Today is May 21st, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. T-minus. Twenty seconds to L-O-N, T-minus. Open aboard. Five. SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft to depart the International Space Station on Thursday, May 22nd, or its return to Earth. Four. China has put out a call for payload proposals for its Mars sample return mission to include international researchers. Three. ExxiaLaunch has signed a multi-year launch contract with SpaceX that extends its small satellite launch capacity through 2028. Two. MDA Space has increased its offer to acquire SATEX-FI. One. The Trump administration has appointed General Michael Goodline to lead the Golden Dome project. Let's go. Happy hump day everyone. We're kicking off today's Intel briefing with an announcement from the U.S. administration about the proposed Golden Dome. And for those not familiar with the president's vision for a new missile defense system, the Golden Dome is aiming to be capable of intercepting missiles even if they are launched from the other side of the world and even from space. President Trump has appointed U.S. Space Forces General Michael Goodline to lead the Golden Dome Missile Defense Shield project. He also says that he wants the project to take three years and $175 billion to complete, which is a huge budget, but a much lower cost in shorter time frame than others have estimated. While it's not yet clear what exactly the so-called Golden Dome will look like, it has been compared to Israel's Iron Dome, though there are significant differences both in scope and scale to Israel's shield. The proposed system plans to consist of next-generation technologies across land, sea, and space, including space-based sensors and interceptors. There's even talk of the use of hypersonic weapons that could deliver warheads from space. The program has been met with criticism from foreign nations. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Mao Ning told reporters that the proposed shield will heighten the risk of turning space into a war zone and creating a space arms race and shake the international security and arms control system. Let's hope not. Space companies are already scrambling to anticipate the calls for proposals, and we will update you when those are released. Moving on now, MDA Space has increased its offer to acquire SATEX-FI communications. SATEX-FI completed a "go shop" process for alternative acquisition bids and received one that beat MDA Space's original offer. MDA had granted SATEX-FI the right to a "go shop" process in the original acquisition offer. The new agreement represents a significant price increase from MDA Space's original offer of $193 million. MDA Space will now acquire SATEX-FI through an all-cash transaction for $3 per ordinary share without interest at an aggregate equity value of approximately $280 million. EXO Launch has signed a multi-year launch contract with SpaceX that extends its small satellite launch capacity through 2028. The new launch contracts span additional transport emissions to SunSynchronous orbit as well as additional mid-inclination, near-polar, and don dusk missions. EXO Launch has launched with SpaceX since 2020, executing more than 160 contracts to date and successfully deploying more than 400 diverse satellites across 20 missions, aboard Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy. The company has set to launch several new separation systems for microsatellites and CubeSats on upcoming missions. China has put out a call for payload proposals for its Mars sample return mission. The China National Space Administration has extended the invitation to overseas research institutions, including those in Hong Kong and Macau Special Administrative Regions, to submit proposals for developing payloads for the Tianwen III mission. The Tianwen III spacecraft comprises a lander, an ascent vehicle, a service module, an orbiter, and a return module. It will be equipped with six scientific payloads, the Raman Fluorescence Spectrometer, ultra-wideband exploration radar, mid-infrared Superfine Imaging Spectrometer, Mars Global Multicolor Camera, Ascent ENA Aurora Detector, and high-precision vector magnometer. All are open to overseas researchers. The mission is scheduled for launch around 2028. SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft will depart the International Space Station on Thursday, May 22 for its return to Earth. The spacecraft will undock from the Zenith, or Space-Facing, port of the station's harmony module at 12.05 p.m. ET, and fire its thrusters to move a safe distance away from the station under the command of SpaceX's mission control in Hawthorne, California. After re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, the spacecraft will splash down on Friday, May 23, off the coast of California. Among the scientific hardware returning to Earth is the Astro-B Reach, designed by our friends at KMI, and the Reach demonstration used Astro-B robots to test a way to safely capture and relocate debris and other objects in orbit, and it could help address end-of-light satellite servicing, orbit change maneuvers, and orbital debris removal. And you'll hear more about that specific demo by revisiting our chat last month with Troy Morris from CalMorris, Inc., and we'll include the link for you in our show notes. [Music] And speaking of those show notes, Alice Carruth, N2K's senior producer, is joining us now with the other stories that we've added links to in today's selected reading section. Thanks, Maria. We have two additional stories in there today, one on Wish and NASA collaborating to advance autonomous flights, and the other is a story about a new bacteria growing on China's space station. Huh, well, yeah, is it too early to panic? Who knows, Maria? You'll have to read up on it and make that call yourself. Those links can also be found on the episode page on our website. Just visit space.n2k.com and click on today's episode title. AT-MINUSCREW, 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 AT-MINUSCREW. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. [Music] We'll be right back. [Music] Welcome back. I am endlessly fascinated by how space missions incorporate art into their payloads. I was fascinated by the Arecibo message, the Pioneer plaque, and the Voyager golden record from a young age. I have replicas of both Pioneer and Voyager's messages hanging on my wall in my office, in fact. And I know I'm far from the only person who finds the ideas behind these messages fascinating, evocative, and beautiful. We featured a few conversations with artists and designers on this show who have continued the conversation about what it means to be human, how we represent our humanity in the context of endless space, and what kinds of messages we might be leaving for future sentient beings, possibly humanity's heirs or beings currently unknown to us, countless eons from now. How do we communicate our location, our values, our humanity when we likely won't have a shared language? And from a practical point of view, how do you make that message clear when payload limitations mean you are measuring things in grams and millimeters? It's quite a challenge, isn't it? And there are lots of approaches that one could take. I invite you to take a listen to our Deep Space episode from January 4th, 2025 to hear my chat with Mark Baskinger at Carnegie Mellon about the MoonArk project and how they approached these exact questions. And in my inbox yesterday, I got news of another approach, and this one is called the Memory Disk Version 3. Version 1 was on the Intuitive Machines Odysseus Lander, Version 2 is on Icebase's Resilience Lander currently en route to Marie Frigoris. Version 3 will have a few copies heading to the Moon because we just have so many options to choose from with lunar missions in the coming years. So upcoming missions from both Astrobotic and Icebase will both have their own Memory Disk V3s. And this disk is the size of a US penny, so quite a small coin. And the cultural artifacts are nano-engraved upon its raw nickel surface, itty-bitty. And that surface is jam-packed with information at a mind-blowing resolution of 133,000 dpi. Your home printer could not even dream of something like that. Seriously, this is just some of what's on this tiny disk's surface. 286 translations of UNESCO's Constitutional Preamble, the entire original French edition of Le Petit Prince laid out page by page, an audio waveform by Richard David James much better known as Apex Twin as a sound hieroglyph, a universal metrics and navigation section heavily inspired by the Voyager Golden Record, and includes its original pulsar map. Oh yeah, and 106 pieces of visual art all etched right onto the surface. Some classic hits on there like the Mona Lisa, as well as a number of modern pieces, including one from one of my favorite contemporary visual artists, Yoshitaka Amano. And he reflected on having his artwork included on the Memory Disk V3 and said this, "Art has the power to transcend time and history. It must express the fundamental elements of our humanity, showing that our present will, one day, become the past. This understanding brings with it a significant responsibility, yet I embrace this responsibility with joy. As I aim for the myths of the future, I create my works with a sense of fun and imagination. If someone in the future finds happiness through viewing my work, there could be no greater joy for me. I am eagerly awaiting messages from the future." By etching information onto a metallic surface, there's no fiddly tech needed to see what's on this disk for eons to come. Just a magnifying glass will do it. Hopefully, our inheritors will still be able to manage that. That's it for T-minus from May 21st, 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 always email us at space@n2k.com. Your feedback ensures that we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in this rapidly changing space industry. N2K 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] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
