Today is February 11th, 2025. I'm Maria Vermazus and this is T-minus. T-minus. Twenty seconds to alloy. T-minus. Open aboard. Five. The Texas Space Commission has awarded over $47 million in grants to space companies operating in the state. Germany has committed an additional 870,000 euros to support the development of an offshore launch platform that will operate from the North Sea. China launches its first Long March 8A carrying communication satellites for the Gwo Wong constellation. DARPA selects two universities to demonstrate novel technology for building future large structures in space. NASA selects SpaceX to provide the launch service for the Pandora mission, which will study at least 20 known exoplanets and their host stars. And it is International Day for Women and Girls in Science. We'll have more on that later in the show. And we're highlighting Madison Fian in today's chat. Madison is the founder and CEO of SpaceCopy, looking at in-situ 3D printing and space using available materials. It is a really fascinating concept, so stick around to find out more. Welcome to this Tuesday's Intel Briefing. Let's get into it. NASA has selected SpaceX to provide the launch service for the Pandora mission. The selection is part of NASA's Vader, or Venture Class Acquisition of Dedicated and Rideshare Launch Services contract. The contract allows the agency to make fixed price, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity awards using Vader's five-year ordering period, with a maximum total value of $300 million across all contracts. Pandora is a joint effort between NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California. The mission aims to study at least 20 known exoplanets and their host stars to find out how changes in stars affect our observations of exoplanet atmospheres. During its one-year primary mission, Pandora will observe each exoplanet 10 times, observing 424 hours each visit. It'll capture critical data about the planet and its host star during transits, which is the event where a planet crosses in front of the star that it orbits. The satellite will use a 17-inch-wide all-aluminum telescope to simultaneously measure the visible and near-infrared brightness of the host star and obtain near-infrared spectra of the transiting planet. This combined data will enable the science team to determine the properties of stellar surfaces and cleanly separate star and planetary signals. Pandora is due to launch later this year. DARPA has selected two universities to demonstrate novel technology for building future large structures in space. DARPA, or the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, is a U.S. government agency that develops new technologies for the military. And the selection is part of the third and final phase of its NOMAD program, and the program plans to conduct a pair of small-scale orbital demonstrations to evaluate novel materials and assembly processes in space. DARPA says that Caltech and the University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign demonstrated tremendous advances in the first two phases and have now partnered in Phase 3 with space launch companies to conduct in-space testing of their novel assembly processes and materials. Caltech is focused on mass-efficient designs for in-space manufacturing and has teamed with Momentus to demonstrate its technology aboard the Momentus Vigoride Orbital Services Vehicle, which will launch on the SpaceX Falcon 9 Transporter-16 mission scheduled for February 2026. The University of Illinois-Urbana-Champaign is focused on in-space materials and manufacturing and has developed a high-precision in-space composite-forming process, and they have partnered with Voyager Space, aiming for launch to the International Space Station aboard NASA's commercial resupply mission NG-24, which is currently scheduled for April 2026. Moving over to China now, and China has launched its long-anticipated maiden flight of the Long March 8A rocket. The spacecraft lifted off from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center, carrying a group of satellites into orbit for the national Guowang Mega Constellation. The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology developed the Long March 8A, sharing that the vehicle is a modified version of the Long March 8. Makes sense. The company says it boasts an increased payload capacity and enhanced mission adaptability, and will provide crucial support for large-scale satellite constellation deployment. No details are immediately available about the amount of satellites that it transported in today's launch. Let's head on over to Europe now, and Germany has committed an additional 870,000 euros to support the development of an offshore launch platform that will operate from the North Sea. The North Sea launch platform is being developed by the German Offshore Spaceport Alliance known as GOSA. GOSA is a joint venture by Traktabel DOC Offshore, MediaMobile, OHB, and Harron Shipping Services. The German government committed an additional 2 million euros to the project, and the proposed platform will be constructed on the 170-meter-long Combi DOC 1 vessel, and will accommodate launchers with a mass of between 36 and 52 tons. A 2020 feasibility study stated that the development and operation of the North Sea launch platform would cost between 22 and 30 million euros over six years. And let's head down back to Texas now, y'all. The Texas Space Commission has committed $47.7 million in grants to five space companies operating in the U.S. state. The grants are part of Texas' Space Exploration and Aeronautics Research Fund, known as SERF. The Commission's Board of Directors voted to award grants ranging from $7 million to Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Intuitive Machines, Space Exploration Technologies, aka SpaceX, and Star Lab Space. The board says that the grants will support Texas companies as they grow commercial, military, and civil aerospace activity across the state. And that concludes today's Intel Briefing. Our producer, Al Scrooge, has more on the stories that didn't make it into the top five today. Indeed, I do, Maria. There are two additional stories we think you should be aware of today. Norway has contracted to Alisalania Space for the Thor-8 telecom satellite, and space journalist Michael Sheetz has announced his departure from CNBC. We wish him the best of luck with his new move, and we're eager to find out where that is. We will, of course, share those details with you when we find out. And Alice, where can we find those stories? Links to all the stories mentioned throughout the show are in the selected reading section of our show notes, and can also be found at space.intuk.com. Click on the episode title. Hey, T-Minus Crew, if you are just joining us, be sure to follow T-Minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. 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. 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 the show so other professionals like you can find us. Thank you! It means a lot to me and all of us working here on T-Minus. [Music] Our guest today is Space Copy's founder and CEO, Madison Fian. I caught up with Madison at Space Common, Florida to find out more about her company. We are a woman-owned small business based in the United States and Canada, and we are an in-situ logistics and additive manufacturing company, and we are focused on building 3D printing technology to power the next generation of spaceflight. Not a small challenge to take on. It is not. It is super complex, but we operate both in space and terrestrial ecosystems and something that is a little bit unique about us is that all of the feedstock that we are generating for use is completely derived in situ. In situ, as in, so we are on the moon and that feedstock is coming from regolith, right? Absolutely. If you are on the surface of the moon, we are talking regolith. If you are in an extreme or austere environment here on Earth, we are talking about soil, sand, basalts, recycled metal, you name it. We can break it down and print infrastructure of various different sizes and capacities. Okay, mind blown. I am just going, wow, the challenges of doing that, impurities. I cannot even, additive manufacturing to me already on its own seems like magic. I know it is science, but when you are talking about just taking what is around you and using that as raw material, that gets into you. I did not know if that would ever be possible. It is amazing to know that you are developing that. That is quite incredible. Please tell me more about this mission, what you are making. That is just amazing. Well, it is certainly a really difficult technology process to wrap your head around, but it is an incredible one nonetheless. How I like to break this down is into four different stages. The 3D printing technology starts first with stage one, what we call beneficiation, or maybe the less technical term is mixing. We take whatever raw material that you have on site to work with and we break it down through a jaw crushing, dual centerfuge mix, a nice mechanical sieve in a vibrational separation process. That will take your biggest rocks and chunks and break it down into a fine powder-like material. Once we have been able to achieve that nice fine particle size distribution, then we carry forward into ramen spectral scanning. This is what you are working with. Big old laser beam and scanning the chemical composition of that feedstock. That is cool. Then stage three, the fun stuff, the actual 3D printing. We have two different systems by the way. We have a laser based system for really complex parts like precision tools and we have an extrusion based system for the larger scale infrastructure like bricks and heat shields and launch pads. Then last but not least, stage four is AI and autonomy. Everything that I just explained is 100% autonomous. I would imagine given the locations that we are talking about using this, it would need to be 100%. We have a little five axis robotic arm that is located inside that 3D printing chamber. It is actually going to lift those 3D printed parts off of that build plate and drop them into a collection bin so it is easy for astronauts to access them. How do you anticipate this being used? I know it is evident, but just walk me through it anyway. We have kind of got a little bit of a milestone timeline schedule in place. First and foremost is the earth based applications. We can immediately use this technology in natural disaster areas and combat zones and places where it is just straight up logistically challenging to get infrastructure shipped into certain locations. We estimate being able to deploy this tech into ecosystems like Arctic or desert or even underwater as early as 2026, which is right around the corner. Then as for the lunar missions, we have got some fantastic partners that are helping us to make this happen with the lofty goal of being able to land one of our 3D printers on the surface of the moon by 2031. We are super excited to be having a CIS lunar flight test that is being planned for as early as the end of this year. We are going to send out the world's most basic 3D printer halfway to the moon and back and see if we can't print with some regular simulant. You know what? If successful, we would be the first folks to ever do so. Wow. I love when I get these conversations where it is like this is the sci-fi future that I know I dreamed of and someone is working on that. Tell me a little bit about your long-term vision for what you are working on. You have already sort of outlined quite a bit of it, but I mean Mars? Yeah. Oh yeah. You know, the space dreamer in us is always looking for let's land on Mars, let's get this concept going. You know what? As a matter of fact, I have been pioneering this concept since 2017. The business has been around for a couple of years now, but the idea has been formulating for much, much longer. When I first came up with the concept, it was specifically around 3D printing for Mars. Wow. That is on the peripheral. It is the long-term goal. You know what? The way that space travel is shaping up and we are talking about being interplanetary species, sending humans to space and long-term duration missions. Think of this in the greater context of the mission planning requirements because right now launch costs from Earth to the surface of the moon, if you are talking per kilo, you are ranging from around 800,000 to 1.2 million US dollars. It takes almost 22,000 kilograms to keep four astronauts alive for a year. You are talking over 6 billion dollars easily and just infrastructure being shipped up and that is not even considering what the cost would be to send it even further to places like Mars. So, immediately you are seeing the need for the technology and you are seeing that not only is it possible, but it is needed. When I look at the kind of long-term vision five years from now, even 20 years from now, the goal is kind of a bit of a technical balance with a humanitarian balance. Not only being able to do some cool science because that is what we are all here for, but also having the benefit of changing the way that humanity looks at infrastructure development that we look at sustainability and that we look towards the future of science as being proactive. This is really capturing my imagination and my eyes are going, "I am just so curious like who you are working with and what kind of projects." You mentioned really underwater, sorry I am a little bit like, "Wow, I know right? There are so many different ecosystems that space copies technology can operate in. So yeah, let me run it down really quick. Those terrestrial applications, we are talking Arctic Desert underwater and I say underwater because it has that microgravity environment. So it is really fantastic what we refer to as the lunar proving test ground. Same thing goes with Arctic. We are talking about extreme thermal gradients of space. Why not try to do that here on Earth first and not only to validate the concept, but also to actually benefit the people working in those ecosystems already. And then as far as space goes, we are talking about microgravity. We are talking about cis-lunar. We are talking about lunar. We are talking about the deep space all the way to Mars. And then as far as actual timelines go, yeah, I was mentioning that cis-lunar test flight that we are planning. Yes. And then actually we have an Arctic field test planned for 2026. For those of you who may or may not be familiar with the Mars analog test site, they Houghton Impact Crater way up in the Northern Canadian Arctic Circle. We have got some partners up there that are helping us to actually get a basic printer up there. Wow. Get a prototype going, get some stuff printing and the best part is that not only is it a terrestrial feedstock, but it's also the site of an asteroid impact. So you get some of that space-based material too. That is so cool. You've got to love your job, what you're building. I can just tell you're really jazz talking about this. This is a really cool thing. I do love my job. I will talk to whoever will listen about this technology, not only because I'm so proud of what we're creating. And the incredible team also behind the story that has helped to create this and pioneer this, but also because of the proud partners that we've had from academic institutes to government organizations like NASA. We've got such a huge repertoire of folks that have come through for us that are not only fascinated in our technology, but are looking for ways to support it. And at the end of the day, that's one of the things I really love about the space community. Yes. You know, it's so dynamic, but also so supportive. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Today, February 11th is the International Day of Women and Girls in Science. This one's personal. I grew up in a house where science and engineering were revered and encouraged at every turn. My peer group in high school were other science minded girls like me. There's a photo in my high school yearbook of our computer club that always makes me chuckle because there I am off to the side, the only girl. It's a dynamic that you get used to. Even at engineering school and college, not unlike high school, it wasn't unusual to be the only young woman in a lab or maybe one of a handful in a large seminar. It was easy for us to remember each other. Us engineering school women would often become friends, toiling away at problem sets and study rooms for hours every day, sharing notes, helping each other prep for exams, rotating who would go to office hours. And it's funny, outside of engineering, many of us probably wouldn't have been friends. We really didn't have all that much in common interests wise, but we knew what we were all up against, so we banded together for survival. I'll skip to the chase. We were the class of 2005, so it's been 20 years. Many of the women I knew from those days went into their chosen fields after graduating. But now these decades on of the dozens of women that I knew starting their careers in science and engineering, maybe four are still working in them. Now career changes happen for all sorts of reasons, like in my case where it simply is just not the right field for you. It happens. But sometimes it's the result of a slow fade, where over the years you have to keep fighting an invisible war, and sometimes you simply get tired of it. Whatever you want to call it, a retention problem, a cultural problem, it goes way beyond any federal mandate or national border. And there are conversations happening, said, and unsaid, especially right now, about whose stories are celebrated, whose confidence and credibility is celebrated, who rises in the ranks with like-minded peers, whose accomplishments are worth a damn, who is a merited hire. In other words, in science and engineering, who belongs? Well, women do. This is only the 10th anniversary of international girls and women in science day. So all you trailblazers toiling long hours over problem sets, labs, trials, reams and reams of data, connecting with that spark of joy that ignited that love of science, ladies, I see you. Our world needs your perspective and your expertise more than ever. Keep fighting out of spite for the haters if nothing else. And please remember, even if you are the only one in the room, you belong. That's it for T-minus for February 11th, 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 Kilpe is our publisher, and I am your host, Marie Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. T-minus. [MUSIC]
