[MUSIC] Every few months we get to report on yet another new valuation for SpaceX. And exactly no one listening is ever gonna be surprised that the number keeps going up. Just a few months ago, the per share price of SpaceX was $112. The new number three months later, yeah, it's a lot higher. Why did something major happen in the last three months? [MUSIC] T-minus. 22nd is the LOS. T-minus. Open aboard. [MUSIC] Today is December 11th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmausus, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] SpaceX is valued at $350 billion. Maxar and Satellogic agree to partner on national security missions. Boryeong invests in intuitive machines. And our guest today is AJ Gemmer, co-founder and CTO at Lunar Outpost. [MUSIC] Happy Wednesday, everybody. Here is your Intel briefing. Bloomberg has an exclusive look at an insider share transaction over at SpaceX with the company and its investors buying $1.25 billion of insider shares. That transaction puts the latest valuation of the per share price for SpaceX at $185 per share, making the company worth roughly $350 billion in all. And that is a big boost in just three months from the previous $112 per share valuation, exhibit A in how Elon Musk-owned businesses are getting a big boost from the results of the US presidential election. According to the Bloomberg exclusive, SpaceX is also looking to buy nearly half a billion dollars worth of its common stock. And of course, SpaceX is rarely out of global headlines for long, thanks to its increased launch cadence over the last few years. And in the last few months was SpaceX Starship's Flight Number 6. No chops to catch for the booster, but there was a banana for scale. And over at Starbase, prep work is underway for test flight Number 7, expected for January. We'll be keeping an eye out for testing on Ship 33, which will be the very first Block 2 version of Starship to be tested, with a number of modifications made on the ship design, from what SpaceX has learned from all of the tests on the Block 1 version. Maxar Intelligence and Satologic are teaming up to support US national security missions. The companies have announced a tasking, data licensing, and distribution agreement that enhances Maxar's ability to deliver monitoring and change detection insights in near real time for the US government and the government's partners around the world. The agreement grants Maxar exclusive rights to task Satologic's high-revisit constellation and use its cost-effective satellite imagery to support national security missions. Matt Turman, president of Satologic, added to the press release that this agreement with Maxar is a watershed moment in Earth observation, providing crucial capacity to warfighters and allies. Combining our constellation with Maxar's expertise enables comprehensive monitoring and analytics to meet the demand for actionable intelligence. South Korean pharmaceutical company Boroyoung has invested $10 million in intuitive machines. Boroyoung has shared in a press release that it'll participate in intuitive machines's $65 million underwritten public offering through a concurrent private placement, acquiring over 950,000 shares of Class A common stock. And they're not the only ones looking to invest in the first private company to land on the moon. Other US and global institutional investors are expected to participate in the public offering under the same terms as Boroyoung. Boroyoung established a strategic partnership with intuitive machines in December last year to explore the possibility of building essential infrastructure for life science research on and around the moon. The two companies have also signed an MOU to develop a platform for space health care experiments using intuitive machines' lunar lander and lunar terrain vehicle designed for NASA's Artemis program. Following its launch last week, ESA's Copernicus Sentinel-1C satellite shared its first radar images. The images of the Earth showcase some of the satellite's capabilities for environmental monitoring. The first images feature regions of interest, and the first image was captured just 56 hours and 23 minutes after liftoff, and features Svalbard, which is a remote Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean. The image demonstrates Sentinel-1C's ability to monitor ice coverage and environmental changes in harsh and isolated regions. Fiasat successfully demonstrated direct-to-device satellite connectivity for the first time in the United Arab Emirates. The communications giant used the Abu Dhabi Space Debate event to send satellite-enabled two-way messages and SOS messages to attendees. It is the third successful demonstration of Fiasat's technology this quarter, following similar tests in both India and Saudi Arabia. RF Communications Company Gorilla RF has announced a 125% year-over-year growth in its satellite communications business. The company says the growth has been largely driven by the increasing demand for Gorilla RF's products in direct-to-cellular satellite applications, and we're sure that as demand grows, we'll be hearing more from companies like Gorilla RF. China conducted a static firing test of its Xzy1 verification rocket, also known as Space Epoch, last week. The Xzy1 rocket, developed by Beijing Jianyuan Technology, is China's first medium-lift launch vehicle with a stainless-steel rocket body. It's powered by liquid oxygen methane engines and is aiming to be recoverable after an ocean splashdown. According to Chinese media, the test involved full-power static firing that lasted 20 seconds, during which its 70-ton class liquid oxygen methane engine was ignited and operated as planned. And staying in China, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation says it's preparing to launch a newly developed rocket, the Long March 8A Y1, in January. The vehicle was loaded onto a ship earlier this week to be transported to the Wenchang satellite launch site in South China's island province of Hainan. The Long March 8A is expected to become the main rocket type used for China's future space launches to the low-Earth and medium-Earth orbits. And satellite company Astranus says they have delivered four satellites to Cape Canaveral, ahead of a dedicated SpaceX launch, which is expected later this month. Astranus says that SpaceX is targeting December 17th for the Falcon 9 mission, and the four Astranus microgeo satellites will support a number of customers, including two satellites which will support in-flight connectivity for a new VU. You'll find links to all the stories mentioned in the show in the selected reading section of our show notes or over at space.ntuk.com. Hey T-minus 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 everybody, we really appreciate it. [Music] Our guest today is AJ Gemmer, co-founder and CTO at Lunar Outpost. I asked AJ to tell us more about how Lunar Outpost was founded. The co-founder and chief technology officer of Lunar Outpost. I have always been both a space buff and a car guy, so Lunar Rovers were a natural thing to me. I'm very excited to be in this position where I get to work on cutting-edge technology, but still be able to go back to some of my roots, building and restoring cars with my dad. Yeah, we've had a really great time. Well, okay, a bit about my background. I went to the University of Colorado at Boulder, CU Boulder for Aerospace, and while I was there, began working at the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics, LASP. That gave me a great appreciation for space science, space science instruments, and their needs, and kind of what the future looked like for space. And during that time, I got really interested in the moon and space resources. And so, together with my co-founders, we came up with the concept for Lunar Outpost, which was to develop technologies and robotic systems that enable a sustainable presence on the moon and also provide benefits to people here on Earth. That is an awesome origin story. Thank you, AJ. I appreciate that. And how cool that you get to merge your two loves and what you do every day. That is the best. That's the dream right there. And congratulations to you and your whole team, really, on the contract that you all were awarded from NASA earlier this year. Can you tell me a bit about that? Absolutely. The Lunar Terrain Vehicle Program is really the latest in NASA's Artemis campaign, in this case, to provide mobility for astronauts when they're on the moon. So, just like in the Apollo days, when we had the Lunar Roving Vehicle, the LRV, which allowed the Apollo astronauts to greatly increase the science they were able to do and the exploration and ground that they covered on the moon, the Lunar Terrain Vehicle is the next iteration of that, carrying two astronauts and a wealth of payloads, both scientific and commercial, to a huge number of sites of interest all over the moon. Using the LTV, we're just going to learn things at an unprecedented pace about the Lunar Environment, particularly the Lunar South Pole, which is very interesting from a scientific and a commercial perspective. That's so cool. And can you tell me a bit about the challenges of the Lunar Terrain? I think many of us have an idea of it in our heads, but we're not in the world as much as you are. So, I mean, what is, I mean, what are you all facing and what kind of challenges are you trying to overcome? The moon is a challenging and harsh environment for anything to operate in, much less a mobile system like a rover. So, there will be elements like the Lunar Dust, which is very sharp and abrasive. It's harmful to seals and the specialized coatings that we use in aerospace. So, dust mitigation is an area that we really specialize in and protecting our rovers in robotic systems and our payloads as well. The moon also has very large changes in its thermal environment. It gets very hot during the Lunar Day and very cold during the Lunar Night. And some of those areas on the moon that are particularly interesting are called permanently shadowed regions. They're areas where the sun never hits and therefore are extremely cold down to, you know, approaching absolute zero. And those areas tend to hold volatiles like water. So, they're very interesting scientifically. If we want to extract resources on the moon, we need to develop hardware that can get down into those PSRs and access that. And dealing with those thermal challenges is another bit thing that Lunar Outpost really specializes in. Furthermore, surviving the Lunar Night is a challenge as well because not only is it cold, it's very long, up to two Earth weeks at the Lunar Equator. And those long duration cold temperatures require a lot of power to survive, which again is a big challenge to robots on the moon. That is a fascinating set of challenges. I imagine work is both challenging and very fun, trying to figure out a solution, solve these really intricate issues. But I mean, sounds like the dream, honestly. So, that sounds really cool. Can you tell me a little bit about also, I'm skipping around a little bit here, but the Lunar Dawn Science Council. This sounds like sort of a meeting of the minds to explore some possible solutions to these fascinating challenges. But why don't you tell me a bit about it? Yeah, the Lunar Dawn Science Council is a concept we came up with, really to make sure that we were addressing NASA's needs for science and science instrumentation, science targets when we designed our Lunar Terrain vehicle. So, we chose to invite Arizona State University to chair our Science Council along with a number of other esteemed institutions and provide input on the question of, if you could go anywhere on the moon and do anything, where would you want to go? Where can you do the most science and the best science? And how do we get your instruments to those points? And that is resulting in a Lunar Terrain vehicle that is really optimized and designed to meet NASA science goals, but also the goals of universities and educational institutions and commercial customers who want to put their payloads aboard our Lunar Terrain vehicle. That's fascinating. Okay. So, when you think long term about the work that you all are doing, what does success look like to you? What are your long term goals there? I think success looks like a thriving Lunar economy with hundreds or thousands of people living and working full time on the moon. That's really what I'd love to see in my lifetime. And in order to make that happen, we need readily available launch and landing services, which are well underway, as well as reliable mobility solutions on the lunar surface. So, that's the piece that Lunar Outpost chose to address and really advance and push forward as fast and as safely and as cost effectively as we can to bring that thriving Lunar ecosystem to life. Awesome. Well, thank you, AJ. Thank you so much for taking the time to speak with me today. I'd like to make sure that my guests get the last word. So, if there's anything that you wanted to leave our audience with, anything you want to tell them, anything we didn't cover that you wanted to mention, by all means. Well, I think we are witnessing a second space race right now. So, for younger generations, including kids in school, this is the time to be a part of the next leap in humanity, exploring the moon, our solar system, and really bringing the future to life. We'll be right back. Welcome back. A lot of times, space stories make us go, "Ahh!" or "Ahh!" but it's not as often they make me go, "Ahh!" And we mentioned it a few months ago, but ExoLaunch of Germany is helping give organizations from developing countries the opportunity to deploy their own 1U to 3U-sized CubeSats, complete with full technical support via the company's ExoPod system. And ExoLaunch is doing this through the U.N. Office for Outer Space Affairs, or UNOSA's, Access to Space for All Program, which is helping nations to develop space capabilities from building satellites to establishing space agencies. And together, ExoLaunch and UNOSA hope to open new doors for countries eager to launch their own space programs, building expertise, and fostering international cooperation all along the way. The ExoLaunch program officially kicked off at the beginning of the year, with applications opening over the summer. And we're mentioning the story again today because the first round window of opportunity to apply to this program officially closes at the end of this month, December 31st, and we want to make sure that people know about it. The Access to Space for All project has had a number of awardees in the past, but no one has been officially picked yet for this ExoPod iteration of the project, so if you're interested, you can hop to for more information on this story via the link in our show notes. That's it for T-Minus for December 11th, 2024, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. 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 Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilby is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmausus. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
