0529-T-Minus-20250527
Today is May 27th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. T-minus. Twenty seconds to LLN. Open aboard. IntelSat receives approval from the Indian government to provide satellite coverage directly to India's broadcast media companies. The UK Space Agency accelerator has announced the launch of the next round of its flagship programs, Explore and Leo. Redwire has delivered the onboard computer for the European Space Agency's Comet Interceptor mission. The Czech Republic says it will send an astronaut to space on a future Axiom mission. Anderosat has raised 43 million euros in an investment round to support the production of their ESPA-class satellites. [Music] And our guest today is Jim Wei, Executive Director of the American Astronautical Society. Jim will be sharing details about AAS and their latest events, so stick around for more on that later in the show. [Music] Happy Tuesday, everybody! With SmallSat Europe kicking off events today, it should come as no surprise that we are seeing a flurry of updates from European companies. So we're starting with the announcement today that Anderosat has closed a new funding round. The Bulgarian-based company has raised 43 million euros, and that's around 49 million US dollars, with the investment round led by Founders Fund. Anderosat says the new capital will be directed towards scaling the production of the company's new Endurance ESPA-class satellites. These software-defined satellites are equipped with advanced avionics and feature a fully modular design, making them ideal for operators seeking rapid deployment of hyperspectral imaging, synthetic aperture radar, broadband, navigation, and other sophisticated payloads. The new funding will help facilitate the construction of a new 17,500 square meter facility in Sofia, Bulgaria's capital. The facility will be designed to produce up to 60 satellites a month by the end of the year. Anderosat plans to fly two Gen 3 Endurance Validation Missions in 2025, one of which to demonstrate propulsion technology, and another to test an Earth observation system using in-orbit processing and a multi-spectral payload. We're expecting big things from them this year. And staying in Europe, the Czech Republic has sent a letter of intent to Axiom Space expressing interest in flying a national astronaut to space on one of the company's future human spaceflight missions. This initiative builds upon a memorandum of understanding that was signed just months ago between the Czech Republic and Axiom Space. The partnership with Axiom Space is expected to catalyze technology transfer, stimulate the local supply chain, and open new commercial opportunities for Czech companies within the emerging space economy. And the Czech Republic is not the only country working to establish ties with Axiom, as the Egyptian Space Agency has also signed a memorandum of understanding to strengthen collaboration in space science, technology, and human spaceflight with the company. The new agreement establishes a framework for joint initiatives spanning scientific research, technology development, and support for future human spaceflight missions. Redwire has delivered the onboard computer for the European Space Agency's Comet Interceptor mission. The company developed and delivered the onboard computer through a contract with OHB Italy. ESA's Comet Interceptor will be the first spacecraft to visit a comet coming directly from the outer reaches of the sun, carrying material untouched since the dawn of the solar system. Redwire's Belgian subsidiary, Redwire Space and V, developed the onboard computer, which is the brain of Comet Interceptor. Redwire is designed to monitor and control other spacecraft components, including transmitting critical data to operators on the ground. The UK Space Agency accelerator has announced the launch of the next round of its flagship programs, Explore and Leo. Previous programs helped participants raise over 15 million pounds in private investment and grant funding. ESA says the accelerator has evolved to offer even more targeted, impactful support for UK space businesses and entrepreneurs. The initiative supports UK-based innovators at key stages of their journey, whether they are already operating in the space sector or developing technologies that make use of space. Participants from Explore and Leo will benefit from insights from some of the UK's leading startup and industry experts, helping businesses to sharpen their value proposition, commercial strategy, and technical approach. They'll also receive curated connections to investors, industry leaders, and potential customers through virtual networking, regional meetups, and specialist sessions, as well as focused one-on-one support to build market readiness, strengthen the execution, and translate ambition into action. Applications are officially open until June 29th. IntelSat has received approval from the Indian government to provide satellite coverage directly to India's broadcast media companies. The company has secured authorization for four geostationary satellites providing seaband coverage over India. The approved satellite fleet will primarily serve India's broadcast media industry, enabling enhanced content delivery and distribution capabilities across the subcontinent and from India to other regions of the world. Following the authorization from the Indian National Space Promotion and Authorization Center, IntelSat has already won you business from three of India's largest media companies. And that wraps up our top five stories for today. Let me bring in NTK Senior Producer Alice Carruth now for more on the stories that we're also keeping an eye on. Alice? Maria, we have three additional links in today's selected reading section of our show notes for our listeners to read up on. The first is on the news that Satix 5 shareholders have approved the agreement and plan of merger with MDA Space Limited. Then we've included a CGTN article on Chinese and South African astronomers' collaborations. And the final link will take you to the announcement that AEcom has been awarded an environmental remediation contract at Bandenberg Space Force Base. And of course, we are watching SpaceX's planned Starship Test Flight for this evening. We'll bring you more on that tomorrow, if it stays on schedule, of course. Alice, in the meantime, where can our listeners find those links? All good podcast platforms include show notes. The links are added to the selected reading section, along with further reading on all the stories mentioned throughout the show. They're also included in the episode page on our website, space.ntuk.com. Hey, T-minus crew, if you're just joining us, be sure to follow T-minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. Also, if you could do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday, please show three friends or coworkers this podcast. A growing audience is the most important thing for us, and we would love your help as part of the T-minus crew. So if you find T-minus useful, please share so other professionals like you can find the show. Thank you. It means a lot to me and all of us here at T-minus. Our guest today is Jim Wei, Executive Director of the American Astronautical Society. Jim started off by telling me about the history of AAS. AAS is a nonprofit technical society. We were formally established in 1954, but in 1952, it all kind of started with a meeting of these folks in Staten Island, New York, the Staten Island Interplanetary Society. That is a great name. Yeah, isn't it great? And they wanted to get together, and I'm going to quote here, "to discuss problems of rocket propulsion, navigation, and physiology in planet hopping." So that was their original mission, right? Of course. That's right. That's right. And so in 1954, the society was officially established to publicly disseminate and support as many of the credible proposals for the conquest of space as possible. So in short, we haven't wavered from that in all those years, and what we do is we bring people together to address the current challenges and opportunities in space exploration and science, figure out where we are now, where we want to go, and how we're going to do it. And that's our role, is to bring them together both in public forums like symposiums, but also presentation or research papers or conferences, things like that. We publish a journal. We're just very proud part of the community. The events list that you have. That is not a small amount of work that goes into that many events, and it is a lot of events. I don't often get to say, "Tell me about your symposia." But please tell me about them because you have multiple. Yeah, yeah, we do. It's a small staff organization. It's only four of us, but we have a lot of volunteers on our... Really? Yeah. Wow, my goodness. Yeah. But we're a big board and lots of committees, so that's how we get it all done. So I'm very fortunate to, again, serve for a lot of those people. And so, yeah, we do three symposia every year, kind of focused on some of the NASA centers. So we do our Goddard symposium in the spring, focused on space science. We do a Glenn symposium in conjunction with NASA Glenn out in Ohio. That one's focused on space technology. And then we do the Von Braun space exploration symposium down in Huntsville every fall. That's fantastic. So we do those three. In addition to that, we do technical conferences, astrodynamics, specialist conference, guidance, navigation and control, space flight mechanics. And we also participate in a couple of other conferences, the ISSR&D conference. We do all the technical sessions for that one. And then the AMOS conference in Hawaii. We do a lot of the technical sessions for that one as well. Wow. So I was at the Boston ISSRDC last year. I did not know that you guys did the technical sessions. Yeah. You all are everywhere. It's quite amazing. I know that you have a lot of things upcoming that I definitely want to hear about. But I'm champing at the bit a little bit to ask you about an event that just happened where you all honored the one and only Gene Kranz. Please tell me about that. I'm just dying to hear more about this. It was truly exceptional. Again, honored and humbled to be in that company. But yeah, AS has the Lifetime Achievement Award that we present only every 10 years. So this is only the seventh time we've ever presented it. And in the past, it's gone to folks like Norm Augustine, Ed Stone, and, you know, way early on Warner Vombran. So yeah, a nice list of people. But this time around, we were very honored to present this to White Flight himself, Gene Kranz. And it was an incredible experience. We had a lot of help and collaboration with the folks at NASA Johnson Space Center, as well as the team at Space Center Houston. So Space Center Houston was our host for this event. Beautiful theater, beautiful place. And then we also got to spend some time in historic mission control over at NASA Johnson. So that was incredible. With him? Yes. Oh, yeah. Oh my God. I got to step over the rope that said, "Don't go here. An alarm will sound." And, you know, I was behind that. And we were really honored to have some special people there with us. Fred Hayes from Apollo 13 was there. Jack Schmidt from Apollo 17 was there. And to sit, you know, next to them and them talking to each other about stories and things. It was just incredible. And Gene Kranz, all of 91 years old, talked for 40 minutes at the podium. You know, and everybody was riveted. It was a beautiful thing. I bet. I was dying to ask, and I am dying to ask, so can one summarize 40 minutes of what he said? Oh, jeez. What did he say? I mean, I'm so curious. It was remarkable. It was a history. I mean, he went from, you know, riding, hitching rides on freight trains to go to college. All the way from Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Space Shuttle, everything. Everything he'd done, he went through it all. And it was amazing. And all along, you know, incredibly valuable insights and lessons. Lessons learned along the way. So, yeah, that's the best way I can summarize it. But I will say we'll have the whole recording actually posted to our site so people can take that in soon. So that should be up there in very short order, just at astronautical.org/justlookfortheawardspage. And it'll be there. I cannot wait to watch that. I was just going to ask you, does he have any thoughts on how iconic he is? He must know how iconic he is. Maybe, but it didn't come across, right? I mean, he's, you know, humble. Absolutely, absolutely humble. And that really came across it. And, you know, what he kept talking about was being a leader of teams. And it was all about the teams. It wasn't about him. It was about all the people around him to make all of this stuff happen. And so, I think that was really his focus and that really came across. I bet that's part of what makes him so iconic. He definitely deserves a Lifetime Achievement Award. If anyone does, it's him. That's what it treats. And this is not to take away from also the incredible work that, on things that you are working on that are upcoming. So, in addition to the kind of the symposia we were talking about, one cool thing that we have coming up in the next couple weeks here is our Student Cansat Competition. It's a pretty unique competition for university students. It is a payload design, build and fly competition. So, AS supplies the rockets, the motors, that kind of thing. And students are charged with a really complex mission to put into this small satellite or payload. It doesn't go to orbit, it goes to a 3, 4,000 feet kind of thing, but they have to accomplish a whole set of tasks. Deploy an arrow break or something like that, land an egg. We've had them deploy a drone, deploy something that glides down on its own and bonus points for a stabilized video, things like that and all the telemetry. And the nice thing is, so this is run by a gentleman that works at the NRL, who builds satellites for a living. He runs the technical portion of it. And so, he knows the experience. And so, these students are doing pre-flight testing, PDR, CDR flight, and then even after they fly, they have to present to a set of judges on what they learned. You know, did they get their data? How did it all work? All that stuff. And everything is scored. We have a couple hundred teams apply for the competition, and then we invite 40 or so down to the actual flight portion of it. And they come from all over the world. So, we have teams from Argentina, Mexico, South Korea, Canada, Turkey, India, and a bunch of teams from the US. And they all come and fly and have a lot of fun together, which is great. And it's just an inspiring, inspiring competition. And every year I see this challenge. I think there's no way any one of these teams is going to accomplish it. And yet, most of them do. They are so amazingly capable students. And it kind of gives you hope for the future of the industry, for sure. Oh, that's so fantastic. From what I know from these kinds of competitions, from my colleagues who've been and have taken part in their own way, everyone comes away with that feeling as well. The future looks really bright. And it's amazing also what students are accomplishing at such young ages. What they're able to do. I don't know about you, but when I was their age, I wasn't doing this kind of stuff. That's for sure. I certainly was not either. I certainly was not. I could not have dreamt of what... I mean, I talked to high school students, I should say, who were casually talking about, oh, they're CubeSats. And I'm going, excuse me. Right. I could never have dreamt of such a thing when I was in high school. Well, and related to that, so I just talked with a company who's going to be supporting the competition, who has students from one of the Turkish teams that have flown for CubeSats with them to orbit. And they said that it all came out of Kansasat because they learned the process, they learned how to go through it all, the missteps, things they could do better differently. And it's all worked out for them. And they've, yeah, they've flown actual satellites. So it's super cool to hear about that. That is so cool. I want to make sure that if there's anything else that you wanted to share with our audience about what you all are doing at AAS that we haven't covered or any kind of call to action that you want to share, the floor is yours. Well, that's great. Yeah. Thank you. So, you know, it's, it's interesting time, right now, right? You know, shrinking budgets, workforce issues, program cancellations, what have you. And, you know, AAS, what we're going to strive to do is to bring all, continue to bring all these people together to talk about all of this and figure out how to work with what we've got, who we've got to accomplish the greatness that we all want to accomplish. It's definitely going to be challenging. We recognize that we're not just single legacies, purpose-built systems anymore. This is an ecosystem and everybody's playing. And so the key to success will be to have everybody talking. And so that's what we're going to strive to do. We're going to keep doing it through our events, through the conversations that we'll have. And, you know, hopefully we can help facilitate those conversations and make this all work for everybody, you know, everything under the stars. Welcome back. The European Space Agency is turning 50 years old on May 30th. Honestly, they don't look a day over 40 if you ask me. And to commemorate their half a century milestone, did you think ESA was just going to write a blog post about their birthday and call it a day of, or snot? No, I don't think so. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. I think it's going to be a great day. And ESA's Deep Space Radio Telescope at Cebrero, Spain will then broadcast it out into Deep Space, pointing it directly towards Voyager 1, with the radio waves expected to overtake the aforementioned Voyager in less than 24 hours. And yeah, that's not just some random fact wait for you. Overtaking Voyager 1 is very much a planned part of the story here. ESA is calling the Blue Danube, and these are their words not mine, the Anthem for Space. The iconic pieces inclusion in Cubrick's 2001 Space Odyssey, of course. And ESA is definitely not at all the least bit salty about the fact that the Blue Danube was not, I repeat, not included on the Voyager Golden Record. They may or may not have even made a short video about how it was not included on the Voyager Records and that that was a very obvious oversight. Okay, yeah, they have in fact made a movie about that. And it's on that space.vienna.info website I mentioned. And the whole effort is being called Waltz Into Space. I should mention that this year is also the 200th birthday of Johann Strauss, who wrote the Blue Danube, so heck of a posthumous birthday present having a work beamed into space. [Music] That's it for T-minus from May 27th, 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 Tre Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kielpe is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
