ATMOS, don’t call it a comeback.

[MUSIC] Today is February 6th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmasus and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] >> T-minus, 20 seconds to L-O-N, T-minus, open aboard. [MUSIC] >> Live. >> Astrobotics Griffon Lander will deliver an Astrolab rover to the moon as part of Astrobotics Griffon Mission 1. >> Four. >> The head of the Russian space agency, Russ Cosmos, has been dismissed by the Kremlin. >> Three. >> Orbex has signed a new customer agreement with Space Logistics and Transportation Company, Deorbit. >> Two. >> Spanish defense company, Indra, agrees to buy 89.7% of satellite operator, Hispasac, for 725 million euros. >> One. >> Atmos becomes the first European company to obtain a reentry license for its Phoenix capsule. [MUSIC] >> And today we're bringing you another great chat from Spacecom. Amalak Bhadesha is the CEO and co-founder of Orbital Composites. Find out about their in-space assembly and manufacturing vision later in the program. [MUSIC] Let's dive into Thursday's Intel briefing, shall we? Germany's Atmos space cargo, best known as Atmos, is the first European company to secure an FAA reentry license for its Phoenix reentry capsule. Phoenix is targeted to launch on the bandwagon 3 rideshare mission with SpaceX, no earlier than April 2025. The capsule is aiming to complete two orbits around the earth before attempting its atmospheric reentry. The Phoenix mission is the first of a planned series of orbital flights designed to refine Atmos' technology. The inaugural flight is aiming to gather critical data on the capsule and its inflatable heat shield. The mission aims to accelerate the development of a versatile and robust reentry platform for commercial applications. And the mission is expected to conclude with the prototype's demise during reentry. Yep, they're not expecting it to fully land, but they do believe that the test flight will provide valuable flight data for the next iteration of their platform, called the what else? Phoenix 2 capsule. We wish them the best of luck. Spanish defense company Indra has agreed to buy 89.7% of satellite operator Hispasat for 725 million euros. However, the agreement is still pending regulatory approvals. Indra is 28% owned by the Spanish government and recently focused on its defense and aerospace businesses to benefit from European countries' increased military budgets. Indra says the acquisition is the result of the company's desire to guarantee the control of communications in space. The agreement includes the purchase of Hispasat's 43% stake in the social capital of Hisdasat, which is a company in which Indra already has a 7% holding. Lots of percentages in the story today. Indra's space will be the name of the new fully integrated space company, bringing together both the civil and military offers and positioning Indra as one of the leading European players in the space sector. Over to the UK now. Orbex has announced a new customer agreement with space logistics and transportation company Deorbit. Under the agreement Deorbit UK will have access to two launches aboard Orbex Prime, which is the company's micro launcher, over the course of the next three years. Orbex is aiming to launch Prime from Saxaverd spaceport in Scotland with the first launch expected later this year. Orbex has a dedicated launch pad and the ability to launch 10 flights per year from the Shetland launch facility. Jonathan First, Chief Corporate Development Officer at Deorbit said in the press release that Orbex Prime's missions will provide valuable insights into the UK's orbital launch capabilities and expand the orbit's portfolio of orbital launch solutions. It is an exciting time to be part of the UK space industry and we look forward to contributing to its continued growth and innovation. Heading over to Russia now and Roscosmos is having a tough week with delays to their first launch of the year. And now the head of the Russian space agency has been dismissed by the Kremlin. Yesterday, the Kremlin released a statement that Yuri Borisov, who had headed Roscosmos since July 2022, had been replaced by Dmitry Bakunov, a deputy transport minister who ran a satellite company before joining the government. The Kremlin has downplayed the dismissal as a "rotation" and say that they have had no complaints against Borisov. And Venturi Astrolab, better known as just Astrolab, has announced that Astrobotics' Griffin Lander will deliver an Astrolab rover to the moon as part of Astrobotics' Griffin Mission 1. The Flip rover, which stands for Flex Lunar Innovation Platform, is aiming to be deployed on the lunar south pole. And the Astrobotics mission, originally carrying the Viper payload as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Initiative, is still scheduled for delivery at the end of this year. [MUSIC PLAYING] And that concludes today's Intel Briefing. Handing it over to our senior producer, Alice Karous. Now, Alice, what stories didn't make it into the show today that our audience should know about? Thanks, Maria. We have two quick reads to increase your space knowledge today. One on US and Japan's bilateral national security space cooperation efforts. And the other is an announcement from Momentum, who secured a new multimillion dollar contract to support NASA's space infrastructure. And for those listeners, where can they find those stories? All the stories that we mentioned throughout our show can always be found in the selected reading section of our show notes. Or alternatively, you can find them on our website, space.intuk.com, and click on this episode title. Hey, team, my name's Crue. If your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership or recruit talent, T-minus can help. We'd love to hear from you. Just send us an email at space.intuk.com, or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] Our guest today is Amalak Bhadesha, and he is the CEO and co-founder of Orbital Composites. And I caught up with Amalak at SpaceCom in Florida and asked him about Orbital Composites' business plan. [MUSIC PLAYING] The goal is to be able to put people on Mars. To do that, you actually need to build things over there. And to even get to there, there's a lot of advantages to build these things directly in space. So in space manufacturing, in our mind, is the next big, hugely disruptive technology after reusable rockets. Because it's a step-function change in the cost of building infrastructure off Earth, whether in space or on another celestial bodies. And it's a hard, hard problem. But that's the goal we set off with. And then we peel the layers back. So if you want to print a spaceship in space-- With what? Yeah. What do you need? What materials are you going to use? What kind of core capabilities? So if you look at that, the most common materials are you need some kind of material that holds things together. You need something that reinforces it. And then you have copper wires, because there are signals going around everywhere. Those are the three most foundational things. And when you can put them together in creative ways, interesting things could happen. So for example, now, if you look at 3D printing, you can make all kinds of shapes. But it's not strong enough. It needs to get stronger. So what do we do? We want to make it stronger by reinforcing it with some kind of reinforcement mechanism, most commonly carbon fiber. Yep. But it could be any other types of fibers. It turns out that's not really being done at the time. And even still, today, it's pretty rare. So that was one thing. Then the other thing is, well, not 3D printers are first of all small. They only kind of print in this x, y, and z direction. So we don't want to be constrained. So then the other part of this was, what motion platforms make sense? So we chose to go with robotics, a standard industrial 6-axis robot. But don't stop at one. What if we can use many robots together? OK, a very complex system. Very complex system, highly autonomous. And I call it actually because I came from the semiconductor world, I call it the GPU of robotics. Meaning parallel processing, parallel printing. How do you go faster? You can go faster by printing faster. But that comes out a huge sacrifice of print resolution, right, and other problems. So instead, the better way to go is to go parallel. As opposed to in serial. In serial, which is a classic CPU versus GPU. Right. Right? And then in the early days, people hated GPUs. Like, oh, we have to program it differently. So we're building these collections of technologies, right? There is the materials aspect. There is how do you move those materials around to make more interesting shapes? Yeah, in 3D space. In 3D space, not in planar space. And then there's a scalability aspect. Can you only print inside your little box? Or can you make things that actually at the right scale? Right. Right? And you kind of need to address all these problems. Yeah. Which are relevant on Earth and relevant in space. Of course. Yeah, and I would imagine with your background in semiconductors, which is so much materials, material science there. I mean, that feels like a very natural fit of saying to you before we start. I was like, will you scratch a surface of space? It's material science all the way down. And it's just amazing to me how many times that adage seems to come true. And have you all had to basically come up with new materials? So we like to say we don't invent chemistry, but we change the physics. And this is a really important point. And the reason for that is that, first of all, there are very large chemistry companies. And so if you invent new chemistry, it takes a long time to incredibly capex intensive to scale that up in production. But even more importantly is the qualification timelines are very, very long. And you can't really easily compete with these material companies. So what we found other tricks, right? And oftentimes what happened is because in composites, especially, the manufacturing is constrained by the manufacturing equipment. Yeah. Yeah. So as a consequence of that, people stopped tweaking and playing with the physics. And everybody has limited themselves to the chemistry. And so we have interesting materials, but it's because we changed the physics, not the chemistry, which means we can use existing materials that are already qualified-- In a very different way. And do that much faster, but still achieve incredible new effects that are not possible with traditional forms of material. All right. That is a great tee up to the next question of-- so what are those new things that you're achieving? So the long-term goal is building what I call gigafactors in space. And the goal is to be able to, instead of launching these megastructures, if you look at what it costs to build space stations, it's tens and billions of dollars. If you look at what it cost us to send a telescope up there, these things are incredibly expensive. Why are they expensive? Because you have to test it to death before launch. But you can't get it wrong, right? You can't get it wrong. And the launch is like a 12-minute car crash. So Cole, the founder of Orbital, he likes to tell the story that, look, it's like you have a Christmas tree. You've got all these ornaments on it, decorated. And then you want to put it in a 12-minute car crash and then hope that after the crash, it's all still intact. That's satellite engineering in a nutshell. And what ISAM does is it changes that paradigm. Yeah, it does. We initially ship materials up and just start making things over there and start assembling them. And you can start building much larger structures than what's possible and get around the attorney of launch fairing, right? Even Starship, the launch fairing is still only eight meters. That's not huge. We want to build 100-meter antennas, one kilometer scale antennas. You might ask why. Well, so-- Yeah, for what end? Yeah. Two of the biggest markets on Earth are energy and communications. Now imagine you want global scale energy, global scale communications. The common denominator between those two things is giant antennas. Yep. Which sometimes when we try to send them up, they fail. They don't work. Because the biggest antennas we send up are what's called unfurlable antennas. Basically, like umbrellas. And it turns out those hinges are quite problematic. And they always get stuck. So there are a very large number of commercial and defense satellites up there which never unfurl properly, and they're just sitting there dead. Billions and billions of dollars spent on this. Just most recently, Viacet had this problem. I was just thinking about them specifically. They had this 22-meter antenna. Yeah, I was very excited about it. And it just refused to open. Yep. I remember that story with her. So that's precisely the problem. Why deal with that problem? If you start manufacturing and assembling these things in space, you can bypass that problem. But they also have a limit. You can only make umbrellas so large until it becomes problematic. So you have a hard limit on how big these can get. We're going to shatter those limits with in-space servicing, assembly, and manufacturing. So the largest market's global-scale communication, direct to cell. Yep. There's billions of cell phones. We're all moving towards it right now. Yeah. If your satellites could talk to it, that's a huge market. And then obviously with Space Base Solar, you can build global-scale technology for energy. Common denominator antenna. Now, you need giant antennas. And the only way to really make them at that scale is to make them over there. Makes sense. Yep. And so we have a great partnership on Space Base Solar with Vertisolus, which is a startup leading the charge there. And then we're working with the Space Force on the building antennas for other use cases. You need big antennas. If you want to look finer on the ground, big antennas. Yep. If you want to look deeper into space, bigger antennas help. So space to gain awareness. Yep. You need bigger antennas. If you want to go further into space, you want to build a new high bandwidth deep space network, you need big antennas. Big antennas is the answer to all your problems in life. So that's how I look at it. So we want to be the company that figures out how to build giant antennas in space. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] We'll be right back. Welcome back. NASA is getting ready for their very first live stream on Twitch from the International Space Station. That will mean something to some of us. And for the rest, well, sorry. Now, NASA's been on Twitch for a while. And it's a live streaming platform popular with gamers. And they've already got over a million subscribers to their channel, not bad. But live streaming from the ISS will be a first. And that's coming up on February 12, 1145 Eastern. So mark those calendars. It'll be a Twitch exclusive, so twitch.tv/nasa, by the way. And it's called Live From Space, NASA's first Twitch Convo from the Space Station, Astronomogy. So OK, why Twitch? Well, for those of us who use the platform a lot, it's kind of a place you go to hang out in the background of your day. And there are a lot of Twitch users who are fiercely loyal to the platform. So doing outreach through Twitch is a great way to meet a big audience where they already are. Up until now-ish, NASA has been sort of just mirroring video content on there. But this upcoming ISS chat will be specifically made for Twitch, which means to me, presumably, the astronauts will be able to see all the running commentary in chat. That would be both Don Pettit and Matt Dominick, who will be talking to Twitch users. And I'm sure it's going to be interesting to see how they react to how Twitch viewers react in chat to someone streaming from about 250 miles above the Earth's surface. That's it for T-minus for February 6, 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. 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 Eiben. Peter Kielbied is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. T-minus. God bless. (thunder rumbling) [BLANK_AUDIO]