Today is July 10, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-Minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-Minus. 22nd to LOS, T-Dread. Open aboard. [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] Five. NASA has awarded Advanced Space a follow-on phase two cyber contract to develop design reference missions for CP&T capabilities that are compatible with NASA's Luna Net framework. Northwood Space has tested its first production-ready phased array antenna system. Australia's Gilmore Space and Japan's Space BD partner on rideshare opportunities. Varda Space has raised $187 million in the series C funding round. US President Donald Trump has named Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as the interim head of NASA. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] And today we will have the second part of my conversation with the Translational Research Institute for Space Helps Executive Director, Dorit Donovie, PhD. We're going to be talking about space medicine later in the show, so stick around for more on that. [MUSIC PLAYING] Happy Thursday, everybody. Thank you for joining me. Let's dive into today's Intel briefing. We're kicking off with a new appointment at NASA. US President Donald Trump has named Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy as the interim leader of the US Space Agency. On a social media post, Trump said of Duffy, he will be a fantastic leader of the ever more important space agency, even if only for a short period of time. The administration is yet to announce a nominee for the permanent role after withdrawing Jared Isaacman for consideration. Isaacman shared his thoughts on social media after Trump announced Duffy's new role. He said, "Short of a new nominee, this was a great move. NASA needs political leadership from someone the president trusts and has confidence in." And speaking of shakeups at NASA, at least 2,145 senior ranking NASA employees are set to leave the space agency according to documents obtained by Politico. The losses are particularly concentrated around senior management positions with 875 GS-15 employees set to leave, according to the documents. And for those like me who also don't speak US federal government pay scales, GS-15 is basically the highest you can get on the base pay scale for US civil service. The departures follow a proposed White House budget for 2026 that would slash NASA's funding by 25% and cut over 5,000 staff. And speaking of that budget, at the time of recording today's show, NASA's budget is being actively debated by the Senate Appropriations Committee. That's an important step in the budget approval process. And we will be bringing new updates on the outcome of any approvals once they have been confirmed. Moving on, VARDAS Space has raised US$187 million in a series C funding round. The new amount brings the total raised by the microgravity enabled life sciences company to $329 million. VARDAS has completed three successful launch and return missions with a fourth called W-4 currently in orbit and a fifth expected to launch before the end of the year. VARDAS CEO Will Brewey says the company will use the capital to build out the pharmaceutical lab that will deliver the world's first microgravity enabled drug formulation. VARDAS Orbital Laboratories are the first to process materials outside of the International Space Station and mark the beginnings of commercial expansion into low earth orbit. Congrats to them. Yesterday, we had a flurry of international collaboration announcements, but one that we unfortunately missed was Australia's Gilmore Space and Japan's Space BD. And those companies have announced a partnership to offer dedicated ride share opportunities on Gilmore Space's ARIS launch vehicles and Ellara sat platforms, opening new mission options for Japanese and global satellite customers. Space BD has supported more than 90 satellite missions and over 600 space related projects with expertise in launch integration, satellite deployment, and supporting experiments on the ISS, including in orbit demonstration services. The company say that this partnership will expand Space BD's global offerings while strengthening space cooperation between Japan and Australia. Northwood Space has tested its first production ready phased array antenna system known as portal. It is designed for supporting satellites in low earth, medium earth, and geostationary orbits. Northwood says portal has demonstrated that it can deliver one kilowatt of transmit power and receive sub picowatt signals within the same face. These faces can be arrayed in modular configurations to support higher power levels, such as six or eight array configurations supporting six or eight kilowatt power to geo at site. This milestone makes the portal system the most powerful commercial communications phased array ever built. The company says it's still on track for global deployment beginning in Q4 of this year. NASA has awarded Advanced Space a follow on Phase 2 CYBER contract to develop design reference missions for communication positioning, navigation, and timing, or CP&T capabilities that are compatible with NASA's Lunanet framework. The project, managed by NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, focuses on developing mission concepts for a standard-based interoperable lunar and martian CP&T relay network. Advanced Space has partnered with Firefly Aerospace on this project, using Firefly's Elytra orbital vehicle as a transfer stage for this relay network. Lunanet is a collaborative effort involving NASA, ESA, and potentially other international partners and commercial entities. It's focused on developing a lunar, standard-based, interoperable communications relay network for industry, academia, and international partners. It is expected to deploy sometime before the end of this decade. And that concludes our intelligence briefing for today. We will have more to come from my chat with Doreet and News on Lockheed Martin's bid to save NASA's Mars Sample Return program. But before we get to all of that, our producer, Alice Grewth, has more on the stories that didn't make today's top five. Alice, what do you got? Well, Maria, we've added two additional links into the selected reading section of today's show notes. One covers the completion of Neospice Group's acquisition of UP42 from Airbus Space and Defense, and the other is about AWS's Space Accelerator Program. So it sounds pretty interesting. Can you remind us where else those links can be found? We also include links to all the original sources of all the stories we mentioned throughout the show on the episode page of our website. Just head to space.intuk.com and click on today's episode title. IT-Crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership, or recruit talent, T-Minus can help. We'd love to hear from you. Just send us an email at space@intuk.com, or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] For our guest segment today, we've got the second part of my conversation with Dr. D'Arrit De Noville. She is the executive director of TRISH, or the Translational Research Institute for Space Health. And she joined me to tell me more about her fascinating work. Remember how to say my name? It's Doritos without the O's. That makes it real easy. So I am an associate professor at Baylor College of Medicine in the Center for Space Medicine. But I also have an appointment in the Department of Biochemistry and Pharmaceutical Biology. And how I ended up doing space health is one of these funny things that happens to you. And I say this to a lot of young people. You just never know when an opportunity comes up. You've never imagined you would end up where you are. And yet it opens up a world that you are just so happy in. It got me thinking about what's out there, and just really being curious about the world. But actually, my first love wasn't so much space, but it was biology. And just the amazing ability of living things to adapt to an environment. What happens when someone develops a condition in a long-term mission? Because we try to do a lot to prevent stuff from happening through screening or whatnot. But are we working on what if somebody develops it while they're very much on a mission and not able to return home? Like, what do we do about that? Yeah, so that's fascinating. This is another area where I think space medicine is really going to be the driving force for innovations for Earth as well. And the reason I say that is right now, we have the luxury of, from low Earth orbit, we can bring somebody back. We can medically evacuate somebody and have them back home within a matter of hours. Right, yep. From the moon, it's a little more complicated. From the moon, it'll probably be a couple of days. So you start to worry a little more about a medical situation on the moon. But even then, you could probably stabilize somebody for a couple of days and bring them back. It would be mission ending, of course. Now, when you consider Mars mission, it really is a forcing function for medical innovation. And what I mean by that is no resupply capability, maybe even no medical support from Earth if there's communication delays or communication disruption, right? So you have to have the crew be completely self-sufficient. To be self-sufficient in terms of the medical situation, first of all, you gotta bring everything with you, right? Like you're not gonna be able to replenish your medications if they go bad over the three years that they're gonna be on this mission. So medication, nutrition has to be just right. And then if you have to do a medical procedure, you can't possibly train for everything. You just can't. And even if you did train on it, it was like two years ago and you forgot how to do it. So we're developing a capability for crews going to Mars that will absolutely require an AI component, a decision support, a, if you will, the bones, you remember bones from Star Trek? - I was just thinking of bones, yes, that's right. - Bones that will actually help the crew because even if they do have a medical doctor on board that goes on this mission, they can't possibly cover everything and know everything and they're gonna need help. So we are developing those kinds of tools just in time training. And then the other thing is, is like most people just go on the web and they'll Google their symptoms and the large language models today from medicine are actually pretty good, but you're not gonna have that on, you're not gonna have the internet on the way to Mars. - No web MD on the way to Mars. - Right, so we're actually building a capability of making you DIY healthcare. - Again, this is an extreme environment. Don't try this at home, but yes, and this makes a lot of sense. To me, as I said, like when I have these conversations with people about one day I go into Mars, it's like it's the human machine that I think, that I'm so fascinated by and yeah, you're right. You have a doctor with you, could be the doctor who needs the help. So then what are you gonna do? You are tackling such fascinating problems. Like what do you do about all this? - It's so cool because I think the tools that we develop because we have to, it's not a luxury. We must have these tools. And that's the thing about a Mars mission, it forces you to make those innovations and foods in a new way of doing healthcare. All those things will mean that we can increase access of people on earth to all these other innovations that are coming from space for healthcare and for nutrition. So to me and the behavioral health, we haven't even touched the behavioral health. - I know, I was just thinking of that too, yeah, yep. - And finding that space for a long period of time. I mean, how do you stay mentally resilient? Many of us started like baking, right? During the pandemic. - We all got a little taste of that and all went bonkers. The mental resilience of crew without the creature comforts that we're all used to, what can one replicate? How does one increase resilience? I mean, this is, talk about the final frontier. I mean, to me that, getting very tricky, but that really is the big question also. If you can't go outside and see a tree, you know, how do you manage this? So what do we do? - Right, so we're exploring a lot of different things. You know, it's interesting that people have talked about maybe using a virtual world to recreate earth. It depends on the individual because some people actually make some more homesick, sadder, because they're not there. Other people are fine with it. They really feel like they're getting that experience, but it also needs to be the multi-sensory sort of experience. Our brains also, it's use it or lose it. So we know that when people go to an article for long periods of time, say nine months at a time, and they're not getting stimulation and the light cycles all messed up, their brains actually start to shrink. Your brain is much like a muscle if you're not using all the senses, all of the parts of the brain, essentially analyzing all the different inputs, 'cause there's no inputs. It's like very monotonous. We know that that's a problem. So how do we keep them stimulated? And so it will be a technical solution. It absolutely has to be a technical solution. Yeah, but it can't just be Netflix, right? Like that, your brain on Netflix ain't gonna be good on the way to Mars. I love to chuckle about it. And I also recognize that we are so complex as crazy human beings. And to me, sure, we can figure out a rocket tomorrow, but it's us human machines that really require a lot of care. I'm always really fascinated hearing about these different experiments going up. Just 'cause it's just so neat to me to see what we're trying to unravel and what insights are being gleaned. So thank you for taking the time to walk me through just a tiny, tiny bit of what you all are working on. I can only imagine this is like the tiniest fraction. So what a fascinating field you're in though. Oh my gosh, if I could do it all over again, I'd be like, can I intern for you? This is gonna be so fascinating. You do have an internship program. Come on over girl. Oh my God. So listeners, take note. I know many of y'all are looking for your next move. Well, thank you. Seriously, thank you so much for taking the time and speaking with me. Is there anything you wanna leave our audience with before we close out today? Anything at all? Yeah, the future is really interesting. The government is becoming just one player and it's exciting because it opens up the possibility for so much more. And the other thing I wanna say is that people wonder why bother sending humans to Mars when you can send robots. It's much cheaper and safer and all that. But the thing is is that robots can't do everything. They get stuck, their tires go out, they run out of energy. They can't do everything. And by pushing ourselves to get humanity out there, we're going to be pushing ourselves to develop new technologies, new capabilities and new understanding of ourselves as humans and as humanity. And so to me, that is the reason to go. Like, I don't know if your listeners know this, but the environmental movement for Earth began with that Earthrise picture from that was taken off the moon, like looking back from the moon, back on Earth and going, oh my gosh, look at this beautiful precious planet. We got it protected. That perspective you cannot get from a robot. You have got to send humans to get the perspective of what we're about, our place in the universe, our place in the solar system. So that's why I'm working on making sure humans can do it. - It's beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing your expertise and your vision with me. I cannot tell you how much I enjoyed this chat. So thank you so much. - Me too. (upbeat music) - In a note that if you missed the first part of our conversation, we ran it on Tuesday's show, and that would be July 8th, 2025. If you want to go back and have a listen. (upbeat music) We'll be right back. Welcome back. From our not dead yet desk, NASA's Mars sample return. An eye-wateringly expensive science dream, or might it one day become reality? A number of the primes have been kicking the tires on Mars sample return or MSR for years. And the price tag always came back pretty, pretty, pretty high. A mission that even had NASA saying the whole idea was just too slow and too expensive. And that is saying something to offense NASA. It's a hard sell in the best of times for NASA. But right now, especially, must I remind you of the proposed cuts from the White House desk? Even if those do not come to fruition, there just isn't a political appetite for a pure science mission costing nearly $10 billion right now. Even if that mission would be one for the history books for sure as one of the most scientifically ambitious projects ever attempted. But don't give up on this dream yet, says Lockheed Martin. As in late June, they quietly dropped a new commercial proposal to NASA for the long-awaited Mars sample return mission. Drumroll please for the new potential price tag. Lockheed Martin is proposing a firm fixed price offering for under $3 billion. Do the math, that is a third of NASA's current $9 billion cost estimate. In case it needs saying, the Perseverance rover has been and is still hard at work collecting those Martian surface samples. So those samples just need a ride back. Not a simple task, but still the value of the knowledge gained is priceless. These tiny bits of Martian soil and rock could hold evidence of ancient life, or at least tell us whether life ever had a fighting chance on the red planet at all. And if we ever want to get humans to Mars, speaking of a fighting chance, yeah, I seem to recall some conversation about occupying Mars by some guy recently. We need those Martian soil samples back so we can help future explorers know where to build, what to avoid, and how to stay alive once they get there. Now Lockheed says they've gained valuable insights from recent successful sample return missions that they've played a part in, including the asteroid sample return mission, OSIRIS-REx, that came back last year. At in their experience, building or operating three of NASA's current Mars orbiters, and Lockheed says they've got the juice. Flight heritage, baby. Their reduced price pitch says they can streamline operations and reduce mission complexity with a leaner lander, a smaller ascent vehicle, and a simplified Earth entry system. So really, who knows? Price tag cut of a third sounds good on paper, but three bill is still a bit of a big bill. But if NASA is able to take Lockheed up on its offer, we might finally get our hands on that dusty red dirt and do it faster, cheaper, and smarter than before. And if not, well, China is working on their own MSR, after all. Maybe they'll share. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) And that is T-minus brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like the show, please share our rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey and the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com. We're 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 nexus 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 are 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. We'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music) - T minus. (upbeat music) (wind blowing) [BLANK_AUDIO]
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