Today is January 14th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmausus and this is T-minus. Space Systems Command expands partnership with the University of Southern California for workforce development effort. California launches 10 navigation satellites into orbit. Ice Space completes mission 2 milestone ahead of the launch of its lunar probe. Starlabs Space opens a European subsidiary. SpaceX launches the Transporter 12 rideshare, taking 131 payloads to LEO. And our guest today is astro-nuclear engineer Christopher Morrison. Chris is a manager at Nuclear Methods and walks me through why he believes nuclear power is the answer for many space missions. Stay with us for that later in the show. Happy Tuesday everybody! Can you believe we're up to the 12th Transporter mission by SpaceX already? Transporter 12 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California this morning, carrying 131 payloads to LEO. On board the mission were CubeSats, MicroSats, and Orbital Transfer Vehicles, carrying 30 of those payloads, 14 of which will be deployed at a later time. To date, SpaceX has launched more than 1,100 payloads to orbit for 130+ customers across the entire rideshare program. That is incredible. And we know many commercial companies and sovereign states have spacecraft on board this mission, and we will bring you more on their deployments in the coming days. Starlabs Space has opened a new European subsidiary in Bremen, Germany. Starlabs says the German office will extend the company's capabilities and demonstrate its commitment to its international partners. The company aims to maintain global cooperation and permanent human presence and expand microgravity research opportunities in a commercial LEO economy. Starlabs joint venture partners currently include Voyager Space, Airbus, Mitsubishi Corporation, and MDA Space. Strategic partners also include Palantir Technologies, Hilton, Northrop Grumman, and the Ohio State University. Starlabs CEO Tim Kopra said in the press release that "We are thrilled to launch Starlabs Space Europe, a regional hub that will facilitate industrial efficiencies and expanded partnerships with allied space agencies, including the European Space Agency and its member countries. More importantly, joining American and European presence sets the stage for life beyond the ISS, one that has a global permanent crew thriving in low-Earth orbit and leading research that can transform all of humanity." iSpace says it has completed all its launch preparations ahead of the liftoff of its SMBCX Hakuto R Venture Moon Mission 2. Now Mission 2, which includes the resilience lunar lander and the tenacious micro rover, is scheduled to launch tomorrow, January 15th, at 6-11 UTC. Also on board the Falcon 9 rocket that will be transporting the iSpace mission will be Firefly Space's Blue Ghost Mission 1. Blue Ghost is targeted to land on the Moon in early March after an approximately 45-day transit to our nearest natural satellite. That mission is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Contract, or CLIPS, and will transport 10 NASA science investigations to the Moon's surface. And we hope to bring you more on that tomorrow if liftoff goes as scheduled, fingers crossed. China launched a G-long 3, or Space Dragon 3, solid rocket earlier this week, carrying 10 navigation satellites into low-Earth orbit. The vehicle lifted off from a converted sea barge off the coast of Haiyang City in the eastern province of Shandong. According to the Chinese Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, who announced the launch, the satellites were developed by the commercial company Beijing Future Navigation Technology, and the spacecraft are part of the Centus Space System, which is designed to feature 190 satellites in low-Earth orbit. Space Systems Command is expanding its partnership with the University of Southern California as part of its initiative to enhance its workforce development effort. The partnership is updating their USC Shield Executive Program in Global Space and Deterrence. The eight-month educational program is a joint effort by the USC Price School of Public Policy and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering, and stems from an initial partnership with the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. Along with serving officers, the Shield program is open to government civilians, academics, and industry experts. [Music] And that concludes today's Intel Briefing. As always, you'll find links in our show notes to further reading on all the stories I've mentioned, and today we've included two additional stories for you. One is on NASA's CubeSat Summer Program, and another is on a new 3D printer developed for space applications by researchers at the University of Glasgow. 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 could 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. 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, please share it so other professionals like you can find the show. Thank you so much, everybody. It means a lot to me. [Music] Our guest today is astro-nuclear engineer Christopher Morrison. Chris is a manager at Nuclear Methods, and I asked Chris to walk us through why nuclear power isn't as widely used in space and his thoughts about why it should be. Going back to the 1960s was just this huge topic of abundance and hope and optimism. You had Eisenhower in the '50s going around. They built a nuclear cruise liner, and he sailed around the world, atoms for peace. At one of the UN conventions, they actually brought a nuclear reactor to the UN convention so they could show all the delegates. It was all this optimism and hope. What? Wow. Yeah, it was going to be the great source of power. Unfortunately, it had connotation with nuclear weapons. As time went on, the Cold War went on, and instead of developing the technology freely, you had to worry about non-proliferation that caused a lot of constraints on the technology. You have this viable technology that can be scaled, gigawatt-scale technology. We're 20% nuclear power in the United States, and we were actually going to 100 in the late '70s and '80s. It was like a full stop on nuclear. Cost wasn't a problem back then. It was all kind of just fear-mongering. You go fast forward to today, and now the political will is there, but the real challenge is cost. We were restarting these technologies. Going into the space reactor pieces of this is that the space nukes, I've known them since 2013. They were a group of national lab folks that had been working on nuclear energy for space since the '80s, really, for a lot of them. They were getting towards their '50s and said, "We're tired of nothing happening, and we're going to make something happen." They started with a small experiment that was funded out of internal discretionary funds for less than a million dollars. They did what's called the Duff Test, which was a critical test where they little light bulb up. They didn't really build anything new, but they wanted to show NASA that, "Hey, you don't need a billion dollars to do a nuclear system. You can do it quickly and easily." With less than a million dollars, they did this test that got them green-lighted for an $18 million project where they actually built and tested at full power, the kilopower reactor. They used a lot of existing infrastructure. They knew how to make it work. They had the connections. Basically, the thinking was, at the time, it was a one kilowatt reactor. Uranium is actually very plentiful. It's a common material versus you look at RTGs, which use plutonium-238. Back in the weapons days, we had a lot of plutonium-238. We used it as the basis for our RTGs and radioisotope heaters as well, like little pellets that a lot of people know this, but actually on the solar-powered spirit and opportunity, you still had plutonium little heaters on them. Even though they were solar-powered, they had plutonium, one-watt plutonium heaters. Plum is a great heritage, but its issue is that it was being produced for a while, then we stopped producing it and we said in the '90s, "Oh, we'll just buy it from the Russians." What could go wrong? Right. You can still think of, "Yes, we can do flagship science missions, but man, we can't do very many of them." Each one of those is, on paper, they're $300 million, but really the cost is much higher for an RTG, the 100-watt, kind of the 120-watt systems, because they don't include all the infrastructure costs in that price. I've heard numbers all the way up to a billion dollars per RTG. Unfortunately in our science missions, the science mission is $5 billion. They're so worried about reliability, they don't necessarily want to consider new technology, which this was what kilopowers originally designed for us. It was a one kilowatt, so 10 times the power. Now, it was four or five times the mass, so it was larger, but the power per unit mass was very competitive. The idea was, "Oh, this can empower the science community and they can do more missions with instead of a billion dollars, they might be able to do it for 100 million." Right. So 10 times cheaper cost, 10 times more power, maybe you're a couple times more in weight. Unfortunately, just the nature of our science missions, that didn't really go anywhere. And NASA didn't pick up kilopower to become a major ... There was talk about a flight program under Steve Jurzic and some of the NASA administrators, but ultimately that didn't happen. And right now, they have a flight program with the Space Force, or I shouldn't call it necessarily a flight program yet, but it can move towards a flight program. And certainly there are other companies out there that are doing well. And now we have political will. We have about two thirds of Americans, about two thirds of politicians that are very supportive of nuclear energy, whether it's for climate change or energy independence or various reasons. So that's promising and that's led to more focus on developing these systems. So you have companies like TerraPower and Kairos and X-Energy that are all pretty big companies that have signed to basically build power stations for AI. AI is the new trend, so you had climate change. But now the difference with AI is that you have these very compact data centers that need incredible amounts of energy and a very compact power source, such as nuclear, is very complimentary to that. So it's now become very interesting. A lot of these tech companies are very interested now in nuclear in a way that they were never interested before, but it's challenging. So a lot of the regulatory environment is a bit slow and confusing. And I think we finally reached the point where most of the people that are actual appointees and in charge of the NRC are genuinely interested in both safety and not trying to hobble the industry more or less. Yeah. So you gave this really great historical context about how we got to where we are now, but are these power sources able to sort of work in conjunction with solar at this point, or can they stand alone? Or is that what we're working towards? There's a space where only nuclear power works and that includes things like permanently shadowed regions during the lunar night, anywhere in the outer solar system. If you want to go on Mars, this is where I think there's a great case for solar plus nuclear, but a benefit of nuclear as well is it's a nice, simple system. You can fly there and it doesn't require a lot of setup. With solar, there's a lot of setup. You got to roll out your panels. You got to build stuff. With nuclear, you might have to dig a hole. You might have to build a little bit of a wall, but in general, it's a very compact and another benefit is it's uranium is very so dense. So a reactor itself, it might be have mass, but its volume is extremely compact. So it's actually volumetric footprint is very small. So it's really beneficial in that way. So when you look at with solar, there's certainly areas again where only nuclear works. There's areas where solar and nuclear are very complimentary. And then there's a few areas like orbiting Earth where there's some interesting use cases where there's like radiation belts. If you know the geostationary transfer orbits, the reason they do that is if you don't quickly get into your geo orbit, you'll get fried by our radiation belts. So you have these radiation belts with trapped protons and electrons and they hit the solar panels. And to protect your solar panels, you have cover glass and some of the military grade satellites have a lot of cover glass, but it's so incredibly heavy. So if you want like an orbit that's in medium Earth orbit and for context of an Allen belts go from like 2000 kilometers up to I think it's a 10,000 kilometers. There's this whole orbital space where there are no satellites because of the radiation, but nuclear who cares? Like it's it nuclear has already has the radiation it deals with. So there's these niche applications. Yeah. And you know, really with nuclear, I also have to talk about scaling with with solar, it's linear. Like you just add more panels, right? You know, you want twice the power, you want twice the panels with nuclear, it's different because once you've achieved that critical mass of reactor, you don't really need to make the reactor bigger. Where I see nuclear coming in is if you want reliability, you want to go to the moon with people like nuclear sure makes a lot of sense. If you're worried about a solar flare as well, you know, there was the Hayabusa one mission that got hit by a solar flare and it's efficiency dropped by over 50% on its panels. So it somehow they still made the mission successful. It just took a lot of extra time. You know, I don't want to send humans somewhere where, you know, go to the moon and all of a sudden you get a solar flare, you know, you go to Mars, you get a dust storm. So I think reliability is a key feature. Now once you're on the moon and Mars and maybe you can produce your own solar panels like there might be a case or, you know, some people have talked a lot about beamed energy and what I'll talk about with beamed energy is you can beam nuclear energy just as well as you can beam solar energy. So there's no, it's a benefit to both. Yeah, it's at that point it's the delivery system, not the source, right? I mean, it's yeah. So those are just some of the like differences between solar and nuclear. And again, I'm a fan of both. But you know, I think there's 100% development and good opportunities for both. And you know, I want to say I've been impressed with like the rollout solar arrays that they're looking at for the space station. And they're going to continue to get a bit better. But I would still make the argument that nuclear is a key technology for space. It's not a key, it's not the only key technology. There are many key technologies, but it's a key technology for space. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Now, I cannot possibly start this story without first playing you this sound. Now is that a lone hailstone, a tiny explosion, a flowerpot shattering as it falls off the top of a tall ledge? Daud, isn't it? That it's kind of both familiar and unfamiliar. But no, it's not hail, an explosion or a falling flowerpot, but rather a small meteorite meeting its inevitable conclusion as it smashes into earth right at the top of the driveway of a homeowner on Prince Edward Island, Canada. That is the video from their home security camera, which captured both the sound and video of the impact when it happened this past July. In all, researchers were able to collect 95 grams of chondrite debris, and the largest chunks easily fit in the palm of your hand, like a large chunk of stone gravel. But it's estimated that this meteorite was traveling at approximately 200 kilometers a second, so something even that small would be extremely deadly, of course, if it hit somebody. But thankfully, nobody was hurt in this meteorite crash, though the homeowner who captured this smashing incident, Joe Valadum, had been standing in that exact spot just a few minutes prior before he took his dogs out for a walk. Had he lingered a little longer or had one of his pups found something particularly interesting to smell nearby, this would indeed have been a very different story, but thankfully luck was very much on his side. And now we know what it sounds like when a meteorite smacks the pavement and goes smashy. 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 Karp. Simone Petrella is our president, Peter Kilpie is our publisher, and I am your host, Marie Elvarmazes. Thanks for listening, we'll see you tomorrow. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. [MUSIC]
