We're quite accustomed to large space expos here in the United States, and if you've attended Space Symposium over the last ten years, then you definitely know what I mean. But right now, all the Space Conference actions seem to be focused on Europe. It was the IAC in Milan last month, and today saw the opening of the Space Tech Expo Europe in Bremen, Germany. We're all getting a little bit of FOMO and wondering if the German Christmas markets are already up? Today is November 19th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmausus, and this is T-minus. NASA awards contract extensions with four companies, latitude signs a multi-launch agreement with Atmos, the orbit signs contracts with Impulso and Morpheus, and our guest today is Lauren Andrade, Director of Marketing and Communications for the Beyond Earth Institute. We'll be talking about Beyond Earth's Leadership Council and the research that they've conducted on the CIS Lunar Economy. Happy Tuesday, everybody! Let's get into it! So, the news coming out of Europe's biggest Space Conference has been dropping all morning, and we're kicking off today's briefing with the announcement that the European Space Agency is extending its Boost Program support for four European launch companies, and those would be Hi Impulse, ISAR Aerospace, Orbex, and Rocket Factory Augsburg, also known as RFA, which will receive each a share of over 44 million euros. Hi Impulse, ISAR, Rocket Factory Augsburg received initial support from ESA's Boost Program in May 2020 as part of the DLR micro-launcher competition. Orbex later received funding through the program in March 2021, and with this new round, Orbex will receive an additional 5.6 million euros, ISAR Aerospace 15 million euros, and Rocket Factory Augsburg and Hi Impulse will each receive 11.8 million euros. According to ESA, the 44.2 million euros in funding extensions are aimed at alleviating the pressure in the months before an inaugural flight when costs are high and the potential to generate revenue is limited. And now, for a roundup of new contracts announced in Bremen, French launch company Latitude has signed a multi-launch agreement with German space logistics company Atmos to deliver the company's Phoenix reentry vehicles into very low Earth orbit. Atmos had contracted Latitude to provide a minimum of five dedicated launches per year between 2028 and 2032. Latitude is working towards the maiden flight of its two-stage Zephyr rocket, which is scheduled to be launched towards the end of 2025. The first commercial flight will follow in 2026, with the French space agency CNES signed on as the rocket's first customer. Impulse Space USA has signed a multi-mission launch services contract with Deorbit. The agreement also includes multiple satellite launches as part of upcoming SpaceX transporter ride-share missions, with Impulse Space providing mission management services, including all logistical and technical support from their facility in Florida. And another company working with Deorbit is Morpheus Space, and the companies are collaborating to conduct an in-orbit demonstration Go-To mission on Deorbit's Ion satellite carrier orbital transfer vehicle. The Ion spacecraft is modular and capable of performing multiple mission objectives at once depending on the configuration. The in-orbit demonstration mission is scheduled for early 2025. Arian Space has signed a launch contract with Exotrail for the first Geo-mission of Exotrail's Space Van vehicle. The Space Van is Exotrail's orbital transfer vehicle, and for this mission it will be placed in Geostationary Transfer Orbit, or GTO, in the second half of 2026, and the first GTO mission for the Space Van will demonstrate a new capacity to bring small satellites up to the Geostationary Arc. Space Van. And now onto other space news, because there's still a lot of it. Congratulations to Dawn Aerospace, which made history on November 12th with the successful supersonic flight of its Mark II Aurora rocket-powered aircraft, making it one of the fastest privately developed aircraft on the planet. Dawn hypersonics achieved a milestone with the Aurora plane, surpassing the speed of sound for the very first time, reaching Mach 1.1 and climbing to an altitude of 82,500 feet. The flight, conducted from New Zealand's Glenten or Aerodrome, exceeded its test target speeds in altitude of Mach 1.05 and 75,000 feet. It is the first time a civil aircraft has flown supersonic since the Concorde. Wow, really? Wow. Dawn says this achievement signifies a major step towards operational hypersonic travel and daily space access, establishing rocket-powered aircraft as a new class of ultra-high performance vehicles. Aerovironment and Blue Halo have announced the execution of a definitive agreement, under which a V, or Aerovironment, will acquire Blue Halo in an all-stock transaction with an enterprise value of approximately $4.1 billion. The companies say the merger will make AV a more diversified global leader in all-domain defense technologies. The combined company will bring together complementary capabilities to offer a comprehensive portfolio of high-growth franchises, powered by technology and focused on addressing the most important priorities and needs of the US and allies around the globe. Jacobs have released their financial results for the fiscal fourth quarter and fiscal year ended September 27, 2024. The professional services firm reported revenue of $3 billion for the year, a 4.4% increase year over year. During the quarter, Jacobs closed the transaction involving the company's critical mission solutions and cyber and intelligence businesses, merging those business units with a mentum parent holdings to create a new spin-off called simply a mentum holdings. And around the time that today's program will be published, I, along with just about every other space fan from around the world, plan to be watching Starship's sixth test flight from Boca Chica, Texas at the time of recording all systems and weather conditions are looking good for the flight. The launch is targeted for 4pm Central Time, so if you're listening to this as we're publishing, go and find a screen to stream it right now! And we'll be bringing you updates about the launch on tomorrow's show. And NASA has announced a new leadership appointment. Clayton P. Turner will serve as the associate administrator of the Space Technology Mission Directorate at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. You can read about that appointment and find out more about all of the other stories I've mentioned by following the links in our show notes. There you will also find the Aerospace Corporation's latest paper on anything else but my favorite, Cybersecurity on Orbit. Hey T-minus crew, if you're just joining us, be sure to follow T-Minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. Also, if you can do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. Here's a little challenge for you, buy 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 T-Minus useful and we really hope you do, please share the show so other professionals just like you can find it. Thanks so much for your support everybody, it means a lot to me and all of us here at T-Minus. Last week I attended the Beyond Earth Symposium in Washington DC and we'll be bringing you some of the chats that I captured during the event over the next few days. And today we'll start with Lauren Andrade, Director of Marketing and Communications for the Beyond Earth Institute. Hi everyone, my name is Lauren Andrade. I am the Director of Marketing and Communications for the Beyond Earth Institute. I am an attorney by trade and recently got my Masters of Law in Air and Space Law. And I also work for an airspace consulting firm here in Washington DC. So we're a few different hats. That's a lot of hats. That's amazing. In your Beyond Earth capacity, which sounds really amazing to say that out loud, in that capacity you have been very busy lately. You gave an amazing presentation. I'm just hats off to you. That is a ton of work that you did. I'm giving it away a little bit. Tell me a bit about this incredible compendium that you've just released. Yeah, so the Beyond Earth Institute has this really cool thing called the Leadership Council where we bring together public and private sector experts and we divide them into these working groups. And every year we sit down and we say, "Hey, do these working groups work? Are they topics that we want?" And for this year we actually had five different topics. So one was focused on the CIS Lunar Economy, one on commercial space stations, one on reliability, health and safety. So really looking at the human factor of space travel, large-scale habitats, and then advanced financing and economics. Why those topic areas? I mean, they're all awesome. But how did you pick those? That's amazing. You know, all but large-scale habitats were topics that have carried through all of the Beyond Earth symposiums as topics that are both timely but also things that we can actually develop actionable and real tangible recommendations for. There's so many space topics that you can theorize on and that need to be theorized on, but as a space policy think tank, our goal is to really say, "Here are some recommendations that we have brought people together in a room to talk about and figure out what is a path forward." So can we boil down all of that into it? So what are the recommendations? I'm sure there's a lot in there. I mean, those are all very incredible topic areas and how does one take all of that, like CIS Lunar Economy? Where did you all land on that? What I would say and what I would urge you all to actually read them, they're bulky, they're dense, but I think what they were all really boiled down to is that there needs to be a really symbiotic relationship between the public and private sector when it comes to space activity. There needs to be regulatory flexibility, there needs to be support for private sector growth and commercialization of space in general, and there needs to be not only support of the activities that we want, but the pathways that we need to get there. Things like indemnification, things like liability medication, things like regulatory framework that actually supports the growth of these things so that they're fiscally possible. And really what I think a lot of the working groups boil down to is that these topics are things that we talked about kind of disparately, but at the same time they're all interconnected and they require really a whole of government and in a lot of ways, whole of commercial sector approach to achieve them long term. That's interesting that you mentioned that because I think often of think tank output, it is very government focused, but you're saying also that we want the commercial, the industry to sort of rally around this. That's an interesting approach to me. Yeah, I think that one thing that Beyond Earth does incredibly well is we are a space policy think tank and the thing that I always say about that is we want people to think. We want to bring people into the room together, whether those are government people, people from competing space companies, people from other nonprofits who have a combined and shared interest in space and say, "All right, y'all, I get that we're all coming at this from different avenues. I get that we all might want ourselves to personally succeed, but how can we make this enterprise succeed and how can we rely on each other and leverage each other to achieve that?" That's amazing. Crystal Ball moment, if I may, we've got an annual administration coming in. There's so much we don't know, but given that you're more in the world of capital than I am, I'm in the Northeast, but way far away from this. Thoughts on maybe, do you think the new administration will be receptive, maybe more receptive? I mean, taking some wild swings here. I think that historically we have seen the Trump administration be very supportive of space policy. What that means for the future and how that's going to evolve, I can't say, but I am hopeful that as we move forward, the space industry will become something that is a little bit more forefront in the hearts and minds of the general public, because it's really easy to say, "Hey, your internet depends on us. Your online banking depends on us." It's a lot easier to think about that in a really theoretical way, but to forget that this is real and space is real, and these have impacts that far expand beyond, "Rock It is Cool." But Rock It is Cool. It is cool. There's a lot of interest there that we need to consider. That's awesome. Lauren, thank you so much for speaking with me. Really appreciate your time, and congratulations on putting out the Facebook paper. I hope our audience reads it, and we'll make sure that if there's a link to that, we will include that in the show notes on this interview. Fantastic. Yes. Thanks for your time. Appreciate it. I'll be right back. Welcome back. For our final item today, I thought I'd share some takeaways from the Beyond Earth Symposium in Washington, D.C., which, as we've mentioned a couple times, was held last week, and I was very happy to attend it. The event's theme was at the crossroads, and with the U.S. election having been just a week prior to the event, certainly the political and space policy crossroads came up a lot. What will the change in administration mean? Will it be good for space or just certain players? Lots of fascinating discussion around that, and how space policy and law might or might not facilitate whatever's coming next. This was an admittedly U.S. centric event, and given its location, not a surprise. And a factoid that was mentioned during the event was that the U.S. Space Force has a larger budget than NASA. Lots of reasons for that, but it's a leading indicator of where we have seen and will continue to see a lot of space-related investment. And while launch is very flashy and, let's be honest, fun, it's a small part of the pie compared to satellites and cutting-edge defense applications, which get top dollar. But still, I hold out hope that groundbreaking science can continue, too. And finally, a personal highlight for me was interviewing sci-fi legend, Ron DeMore, who is the writer/creator/producer of Star Trek The Next Generation and the U.S. Space Nine, Battlestar Galactica, and for all mankind. I really enjoyed his insights into what in real space inspires his creative work in sci-fi space, as well as his thoughts on how we in the space industry can get more people excited about what we're doing. And for his answer on that specifically, well, tune in when we drop my full interview with him later this week. Sorry, you gotta wait a few more days. I'm especially thankful to all the wonderful T-minus listeners who recognized my voice in the halls and said hello. It was so wonderful to meet you all. And I am especially grateful to the Beyond Earth Institute for the invitation to attend their event. [MUSIC] That's it for T-minus for November 19th, 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're 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 Petrell is our president, Peter Kilby is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [MUSIC] T-minus. [MUSIC]
