Today is February 12th, 2025. I'm Marie Evermazes and this is T-minus. T-minus. Twenty seconds to L-O-N, team. Open aboard. Five. Rocket Lab has delivered a third Pioneer spacecraft for Varda space industries. Four. After scale, UK has successfully completed the midterm review of the current development phase for the UK active debris removal mission with the UK space agency. Sierra Space has been awarded a $16 million firm fixed price contract from AFRL to continue upper stage engine maturation. Breadwire has been awarded a contract by Orion Space Solutions to deliver a Mako spacecraft to support the US Space Force Space Systems Command Tetra 6 mission. Breadwire to develop the preliminary spacecraft design for an upcoming astrophysics mission for the European Space Agency. And today's guest is Richard Turner and he is the CEO at Convergence Data. And I sat down with Richard at Spacecom 2025 to discuss supply chain for aerospace and defense solutions. That chat will be coming up after today's headlines. And speaking of those headlines, let us dive in on this fine Wednesday, shall we? We're kicking off with two big announcements from Breadwire. The first is a new contract award from the European Space Agency. Breadwire has been awarded a study contract by ESA to develop the preliminary spacecraft design for an upcoming astrophysics mission. That mission is aiming to image faint galaxies in the nearby universe and provide insight into the nature of dark matter. Breadwire's Belgian subsidiary, Breadwire Space NV, has been awarded one of two parallel industry studies to lead Phase A and B for the analysis of resolved remnants for accreted galaxies as a key instrument for Halo Survey's mission. And that mission is better known as best acronym ever, "Orakis" and is expected to be adopted by the Science Program Committee in mid-2026. ESA is budgeting 60 million euros, which is about $62 million, for this platform, and $99 to $109 million for the full mission. New details were shared about the value of Breadwire's study contract. And for our next story, we're still staying with Breadwire, as the company has been awarded a contract by Orion Space Solutions to deliver a Mako spacecraft to support the US Space Force Space Systems Command Tetra-6 mission. And that mission is a follow-on contract to the US Space Force and Air Force Research Laboratory's Tetra-5 mission, for which Breadwire is delivering two Mako spacecraft. The Mako spacecraft for the Tetra-5 and Tetra-6 missions will be the first satellite in geosynchronous orbit to be refueled and demonstrate compatibility with multiple available refueling mechanisms. The Tetra-5 mission is scheduled for later this year and plans to demonstrate key capabilities such as cooperative and prepared inspection, docking, on-orbit refueling, proximity operations, and next-generation autonomy techniques that will all help to enable future on-orbit servicing capabilities, spacecraft autonomy, and sustained space maneuver. Tetra-6, on the other hand, will enable the Space Force to demonstrate additional technological capabilities. And moving on to Sierra Space now, and they have been awarded a $16 million firm fixed-price contract from the US Air Force Research Laboratory to continue upper-stage engine maturation. The announcement comes as Sierra Space completed the test campaign for its VR-35K-A upper-stage engine under contract with AFRL's Rocket Propulsion Division. The new award is a follow-on to a more than $22 million contract awarded to Sierra Space in July 2023 by the Air Force Test Center at Edwards Air Force Base in California. The VR-35K-A is a high-performance liquid oxygen/liquid hydrogen engine that Sierra Space says produces 35,000 pounds of thrust at a higher performance than any engine currently on the market. With the new funding, Sierra Space says it plans to continue to mature its upper-stage engine technology as it moves into a more extensive qualification phase. Let's head over to the UK now, and Astroscale UK has successfully completed the midterm review of the current development phase for the UK Active Debris Removal Mission with the UK Space Agency. The "cosmic" debris removal concept is aiming to safely deorbit two inactive UK-registered satellites. This midpoint milestone sees Astroscale UK making progress with partners on key areas, including debris detumbling capabilities and robotic capture systems. When debris objects are tumbling in space, cosmic will rely on plume impingement, which is a cool novel method that uses thrusters on the cosmic servicer to reduce the tumbling rate to ensure safe and secure capture. And to validate this approach, Astroscale UK is undertaking a test campaign at the German Aerospace Center in Göttingen using a specialist vacuum chamber to replicate real-space conditions and link simulation with real-world data. A final technical review is set for March 2025 to conclude the next phase of testing. And Rocket Lab has delivered another Pioneer spacecraft for VARDA space industries. The vehicle is at Vandenberg Space Force Base in preparation for launch, its Rocket Lab's third Pioneer spacecraft produced for VARDA, and the second that the company has delivered for launch within a month. The spacecraft will support VARDA's next orbital processing and hypersonic re-entry mission, which is W3, and is scheduled for launch no earlier than March. And that concludes today's Intel briefing, but our producer Alice Kruth has a few more stories to share. Thanks, Maria. Keeping the briefing to five stories is always a stretch when there's so much going on in the space industry. So we've added links to three additional stories today in the selected reading section of our show notes. The first is a Reuters article on China building space alliances in Africa in response to the US administration's aid cuts. The second is about a funding raise for Mementus, and the third is an announcement from the Space Foundation on the recipients of the Space Achievement Award. Thank you, Alice. Those links can be found on our website space.entuk.com and just click on today's episode title. Hey, T-Minus Crew, if you find this podcast useful, please do us a favor and share a five-star rating 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 for your support, everybody. We really appreciate it. [MUSIC] Our guest today is Richard Turner, CEO at Convergence Data. I sat down with Richard at Spacecom 2025 to discuss supply chain for aerospace and defense solutions. I started by asking Richard about his background and how he started the company. I started as a mechanical engineer designing parts for a company. I realized that that wasn't my calling, and I wanted to be a bigger part of a business. Inevitably, I became an entrepreneur and started this company, hard to believe, 25 years ago. What you are doing with your company is really interesting to me. Again, you were really ahead of a big, big trend. Tell me a bit about what Convergence Data does. We offer, I consider it a basic service, which is we basically establish catalogs of parts and products. For our aerospace companies going all the way back to the days when we started with companies like Boeing and Northrop Grumman over 20 years ago, we build catalogs of primarily electronic parts. Electronic parts are a major part of the build material for a lot of these A&D companies, and they're expensive. You want to make sure you have a catalog of the preferred parts that makes it really easy for engineers to find the right parts and for procurement to buy the right parts. We've been doing that for the last 25 years. A&D has always had the lead in this area. They've always had strong governance. A&D, sorry, what do you mean by that? Aerospace and defense. Okay, just to make sure. They're pioneers for a lot of the technologies in building products, from product life cycle management to the sum of the work that we do. They had parts catalogs before we even showed up 25 years ago. They are the pioneers, and we've learned from them and built our business over the last 25 years to service other manufacturing verticals. Fantastic. You're taking those best practices and establishing them, but in a very dynamic way, it sounds like, especially since it's a SaaS solution, if I understand correctly. It's a SaaS solution, correct. All right. So, can you maybe give me a sense of the landscape of, before you all entered the scene, what things were like and how you have changed things? Well, I think the best way to look at it is a lot of the pain points we call it that these manufacturing companies have are high costs. Their products are costing too much. It's taking too long to get these products to market. A lot of it has to do with not having a governance process in place for selecting parts, making it really easy for engineers to find a preferred part, add it to their bill of material, and encouraging engineers to reuse parts. When that's not happening, you don't have governance in place, you end up with unnecessary high cost, way too many parts, way too many suppliers. Right. Procurement does not like that. And procurement is downstream of engineering, and they inherit this mess. And they're racing to onboard suppliers. They shouldn't probably be onboarding for parts they shouldn't be having to buy because there's no governance process in place. That's really the pain points that we saw for a company. So for engineering, making it easy for them to find a part, giving them the data they need, giving them the search engine, adopting classification, putting these parts into their PLM system with classification, just making it easy for them to find parts that they're not introducing unnecessary parts or duplicate parts, which happens all the time. And then procurement, just giving them the information they need to find the right suppliers, set up long-term agreements with suppliers, get the best pricing, and just make their job easier versus onboarding unnecessary parts, ending up with high-costing suppliers, suppliers they probably didn't want to onboard. They're kind of snowballs as you get downstream of where the new parts are created. Yeah, it's a really interesting place to be right now, especially where you all are, you must have a very really complex view of where the market is going right now, especially given, I mean, it's surrounding us right now, how much the industry is just ballooning and how much demand there is for all sorts of specialized parts, and on these very challenging timelines. Yeah, go ahead. If you look at all the companies that are here at the SpaceCom conference here in Orlando, they're mainly suppliers that provide highly advanced machine parts, so that's good and bad, I mean, for the OEMs, for the Blue Origins, the SpaceX, is they want to make sure that the parts they're building are the right parts. Right, yep. And could they reuse a part versus issuing a custom part that I know they're spending a lot of money for? Some of our customers spend over $2,000 for a single washer because the procurement doesn't have the ability to check the price because they can't find similar washers from similar suppliers. Wow, yeah. And that's why the rockets are costing so much to build, it's a race to space to build those rockets and they're creating unnecessary parts. There's no governance process in place, so it's concerning for, especially for these SpaceCom companies, they're really startups compared to like a Boeing and Northrop, right? They've grown fast and they've built their products really fast and they probably have parts they shouldn't be ordering because they're working so quickly. So by putting a governance process in place and slowing them down, getting them to reuse parts, that's going to save them a lot when it gets to procurement, when it gets to supply chain, when it gets to releasing that rocket, there should be a lot less quality issues because you know you've got parts that have high quality from preferred suppliers. That's the big issue I see right now with a lot of the SpaceCom companies. I'm wondering about barriers especially for a lot of these smaller, not necessarily the suppliers, but for the smaller startups. I mean, raising capital is extraordinarily difficult. This is not a cheap business to be in, it's got high risk. I'm wondering if you have advice or, I mean you sort of touched on it a little bit, but for those smaller startups that are really trying to make their way into the industry? Yeah, you know, I think for the OEMs working with the startups, they want to make sure they do a risk analysis and make sure that they can truly produce the products and deliver against the quality. Yes. And when you have lots of suppliers and a lot of these are startups, they probably don't meet a lot of those requirements and they find out unfortunately the hard way. And that delays rockets from being built and launched. So that's a concerning issue. I think if they had less parts to manage, this issue would be smaller. Reducing complexity. Yeah, reducing complexity, exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Given that your company's been around for 25 years, what changes have you seen in the industry in that time, especially as it pertains to basically everything you've been mentioning about procurement and supply? Yeah, I mean, interestingly enough, a lot of the issues that we saw 25 years ago still exist today, which is kind of sad because companies don't see the governance process around introducing parts as being sexy. They just see the software tools that engineers use to design parts as being really cool. They need to make sure that they have these other governance tools in place to keep costs down. And I think that's starting to become more recognized, especially by the larger A&D companies. So I think the trend is that eventually the Blue Origin's, the SpaceX's are going to follow suit and recognize that they need to invest more in up front to make sure they're introducing the right parts, their rockets. So I think that's the big trend I'm seeing. That's interesting that you mentioned that that's been present for all this time. And you don't, gosh, is it a cultural issue between engineering first versus procurement versus engineering mentality? I think you hit the nail on the head. Engineering and procurement, they typically don't work together. No. And when it comes to things like purchase parts, really, especially the high spend, like for space companies, it's valves. Yeah. Where they spend billions on valves. And if you get engineering and procurement working together, managing those categories and determining what is an acceptable valve, you know, and working together on managing the spend on those categories, they're going to be a lot more successful. But today it's engineered designs apart, closer over the wall to procurement. There's no discussion. It's adversarial, I've passed in many cases. They're not working together. So they've got it, I think from an organizational perspective, getting them working together, managing. We see that in our more advanced manufacturing companies. Those groups work together more closely. I'm very curious, when you're speaking to fellow C-level executives, what is the message that you want them to understand? Because I feel like when you're talking to a CEO, it's a different message than, you know, a team of engineers about this. So for a CEO, the biggest expense for a manufacturing company is a direct material expense. And it's the parts they put into their products. They have a recurring expenditure. They're not like indirect, where you buy them, you know, once they're going into your product and they're going in in high volumes, and that's your highest cost as a manufacturing company. So it's important that they have engineering and procurement working together, kind of managing that cost. Otherwise, they're not going to achieve the margins they want to achieve. They're not going to get products out the door at the rate they want to go and do. The higher up we get in the company, the more they understand our value proposition. When we come in at a lower level with engineering, they're like, why do we need to worry about this? It's not our problem. We're probably talking to the wrong people because it's the people downstream of engineering that inherit the problem. Right. I think it's more of like an operations issue that needs to be addressed. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's take a moment to appreciate one of the many, many hard workers at NOAA. NOAA's Deep Space Climate Observatory, which is often better known by its acronym Discover, for about a decade now has been Earth's silent guardian against solar storms. Discover watches what's going on in space weather for us one million miles away at La Grange Point One. It monitors solar wind and sends early warnings of coronal mass ejections and geomagnetic storms that could knock out power grids, disrupt GPS, and interfere with other satellites. Something that, by the way, we've all been particularly concerned about in the last year or so as we've been approaching or are now at the 11-year solar maximum. You probably remember May 2024 when many of us saw beautiful aurora in places that we normally wouldn't. Nice photos and all that. It was all thanks to the strongest solar storm in 21 years and Discover saw it coming and detected the storm's shockwave as solar wind speeds doubled to 1.5 million miles an hour in just 20 seconds, allowing forecasters to issue timely warnings. Not bad for a spacecraft that has long outlived its original mission. But even workhorses retire eventually, and I know some of you listening who've been pulled out of retirement might relate to this. Discover is still running well past its expected lifetime and doing great. That said, NOAA's next-generation space weather sentinels, starting with the Space Weather follow-on Lagrange 1, are scheduled to launch in the second half of this year and will take up the reins on tracking solar storms in anticipation of Discover being put out as a pasture. But for now, Discover seems fit as a fiddle, keeping watch for us and remaining a steadfast lookout protecting our modern world from the sun's temperamental outbursts. So thank you, NOAA, and thank you, Discover. That's it for T-Minus for February 12, 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. We make you smarter about your team while making your team smarter. 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, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We will see you tomorrow. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. [MUSIC]
