Today is February 3rd, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. >> T-minus. >> Twenty seconds to LLN. >> Go for Launch. [MUSIC] >> Teledyne Technologies completes its $710 million acquisition of Accelotos Technologies Aerospace and Defense Business. >> Four. >> Sierra Space successfully completed in past its joint test 10B milestone in collaboration with NASA on the Dream Chaser space plane. >> Three. >> China completes in orbit testing of a new power unit. >> Two. >> A six-person crew from Russia and Belarus have completed a 366-day analog astronaut mission. >> One. >> The US Space Agency has paused all analyst and assessment groups work to review and ensure compliance with presidential actions. [MUSIC] >> Today will be the first installment of the monthly Ask Aegis Space Law segment. Bailey Reicheld and Jack Shelton from Aegis Space Law will be walking us through some of the frequently asked questions that space companies have when it comes to the laws of working here in the United States space industry. They're providing fascinating insights for both startups and established space companies. So join us after today's headlines. [MUSIC] Happy Monday, everybody. Hopefully it's back to business as usual for most of you that joined us in Florida last week for Commercial Space Week. I'm looking forward to sharing some of the chats that we captured in Spacecom and the coming weeks. Now on to today's intelligence briefing. If you've been paying attention to what's going on in the United States politics over the last two weeks, then I'm sure like me, you cannot keep up with the sheer amount of information that's being disseminated. It seems that's also the case for US federal agencies. Not only were all DEI initiatives revoked and hiring stopped, but it seems that committees and groups are also taking a pause while they figure out what's going to happen moving forward. At the US Space Agency, Kathleen Vander Kaden of NASA's Science Mission Directorate sent a memo informing all colleagues that things are going to slow down for now for all analysis or assessment groups, which she refers to as AG. And the memo read this, as NASA continues to review and ensure compliance with presidential actions, we are requesting that you please pause all meetings and activities of planetary science analysis and assessment groups. Please make your communities aware of this request. If you are no longer the chair of one of these AGs or AG associated groups, please let me know so I can ensure the appropriate folks receive this information. And it should be noted that the affected groups are not formal advisory committees governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act, but do provide findings about the state of NASA's astrophysics and planetary science programs. We're sure that a few people are being left in limbo between the pause of these groups and the resignation information that was shared last week. We will be watching closely about how NASA, NOAA, and the FAA, and other space-related agencies navigate all the new policies coming from the White House. Meanwhile, the Russian Academy of Sciences has completed a 366-day-long analog astronaut mock moon mission. The Institute of Biomedical Problems, also known as IBMP, conducted the year-long biomedical isolation experiment called Sirius 23. The Sirius project, which stands for Scientific International Research in Unique Terrestrial Station, launched in collaboration with NASA's Human Research Program in 2017. Previously, they conducted shorter experiments lasting just 17, 120, and 240 days. But for this mission, a crew of six analog astronauts from Russia and Belarus lived and worked in a sealed environment. Russia says the mission will aid in solving the challenges of isolation, resource scarcity, and physiological stress expected during future missions. And China has completed the testing of a new power switch and converter device built with third-generation semiconductor materials. And the device was designed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences, also known as CAS, and was tested onboard China's Tiangong Space Station. CAS says the unit shows promise for use in electric vehicles and aerospace devices due to its ability to operate at higher temperatures, withstand higher voltage, and improve power density. Power unit is a silicon carbide or SIC device made of a chemical compound from silicon and carbon. According to CAS, the device has an efficiency of 95%, which is compared to the 85% efficiency of traditional silicon devices. The device is expected to help power future Chinese missions, including deep space exploration. Back to the US now, and Sierra Space successfully completed in past its Joint Test 10B Milestone in collaboration with NASA on the DreamChaser spaceplane. The test demonstrated several capabilities of DreamChaser, including its ability to power on, air cool, and exchange data with multiple powered payloads inside its pressurized cabin. Sierra Space says this is an important progression towards DreamChaser's planned mission to resupply the International Space Station. By achieving this milestone, Joint Test 10B confirms that DreamChaser will accommodate various payloads. It demonstrated that Sierra Space can provide power within a specific voltage range and maintain the necessary environmental requirements for payloads. It also ensured all vehicle and payload data were seen in both Sierra Space's Mission Control Room in Lewisville, Colorado, and in the payload support control rooms at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama. If you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do here, we are at T-Minus Daily on Instagram. And that's where we post videos and pictures from events like commercial spaceweek, by the way. Excursions and even some behind-the-scenes treats for you. Links to all that are in the show notes. Hope you'll join us there. [Music] Bailey Reichelt and Jack Shelton from Aegis Space Law are bringing us a new segment. If you have questions that you'd like them to tackle in Ask Aegis Space Law, then just send us an email at space@entuk.com. [Music] Hi, welcome to this monthly episode of Space Law FAQs. I'm Bailey Reichelt, and this is my partner Jack Shelton. We're the co-founders of Aegis Space Law. And we're here to answer your questions about space law. But first, what even is space law? Jack, can you tell us? What we focus on the most are the laws that apply to businesses in the space industry. So broadly, when people think about what is space law, often they think about international treaties like the Outer Space Treaty and the Liability Convention and things like that. And while those do have some impact on businesses, it's really not what we see day to day. Far more often, we're concerned with things like export controls and FCC licensing and launch licensing and things like that. So what we're going to focus on are the things that actually impact businesses who are trying to put things into space and do other things corollary to the space industry. Good. Excited to be doing the first episode of our Space Law podcast. Yeah, so we're going to be doing some FAQs that we frequently get, as the FAQ name implies, related to the space industry. And Bailey, I think you've got a couple queued up for us today. Well, absolutely. So if you guys missed kind of our intro podcast, we're going to be talking through some questions with Jack being the attorney as he is. And I'm going to be one of our clients asking one of the questions we get asked all of the time. So hopefully you can step into the shoes I'm going to set forth for you and glean something useful for your space company. All right. So, Jack, I am representing a foreign company. And I've been told really good things about putting my footprint in the US market, that if I want to be in the space industry, the US market is the place I have to have a footprint. I know I need legal help to do this. I have no idea where to start, or even if it's a good idea to come to the US. Do you have any initial thoughts for me on how I could decide if it's even worth hiring counsel to come to the US? Yeah. So there's typically from what we see three reasons why companies come to the United States. The first is maybe the easiest one to solve for, which is when you've got a foreign company that let's say they just want to make sales in the United States. And if they just want to make sales to US companies, sometimes we've seen where US companies are more comfortable dealing with another US company, perhaps because of export control reasons. Sometimes those reasons aren't that good, but they just feel more comfortable dealing with a US domestic company. And so we've seen some companies go ahead and set up an LLC in the United States just to have essentially a sales office. It's not entirely necessary to have that LLC. You could just be a foreign company selling to US companies. However, because of that comfort level, sometimes people choose to set up an LLC. Another reason is if a company is hoping to get funding in the United States, often they're going to want to set up maybe a Delaware C Corp so that they can receive the funding in a Delaware C Corp and raise with VC capital, for example. When raising VC funds, typically Delaware C Corp is what we recommend just because it's what investors are familiar with and you're probably more likely to get investors that way. Of course, US investors sometimes they're happy to invest in foreign companies as well. So that's a little bit of stuff you're going to have to figure out, determining whether you're necessarily losing out on investment opportunities by staying abroad. And then I think the third reason why is a lot of companies want to get involved in certain kinds of government contracts, particularly SBIR contracts and STTR contracts. These are Small Business Innovation and Research and Small Business Technology Transfer arrangements, both of which require there to be a US company, which is more than 50% US owned. And so we've seen foreign companies come to the US, partner with one or more US persons and set up an LLC for that purpose so that they can get one of those contracts, which they essentially treat as seed funding so that they can pursue some research and development and get a strong foothold. Oh, wow. Okay. So that's a lot to think about. So first off, I need to figure out the best kind of entity and that seems to depend on if I really want to take investment or not. It might not be a deal breaker. Maybe I could still get investment if I just stay outside the US. But it also sounds like I need to kind of understand what my ownership structure would be. Yeah. Because if I want to take certain types of contracts if I'm going after a certain market, and it sounds like you said the government contracts, like government, a certain subset of government contracts in the US, I need to have a very specific structure. That's right. It's really, as far as I can think of right now, the only ones I'm aware of are the SBIR and STTR contracts in which you have to be more than 50% US owned and established in the United States. There might be some other types of government contracts where you need to be a US company. But the SBIR and STTR arrangements are the ones that we see the most often. And they require more than 50% US ownership. And so that requires structuring in a certain way. It kind of takes a long time to go into about exactly how we do that. And given that we've got a few more things to hit, we probably won't go deep into that today. But we can cover that on another one, I think, how particularly we would structure such things. Great. And that investment question, I mean, we're always going to need money. And I thought if you wanted investment from US investors, you needed to move to the US. Sounds like that might not be true. Oh, no. We've currently seen foreign companies getting US investments. So it's not necessarily true. But I mean, let's say that you're approaching 10 different investors. I mean, I imagine that one out of those 10 would say, now I only invest in Delaware seed corpse. I only invest in US companies. And so there's certainly a possibility that you're losing out on some of your opportunities there by being a foreign company seeking US investments. All right. So if I do come to the US, but let's say my entire structure is foreign, all my employees currently are foreign. I'm foreign. If I come to the US, and I want to take investment, am I going to have any other issues just because my entire staff is foreign? Oh, gosh. Well, there's a number of things to think about when it comes to foreign persons, particularly when you need to think about US export controls. So let's say that you are coming to the United States and you begin actually developing technology in the United States. Well, that technology that's being developed in the United States can't, well, possibly it's restricted for export control. A lot of space technology is restricted under the ITAR, International Traffic and Arms Regulations, or the EAR, Export Administration Regulations. And what that means is that sometimes you cannot share that technology with foreign persons without first having a license from the US government. So you need to put procedures in place to determine when you need a license. And sometimes you need to get those foreign persons licensed to receive the technology, or you get your foreign entity licensed, and then often they can share it with the employees of the foreign entity. That is a lot to think about. So if I take this back to my team, and we decide we definitely want to be in the US, we want to establish some sort of entity, and it sounds like I need to think a little bit further about the type of entity, and maybe where it is depending on if I need investors or not. But what kind of timelines do you think I should give them for how long this might take? Is there any way I could determine the timeline or the cost? That's a pretty broad question. If we're talking about just really quickly setting up a simple LLC, and it depends on the state, but let's look at Colorado, for example. In 15 minutes, I can create an LLC in Colorado. I can just go online, go onto their website, create an LLC real fast. It's really simple. I'm probably going to want to put some, if we have, let's say, a US partner who's going to be our 51% owner, okay, we're going to want to put some paperwork, a governance structure in place. So we're looking at spending some resources for attorneys to put that governance structure in place to make sure that there actually is that US ownership and control for that kind of a structure. And so that's going to take some legal resources. And so just depending on how much back and forth is required among the partners to get comfortable with the paperwork and the governance structure, maybe you're looking at a month or two in terms of putting that together. Possibly the bigger timeline issue that you're going to have with respect to CMMC compliance, particularly if you're dealing with the defense industry with the DoD, you're going to have DFARS flowdowns requiring CMMC compliance, the cybersecurity maturity model certification. And that's going to require you to have a certain level of cybersecurity in place, which might take quite a bit of time to actually put in place. And so gosh, that might take up to a year to put together. Thank you. I feel like to have a much bigger understanding of what the undertaking is. This is not something we're going to get spied up in a week. It's something we really need to think about as part of a broader strategy for our business and our growth plan. So thank you. Bailey, thanks so much for that question. And everybody, if you have any other questions that you want to ask us that we can answer on the future podcast, please reach out to space@intuk.com. Send us an email and we can answer your questions. Thanks. We'll be right back. Welcome back. It has been almost five years exactly since the tweet heard around the world by the San Miguel Sheriff of Colorado. And it goes like this, large boulder the size of a small boulder is completely blocking eastbound lane highway 145. Please use caution and watch for emergency vehicles in the area. Ah, yes, that good old large boulder the size of a small boulder, probably because COVID was bearing down upon the world and we were all feeling a bit on edge. But honestly, that post spawned a bazillion memes. And I do like a funny comparison like that. But this one I've been hearing lately, not so much. Large asteroid the size of a city killer asteroid has a 1% chance of impacting Earth eight years from now. Yeah, not so great to be very precise. NASA's JPL's latest calculations say asteroid 2024 YR4 has a mere 1.6 chance of unleashing an airburst the size of an eight megaton bomb somewhere on Earth on December 22nd, 2032. So mark your calendars. The expectation is that 2024 YR4, if it does come in contact with Earth, it'd be akin to the famous Tunguska event in 1908 where there was some kind of massive airburst from a celestial body that just pancake millions of trees across thousands of square kilometers in Siberia. And something like that could flatten the city or trigger tsunami if it happened at the right place near coast. But before we place a frantic call to our planetary defense teams who are still busy analyzing data from their successful revenge on the dinosaurs, dark asteroid impact mission in 2022. Don't panic. Chances are as asteroid 2024 YR4 continues on its merry way, the likelihood of it making any kind of impact with Earth will approach zero. But it will make a close fly by in 2028, so perhaps it'll just wave nicely as it zooms safely by. That's it for T-minus for February 3rd, 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. Your feedback ensures that we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry if you like our show. Please share our rating and review in your podcast app. Also, please fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com. We're privileged that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine 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. N2K makes it easy for companies to optimize your biggest investment, your people. We make you smarter about your teams while making your team smarter. Learn how at n2k.com. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iban. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I'm your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
