AST SpaceMobile is on a roll.

Today is February 26, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. >> T-minus. >> Twenty seconds to alloy. >> Open aboard. >> Five. >> Assemblies underway for Gateway Lunar Space Station's power and propulsion element. >> Four. >> Arian-6 and its passenger, the CS03 satellite, are scheduled to launch on March 3. >> Three. >> AstroScale's address J concludes Phase 1 of the commercial removal of debris demonstration for JAXA. >> Two. >> SpaceX says a small liquid oxygen leak caused its Falcon 9 second stage to reenter Earth's atmosphere over Europe last week. >> One. >> AST Space Mobile has been awarded a contract in support of the US Space Development Agency through a prime contractor with a total expected revenue of $43 million. [Music] >> And our guest today is Rahul Rugani, Chief Systems Engineer at Archesis. And I spoke to Rahul about developing a robotic platform for hosted payloads in low Earth orbit. So stick around for more on that after today's Intelligence Briefing. [Music] >> Happy home day everybody. We're kicking off with more good news for AST Space Mobile. They're having a great week after successful live video call demonstrations, but the top news for them today is a contract award. AST Space Mobile has been awarded a contract in support of the US Space Development Agency through a prime contractor with total expected revenue of $43 million. This new contract follows successful testing on Blue Walker 3 in orbit under the previous contract announced in February 2024. AST will use its next generation Block 2 Bluebird satellites to create robust and resilient communication solutions for the US government. AST's Block 2 Bluebird satellites feature the largest commercial phased array antennas ever deployed in low Earth orbit. They will span 2,400 square feet, which AST says will set a new standard for advanced connectivity and performance. It's been a week since reports of a fireball were shared across social media by users in the UK, Germany, the Netherlands, and Poland. The source was quickly confirmed to be a Falcon 9 second stage with debris later found on the ground in Poland. SpaceX says that during the coast phase of the Starlink 11-4 mission, which was launched on February 1st from Vandenberg Space Force Base, a small liquid oxygen leak developed and that ultimately drove higher than expected vehicle body rates. SpaceX says they were unable to perform the deorbit burn and the vehicle was successfully "passivated" on orbit to remove sources of stored energy. Teams are actively assessing the root cause of the source of the leak and say that they have already implemented mitigations for future flights. SpaceX says it's working closely with the government of Poland on recovery and cleanup efforts. Moving over to Japan now, Astroscale's address J concludes Phase 1 of the commercial removal of debris demonstration for Japan's Space Agency JAXA. To mark the occasion, Astroscale Japan has unveiled the first-ever footage captured during address J's ultra-close approach, which reached just 15 meters from the rocket-upper stage. Address J successfully completed all observations of the debris required by the JAXA mission, including two fly-around operations. These accomplishments have provided critical data to inform the follow-on, address J2, debris removal mission. Arian-6 and its passenger, the CSO-3 satellite, are scheduled to launch on March 3. The VA-263 mission will be the first commercial flight for Europe's new heavy-lift launcher, Arian-6, after the successful inaugural flight in July last year. Arian-space will launch the CSO-3 satellite for the French Defense Procurement and Technology Agency and the French Space Agency CNES on behalf of the French Air and Space Forces Space Command. This is a rescheduling of the mission that was originally planned for this week. Arian-space says additional operations on the ground are now completed, authorizing the company to launch on March 3 at 1.24 p.m. local time in Kourou, French Guiana. And turning our focus now to the United States, assembly is underway for Gateway's Power and Propulsion Element, which is the module that will power the lunar space station's journey to and around the moon as part of NASA's Artemis campaign. Technicians are installing key hardware on the element's propulsion bus module, following installation of both electric propulsion and chemical propulsion control modules. The Power and Propulsion Element is managed out of NASA's Glenn Research Center in Cleveland and built by Maxar Space Systems in California. The Power and Propulsion Element will launch with Gateway's Habitation and Logistics Outpost, known as Halo, ahead of NASA's Artemis 4 mission. [Music] And we've got a lot to look forward to this evening, us space nerds. N2K's senior producer Alice Kruth has more on that. Over to you, Alice. Yes, Maria. It's launch night for Intuitive Machines' second mission to the moon. IM2 is due to lift off at 7.17 p.m. Eastern Time on a Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center. We've included more details on that launch in our show notes along with two additional stories, one on Space Command possibly being moved to Alabama and another announcing a promotion at SAIC. And let's please remind our listeners where they can find all of those stories. Links to further reading on all the stories mentioned throughout the show can be found in the podcast show notes and also at our website, space.n2k.com. Just click on this 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, we really appreciate it. [Music] [Music] Our guest today is Rahul Raghani, Chief Systems Engineer at Arcusys. [Music] I'm the Chief Systems Engineer at Arcusys, a small startup in Southern California based in the LA area. And we've been around for about five years now and we've been developing a robotic platform for hosted payloads in low-Earth orbit. But I got involved in this company when I met the founder who was my research advisor at USC when I was doing my graduate studies. Oh, neat. Okay, USC, which USC? Is it just USC or which one specifically? The USC School of Astronautics. Cool, cool, very cool, very cool. So you met him when you were a grad student. Yes. So how did you know you wanted to go into aerospace engineering? Like what was your origin story there? I mean, since I was a kid, I'm really interested in space. I was really just watching all those shuttle launches. Yeah. It was really inspiring. Very cool, very cool. All right, so tell me about what you're working on. Yeah, so at Arcusys we're working on a platform for hosted payloads. So kind of like, think of it like a little motel in space that anyone who wants to send their experiment up, they can host it on our platform. Kind of like, we have an interface, kind of like a space USB that they plug into. So we can plug it in with a robotic arm into our platform. They can run their experiment and then when they're done, they stop paying rent and utilities and then we safely deorbit them and put a new payload in this place. Oh, cool. So if they only need to do a three month experiment, they only pay for three months. They don't need to buy a whole satellite that costs three to five million dollars. Ah, so the vision there definitely would be very transformative for how we're doing science on orbit right now. Exactly. And all sorts of cool things, really. So that would fit in really, really interestingly with the growing space ISAM ecosystem that's happening right now. Yeah, for sure. I mean, our long-term goal is to be able to build things in space and build new satellites in orbit. That's how we got into this business. But as we started, we saw that there was a huge market for hosted payloads and experiments in orbit. And we're using that as a stepping stone to get to our eventual goal of building things in space. Cool. So what kind of hosted payloads would you all be able to take on? Really anything that needs to run in space. So we have a few customers who are doing biological experiments. They're doing TRL raising missions so they want to get their technology tested in orbit. There's new sensors, new materials. Really anything that needs to be in vacuum in space to do its test. It's so funny. I recently just had a conversation about orbital testbed. So it's like this is a very, very timely conversation. So yeah, tell me a bit about sort of where you all are in your development. Yeah. So I mean, we have designed our entire platform on the ground. We have built a full-scale mock-up of our spacecraft with a robotic arm that our partners have motivated space systems. And Pasadena have loaned us. We have that arm manipulating payloads, attaching it to other spacecraft mock-ups. And we're in the process of closing our seed rays for venture capital so we can build and launch this thing. Fantastic. So timelines, because especially if you all are in seed rays right now, I know it's a really big time for you all. So tell me about your time lines. Timeline, we're going to launch a small demo mission in 2026, mid-2026. And then about a year after that, we'll launch our full platform that can host up to 60 payloads at a time. Wow. How big are we talking? Yeah, we're talking about three meters in diameter. Wow, all right. That's impressive. It's big, but it fits in SpaceX Falcon 9 fairing. That's amazing. We don't even need to wait for Starship. I was going to say that was my other question. That's really cool. So smart design on that. You know that Falcon 9 is doing a great job. Starship is going to be great, but it's not here yet. So we can't just buy a launch on Starship. That's right. Not yet. One day we know. That'll happen soon, but not yet yet. That makes a lot of sense. Well, that's really cool. So yeah, what do you want to impart to our listeners and viewers before we head out today? I think really that ISAM is the next growing frontier in space. And I expect to see, there's a lot of companies already doing ISAM. I expect to see a 10-fold increase in the next decade on doing operations in space and being able to manipulate things in space. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's fascinating. I've had a few conversations to that degree here on the show this week, which is just fascinating to hear that that's where things are moving and that we have that capability growing. Folks like yourself are working on making that happen. And the future is now. Yeah, exactly. This is so cool. We recently completed a study for the SDA on how we can use technologies that we're building to de-orbit some of their spacecraft at the end of life, because they want to be good stewards of, if they're setting up a constellation, you ought to make sure that you clean up that space after when you're done. We'll be right back. Welcome back. The 2025 American Astronomical Society meeting back in January had oodles of fantastic findings to share, and we are all still digging through them all. So here's another neat one, courtesy of two astronomy teams, one at Penn State using the James Webb Space Telescope or JWST and another at MIT using the Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite or TESS. So imagine a planet the size of Neptune orbiting its star in just 9.1 hours. To circle the drain that fast, you have to be awfully close to what's pulling you in. And yeah, K2-22B is right up against its star and so hot that the rocks of this planet aren't just melting, they're vaporizing. So yeah, how hot are we talking? Try 2100 Kelvin. This makes K2-22B almost look comet-like with a dust tail streaming behind it, kind of like a dramatic spray of blood after the killing blow in a samurai movie. And I guess I'm not the only one watching a lot of sword fighting films lately because this is the great description from Nick Tusei, who is a PhD student at Penn State and one of the lead authors on one of the studies here. And he said this, "These planets are literally spilling their guts into space for us. And with JWST, we finally have the means to study their composition and see what planets orbiting other stars are really made of." And yes, he said these planets because K2-22B, as observed by the Penn State team, is not the only planet being ripped apart at the seams and recently studied. The MIT team pointed tests at the star BD+054868A, there will be a quiz on that later, to check out its disintegrating planet, which is orbiting it every 30 and a half hours. And that planet has two massive dust tails, one in front and one in back, and they cover more than half of the planet's orbit as it evaporates around its star. And oh, by the way, it also covers about 1% of that star's light. The MIT researchers estimate that that planet, which is about the size of our moon, is vaporizing about a moon's worth of dust every million years. So, doing the math, that planet has about a million years left. And that is blazingly fast on the cosmic scale, but no, these death stars are not nearly as dramatically fast as a Hollywood Darth Vader Death Star. That said, whether your K2-22B or Alderaan, the end result is the same. That's it for T-Minders for February 26, 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 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 Trey Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben. Peter Kilpey is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [MUSIC PLAYING] Team minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]