There was a special delivery to space by Roscosmos yesterday, courtesy of both Russia and its new BFF, Iran. How many satellites can a Soyuz-class spacecraft get into orbit at once, do you think? Okay, that's perhaps an unfair question, as it depends on the kinds of satellites, of course, but what do you think? How many dozens are we talking here? Well, we'll tell you in the top story. Today is November 6, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasas, and this is T-Minus. The launch is 53 satellites to space, including two Iranian spacecraft. Redwire receives the third batch of pharmaceutical drug crystals from space, KT, KT-SAT, and KAI to collaborate on satellite projects. And our guest today is Sam Wilson, Senior Policy Analyst for the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at the Aerospace Corporation. And we're going to be discussing his chapter on finance from the Aerospace Corp's space agenda 2025. Be ground for that chat later in the show. It is Wednesday. Let's dive into today's Intel briefing. The Russian Space Agency said a Soyuz 2.1 spacecraft launched on Tuesday from Vostochny, carrying 53 satellites to orbit. Of those, the satellites included two Russian ionosphere M Earth observation satellites and two Iranian-made satellites. Iranian state news said these two satellites are the nation's first private sector-made spacecraft. This marks the third time that Russia has launched satellites for Iran, and Russia's continued launch support for Iran is part of an ongoing comprehensive strategic partnership between the two nations. Redwire says their third batch of pharmaceutical drug crystals grown in space have successfully returned to Earth. The returned samples include crystals being studied by Eli Lilly and company using Redwire's Pillbox platform. Lilly researchers are using this experiment to potentially accelerate the discovery of novel medicines to treat chronic diseases. And this is the part where we all get very excited about how microgravity environments can improve medicine for crewmates on planet Earth. One of the experiments built upon earlier research that concluded that insulin crystals grown in microgravity are larger and more ordered than those grown on Earth. It successfully crystallized the same insulin experiments flown as part of a previous investigation to demonstrate consistent, repeatable results. Korea Telecom, or KT, has signed a Memorandum of Understanding with KT-SAT and Korea Aerospace Industries to partner on 6G and low-Earth orbit satellite projects. The three companies plan to jointly pursue domestic and international projects, including the deployment of 6G/LEO communication satellites and the establishment of integrated manned and unmanned systems. Is it a bird? Is it a plane? Is it a starship? No, it's China's new Long March 9 spacecraft, but you'd be forgiven for thinking that it was a replica for SpaceX's Super Heavy Lift vehicle. China has unveiled the latest specifications of the Long March 9 rocket, which plans to have a fully reusable first stage powered by 30 YF-215 engines. The new design also includes a fully reusable configuration of the rocket with an upper stage that looks very similar to Starship's second stage, complete with flaps in similar locations. According to a recent presentation at an airshow, China intends to fly this vehicle for the first time in 2033. Earlier this week, China's Shenzhou 18 spacecraft returned to Earth with the 3-man crew on board, but it also carried 34.6 kilos of space station experimental samples. Chinese media say the samples are poised to advance the development of space fiber lasers, facilitate the creation of extraterrestrial materials, and explore the prospects of Earth life spreading throughout the cosmos. Some of the return samples are high temperature resistant alloys, fiber optics, and optical coatings. The spacecraft also returned nanoparticles derived from methane combustion that are intended to facilitate the future synthesis of critical particulate materials for extraterrestrial environments. We are expecting China to share some of the results of the 28 experiments in the coming months. Lithuania-based satellite manufacturer NanoAvionics says one of its satellites has collided with space debris. The discovery was made after the MP42 satellite took an image of its solar panel, which then revealed a 6mm hole. NanoAvionics shared that this space debris or micrometeoroid impact would have been left unnoticed if not for MP42's selfie camera, but two questions still remain unanswered, when the impact occurred and what caused it. Fortunately, the hole is so small that it caused no measurable drop in the solar panel's electricity output. A new report from the National Academies has concluded that engineers missed the warning signs ahead of the collapse of the AeroCibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico in 2020. The report found that the collapse was caused by failures of cable sockets that supported the platform above the dish due to accelerated zinc creep. I do not know what that means either. Political engineers who inspected the cables and sockets missed warning signs, especially after winds from Hurricane Maria, no relation, placed extra stress on the cables. The authors also speculate that the electromagnetic environment may have been a contributing factor. The report, failure analysis of the AeroCibo Observatory 305-meter telescope collapse, presents lessons learned and makes recommendations to help ensure the safe operation of other unique critical science facilities. And that concludes our briefing for today. You'll find three additional articles in the selected reading section of our show notes. One is on the latest Minuteman 3 ICBM test, another is on Teledyne's latest acquisition, and a third is on laser welding in space. All those links and more can be found on our website, space.ntuk.com, and just click on this episode title. AT-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. It'll help other space professionals like you to find the show and join the T-minus crew. Thank you so much for your support, everybody. We really appreciate it. Our guest today is Sam Wilson, and he's the senior policy analyst for the Center for Space Policy and Strategy at the Aerospace Corporation. And Sam coauthored a chapter in the Aerospace Corporation's Space Agenda 2025 report on financial forecasting for the space industry. And I asked Sam to start off by telling us more about the chapter that he contributed to. One thing that's really interesting is that chapter is mostly, I'd say, a diagnosis of the challenge and opportunity presented to the Department of Defense, looking at some of the financial trends over the last several years, but also beyond that. And you can see we have a couple of graphics that show that from 2008 to 2021, venture capital investment steadily rose until it hits this huge peak, which is a peak even looking beyond 2008, looking decades, huge amount of venture capital investment. And then it fell pretty precipitously from 2021 to 2023. And so you have this on the venture capital side. Again, the venture capital investment has dropped nearly 50% from 2021 to 2023. It's not just venture capital that you see this trend. Another way you can see this is SPACs. I think SPACs is one of those terms that actually the acronym makes more sense than the full definition, the special acquisition, special purpose acquisition companies. But a lot of space companies went public through SPACs. And those also had this huge jump in 2020, 2021. And then from there, they fell 97%. So what you're really seeing is a ton of capital that was available and that was relatively cheap going into 2020, 2021 in the pandemic and then falling really precipitously. So that definitely impacted commercial space companies who benefited from this really unique investment environment, both in the public and private markets in that 2020 to 2021 period. Sounds like in the context of, when we're talking about this set of papers for talking about policy moving forward in the upcoming year with the upcoming administration, sounds like there's an opportunity there given the sort of the gap that maybe this is where the DOD and the federal government can come in and be that financial bright spot that many of these private companies are really needing right now. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think for the other part of the context here is that the Department of Defense and other agencies within the US government have been saying for a long time, including in policy directives going back to the early 90s, if not in the 80s, saying that we need to use commercial space to a much greater extent. And we really need to use the commercial space services. And now because of this very exceptional investment environment that led to a lot of commercial space companies receiving a lot of investment, now there's so much commercial space capability that US government could leverage, could use, could buy services from. And this is really valuable, I think, from an acquisition perspective because this is a lot. Buying something that exists versus building something from scratch is a lot less expensive, right? It didn't have to pay the development costs of a lot of these commercial space firms, but now it can take advantage of those services that they provide. And so from an acquisition perspective, I think it just makes a lot of sense. And then from an industrial policy perspective, it makes sense too because you have all these US companies that are now in a different investment environment. And for a lot of these capabilities, there aren't really commercial markets yet that are mature. And so they really need revenue. And so I think one of the things that we say that may be provocative is that in the absence of government revenue, a lot of these companies may not survive. And I just think that's important because from the Department of Defense perspective, a lot of these firms are offering services that are really valuable to them now in the future. And so they should try to take actions now to prevent that. I don't know if this makes sense in the context of the work here, but I'm curious. We've talked a bit about the upsides for the government to be, and I'm borrowing language from the paper. It sounds like an anchor tenant in a lot of these companies. What are the downsides or possible risks though in this situation? This is just a curiosity thing on my part. Don't know if that's relevant, but I would imagine risk is part of the calculus here. Absolutely. There are significant trade-offs here. And I think the trade-offs are what most people talk about with respect to being the anchor tenant or the biggest customer for a commercial firm, which is why in the paper we wanted to say, "Hey, we're going to defend actually the case of being anchor tenant," which I think is often used as a pejorative term because is it really commercial if most of the revenue is coming from government? I think our point is that the risk here, if you don't do this or if you have a hard rule against it, again, is that many of these firms that you want to leverage may not exist if you say, "We're only going to pay here and provide 20% of their revenue." I think that to me, that's really an important point to underline under all of this. But yeah, sure, there's definitely trade-offs. Other people have pointed out that you're distorting the market if the government is providing a lot of revenue to individual companies and you're picking winners and losers in some respects. I just think given how much investment went into this, who's the government to do this now? Because the truth is that there's so much capability that exists and I think what they should prioritize is trying to ensure that the really compelling services continue to exist rather than trying to think about, "Are we distorting the market?" To me, the market was already distorted because again, it was just incredibly unique investment environment. That's my view on this, but definitely there are trade-offs. The truth is that you can still be anchor-tenant and the commercial firm may still fail. You could be anchor-tenant and a commercial market may never develop. One of the analogs we use in the paper is the aviation industry before World War II was relying on government airmail contracts. That was a case, of course, when a commercial market developed, but a commercial market may not develop a sizable commercial market might not develop in some of these areas. I still think it's worth it to be the anchor-tenant because again, the trade-off should be how expensive would this be for me to build from scratch rather than for me to be a ten to 20 years? I think you're still going to see that on that equation, it's still preferential to be an anchor-tenant. In some cases, the government may be the sole tenant, but that does happen sometimes. But sometimes that is the necessary thing. I could totally see that. A lot of what you've been mentioning here, I have to ask because of the election, it does sound pretty administration agnostic. Does this specific conversation really matter when it comes to the specific president and powers? I think the question I'm trying to ask, or is this completely agnostic depending on who's in there? It obviously depends on who is going to fill out some of those leadership positions in the agencies that have space equity and then the agencies that we're talking about. This is a bipartisan objective to use commercial space to a greater extent. We can see that again and how policy directives from the White House have been calling for this across administrations, both Republican and Democrat. I don't see any difference. I think this should be something though that the next administration should consider pressing. With respect to space issues, I think you have all this great commercial capability and you can extract a lot of value from it. Also, you can benefit the US industrial base in a really significant way. To me, it should be something that the next administration really thinks about seriously. We'll be right back. Welcome back. So many sci-fi classics involve humanity trying to figure out a message sent to us from the great unknown. Would intelligent life exist outside of Earth and wish to speak with us? Would we ever have a chance of understanding one another? Would it be more of a context situation or an arrival situation? How do we know if humanity would maybe be up to the task of intergalactic communication without a babelfish? Well, last year a number of space organizations, including ESA and who else but the SETI Institute, decided to try and see if we could test ourselves and figure this all out. In Assign in Space, which is a project by media artist Daniela DePaulis, a simulated message from an extraterrestrial source gets picked up by an ESA spacecraft and then it's all up to us to crowdsource what it means. But as a steganographer can tell you, finding information in the raw data is one task but making sense of it all is another. True to form, ten days after the project started, project participants sussed out the signal from the noise but figuring out what the actual message was took an entire year, which honestly to me is kind of impressive on a number of fronts. ESA announced on October 22 that a father-daughter team from the United States were the two that decoded the message, which was an image of five amino acids. So that's another piece of the puzzle placed. But what is the intent here? That part is still in progress. In fact, there is a Discord server for anyone who wants to participate in this really cool simulation. Maybe you'll be the one who figures out what it all means. And that's it for T-Minus for November 6, 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 Karpf. Simone Petrella is our president, Peter Kilpie is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We will see you tomorrow. T-minus. T-minus. . [BLANK_AUDIO]
