Ad astra, Bill Nelson.

Today is January 22, 2025. I'm Maria Varmausus and this is T-minus. NASA calls for submissions for its sustainable business model challenge to develop commercial solutions for climate challenges. Finland signs the Artemis Accords. Carmen Space and Defense has filed a registration statement for a proposed IPO or initial public offering. Rocket Lab schedules its next launch for Kinease. Bill Nelson steps down as NASA Administrator as U.S. President Donald Trump begins his second term. And our guest today is Patrick O'Neill. He's the public affairs and outreach lead at the International Space Station, U.S. National Labs. Patrick has some exciting news to share with you all about a new segment starting here on T-minus in February, so stick around to find out more later in the show. It's been a big week of change here in the United States, and it's only Wednesday. On top of the inauguration of the 47th President, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has also officially stepped down from his position as expected. Of course, this isn't breaking news, just part and parcel of the turnover when administrations changed in the United States. As we have previously reported on the show, President Trump has nominated Jared Isaacman as the new agency chief. However, his nomination has not yet passed through the approval process. In the meantime, the White House has appointed Janet Petro, who most recently served as director of Kennedy Space Center, as acting NASA Administrator. We wanted to take a moment here at T-minus to thank Bill Nelson for over five decades of public service. Nelson is a former congressman for the state of Florida, with his district including KSC, and he also had the privilege of traveling to space in 1986. He coincidentally flew on that STS-61C mission with Charlie Bolden, who also became a NASA Administrator under the Obama administration. It was the last shuttle mission before the Challenger disaster, both occurring 39 years ago this month. Nelson shared his departing comments on social media, stating, "As I leave public office today after 53 years, thank you for the great privilege of a lifetime of serving the people of our country. I am humbled and grateful." And Bill Nelson, we wish you all the best. Moving on to our next story, Rocket Lab has scheduled the next electron launch for Internet of Things connectivity provider, Kinease. As always, there's a great mission name. This one is the IOT for You and Me mission, and it's scheduled to launch during a window that opens on February 4. The launch will take place from Rocket Lab's private orbital launch site in New Zealand. The mission is the fourth of five dedicated electron launches booked by Kinease in a multi-launch contract that will see Rocket Lab deploy an entire constellation of 25 IOT satellites. IOT for You and Me will be Rocket Lab's first mission of 2025. To our next story now, and Carmen Space and Defense has filed a registration statement for a proposed initial public offering. According to the filing, Carmen had a net income of $11 million on revenue of $254 million for the nine months ended September 30, compared with a net loss of just $340,000 on revenue of $203.7 million just a year earlier. Some of Carmen's existing stockholders identified in the registration statement are also expected to sell shares of common stock in the proposed offering. The number of shares to be offered in the IPO and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. Carmen has applied to list its common stock on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol KRMN or Kermin. Heading over to Finland now, and Finland has become the 53rd nation committing to the safe and responsible exploration of space that benefits humanity. Willa Reidemann, who is Finland's Minister of Economic Affairs, signed the Artemis Accords in front of an audience of Finnish space officials and workshop attendees. NASA and Finland have a long history of collaboration, and most recently Finland has been working on the upcoming Intuitive Machines 2 delivery to the moon under NASA's Artemis campaign and Commercial Lunar Payload Services, aka CLIPS initiative. And that is because Intuitive Machines will deliver a lunar LTE 4G communication system that was developed by Finnish company Nokia, you might have heard of them. Its US subsidiary, Nokia of America, was selected as part of NASA's tipping point opportunity to advance a lunar surface communication system that could help humans and robots explore more of the moon. And speaking of NASA, NASA has opened up calls for the agency's Sustainable Business Model Challenge. They're looking for entrepreneurs, startups, and researchers to leverage NASA's publicly available Earth System science data to develop commercial solutions for climate challenges. Organizations have until June 13th to submit proposals that bridge the gap between vast climate data and actionable solutions that support climate resilience and decision making. And that concludes our Intel briefing for today. As always, you'll find links to further reading in our show notes, and today we have included two additional stories for you to read. The first is an announcement from Flexential Links, who is partnering with Lone Star Data on their next lunar data center mission. And another is a Reuters article suggesting that the new US administration may likely axe the space council. Hey T-minus crew, if you find this podcast useful, please do us a favor and share a five star reading 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. Our guest today is Patrick O'Neill, Public Affairs and Outreach Lead at the International Space Station US National Laboratory. I spoke to Patrick about a new collaboration that we have planned with the ISS National Lab starting in February. I'm Patrick O'Neill, I'm the Public Affairs and Outreach Lead for the International Space Station National Laboratory. Patrick, I don't always say who to everybody's intro, but I'm just so jazzed to be speaking with you because we're going to be doing something so cool and we're announcing it to the world today. So I don't want to be the one to break the cool news. I feel like this should be you telling me about what we're going to be doing. Normally, I just write press releases. So this is awesome. I get to go out there and verbally talk about news. You get to tell us. So before we get into the telling of what that is, maybe we should start with what the ISS National Lab is first and then get into the cool news. This is a bit of a teaser. So why don't we start with that? We can certainly do that. So the International Space Station National Laboratory was created through an act of Congress where they wanted to open up access and opportunity for researchers to leverage this unique platform in low Earth orbit. And so you looked at all the great things that NASA was doing on the space station, but a lot of that was focused on better understanding of how to live and work in space, especially for our astronauts along duration missions. But during a lot of the science and the knowledge that was gained, we were able to realize, man, what if we were able to take some of that knowledge that we can do in space and bring it to the people here on Earth? Could we improve pharmaceuticals? Could we create more effective products for us as consumers here on Earth? And that's kind of the genesis of the ISS National Lab. So we get up to 50% of the research allocation that goes up and down from the space station. We get up to 50% of the astronauts' crew time dedicated towards supporting research on the station. So we have a very large footprint on the research portfolio and the things that are happening up there. So it's a really exciting environment, but we had the chance to work with Fortune Favrener companies, innovative startups, academia, nonprofit, other government agencies, all with the intention of leveraging space to benefit life here on Earth. While also developing a sustainable and robust economy in low Earth orbit. Honestly, the headlines that come out of the work that you all do, like Collectively You All, are honestly some of my favorite things to ever read about and talk about because it is just that is the future that I think we all want to be building. And like you all are making that happen. So I just, I love that, Kudos. It's incredibly important work. So now that we have, now that everybody sort of knows who you are, what you all mean, the amazing stuff that you do, we're going to be collaborating in a really cool way. I'm so jazzed about this. I can barely contain my excitement. So without further ado, why don't we introduce our audience to what it is that we're going to be doing soon? Yeah. So as I mentioned, you know, part of our job is to enable access and opportunity for researchers and companies to leverage the space station. But part of that is also being able to communicate to the public what is going on up there. And so we're going to be working with your team to do just that. Researchers, hardware partners, those that are involved in the space station community having the opportunity to talk about what they're doing on the space station and why they're doing it. And so I'm really excited about bringing this to your audience. And hopefully that will also kind of get people thinking about ways in which they can use the space station, whether that be this space station, future space platforms, or even joining NASA in their journey to the moon and Mars. I love it. I cannot tell you how much when we were floating this idea for the segment. I'm like, yes, I want to do that so much because these conversations are going to be probably a little more in depth than the ones that we've had in the past on this show. So we're going to spend a little more time really getting to know a bit more about what the experts are working on, what the teams are working on, you know, the kind of research that they're doing, what they're building, all that good stuff where it's just like, this is what we want space to be doing. It's so, so cool. I mean, space is becoming so much more democratized. I mean, there's so many people that are getting involved in this. You know, again, that's what's fun about this collaboration is, you know, there might be the researchers one week there or one month that are talking with you, but it might be, you know, one of our hardware partners that's talking about a myriad of investigations. It might be people from NASA. It might be from some of our launch providers. You know, so hopefully it's the opportunity to really give strong insights into a lot of things that are happening on station and the valuable contributions it's giving all of us here. Absolutely. I'm, I'm, I've said it five million times. I'm still looking forward to it. And often I've found with these interviews is that sometimes an interview that I go into where I'm like, I don't know. I mean, we'll see what I end up learning. It ends up blowing my mind every time. Something completely unexpected where you think, you know, where it's going to go. And you find out like, you came up with this idea. How? Or this ended up having this application where it's just incredible. And I've used a lot of superlatives. So I'll try to stop. I mean, I'll give you a fun example. There's a research team from Emory University that we've been working with for the better part of 10 years now. And they just had one of their latest investigations published in a biomaterials journal, a top tier journal. But if it's kind of fun because I had the chance more than 10 years ago to actually meet the researcher themselves when we were doing kind of an outreach event at Emory University. And she was one of like eight people that was in the audience. And afterwards she came up to me and she was asking questions. She's like, this is really cool stuff. I want to do stem cell research in space. And I said, well, funny enough, we have a research solicitation that is open right now focused on stem cells. She applied for it. And then she's flown multiple times since then. And I had the chance to go and meet with her last year. We were doing a video about the research they were flying. And she brought me back into the room and she said, this was the room where you changed my life. This is how you changed how it was that I thought about science. And since then, space has been at the forefront of what it is that my team is thinking about. And so it's conversation stories like that where hopefully we can bring that to your audience as well, where it's just thinking outside of the box. And we typically live in this world of like a 3D universe, but what if you added an extra dimension to that and you're now able to have a 4D perspective? What types of things could you learn? And hopefully through this collaboration, we'll be able to impart some of the things that people have learned along the way. I'm so excited. So thank you. Thank you to you. Thank you to the teams, everybody that we're going to be working with. It's going to be so great. And I know our audience is going to learn a lot. And I cannot wait to hear stories like what you just mentioned about that imagination being sparked because my goodness, is there anything more gratifying than that? What you just told me, I'm like, oh, that is like, that's just incredible. You've got to have a lot of stories like that. Yeah. But the good news is that I know those people and we can bring them to your audience so we can bring Dr. Shoe over and she can talk about the research that she did. And she can talk about how we got to where we are right now. I'm going to be learning so much that's going to hurt my brain and I'm looking forward to that immensely. So, Patrick, thank you so much. The best opportunity and I know our audience is going to love this. So I'm so jazzed. Thanks again for speaking with me today. Thank you for this amazing collaboration. Thank you for looking forward to it as well. Absolutely. Let's go. We'll be right back. Welcome back. You down with Flattly? Yeah, you know me. And if you still send physical mail through the post and you know, some of us actually still do. In the United States, there are now two new priority mail and priority mail express stamp options for you to express your incredible space nerdery. Monday, the US Post Office unveiled Spiral Galaxy NGC628 and Star Cluster IC248 stamps. Say that five times fast. And both images are as dazzling and colorful and swirly vortexy as you might imagine and come to us via what else but the web space telescope. Stamps of this kind tend to be physically a bit larger than the first class mail stamp. In other words, the regular envelope stamp that adorned the holiday cards you may or may not have received in the mail. Bigger real estate lets these cosmic images really shine. Web's stunning pillars of creation and the cosmic cliffs of Kareena and Abula have made their mark on priority mail just last year. Both of these new stamps were officially first issued on Monday at the post office in, drum roll please, Big Sky Montana. Can I hand it to the USPS? That's cute. And that is it for T-minus for January 22nd, 2025, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For 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 and 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, to 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'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, Maria Varmausus. Thank you so much for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. Bye. [end] [MUSIC]