Today is February 19th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmausis and this is T-minus. And our guest today is Alex Pospikov, CEO and co-founder of Mission Space. And I caught up with Alex in Orlando last month to get an update on the Space Weather Company and its move to the United States. Find out more later in the show. [Music] Happy Wednesday, everyone. And I am recording live from Zero Trust World in Orlando, Florida today. That's the background noise you're hearing. And we feel a little bit like chicken little at the moment, proclaiming that the sky is falling. But the reports of space tracking, the Earth's atmosphere and landing on land are becoming more of a regular occurrence. In the early hours of this morning over Europe, reports of a fireball were shared across social media by users in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland. Q-hour go-to for space tracking, Jonathan McDowell, aka Planet 4589, who shared that he believed it was the re-entry of a Falcon 9 second stage from the Starlink 11-4 launch. It apparently failed in February 2. And according to Jonathan, the second stage re-entered over northern Europe last night with entry over the Irish Sea at 343 UTC and the re-entry track extended to Poland and Ukraine a couple of minutes later. Videos of the fireball can be seen all over social media platforms. And a profile called Dutch Space on B-Sky went further to show an unconfirmed image of debris found in Poznan, Poland. If confirmed, it looks like a composite overwrapped pressure vessel known as a COPV, similar to one that was found in Washington State after another Falcon 9 re-entry. The press officer of the Poznan police told local media that employees of a company near Poznan had discovered an unidentified object resembling a tank on their premises. He added that no injuries were reported as a result of this incident. The Polish Space Agency known as PulsA confirmed that a Falcon 9 rocket had re-entered over the country, and we will continue to track this story as those reports develop in the coming days. Moving on now, Tru Enomaly has announced that it's expanding its operations into Southern California with a 90,000 square foot factory in Long Beach. According to the press release, the factory will serve as the company's footprint for new product development and vertical integration, and include 20,000 square feet of office space for Tru Enomaly's growing employee base. Tru Enomaly says the company's existing factory in Colorado will continue to serve as headquarters and be used for product development, manufacturing and production. We should also add, given the rumors about layoffs affecting so many in the industry that they are actively hiring across locations and disciplines, so links to those opportunities can be found in our show notes. ExoLaunch has officially opened its French location. The company took to social media to share that ExoLaunch France is officially open, expanding our presence in one of the world's most important space hubs. The German Headquartered Space Integration Company says that they chose the location to support the region's growing space sector with expertise and execution that satellite operators can count on. ExoLaunch France will be run by Christian Weber, who has previously worked at Telus Alenia Space, and the company says Christian will be joined by both existing and new teammates, strengthening ExoLaunch's local presence. Moving back to the United States now, and the US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Shreena Ramoti met in Washington, D.C. last week to discuss cooperation efforts. The two leaders reaffirmed the strength of the India-U.S. comprehensive global strategic partnership and pledged to accelerate defense technology cooperation to include space. They announced two initiatives, the U.S.-India Trust, which stands for Transforming the Relationship, Utilizing Strategic Technology. The initiative aims to catalyze government-to-government, academia and private sector collaboration to promote application of critical and emerging technologies, including space, while encouraging the use of verify technology vendors and ensuring sensitive technologies are protected. And the second is the Indus Innovation Initiative, which is a new innovation bridge modeled after the successful IndusX platform, and that will advance U.S.-India industry and academic partnerships and foster investments in space. And Rocket Lab launched its 60th Electron Mission, deploying the next satellite in the Earth Imaging Satellite Constellation for Black Sky. The Fasten-Year Space Belt's mission lifted off from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. It successfully deployed the first Gen 3 satellite by Black Sky to a 470-kilometer orbit. The Fasten-Year Space Belt's mission launched just 10 days after Rocket Lab's previous Electron launch from Launch Complex 1 as the company continues to ramp up its Electron launch cadence. And that concludes today's Intel Briefing. And 2K Senior Producer Alice Grooth has more on the stories that didn't make the top five today. Alice, what do you got? I have a few extra nuggets for you to chew on today. First is the news that former CNBC reporter Michael Sheets has joined Firefly Aerospace as their new director of investor relations. Good for them. Right? And Blue Origin has announced the next crew going up on their new Shepard Suborbital launch. And we've included a Reuters article on President Trump saying that SpaceX CEO Elon Musk will not take part in space-related government decisions. And a reminder, where can our listeners find those stories? Links to those stories, along with the others mentioned in the headlines, can be found in our show notes and at space.intk.com. Just click on this episode title. Thank you, Alice. Hey, T-Minus Crew, if you find this podcast useful, please do us a favor and share a 5-star rating and a 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. We really appreciate it. [music] Our guest today is Alex Pospikov, CEO and co-founder of Mission Space. We caught up at Spacecom last month to get an update on the Space Weather Company. [music] I'm Alex, I'm the CEO and co-founder of Mission Space. And what we do with developing Space Weather Forecasting, so we can give hours in advance alerts about if the solar storm is going to happen or not. Yeah, and we are in a solar maximum right now, so it's a really exciting time for us. I have bad news. It's not solar maximum yet. Wait, I thought we officially were declared maximum now? No, let's say we're going to the solar maximum. Okay, fair enough. What other bad news is it? NASA thinks that the models that we heard of since 11 years, 11 years cycle before it's not working properly. Oh, so we're just going to completely break down that paradigm. I mean, you know, science, that's nature of science. We learn new things, we adjust, of course. All right, so you all, last time I spoke to you, it was a remote interview. You were in Luxembourg. Yes. And I know there was a lot of developments happening and a lot of things have happened since that are really cool. So walk me through it. So you have moved? Yes, we moved to Miami. It's like the best place to monitor the sun. It's the place where you can get sun the most. Yes. And I'm really excited to see like what's going on in this Miami tech ecosystem. It's really, it's really, it's really very well going on. Second big news that we're launching cars, satellite and board of transporters 13. Oh, hey. On the SpaceX and like fingers crossed, recounting the days. Hope that everything will be very good at this point. And since we're here, we, of course, are engaging with a lot of customers trying to educate them, working with associations, because the biggest issue with the space weather now that you have different level of understanding of the problematic of the space weather. Yes. Even inside the NASA, sometimes you can see people, you can say, there's like no problem. I don't see any issues with it. And other who just, you know, ringing all the bells they can because it's really think we must have a lot of attention. Of course. Yeah. I'm so curious about the conversations that you've had since the last time we spoke. I feel like I'm going back to that a lot, but still, I mean, a lot has happened. You've done a lot of development since then. And more and more people are understanding how much space weather, as you said, impacts everything, but also especially all of spacecraft and Leo and geo, et cetera. So what are those conversations been like? Let's say to get people to tell the real truth is a very big problem because when you speak about space weather, speak about the risk and that your vulnerability to such risks. Most of the satellite operators just want to get silent, want to have silence about it because they don't know what to answer. They don't know what to do. The same also goes with the airlines. The biggest thing here to explain them, okay, we're all together. If it's not happening before, it will happen and then somebody will be punished for it because he must be in charge. You can say, oh, it's never happening before, right? Of course, of course, of course. So finally, you can, let's say, have some kind of safe conversations about it. So what we have now that finally customers, different industries, they understand what they want to have because the only thing they want to have is what the impact will be on my operations. What the risks also will be if I'm not doing any measures around it. Can I have go or no go because imagine now you don't have any real time data. So if you're planning some operations, you don't know exactly what's happening now. Yeah, what's the delay usually now? At least a day or how many days? It can be up to date. It can be up to like two or three days. It depends. So you, yeah, ancient. Absolutely. But you need to have it now. Imagine if you're like airline, you need to have like every day 16,000 polar flights per year. And they are the most heavily affected by the space. Of course, yeah. Of course, if we speak about like people in space on moon settlements, it's like the thing you need the most. It's like core. It's like core for the new space. Yeah, of course. Yeah. And now since like space, whether the domain that was heavily dominated and it's still by scientists and people say, okay, but there is like free data on NOAA and how what's your business, what you will do. The answer is the NOAA is crucial element of our space industry, but it's scientific agency with the purpose to do science. And all of the space, whether raw data we have now, it was developed for scientific purposes. Right, right. So it was developed for scientists to do their job. And if somebody can use it, well, okay, but it's not the job of the scientists to deliver you the product that you want to have for your satellite operations. Right, it wasn't built into the design. Absolutely. Absolutely. And these like huge opportunities we see here. So there are a lot of technical, technical uncertainties. There are a lot of things. So what you have now, you don't have real time data and you don't have, you don't have understanding what's going on now and the forecasting. Why you don't have real time data because you need to have multi point, multi point measurements with high green alert data. Yeah. It means you need to have a real time constellation of the satellites on Leo. That's what we do. You don't, you didn't have it before. Yeah. So the god wasn't possible to have it for like fraction of a cost. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I was going to say that I feel like that brings us to the, the, the mission that will be going on transporter 13. Tell me about what you're sending up there. So we're sending our space weather sensor. Yeah. We, we name it ZOR. So ZOR, ZOR in Hebrew means it means radiance. It also mean knowledge. So a lot of things around it. So we have three sensors. So we have like three instruments on board, on board the fan sensors. So we have two spectrometers. Yep. And we have one chain of detector for measuring products. Yeah. So it will be the first, the first one who will get, get the data in the, in the real time from space. Of course we have other payment that we want to develop in place, but the first one will be only three of this. Fantastic. So the plan is for a constellation though. That's what you're building. Absolutely. We also have 24 satellites because we want to have one satellite every hour on the, in the polar cusp, in the polar cusp to get the data from them. Plus we also will have different orbital planes because it's also will give us additional age of the data that this lies between us. Yeah. Last time I spoke to you, I think I said this, but I mean it, you all are doing really exciting things. It's a really interesting niche that you're owning also. I mean, it's just one of those things where you tell people about it. Like that's really cool. And the need is very apparent. So it's like, it makes a lot of sense what you're doing. So the need is, the need is apparent, but of course it's sometimes so hard to convince people we need to go there. But I mean, it's the same like with any kind of risk. I just spoke with the guy who is helping risk management of ships. Yeah. And he said, people always will tell you it's not, it's never happened before, but if it can happen, it will happen. Yeah. Yeah. That's right. It's really exciting about transfer to 13. Congratulations. That's really cool. And I really look forward to next time we meet up, I'm sure, to conference like this or remotely. Yeah, it's gonna be something else cool. More and more satellite in space. I know. I know. You're building out your constellation. That's so cool. Well, thanks for dropping by and telling me about all this. Is there anything else you want to share before we close out? I want to tell you that the issue of this space where it will be with us forever, it's going to be like even more and more important when we'll have our presence on the moon and on Mars. And now the Mars is nearer than we thought. I hope so. Apparently, yeah. At least I hope so. It's just a whirl here. But to be able to get us like for the forecasting space where it will be on the Mars and on the moon, we need to have something here. Yes. So it's not possible just to say, okay, now we'll develop. Well, I want to say that, oh guys, forget about all of this thing. What we'll do, we'll do space where forecasting for moon settlements and Mars. But that's not the way how it can be in CERN investors, for example. Yeah, I was going to say, woo, that's quite a gap. But to be able for us to have moon settlements and Mars missions finally, we need to solve this problem and to solve it. We need to have as much resources and we can in this domain, it can be one company, it can be one nation, because you can do measurements just like in one place. In weather, you can do it. In space, weather. Not so much. It is one planet. So absolutely. Yeah, absolutely. Well, thank you and congratulations on all your success. May continue. Thank you for speaking with me and dropping by today. I'm so happy to have you here. Welcome back. A fascinating study out of Johns Hopkins University might just have astronauts jumping for joy. There is, potentially, a new way for them to stay fit during long space missions. Jumping workouts. New research conducted on mice found that simply hopping around could actually help prevent cartilage damage. And that is a real concern for astronauts when they're exposed to low gravity on the moon or Mars for long periods. This new GHU study, recently published in the Journal of NPJ Microgravity, showed that mice that had had limited movement for several weeks developed thinner cartilage, which can lead to painful arthritis over time. But when researchers added in some good old jumping exercises for those mice, their cartilage actually became thicker and healthier. To give you some specific stats, mice with reduced movement had a 14% reduction in cartilage thickness, while those in the jump training group had a 26% increase compared to a control group. And the jumping mice also had 110% thicker cartilage than the reduced activity group. And the shin bones in the jumping mice had 15% higher mineral density. And this breakthrough is potentially huge for astronauts who do usually face muscle and bone loss in space. Jumping somehow not only strengthens bones, but could also be the key to keeping astronaut joints in top shape during extended stays on distant worlds. So it's possible that we could see jumping drills soon added to astronaut training exercises to keep our astronauts pain-free and mobile in space. Plus, the findings may help scientists develop new ways to treat cartilage issues back here on Earth, like arthritis. Honestly, I'm taking notes for myself. And that's it for T-Minus for February 19th, 2025, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. And we'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in 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 Tre Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our Executive Producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpe is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] Team, I'm in. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
