0512-T-Minus-20250501
Today is May 1st, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. T-minus. Twenty seconds to LLN, team. Open aboard. Five. NOAA's OSC has announced a new opportunity for commercial space situational awareness companies to support the development of tracks. Four. Sidus Space has signed a memorandum of understanding with Saturn satellite networks. Three. Axiom Space has signed an agreement with Germany's North Rhine Westphalia. Two. DLR has completed the qualification campaign for the Callisto reusable rocket demonstrator's top block. One. Atmos Space Cargo has secured new investment and has established a new French subsidiary in Strasbourg. Let's go. Our guest today is Joshua Broom, the head of space at the UK Department for Business and Trade. I caught up with Josh at the Space Symposium to discuss the space business environment in the UK, so stick around for more on that later in the show. Happy Thursday everybody. We're kicking off today's Intel briefing with stories out of Europe. Atmos Space Cargo has announced a new investment from French venture capital firm Expansion Ventures. They haven't committed to how much the new funding amounts to, but the announcement follows Atmos's first test flight of its Phoenix 1 reentry capsule on SpaceX's Bandwagon 3 rideshare mission last month. The European Space Logistics startup has also established a new French subsidiary in Strasbourg. Atmos says it selected the city for its strategic location at the intersection of European innovation with close ties to institutions such as the International Space University and several French-German Aerospace Hubs. The Strasbourg office will serve as the new home for Atmos's operations and future R&D topics, including payload management and mission control. The German Aerospace Agency DLR has completed the qualification campaign for the Callisto Reusable Rocket Demonstrator's top block. Callisto is a joint initiative between DLR, the French Space Agency CNES, and the Japanese Space Agency JAXA. It aims to mature key technologies to enable the recovery and reuse of rocket boosters. With this key element of the demonstrator now nearly qualified, Callisto is approaching the end of its decade-long development. Initial test flights are expected to begin from the Guiana Space Center in 2026, with up to 10 flights planned over a six-month period. Axiom Space has signed an agreement with Germany's North Rhine Westphalia. Axiom and the state government plan to collaborate on creating a robust space economy and providing modern, efficient and affordable space infrastructure for the international community in the future. This isn't the first time that the space company has signed an MOU with a regional government. Just recently, they signed partnerships with the UK cities of Liverpool and Manchester to support regional economic growth. Cyta Space has signed a memorandum of understanding with Saturn Satellite Networks to support the development and deployment of Saturn's SBNX-GO satellite solution. Cyta Space plans to work closely with Saturn to provide critical support across various activities, and in return, Saturn intends to award Cyta's a scope of work that includes assembly, integration and testing at Cyta's advanced manufacturing facilities in Florida. And calling all Space Domain Awareness Companies, the Office of Space Commerce needs you! NOAS OSC has announced a new opportunity for commercial space situational awareness companies to support the development of the traffic coordination system for space, also known as TRAX. Vendors are invited to participate in a TRAX Pathfinder project that will examine the commercial capability for rapid detection, orbit determination and space object identification after deployment post launch. OSC's commercial COLA GAP Pathfinder OSC placed three orders in the global data marketplace for commercial tracking data, orbit determination services using commercial data, and an order for data quality monitoring services related to the previous two orders. More details can be found by following the link in our show notes. And speaking of show notes, N2K's senior producer Alice Carruth has more on what you can find in today's selected reading section. Alice? Thanks Maria. We have three additional links included in today's original sources. One is on Sling Shot Aerospace's new Canada Hub, another is on the Space Force's new missile warning architecture, and the third is on a coalition's joint letter to Congress opposing the budget cuts to NASA's Science Mission Directorate. And those links can also be found on our website, space.n2k.com, just click on today's episode title. Hey T-minus crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your salt leadership, or recruit talent, T-minus can help. We'd like to hear from you. Just send us an email at space@n2k.com, or send us a note through our website, so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. Our guest today is Joshua Broome, the head of space at the UK Department for Business and Trade, and I started off by asking Josh to tell us more about his role. I'm Josh Broome, I'm the head of space in the UK's Department for Business and Trade, so I'm the global head of space. I set the UK government's export and investment strategy for the space sector, and then we have fantastic people and colleagues in our embassies and our consulates around the world that then implement that on the ground. I'm responsible for industrial policy, so that means working directly with UK space companies on what changes to the business environment, regulations that they want to see, providing them with business support, business advice on how to grow their companies, and feeding that into the whole of the UK government. So we work really closely with UK Space Agency, the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology, UK Space Commands. We collaborate and work with all those departments. So yeah, the business of space is very expansive, so I'm docked into all those counterparts and all those colleagues extensively. Thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate it. Tell me a bit about your major priorities right now. So for business and trade, we have a number of priority markets where we see huge growth potential for the UK space sector and strong potential for international collaboration, particularly on defence and national security. So of those priority markets, the US is one of them. That's why we're here at Space Imposium. The level of interest in the UK and the UK space sector continues to grow. We are the largest space sector in Europe. Not many people recognise that. We're also a bit too British about promoting that. Don't want to brag too much, right? Exactly. We don't quite go around saying enough, so we're trying to fix that. Second largest exporter of satellites in the world after California. I knew that one off top of my head. Exactly. So you're doing a better job than we are promoting the British space sector. So no, that's what we're trying to do here. We've got a number of UK companies here, so not just to engage with our US counterparts and our colleagues and our friends and allies, but also we're literally next to the German Space Agency. We work very closely with the Germans, the Canadians as well, the US, Canada, Germany, France, Japan, Korea, they're all here. Space Imposium has that international reach that some international conferences just don't have. So this is a really strong opportunity for us to engage with a lot of foreign companies and foreign governments to bring down those barriers to trades and investments and collaboration. What can we do to unlock interest in each other's sectors? Where can our space agency collaborate with other space agencies, including NASA? And ultimately support American companies, other companies in working in the UK. So it's not just about promoting the UK outwards. It's also bringing in... Yeah, promoting other companies to come in and work and help us build out our space sector because there's some fantastic technology and capability that exists out there in the world. Yeah, tell me a bit about when you're talking about breaking down those barriers, what are things that maybe other nations can be doing to maybe more easily collaborate with the UK or maybe vice versa, things that... I guess just to break down those barriers a little bit. So we do a lot of that at government level. So it's a pump for business and trade. We're sort of a mixture of the Commerce Department and the State Department. So they have responsibilities that we have. And so we sit down with them when we talk to them about what are those soft barriers to what is it a lack of understanding, lack of knowledge? How can we upskill the federal governments and the state governments? So we've got memorandums of understanding with the state of Colorado and the state of Florida, which is all about explaining and upskilling the understanding at state level of the opportunities with the UK space sector. Oh, at a state level. That's fascinating. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So bringing that understanding to the people that can then work with American companies to upskill them and what are the opportunities in the UK. We also collaborate on things like procurements. So US space systems commands have been working with some allies on how do we collaborate in terms of military capability and space? How do we procure from each other's space sectors? And so my department have been feeding into that because ultimately we want to see UK companies providing into US military capabilities so that as an alliance, as a grouping of countries, we are stronger together. So it's everything from upskilling and information sharing, breaking down those barriers on things like procurements, enabling and facilitating discussions that UK companies might not be able to have with certain stakeholders that UK government can open the door. And so that facilitation that we can provide is really powerful as well. And similarly, we encourage our counterparts in US government, Japanese government, Canadian government to do the same with us. Yeah, collaboration is clearly a strong theme here. I'm so curious. What has you most excited? What's coming down that you're like, oh yeah, that's going to be awesome? Two things I think. One is the huge surge in commercial interest in the sector. The UK space sector is quite commercially focused already. So the large majority of the revenue that's generated in our space sector already comes from commercial contracts. So that's not the case in a number of space economies and space-faring nations around the world, but that's changing really rapidly. And so that real push and innovation that's coming through in the commercial sector is hugely exciting, not least because it's something that the UK is quite good at. We're very innovative. We're quite agile. We've got fantastic companies popping up all over the place because we're quite commercially driven already. So a big commercial boom is a huge opportunity for the UK. And between the UK and our allies and partners and the new NASA administrator, one of his big focuses is great commercialization and moving NASA to embrace the commercialization of the sector. So obviously, like I said, for the UK, that's great news for us. So that commercial drive is a huge opportunity and really exciting. Then I think the kind of recognition, the growing recognition in the number of nations of the importance of space is really exciting as well. So it's certainly the case in, for various reasons, geopolitically over the last few years, the interest in the space sector, the recognition of the importance of space to our economy, to our national security has gone up dramatically in a number of countries. The US is obviously one of the most well-established space-faring nations. And the general public are bought into that and they support it and they can see that the opportunity for space for the US, that hasn't existed in a lot of nations. I was going to say, do you have to make that case in the UK as much as more than maybe you would want to? I mean, I mean, want to maybe not the right word, I'm sorry. We always have to make the case, basically when we're spending taxpayer money on the space programs and support for space companies. We always have to make that case that space is part of your everyday life. Space is driving economic growth. Space is essential to our national security. But in recent times, that recognition not just in the UK, but elsewhere in Europe, in the Middle East, in Asia, increasingly in Latin America, we've got some fantastic relationships there and they're really, it's like a switch has been flipped. The cognizance is there, yeah, absolutely. That recognition and embracing of the space sector in more and more markets and countries around the world is super exciting. That's fantastic. I just want to say, if there's a pitch that you sometimes give, I'd love to hear it. I guess I want to give you the floor to do that because I always like kind of hearing that part of the house that's made. Amazing. Yeah, I'm too good at the soapbox element. So I mean, the UK space sector is probably one of the only space sectors in the world where you'll find such a diverse range of not just capability and technologies that we're interested in, but countries and types of companies that are home, that the UK is home to. So we have domestic companies. We have homegrown UK talent, but we also have so many US companies operating in the UK. We have so many European companies operating in the UK. There really aren't that many countries that have the ecosystem, have the business support, have the mentality, have the business environment that would welcome that and embrace that. That is intentional. That is a policy driven decision for the UK to be internationally facing, to be welcoming of a diverse and broad industrial base. So we want those companies here. We want American companies to see the UK as an extension of their market. We want European companies to see the UK as a home, as a natural ally and partner. We want those emerging space economies to also look to the UK for our expertise and the technology we've done. Alongside American and European and Japanese and Korean companies that the UK is home to. So we really are in, never say unique, because someone will always put their hand up and say, "No, no, that's not necessary." It's always that guy. We're certainly one of the most uncommon places in the world to do business in space, because we're so accommodating and so welcoming of that international angle. We'll be right back. Welcome back. We keep reading articles about how much junk there is in space and how many times objects have to maneuver on orbit to avoid collision, and, well, it got us thinking. How often does the International Space Station have to power up to avoid space debris? Well, it turns out that while the frequency varies, it's estimated to maneuver, when I guess, about once a year. And it just so happens that it had to do so yesterday. The station's Progress 91 thrusters were fired at 6.10pm Eastern time on Wednesday for 3 minutes 33 seconds to raise the orbit of the International Space Station. That maneuver provided an extra margin of distance from a piece of orbital debris from a fragment of a Chinese long-merge rocket that was launched back in 2005. The pre-planned debris avoidance maneuver was coordinated by NASA, Roscosmos, and other space station partners. Without the maneuver, NASA estimated that the fragment could have come within around 0.4 miles of the station. That is, in space terms, very much a little too close for comfort, we're sure you'd agree. NASA says the maneuver had no impact on operations aboard the space station and will not affect US Spacewalk 93, which was expected around the time that we are recording today. And it seems that although there is estimated to be a million pieces of junk whizzing around up there on orbit, NASA and their partners have things covered, and we hope that that continues to be the case. [Music] That's it for T-minus for May 1st, 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 Kilpie is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We will see you tomorrow. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
