Today is January 7th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmausus, and this is T-minus. T-minus. Twenty seconds to L-O-N, T-minus. Open aboard. Five. Intuitive Machines completes its finer lunar lander installation. Four. The International Space Foundation and ISS National Lab announced $3.6 million in funding for research. China sees its first space launch of 2025. Toyota to invest in Japanese space startup Interstellar. NASA provides an update on the Mars sample return program. And our guest today is Mike Gold, Chief Growth Officer at Redwire. Redwire has had an incredible year of accomplishments on the International Space Station, from rollout, solar arrays to 3D printing cardiovascular tissue. They're using the ISS National Lab to develop and research science that has real impact for us here on Earth. So stick around for my chat with Mike later in the show. We're kicking off today's show with a recent update on the Mars sample return program. NASA held a media call at 1pm Eastern to share details on the latest with Mars sample return, which has already been marred with setbacks over the years. Just a reminder, NASA decided in spring 2024 that they were no longer looking in-house to bring the samples collected by the Perseverance rover since 2021 back to Earth. NASA cited spiraling costs and schedule lapses as its reasons for no longer using the NASA plan. Instead, the US Space Agency is now reviewing two possible opportunities to bring back the 28 samples already collected by the Mars rover. The first option is the Sky Crane, which is a soft landing system used in the last part of the entry, descent, and landing sequence developed by the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory. This system was used to bring both the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers to Mars and would be updated to instead collect the samples. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson says the review board estimates that the cost to use this system would be between $6.6 and $7.7 billion. Option two is looking at commercial capabilities with heavy lander systems. Now this could be SpaceX or Blue Origin or any other company wanting to bid for the program. The schedule and budget to determine the best strategy going forward is still to be determined, but NASA estimates the cost for this option to be around $5.8 billion to $7.1 billion with a direct return as early as 2035. NASA's Associate Administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, Nikki Fox, says that bringing back the samples from Mars is still very important for the US Space Agency to learn more about our neighboring planet and to learn more about the origins of our planet. NASA says it's still looking into options and expects to have a final decision on how it will progress with the Mars sample return program in 2026. Woven by Toyota, a Toyota subsidiary, will invest about $7 billion, which amounts to about $44.4 million, in Japanese startup interstellar technologies. The investment is part of interstellar's Series F funding to support mass production of its rockets. Woven will also appoint a director to the interstellar technologies board and support rocket production by strengthening supply chains and corporate governance. Interstellar has been collaborating with Toyota since 2020. The companies are working together to support the Japanese government target to secure a domestic launch capacity of around 30 launches annually by the early 2030s through both core and private rockets. China launched its first space mission of the year yesterday. A long March 3D rocket lifted off from Shichang's satellite launch center in southwest China, carrying the Xi Jian-25 satellite. Xi Jian-25 was developed and manufactured by CASC subsidiary, the Shanghai Academy of Space Flight Technology, and is aiming to advance key technologies for on-orbit refueling and extending satellite lifespans. The US National Science Foundation, known as NSF, is funding a solicitation that seeks proposals leveraging the International Space Station National Laboratory for research in transport phenomena. Through this partnership, NSF will fund the selected projects, and the ISS National Lab will facilitate hardware implementation and in-orbit access to the ISS. NSF will provide up to $3.6 million in total funding for multiple projects to use the Space Station for research. More details about this solicitation and information on how to apply for the funding can be found by following the link to the press release in our show notes. Intuitive Machines and Nokia have successfully completed the final integration of Nokia's Lunar Surface Communication System, or LSCS, into the IM-2 mission lander named Athena. Athena and the LSCS will voyage to the Lunar South Pole region in the upcoming IM-2 mission, where Nokia and Intuitive Machines intend to deploy the first cellular network on the moon. That mission is currently scheduled to launch in February of this year. [Music] And that concludes our top five countdown stories for you today, but there is so much more going on in the space industry for you to read about and to learn about. In our show notes, you'll find links to articles covering the departure of Sierra Space's CEO, an MOU signed between Reorbit and India's Ananth Technologies, and a rescheduling, again, of New Glenn's inaugural flight, now expected no earlier than January 10th. Hey, T-Minus Crew, if you are just joining us, welcome and be sure to follow T-Minus Space daily in your favorite podcast out. Also please do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. Here's a little challenge for you. By 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. If you find T-Minus useful, please share so other professionals like you can find the show. Thank you so much for your support, everybody. It means a lot to me and all of us here at T-Minus. . And our guest today is Mike Gold, Chief Growth Officer at Redwire. Redwire has had an incredible year of accomplishments on the International Space Station, and so I asked Mike to walk us through just some of the work that they've completed on the ISS in 2024. Our rollout solar array product, which is an amazing story that frankly I think doesn't get enough attention, that we have rollout solar arrays that we develop for the International Space Station, and they're compacted like a carpet when you launch, so it saves a lot of ferry room. And then when you reach orbit, it rolls out, providing a huge amount of volume and therefore energy. And these rollout solar arrays were initially developed on contract of Boeing. Thank you, Boeing. And two NASA and are now providing power for the International Space Station as we speak. And this technology is also being used for the lunar gateway, which these arrays, the rollout solar arrays that we developed for gateway may be the largest solar arrays ever deployed by humanity. So it's been amazing to do that work. In this case with our customer Maxar, who's developing the power and propulsion elements. So it's been terrific to see these arrays develop, yes, for government projects, but now being commercialized via our friends at Blue Origin and our wonderful customers at TALUS who are doing these incredible innovative satellites to really connect the world. So it's been a great story of technologies developed for NASA that are innovative. They're now going to the private sector. And then of course we have to talk about the incredible strides with microgravity, the first human meniscus being printed, the cardiovascular tissue being printed on the International Space Station live, and then brought back to Earth while still live. These are incredible innovations being driven by our BFF, the Bio Fabrication Facility. And that's to say nothing of what's occurring with Pillowbox, which are microgravity drug developments that we're doing to use microgravity to create new drugs or different types of existing drugs that have better longevity, increased efficacy, fewer side effects. So it's whole revolution as we combine pharmaceuticals and biotech with microgravity in space. I'm so pleased to be a red wire where we are just blazing trails and creating this whole new era that can not only support exploration but create a better world for all of us here on Earth. When I think about the incredible innovations happening in low Earth orbit with pharma, biotech, red wires name just comes up all the time and it's just amazing to see where things are already. And I'm so curious to hear your thoughts on where you see things going because I mean you all are there at that forefront. Yes, absolutely. So there's really two ways that this is going. One is as the president of our in space industries group says, make it, don't take it. And that's fabricating parts, electronics. We have a system called Fab Lab. We're very good at naming things as you can tell here at red wire and possibly some of those fans involved in that that will manufacture parts, components. We're the only company to have actually 3D printed parts and components on the International Space Station. We've done over 200. And while though it's a nice capability to have in low Earth orbit on the ISS, the ability to print these parts, components, systems, tools. I believe we'll save lives on the moon and particularly on Mars. The farther out you get, the more important that capability is. So I'm thrilled with what we're doing and what we've done in that area. And then when it comes to Earth, we've got a couple of variations there with the regenerative medicine and the creation of the meniscuses of cardiovascular tissue. We will in the future be working with kidney tissue, liver tissue. Once you understand the basic principles of being able to print with human tissue, obviously you've opened up a door then to a wide variety of tissue types that can really have some just phenomenal results. So that is going to be very exciting as we expand out the different types of tissues, types of potential organs, tissues that you're going to work with. And then the subset or a different line are the drug development. So drugs are developed from seed crystals and we create these seed crystals in microgravity that are much more uniform. The crystals are larger and that results, or can result anyway, to better more enhanced types of the drugs. And I believe that's probably nearest to the boat is the drug development we've flown. It's close to 30 now pill boxes. Pill boxes, the system that develops the seed crystal in our adsep system, which is on the ISS. So it's an extraordinarily exciting time to be in the space industry, a more exciting time to be at Redwire, which is leading the way globally on all of these activities. It's just an honor to be here and be a part of this amazing team. I believe it. And just so much growth is happening at Redwire Global Expansions. And as I mentioned, as I keep saying, every time I look at a mission, your name is in there. So Redwire is a part of these incredible missions. And we're just talking about one section of the amazing things that Redwire does. Proba 3 is something that's very recent in my mind anyway. I'm sure it's taken a long time to get to where it is, but that was just another mission that I was thinking of recently, where it's just an incredible science happening and Redwire is a big part of that. Absolutely. Proba simulating a solar eclipse and let's not sleep on Hera. Again, these are onboard computers that we're doing in Europe. So the roses that we were discussing before were important part of powering the Dart mission, the double asteroid redirect test mission. Planetary defense. Absolutely. And recently, like had the dinosaurs and Rose and Darth, they'd still be around doing a podcast today. Very excited at Redwire to have contributed. Your job being chief growth officer, you're looking ahead, I imagine, all the time at what's coming next. I'm so curious about your long-term vision for growth. Maybe any markets you see Redwire moving into or expanding into, just your thoughts on like the long-term, long-term. Yeah. So spoilers. There's constant growth at Redwire. I wouldn't even be surprised if there's interesting news by the time this podcast goes up. And let me just say generally, diversity is key. I think that's what Redwire stands for. And diversity is not just the right thing to do generally. It's the right thing to do for business, whether we're talking people or we're talking business cases, capabilities, or technologies. The commercial space field can be such a roller coaster. And the fact that Redwire is so diverse in terms of capabilities, in terms of locations, geography, customer base, that's really why I think we're strong in for the long haul and we'll succeed where other companies may fail that are more focused on a single capability or a single field or technology. So looking to the future, I expect us to even further diversify our portfolio while of course leveraging the synergies that all of Redwire's technologies can bring together. I'm certainly hopeful that we'll see movement and possibly under the new administration even more alacrity relative to the commercial space stations. As we've been discussing, these microgravity developments are dependent on the International Space Station, which by the way deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. I always like discussing that because everyone involved is just the singular extraordinary system. And I worry every day about losing that amazing platform. And we need to make sure that America, our international partners of the world has access to a station like that moving forward. And I'm excited about opening up the commercial entrepreneurialism and the ideas that the private sector will bring to actually creating that platform. So I think in the years to come, you're going to see a significant effort there. And also, as we talk more about the new administration, what aspect of Redwire we haven't discussed is national security. And the late 16 antenna literally helping bring the national security world together and a number of other products that we do for SDA and other entities and the customers that weren't for SDA. And what I've really liked seeing with SDA in particular is how they're trying to grow the industrial base. A diverse industrial place bring new ideas, new companies, and new technologies to the fore. I think in many ways SDA is the intellectual inheritor of the Cots and CRS programs that NASA supported and resulted in such amazing commercial growth. And as we look at the next job administration, I think we're going to see even greater and more robust opportunities, particularly for companies like Redwire that are as large as the big primes, but still have real capabilities. I think we're going to be entering to a whole new realm of those possibilities in the defense world over the next four years. And I'm very excited with that and look like, and I think we're going to have great capabilities to preserve ours and our allies freedom and to keep the world a safe and better place. Absolutely. And as we're talking about the look ahead, as a wrap up question, since this is the beginning of 2025, I have to ask the obligatory missions that you're looking forward to in this year in 2025. I know again, I'm asking you to pick amongst your children, but these children aren't there yet. You have a favorite. Yeah. Yeah. The Leo, very low earth orbit as we talk about protecting our freedoms, protecting our friends and allies and America, resilience is key. Diversity, as I mentioned before, not just key for Redwire, but key for our defense communications capabilities. And having very low earth orbit, which Redwire is working with Darpan, Redwire has actual contracts with Issa on as well. I'm so excited of those missions moving forward and at least working on the contracts and the capabilities that we've got to mature that the Leo capability. I think again, that's going to be, it's not a whole new world, a whole new orbit that is going to be very important both for defense and I believe commercially as well. There's a lot of advantages on remote sensing that that will be important. And again, I'm very excited about the additional pill boxes and the additional regenerative medicine activities that we'll be dealing with, particularly as we believe vascular tissue is next up that we're going to be experimenting with. And as we go to kidney liver tissue and different tissues, as I mentioned before, very, very excited about those activities. Also in Belgium, we're building the international birthing and docking mechanism, the IBDM, that will literally bring the world together. It will bring gateway together as we take those components and dock them. That's just a few of the many missions that I'm excited about as we look towards 2025. We'll be right back. Welcome back. It feels a bit like a cheat code for viewing extraordinarily distant objects in space, gravitational lensing. That is when light gets distorted or bent or lensed by large masses in space, creating those circular sort of swirlish light patterns in images from the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble. And like a camera or a telescope, you can use a lens, gravitational one in this case, to see super far away objects. Up until recently, this usually meant looking at one, maybe two super far away stars through a gravitational lens. But what's better than one gravitational lens? Well, two. And their powers combine. Astronomers took a closer look at images taken over time with Webb of galaxy cluster Abel 370, which has a named gravitational lens phenomenon called the dragon arc. Massive dark matter in the galaxy cluster provided a 100x magnification macro lens, and when conditions were just right, it aligned with a 10x gravitational micro lens made by a star in that same galaxy cluster. So that's two lenses stacking right there, allowing astronomers to peer through both at the same time to see a galaxy nearly 6.5 billion light years from us, looking back in time to when the universe was just a wee babe half its age now. Not only that, the astronomers were able to see not just one, not just two distant stars, but over 40. So again, by peering through two gravitational lenses when they happened to be stacked in just the right way, thanks to Webb, astronomers found that they could look halfway across the known observable universe. Wow. The data collected by Webb for these findings was from 2022 and 2023, and you can read the peer-reviewed paper about this remarkable achievement in astronomy just published this month in the journal Nature Astronomy. That's it for T-Minus for January 7th, 2025, 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 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 Kilpey is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Vermazus. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] T-Minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
