Many of the VCs that we hear from who are investing in the space industry say they're interested in companies doing work outside of the usual space lanes and instead are using space to disrupt industries where we don't usually see space mentioned at all. That is where the magic happens, they often say, and that is also often where we see the big, big money. Today is December 12th, 2024. I'm Marie Overmazas and this is T-minus. Australia's fleet space raises $100 million. Lumen orbit opens a safe seed round due to increased VC interest. The Artemis Accord officially reaches 50 signatories and our guest today is Araz Faze, co-founder and CEO at K-Han Space. We'll be featuring a short excerpt from our AWS in orbit conversation with Araz about K-Han Space and their SAC-CAT system. So join us for that later in the show. It is Thursday. Here is our Intel briefing for today. Fleet Space of Australia has closed a $150 million Australian Series D funding round to advance its exosphere exploration platform which integrates low-Earth orbit satellites, AI, and seismic sensors to streamline the discovery of critical minerals. The investment was led by Canada's Ontario teacher's pension plans venture arm and aims to meet the growing demand for minerals essential to clean energy technologies. The Series D brings the company's total valuation to $800 million Australian, which is about $510 million US. This large funding round speaks to how this technology is an interesting case study of two very different industries working together to enhance each other. In this case, space tech and mining. Fleet Space's exosphere provides real-time 3D imaging of subsurface geology in order to reduce environmental impact and speed up mineral exploration for major players like Rio Tinto and Barrick Gold. Fleet Space has also introduced AI-driven exploration tools, expanded operations across five continents, and conducted groundbreaking imaging surveys in Australia and Chile. This new funding supports Fleet Space's terrestrial exploration efforts and its Lunar Technology Initiative called SPIDER, which is set to launch in 2026 to analyze the moon's subsurface. So the company's advancements aim to optimize mining operations on Earth, while also helping to explore new worlds to address critical resource needs on Earth and beyond. LumenOrbit has raised $11 million in their latest seed round. The Washington-based company is looking to develop data centers in space. LumenOrbit co-founder and CEO Philip Johnston told TechCrunch that due to the high investor demand, the company has since opened up another safe round on top of it at a higher valuation to let more investors in. Lumen is planning to launch a demonstrator satellite in May that will include Nvidia's Terrestrial Graphics Processing Unit. It also plans to launch another test satellite that's 100 times more powerful in the following year. We mentioned earlier this week that there would be two new signings of the Artemis Accords and yesterday, two separate ceremonies were held to welcome Panama and Austria to the International Consortium. Panama and Austria have become the 49th and 50th nations to commit to the responsible exploration of space for all humanity. Astroscale's active debris removal by Astroscale Japan, also known as "Address J," successfully approached a large piece of space debris to approximately 15 meters. This is the closest approach ever achieved by a commercial company to space debris through rendezvous and proximity operations or RPO. The mission is an advancement of its initial goals set out by JAXA, and the objective was to demonstrate highly precise and complex close-range RPO capabilities by advancing to the capture initiation point where future debris removals start robotic capture operations. The Italian space agency ASI has selected deorbit for a validation and demonstration of technologies in orbit. ASI says the collaboration represents a decisive step to accelerate innovation and strengthen Italian competitiveness in the space sector. The technologies of interest will be selected through a dedicated call to be released at the beginning of next year. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Partners at Arrow Virenment are completing a detailed assessment of the Ingenuity Mars helicopter's final flight on January 18, 2024. The report is expected to be published in the next few weeks. The Ingenuity helicopter exceeded all expectations as a technical demo on the Red Planet, and it was the first aircraft in another world, and it operated for almost three years, performed 72 flights, and flew more than 30 times farther than planned, while accumulating over two hours of total flight time. Blue Origin has signed a technology licensing agreement with Nimbus Power Systems to facilitate electric power and potable water production in space applications. Nimbus's fuel cell technology features gravity and momentum-independent water management, which they say is a critical enabler of fuel cell power production in space environments. John Calouris, Senior Vice President of Lunar Permanence at Blue Origin, said in the press release that the companies are collaborating on an advanced polymer electrolyte membrane fuel cell technology that is specifically tailored to space applications. Calouris says, "Working with Nimbus leverages the latest advances in their terrestrial fuel cell technology to accelerate Blue Origin's in-house fuel cell solutions for in-space and lunar products." Canada's MDA Space has launched a new MDA Space Indigenous Student Scholarship Program. The initiative is designed to help develop the next generation of industry leaders while promoting STEM education and opportunities in the space industry with Indigenous communities. The program is partnering with Inspire, an Indigenous national charity dedicated to investing in the education of First Nations, Inuit, and METIS people. The MDA Space Indigenous Student Scholarship will be awarded to five Indigenous post-secondary students enrolled in STEM-related programs. NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland has investigated how ongoing lunar activity will affect the lunar environment, and the team found that landing, exploring, and even breathing on the moon can alter the lunar atmosphere, barely existent though it is, which would create problems for humans and technology on the surface and make key science goals harder to achieve. The report speculated that human activities might create temporary atmospheres on the moon, and that the creation of these atmospheres will likely present some problems for astronauts and scientists in the future. And you can read more on that report by following the link in our show notes, and you'll also find two additional articles in there today, one's on the potential incoming NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman's comments on US space competitiveness, and another's on a vest being tested, a vest test if you will, on the ISS to protect astronauts from space radiation. 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 Kehan Space, and we'll be featuring more from this chat and about how they work with AWS or Aerospace and Satellite on Saturday's AWS in orbit episode. Visit space.n2k.com/aws to learn more. [Music] Our guest today is Araz Faisi, co-founder and CTO at Kehan Space. We'll be featuring my full conversation with Araz and Tim Sills from AWS on the AWS in orbit episode which will be released this Saturday. So this is Araz telling me about how he founded Kehan. I went to high school with my co-founder Cia Mac. We went to college together, we were roommates, we studied engineering, but our passions were different. My passion was automation and computers, and his was space. So with that after that, we both did graduate school and went and worked and semi-work on NASA, JTA missions, commercial missions, and we've been very close friends. So he kept telling me that, look, there's an opportunity. I see a massive opportunity in space industry where we're going from old space to new space, old space where you, you know, a handful of nation states or major companies would spend billions of dollars designing a mission, building it, launching it and operating it to a place where the cost of going to space is going to be a fraction of what it used to be. So now we're going to have a huge burst of growth in commercial space industry. Turns out he was right. So in 2019, we started experimenting with a couple of problems that we predicted that was going to be painful problems for space industry. In 2020, we realized that we are on the right path and we together we started a company. And the first thing that we identified as an acute problem that needed to be solved was collision avoidance in space. So we started working on an autonomous satellite collision avoidance solution where our product would notify you if we detected a high risk induction or potential collision events in orbit. And if you needed to perform a maneuver, we would give you a maneuver option or off-tone maneuver options to get out of the way. But as the industry has progressed, then that problem has filled up quite a bit. So fast forward to today. Kion Space is a space situation awareness company. We focus on analytics. We don't have our own sensors by design. We ingest data from government and commercial data sources, from satellite operators. And you can think of Kion as Waze for Space or Google Maps for Space. We are the premier space traffic coordination platform for satellite operators. Over 20 satellite operators use our solution half-binder today to coordinate with each other when they have virus conjunctions over where they want to fly around each other. They will be recently launched on the product called satcat.com. It's been a very popular solution. It's an open source platform where we ingest data from several open source data sources in one place where operators and enthusiasts and users, I would say, because we have a broad spectrum of users who can come to Satcat and find what they're looking for when it comes to space data. So how did Satcat come to be? Our internal team was frustrated by the fact that you had to go to like four, five, six, and different websites and web pages and data sources to compile the data that you needed. So for example, I want to see who the satellite belongs to. I sometimes had to go to three different sources to figure that out. I wanted to see what the historical data was for this, and I had to go and download data from multiple sources, fuse them. One person on the team, in fact, decided that he was going to solve the problem for us. So he started building on this thing, and it started to look really nice and feel really nice. So at some point, we decided, "Look, let's just open it up to the public and see what we will get." And we just did a couple of, I think, all we did was one interview and then one or two LinkedIn posts. And within a few weeks, we were serving thousands of customers. And that was kind of one of those moments where we said, "Huh, there's something there." And yeah, it's been just massive growth since then. Awesome. So yeah, tell me a bit about who uses Satcat and a little bit about what they use Satcat for. Satcat is serving a really wide range of different audiences. You can be just a space enthusiast to go and see where the ISS is, or when the next time the ISS will pass over my head, or, "Oh, I heard about this over through the briefing. Let me go see how it looks or what is it." All the way to someone who is a seasoned satellite operator and they want to go and look at their competitors' constellation and see what kind of maneuvers they have in performing, just as a comp and tell kind of, right? So you have everything in there. You have reporters who go in and get the data they need. You have government folks. We've had several government agencies come to us and say, "Hey, this looks great. Can you get this and that?" And that's not something that we expected. But you can come to Satcat with a different goal in mind and you'll have a completely different experience from another type of persona who comes in and looks for that. And that's what we're trying to find, to deliver better experience to different personas more properly. Fantastic. Going from that "aha" moment to scale, that had to have been quite a challenge, especially so quickly. Can you walk me through how that went? Well, one thing I can tell you is that generally the engineering side of things and scalability is secure. None of that is an issue because when you build your infrastructure, when you build your system and an infrastructure that's scalable and all that, so that's something that you don't have to worry about. So most of our effort have gone into trying to figure out what would be the next thing on Satcat from a product perspective, from the capabilities perspective. In reality, it's kind of changed the face of our company. It was a very day and night kind of difference for me when I used to go to events and meet folks and talk to people. They would recognize the company what we do, but it would be real if they were able to name all the products that we had. But now, if I'm saying kind of interaction with folks, one of the first things that they mentioned is Satcat. They're like, "Oh, I did this thing on Satcat. It was cool. Oh, how's Satcat coming? Or, oh, what's the next thing on Satcat?" So, Satcat has become the new brand for the company, per se. So we've really quite a bit of a shift in the direction of the company based on that experience and the learning. So obviously, we've put more efforts, engineering efforts, more product efforts into Satcat, and hopefully, it will pay out. We'll be right back. Welcome back. We've been talking a lot about amateur radio here at N2K lately. My colleague Dave Bittner just got his technician license, so he's officially a ham now. And I took a class a few years ago, but didn't get around to taking the exam. So, I'm thinking it's about time I just get it done. One thing that stands to reason about radio, whether you're a ham or not, is the greater the distance you want to cover, the range, the more power you need, and the bigger antenna you need. Yes, there are other variables to keep in mind too, but please don't at me, hams. I'm trying to keep this simple. So, if you want to talk to a neighbor a few blocks away, a handheld radio can do the trick. But stuff way out in space? Well, think of how big Arecibo is. So, when you hear the headline that amateur radio operators were able to get signals from Voyager 1 nearly 25 billion kilometers away, no, they were not doing it from a mobile rig in a car, although that would be extremely impressive. No, they were using the Dwingaloo dish telescope in the Netherlands. Big dish telescopes around the world make up NASA's Deep Space Network, and they usually communicate with Voyager 1, but Dwingaloo is 25 meters across, and that is much smaller than those 70 meter dishes in the Deep Space Network. So, catching the extremely faint signal from something so extremely far away on something that's way smaller than is meant to pick up those signals, that's a challenge for sure. But cameras, the organization of volunteers who operate the Dwingaloo radio telescope were able to receive Voyager 1's signals on December 8, and that is a rare achievement for any telescope on Earth, let alone for the world's oldest rotatable 25 meter radio telescope. And of course, for the people operating it. So, congratulations to Cameras and well done Dwingaloo. And oh yeah, I will be interviewing Dave Bittner about him becoming an official ham, so definitely stay tuned to hear more on that in an upcoming show. [Music] That's it for T-minus for December 12, 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 Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
