind of hosted together, has kind of complicated things a bit. There's likely been some pushback and by some of those more commercial entities about this type of regulation as well. Absolutely. That does make things a lot more complicated. More interesting too, but more complicated. And Brianna, anything you wanted to add to that as well? I wanted to give you an opportunity. I would say maybe one of the reasons is people think it's kind of OK as is. I mean, we do it's one of the things is that we want to get that designation for the space sector as critical. But I mean, we're already talking about it as if it's critical. We have the space policy directive back in, I think, 2019 or 2020. And then the Biden-Harris administration put out their space priorities framework. And in all of these, we're saying that space is critical. We're recognizing that really the last step is pulling that lever on getting the designation so that those other things can happen, the resources, the information sharing, the figuring out the scope specifically and getting that sector risk management agency. It might just be one of those situations where they're thinking everything. We're already saying it's critical and that's good enough for now. But I think there's a lot of benefits to actually making that designation. I'd say the security, the view on security has also kind of shifted relatively recently as well, where traditionally, space systems reviewed as secure by obscurity. And with the commercialization of space, there's commercial off-the-shelf components that are relatively cheap. And with the space economy currently booming and there's more and more kind of investment going into this area, that's not really the case anymore. There really does need to be a shift to secure by design, which also has been complicated with the commercialization of space and how difficult it can be in some cases to maintain some of these systems that are all the way up in space. Obviously very difficult and expensive to patch legacy systems that are that far away. [Music] We'll be right back. Welcome back. Our solar system is a little less fabulous today as we are now officially down one comet. Aw, these celestial visitors make themselves known in our skies as they swoop towards and then away from our sun. Their little tails essentially the visual sign of them getting a bit singed. And as often happens, they can sometimes get a little too close. And from that singed, those comets do go poof. I know I was hoping for a Halloween comet to grace the spooky night skies while I'm out taking my daughter, Trick or Treating. And for a while there, things were looking promising. But the comet C 2024 S1 got within .008 AUs of the sun, which is really, really close to the sun by the way. And well, sun versus comet, the sun will win every time. Our knowledge of the comet C 2024 S1 was sadly brief. It was only discovered last month via the ATLAS survey from a telescope in Hawaii. The hope was that it might become a spectacularly bright sight in the night sky, brighter than Venus perhaps, should it have survived its closest approach to the sun or perihelion. Sadly, as I mentioned, C 2024 S1 got a little overconfident on the approach and it is now an ex comet. By the way, to be clear about this comet that has ceased to be, it is not the comet that many of us have been enjoying in the night skies from late September through this past early October. That comet is C 2023 A3, otherwise known as Su Qin Shan Atlas. And some news stories have been conflating these two comets, but no, Su Qin Shan Atlas survived its perihelion. And we will see it again in about 80,000 years. That's it for Team Minus for October 29th, 2024, brought to you by NTK Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.ntuk.com. We are privileged that NTK and podcasts like Team 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 Kilpe is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Vermazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] Team Minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]