0507-T-Minus-20250424
Today is April 24th, 2025. I'm Alice Carruth and this is T-minus. T-minus. Twenty seconds to L-O-N team. Go for the floor. Five. Sierra Space has completed hyper-velocity impact trials of its live habitat at NASA's White Sands Test Facility. Four. Firefly Aerospace to develop a ceramic matrix composite nozzle extension for applications in liquid rocket engines. Three. The United States Space Forces Space Systems Command has awarded RAVT LLC $2.9 million for the development of an application programming interface. Two. Catalyst Space has acquired in-space servicing company Atomos Space. One. China launches the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft with three astronauts to the Tiangon Space Station. Three. [Music] Let's go. [Music] Our guest today is Troy Morris, co-founder and CEO of Kall Morris, Inc. Troy caught up with Maria Varmazis at the 40th Space Symposium and shared an update on the recent KMI demonstration on the International Space Station. Stick around for more on that in the second part of the show. [Music] Happy Thursday everyone. We're kicking off today's Intel briefing in China, a little after 5.15pm in Beijing today. A long March 2F rocket topped with the Shenzhou-20 crew spacecraft lifted off from the Zhou Shun satellite launch centre. The three-person crew included Commander Shen Dong, who's returning to space for the third time. The spacecraft docked with the Tiangon Space Station around six and a half hours after launch. The crew was greeted by the incumbent Shenzhou-19 take-anots. The current Commander will hand over control of Tiangong to the incoming Shenzhou-20 astronauts, who will begin their six-month-long mission aboard the space station. The Shenzhou-19 astronauts are due to depart for Earth on their own spacecraft with their return scheduled for April 29. Catalyst Space has acquired in-space servicing company Atomos Space. Catalyst says it plans to continue operating the 20,000-square-foot facility in Brunfield, Colorado, where Atomos builds and tests its spacecraft. Key members of the Atomos team will also join Catalyst following the transaction, including Atomos co-founder Vanessa Clark. The merged teams plan to develop and launch spacecraft capable of rendezvous and docking to perform life extension, spacecraft upgrades and space domain awareness. Catalyst says it will leverage the Atomos Quark spacecraft to serve missions for both commercial satellite operators and defence customers. The US Space Forces Space Systems Command has awarded a $2.9 million contract to Raft LLC for the development of an application programming interface or API. SSC says the API gateway is an enhancement tool that expands data accessibility and enhances interoperability with the Unified Data Library, which is a cloud-based multi-classification repository that serves as a central hub for accessing and managing data to support Space Force operational systems. The Space Force says many producers of data have legacy data messaging formats that cannot be read by modern API endpoints making much of this data unusable. An API gateway addresses this issue by transforming and translating legacy and some current data messaging formats into modern API endpoints. This capability is also automated which enables these functions to be performed in real time, thus making data more accessible, available and usable for military purposes at the speed of need. We all know that data is king in the space industry, right? Firefly Aerospace has been awarded a contract from the Air Force Research Lab to develop a ceramic matrix composite nozzle extension for applications in liquid rocket engines. Firefly says that this lightweight material improves rocket performance by increasing launch vehicle payload capability while lowering production costs compared to industry standard metal-based nozzle extensions. Firefly plans to design, build and test a composite-based nozzle extension to validate the material. Once developed and validated, the composite nozzle extensions will enable future responsive space applications that support US national security and the larger commercial space industry. Sierra Space has recently conducted hyper-velocity impact trials at NASA's White Sands Test Facility in my hometown of Las Cruces, New Mexico. The trials aim to optimize the structural integrity of Sierra Space's large integrated flexible environment habitat known as LIFE. Sierra Space says the goal of this NASA-supported testing was to refine a shield for the company's expandable flexible space station structure to make it capable of withstanding impacts from hazard on orbit. The impact testing was conducted under an unfunded space-act agreement called Collaborations for Commercial Space Capabilities. It used NASA's two-stage light gas gun to replicate micrometeoid and orbital debris travelling at speeds around 7km/s. Sierra Space says the successful testing marks a key milestone in developing the LIFE habitat as a solution for long-duration space missions. Additional testing will further refine LIFE habitat ahead of its first launch to low Earth orbit. [Music] And that concludes today's Intelligence Briefing. N2K producer Liz Stokes has the stories that didn't make today's top five. What do you have for us, Liz? Alice, we have two additional links for listeners in the selected reading section of our show notes. The first is on the crew for the inaugural Titan's Genesis Spaceplane mission, which is due to launch in 2029. And the second is the state of the space industrial-based 2024 report, which has just been released by New Space Nexus. All good stuff for us to be reading up on. Liz, can you remind us all where those links can be found, please? Links to all the stories mentioned in the daily episodes can be found on our website, space.n2k.com. Simply click through the daily podcast pages. Hey, T-miners crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership, or recruit talent, T-miners can help. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at space@n2k.com, or send us a note through our website so that we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. [Music] We recently caught up with Troy Morris from Cal Morris, Inc. at the 40th Space Symposium in Colorado Springs. Troy spoke to host Maria Val-Mazes about KMI's recent demonstration on the International Space Station. [Music] Troy, good to see you. Good to be here. Yeah, nice to see you in person, my goodness. Yeah, it's a fun change, and that's some of the joy of these conferences when they're well attended is finding the folks you've been talking to online for long times. I know. Well, it's been, it was a few months since we last chatted, and then it was a while before then, so good to see you. For our audience who, I feel like we should do an intro. That generally helps. Yeah, generally helps. So who are you, Troy? Yeah, hello there. I'm Troy Morris. I'm one of the co-founders, and I serve as CEO for Cal Morris, Inc. KMI, we are an in-space logistics and mobility company currently operating on the ISS, but I'm sure we won't talk about that at all. No, no, no. Yeah, so, yeah, what else is going on? No. So, yeah, we're probably based in Marquette, Michigan, and so it's something that we're bringing innovation from a unique place. And so happy to talk more about a lot of things today. Yeah, okay. So I'm looking at this incredible facsimile. So this is, tell me what I'm looking at here, exactly. Yeah, so for those that are able to see the static video we'll have here, we also will be able to share some of the video from station. But what we're seeing here is my terrestrial model of the Reach Arm Endeffector. So this is a mechanical linkage. This unit here is seven linkages. It is missing most of the fun parts because I have to take it through TSA, which they're kind of rough sometimes, as well as it's ITAR safe so I can bring it around to international events and show a lot of our partners from around the world that are, "Whoa, how are you doing that?" This can be that first stepping stone to understanding. So the arm is about the length of my arm, but it's, again, smaller than what the future flyer will be, but very similar to what is currently on station. Yeah, so tell me, so we did talk about this last time, but just to refresh everybody's memories, what Reach has done on the ISS. Yeah, so in a wonderful partnership and sponsorship by CASE, the Center for the Advancement of Science and Space, and through the International Space Station National Lab. I think I got the full titles there. You got it, yeah. No, but working with them has been fantastic. So they helped work us from an early start-up to where we're at now today of getting our arms on station. So not just one, but six of them. So we can test four of our arms at a time in each of the cardinal directions on the astro-bee. And so the astro-bee is standing in for our future flyer. And so by using the astro-bee, we're able to do now nearly 200 capture cycles of the astro-bee propelling forward, like our spacecraft will. The Reach arm is deploying just like they will and capturing again and again a test target, a client that we've built that we can swap out from solar cell to mylar to aluminum. You know, the major components that make up every satellite humans have ever launched. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it's been able to give us, you know, not just a good example, hundreds of good test cases. And we've really pushed the bounds in some great scientific ways. Oh, I can feel that enthusiasm from across the table. That's so awesome. And I'm hearing a lot of the future statements about what y'all are working on next now that you've had this incredible, many, many series of fantastic demonstrations on the ISS. So what are you looking at now with the future? Yeah, so the first thing is regrettably we need to bring it home. And I say regrettably because we first started with being given permission for four sessions with the crew. Fantastic. Our team loved it. They learned so much, prepped so much with so much that we were working with from NASA Ames, Marshall Johnson, so many great centers, and they went really well. Yeah. And so we were actually awarded two more sessions. So we're, you know, six for four, which is more than 100%, always good. And we're trying to squeeze one more, but we do want to get the hardware back down with upcoming down mass, which is at a privilege and a premium on the space station. So there was conversation of should we continue and just keep testing more? I think that the crew might enjoy having a nice friend that they can play catch with, but it is something we unfortunately need the hardware back. The pictures we've gotten from Don and others on station are good. But once you can really tear into this hardware and check everything we need, there's the mission coming forth in 2027. So we need to get the hardware back now so we can really evolve the technology and be ready for that future case. What do you look at when it comes back to, is that something you can tell us about? Like what do you actually investigate when it comes back down? So, you know, it's something that's a little bit hard after seeing how many hours it's operated on earth. And then on station, it's a little buddy, you know, Reach has about the tensile strength of a toddler's hug, but the grip strength to move cars. So it kind of reminds me of that baby from the Incredibles, Jack Jack, just like cute, adorable, but also extremely strong in the right ways. And so we have to dissect it. You're taking apart Jack Jack? It's hardware. It's just hardware, I swear. And so being able to dissect and evaluate some, you know, wear, tear, how some components worked. There were some components that you didn't fully function. That's perfect. That's what we're doing. You don't want to have everything perfect because that means you're not pushing it to the limit. Right, right, right. And so we've pushed it to the envelope. We've pushed it past the envelope. We've reestablished what the envelope is. And so now it's just testing that, taking some components apart, comparing them to new productions as well as I can't make my engineer sit still. So every day that we have not been doing operations there, oh, what if we tweak this? What if we approve that? Now that we saw that data before we get hard numbers, they're just taking the video input and be like, we can improve that component by a percentage of a percentage. I'm like, yes. So, comparison to what we launched nearly a year ago to what we've been building now to what it'll be in the future. Yeah, I was going to say the optimizing process and also I imagine the art of the possible imagining what new things you all could do, like new capabilities. Is that also part of that conversation? It is. It's not directly tied to, you know, the down mass and the operations on ISS. It's a lot of the conversations I've been having this week. Being able to talk with some of those in national security, some of those that are in the commercial space. It's really changing the conversation from, hey, we'd like to do something neat in the future. Sure kid, whatever. To, hey, this is our capability. We're demonstrating right now and it's fantastic to have a kernel turn to a staff and say, get them on my calendar. Oh, I was never this popular in high school, but I can at least do something good now. That's very validating. So being able to, you know, connect with those customers and figure out partnerships that are going to be moving forward for everything from end of life servicing, life extension, cheers to our good friends over at Space Logistics for their announcements. So, you know, being that tow truck in space. Yeah. So it's something that this is really opening up the aperture for the appetite of the industry. Yeah. I don't know if I could say that twice fast, but it's something that it's really changing the thing, the industry in a good way. You know, it's amazing. We met last year and, you know, we here at T-minus have sort of been watching y'all's journey since we started. And it's been amazing how validating it has been for you all to see your vision really happening and being so, you know, enthusiastically brought on board by the industry. It's been just really incredible to see and what again, a validation of the hard work that you all have been putting into this incredible technology. I appreciate it. And it's also appreciated to all of our team, our partners, our backers. I mean, again, like I said at the beginning, we're from Michigan. Yeah. Not exactly the first state most people think of for aerospace excellence, except for the NASA launches we had in the 70s. The amazing technical schools, some up the road. We're trying to start our first actual major at my alma mater for space. There you go. I was in Ann Arbor on Friday talking to the University of Michigan for investment, national security and deep tech. That's us. We sit at the middle of that bend diagram. So it's about bringing the capabilities of the arsenal of democracy that Michigan has historically been. Bringing that to the national space. And so, yeah, we're authentic. We're real. We're raw. We're Midwestern, but we're making stuff happen. That's so amazing. Yeah. Tell me a bit about all the other stuff that you're all working on because you as a company, you're also growing and doing a lot. Starting, trying to get a new major at Michigan, also amazing school. So that's not a small thing either. I should correct. We are not Wolverines. We are Wildcats. So we're from Northern Michigan University. Northern Michigan University still. One of our angels is an alumnus of University of Michigan. So he brought us down there. Nothing bad going below the bridge for those that understand the tupin and salas. So yeah, we're heavily involved in building that next generation. My partner was who's out here with me now. He was just talking with Embry Riddle and some partnerships we're going to be trying to do with them in the state of New Mexico. Huge. Because we have representation across seven or eight states now with employees. Wow. So we've grown quite a bit. Yeah, you have. My goodness. So yeah, the growth is fantastic. We're still very capital efficient for those investors who might be listening. But it's something that, you know, we can do things the right way without, you know, the ping pong tables of startups in the past. There's a way to be effective, efficient and do it the right way. And so that's what our growth is about is investing in that next generation workforce development, something we continue to do. Local development education. I spend more time than I might like in DC helping to educate our representatives, congressfolk senators and their receptive. I will say that they are receptive. So it's something that, you know, with all that's happening in this nation in this world, there are things that we can make safe. We can make space safer. We can do things safely. We can help each other. Collaboration. And so I continue to try and beat that drum as best I can. That's awesome. Thank you for doing that. And I've heard many folks in your situation saying similar things like I'm in DC a lot. But it is so important onward and upward to all of you. It's so great to catch up with you, Troy. Thank you so much for joining me today. Thank you for having me. We'll be right back. Welcome back. We love a bit of space history on this show and we especially love the opportunity to share the love for our favorite space telescope. On this day, April the 24th, 1990, the Hubble Space Telescope launched orbit on the Space Shuttle Discovery. Yes, it's been 35 years of the Hubble Space Telescope. It's completely transformed the way that we see the universe from unveiling the mysterious depths of distant galaxies to helping us peer into the birth of stars and planets. Hubble has been our cosmic time machine. Over these 35 years, it's captured some of the most breathtaking images I've ever seen, like the pillars of creation, the Eagle Nebula, and the stunning deep-filled images that show us galaxies billions of light years away. These images aren't just beautiful. They're scientific gold, providing clues about the universe's age, its expansion, and the way it evolves. But Hubble didn't just give us pretty pictures. It's been integral in shaping our understanding of dark energy, proving the existence of black holes, and helping scientists measure the universe's expansion rate, which is still a hot topic of debate. And of course, it's inspired generations of scientists, astronomers, and curious minds. So here's the 35 years of groundbreaking discoveries and stunning images. Hubble may be nearing its final years, but its legacy will last forever. And go and check out the latest image of the Sombrero galaxy that's been shared to celebrate the occasion. Hubble still manages to take my breath away. That's it for T-miners for April 24, 2025, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. We've privileged that N2K podcasts like T-miners 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. 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 Kilpie as our publisher, and I'm N2K senior producer Alice Carruth. Thanks for listening. [Music] T-miners. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
