Today is July 3, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-minus. 22nd to LOS, T-dred. Open aboard. [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] Five. A Russian cargo spacecraft is due to lift off to the International Space Station. Four. McLean Engineering and Applied Technologies has been selected by NASA to provide simulation and advanced software services to the agency. LN Space has been selected to manufacture the next five satellites for Satelliott. Atomic Six has won a $2 million TAC-5 from US Space Force Space Systems Command to mature and flight qualify the company's solar array for commercial and defense sectors. AST Space Mobile has closed a $100 million equipment financing facility led by Trinity Capital. [MUSIC PLAYING] And our guest today is astronaut scholar Abigail Glover. The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation is celebrating its Founders Day this month, and we wanted to find out what one of their amazing scholars, Abigail in this case, is doing with their support. Find out more when I catch up with abs later in the show. [MUSIC PLAYING] We're kicking off with some financial news from AST Space Mobile for the top of our Intel briefing today. The space-based cellular broadband network has announced the closing of a $100 million equipment financing facility led by Trinity Capital. And for those not down with financing lingo, myself included, an equipment financing facility is a type of loan or lease agreement that allows businesses to acquire equipment by borrowing or renting it instead of paying the full purchase price upfront. Essentially, it's a way to finance the purchase or lease of equipment needed for business operations. And the news has bolstered the stock price for AST. This non-dilutive financing is designed to support AST Space Mobile's accelerated manufacturing and network deployment goals during 2025 and 2026. The facility used existing and planned equipment as collateral and is designed to fit into a more mature long-term capital structure, facilitating future debt capital, enabling flexibility and facilitating continued growth. Andrew Johnson, who is the chief financial officer of AST Space Mobile, stated in the press release that this facility is the first such type of financing agreement for the company and reflects our stage of rapid growth and transition from research and development to full-scale manufacturing and network deployment. Moving on to our next story now, and Atomic Six has won a $2 million tactical funding increase from the US Space Force Space Systems Command to mature and flight qualify the company's light wing solar array for commercial and defense sectors. The 21-month TACFI grant will involve composite coupon testing, cell compatibility demonstration, and thermal vacuum and vibe testing to prove the light wing's ability to survive launch and operate in space. Atomic Six says the all-composite, lightweight, redeployable satellite power system delivers over four times more power per kilo than existing arrays, and that would enable energy-intensive operations such as orbital compute, high bandwidth communications, and human habitation space stations. The company also announced that former ISS commander Chris Hadfield has joined its advisory board to accelerate the technology's path to market. That is not a bad name drop there. Atomic Six says it already has $2.7 billion in contract requests from major constellation operators, and their light wing was just selected by CIDA Space to power the world's first lunar data centers, which is in partnership with Lone Star Data Holdings. So honestly, kudos to them on all their great news. And we're heading over to Spain now, and LN Space has been selected to manufacture the next five satellites for satellite. The satellites will become part of the Satelliots Low Earth Orbit Network and are scheduled for launch in 2026. Satelliots says the spacecraft positioned the company as a dual-use civilian and defense 5G satellite connectivity operator in line with Europe's strategic push for space autonomy. LN Space manufactured the first four commercial satellites for Satelliots constellation, which were successfully launched in August 2024 aboard a SpaceX rocket. The new satellites will be manufactured at LN Space's facilities in Negrón, Spain, and will include significant enhancements compared to the models that are already in orbit, enabling improved performance and greater payload capacity. McLean Engineering and Applied Technologies has been selected by NASA to provide simulation and advanced software services to the agency. The simulation and advanced software services to contract, known as SAS-2, includes services from October this year through September 30, 2030, with a maximum potential value not to exceed $150 million. The contract is a single award in definite delivery and definite quality contract, with the capability to issue cost plus fixed fee task orders and firm fixed price task orders. McLean is tasked to provide simulation and software services for space-based vehicle models and robotic manipulator systems, human biomechanical representations for analysis and development of countermeasures devices, guidance, navigation, and control of space-based vehicles for all flight phases, and space-based vehicle onboard computer system simulations of flight software systems. Hopefully you caught all that. Responsibilities also include astronomical object surface interaction simulation of space-based vehicles, graphics support for simulation visualization and engineering analysis, and ground-based and onboarding systems to support human in the loop training. And at the time that we are getting this show ready to publish right now, a Russian cargo spacecraft is due to lift off to the International Space Station. Soyuz rocket is scheduled to launch the uncrewed Progress 92 freighter from the Russia-run Baikonur Cosmodrome in Kazakhstan today at 3.32 PM Eastern time. The spacecraft will be delivering approximately three tons of food, fuel, and supplies to the Expedition 73 crew. And after a two-day in-orbit journey to the station, the spacecraft will dock autonomously to the space-facing port of the orbiting lab's Poisk module on Saturday, July 5. And the Progress 92 spacecraft will remain docked to the space station for approximately six months before departing for re-entry into Earth's atmosphere to dispose of trash that's been loaded by the crew. And that is it for today's Intel Briefing for this July 3. A reminder that you can always read more about all of the stories that I've mentioned in today's Intel Briefing and our show notes, which are mentioned in your podcast app and also on our website, space.ntuk.com. Hey, T-minus crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership or recruit talent, P-minus can help. We'd love to hear from you. Just send us an email at space@ntuk.com or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. And a quick programming note for you, everybody. Tomorrow is July 4, and that is our Independence Day here in the United States, so we will not be publishing our daily Intel Briefing that day. But we do have some special programming that'll drop in the podcast feed, though, so do not fret if you're looking for something to listen to tomorrow. But otherwise, we'll be back to our regular scheduled programming with a new Deep Space episode on Saturday, July 5 and back to daily Intel Briefings on Monday, July 7. Happy 4s. [MUSIC PLAYING] Today's guest is Abigail Glover, Astronaut Scholar for 2024 and 2025. We met Abbs at SpaceCom earlier this year in Florida, and it turns out that she's a big fan of the show. Thank you, Abbs. We're big fans of you as well. And we know that she is going to do amazing things in her career. Now, Abbs started by telling me about her background and how she came to find out about the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. I grew up in a small town in West Virginia and moved down to Florida in 2015. So 2015 to 2016 year was actually my senior year of high school. And at the time, I was convinced my life was going to revolve around theater and the arts. And then something really switched over that summer. I had to sit down and do a lot of hard thinking about what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. And art, to me, is something that I can always have with me regardless of where I am. And so I decided, OK. I could do anything in the world. What would that be? What would I want to accomplish? And I thought back of a lot of my childhood memories, like looking at the stars through my telescope with my dad and building things with my hands. And so I was like, that's it. That's what I want to do. I want to be an engineer. And so I enrolled in community college at Lake Sumter State College. And I actually started the astronomy club there. And they had a Direct Connect program to UCF. And I'm not familiar with Florida universities. I was really nervous to have to pick one. So actually my very first semester of community college, I went to the visitors complex because they had just opened Heroes and Legends. And there was a plaque with Alan Shepard that talked about the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation. And I immediately started googling stuff about, what is this? This sounds so cool. I knew whatever type of engineering I had to do, it was going to be space related because it was just so cool to me. And so one of the universities on that list for ASF was University of Central Florida. So I was like, that's it. I'm going to UCF. So once you got there, how did you get interested in doing research? One of my friends was like, hey, if you're starting to look for internship opportunities, it's a really tough market out there right now. Try to see if there's some research on campus that you can do. Reach out to a professor that you love and see if they have anything available. And I was like, you know what? Yeah, that's a great idea. I'm going to do that. And at the time, I had just finished taking asteroids, comets, and meteorites with Dr. Umberto Campines, who at the time he was teaching it, was working on OSIRIS-REx. And so I sent him an email, you know, hey Dr. Campines, was wondering if maybe you have any research available. And he was like, unfortunately, I'm going to be right. I don't have anything. Let me hand off your name to a couple of people. And I wound up on Anna Megke's desk. And Anna was running this nonprofit called Exalith Lab. And Exalith Lab focuses on producing high fidelity lunar asteroid and martian regolith simulants. And so I interviewed with her. And she's like, I don't have anything research-wise. But I can tell you're eager. You want to do something. So I'll make you a deal. If you do some grunt work for a little bit, you crush up these rocks. You help us mix and package up the simulants. If something comes up, you will be on the first on my list. I was like, perfect. She's like, well, before you say anything, come see the lab. Try it out first, because you may hate it. Yeah, that's fair. And funny enough, that was a big readout process for them. Because the lab, at the time, we were working out of an outdoor storage unit with one little AC unit in a corner to cool us down. We were doing this for four to six hours at a time. And at the end of the day, we'd clean everything up. We'd push it back into the storage unit. And they're like, we understand if this isn't your cup of tea. And I was like, are you serious? I get to use this mining equipment. I get to use heavy machinery. This is so cool. And good attitude does take you a long way. It honestly does. Yeah, and it was great, too, because I didn't realize it at the time. But it was providing me with the foundational knowledge that I needed for the research I would ultimately end up doing. So after you started having these experiences, like, where do you go from there? I wanted to do an undergraduate thesis, but I didn't have a project in mind. And so I talked to my graduate student mentor, Jared Longfox. He has been such a key part of my growth and my journey over the last four years. But I asked him, I said, hey, Jared, do you have anything that I could do for this undergraduate thesis, like any sort of grunt work that I can get you data on? And he was like, let me ask around. Let me see if I can do anything. And he came back a couple days later. And he was like, yeah, so Jet Propulsion Labs has this toolkit that they really need some data for. If you can get that, that would be awesome. And I was like, like the JPL? And they were like, yes. So I was like, yeah, yeah, let's do it. Let's do it. So the toolkit that they needed data for is called the Sparta toolkit. And the way I like to describe it to folks is that it's the Swiss Army knife of geotechnical toolkits. And it's not just for the moon, but also Mars and any other rocky surface. Nice. It is so robust. It's absolutely phenomenal that this is something that's being developed. And I was surprised that I hadn't heard anything about it before because it's already up to like a TRL6, TRL7. Really? Yeah. Wow. They've done testing in the Vomit comet, out in the field, all that fun stuff. So I spent three semesters conducting a literature review. I got the model from them. I modified it for a testing rig that we had. I made my own adapter for it because I knew exactly what we needed. I worked really closely with the UCF machine shop. They were phenomenal to work with. They created this really beautiful piece of art. And then I spent hours in the lab compacting this miniature test bed and deploying the unit and processing the data and seeing how it compared to published data. And the really awesome part of it was its valid data. That is truly extraordinary. And I know you're going to grad school after this, right? Like you're not even done. You've still got stuff that you're doing. Do you see regolith being a big part of your future? Or do you want to do a completely different area of research? Like what are you interested in? Yeah. Funny enough, I always joke that my internship at NASA is my day job. And then regolith is like my dirty little secret, right? But really, it's not. Both go really hand in hand. And everybody expects my internship at NASA to be directly related to the regolith. And funny enough, it's not. I've learned a lot about Artemis II because that is the mission that we are working towards right now. I've learned so much about the ground systems that we develop to make a successful launch. And also the importance of human factors. I haven't heard a lot about it, but there is so much science that goes into human psychology and engineering things to make it as safe as possible for our astronauts and our ground crew. And I mean, this is going to be one of the first human-rated deep space missions. And that is so exciting for me to be a part of that and to be able to see something so vastly different from my research and learn such different things. I mean, data analysis on that side of things is absolutely insane. And I realized how much I loved it. And so that's really helped with my research work as well. I am starting grad school in August. So I'm preparing to wrap up my internship and move to Colorado to attend the Colorado School of Mines to pursue a PhD in space resources. Oh, my goodness. They are not ready for you, abs-- they better get ready. You know, one of my things was my grad school had to have a regolith test fed. And School of Mines also has a 120 ton test bed, just like UCF does. Even though I haven't even started yet, I'm already working with a group of graduate and undergraduate students to put together some information and compile some data and get ready for a CDR, critical design review at the end of the summer, so that we can hopefully start integrating new hardware into this testing rig as soon as I'm there in the fall. That's amazing. My research is going to focus all on-- yep, big space dirt. It doesn't go away. I fell in love with it so much. And so my whole graduate degree is going to focus on doing more quantification of these simulants, because I only got to experience one small sliver of the pie. There are so many other places out there that make their own simulants aside from Exalith Lab. You know, Colorado School of Mines makes their own, Michigan Tech makes their own, NASA makes their own. And there are so many differences between them, because you know, simulant will never be 100% accurate to the real thing. And how it varies is very important for the research we're doing. And so I really want to help-- there's a database floating around that NASA currently has. I really want to help NASA compile that database. And then, you know, the future is AI. So understanding how to use machine learning to take that data and make it more robust and how to connect these different geotechnical properties and physical properties so that we can better understand how our simulants are related to the real thing. So that's kind of my focus for the next four years, is really getting into even more of the geotech aspects and figuring out where to go next. We'll be right back. [MUSIC PLAYING] Welcome back. First up, a quick update on yesterday's final story about a new interstellar object in our solar system. My literal last words on that story were that I hoped the new object would get a better name soon than interstellar object candidate A11PL3Z. Well, great minds clearly complain alike, as that object does indeed have a new name as of today. Solar system, say hello to our new friend as it makes its way through our neighborhood, interstellar comet 3i. Still orbitally wacky, by the way, though its orbital eccentricity has been downgraded to around six from yesterday's 10. Anyway, yes. Now, on to sports. Yes, sports, famously a thing we cover here on T-minus. Well, we do when it's space-related. And the US baseball team, the Colorado Rockies, have entered into a patch partnership with York Space Systems this week. And that means the York Space Systems name will be a patch on the sleeve of the regular team jersey of the Colorado's Rocky team for the next five and a half years. And that does make York the very first aerospace company with this distinction in any professional sport. That distinction being having their name on the regular jersey. Little asterisk on that story there, though, with the first aerospace company on the regular team jersey. Indeed, that is York. There have been other aerospace companies on non-regular team jerseys, though. Lunar Outpost had their logo on the Juventus football, or soccer football jersey at one point, though it was a pre-match jersey, the warm-up outfit, in other words, and not official kit. Very close. Still feels like a nice opportunity for me to mention, shameless plug, that I spoke with Lunar Outpost's co-founder and chief strategy officer, Forrest Mayan, recently in our chat. We'll be the deep space episode coming up this Saturday, July 5th. So yeah, don't miss that conversation. And that's T-Mine is brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We would love to know what you think of our podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in our show notes or send us an email at space@n2k.com. We are proud that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine 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 helps space and cybersecurity professionals grow, learn, and stay informed. As the next is for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, the technology, and the ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how at N2K.com. 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 am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. Have a great July 4th. We'll see you next time. T-minus. 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