Today is July 15th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] The NASA Science Mission Directorate is seeking proposals for research opportunities in space and earth sciences. Four. Spire Global has been awarded a $1.2 million extension modification from NASA to continue participation in its commercial satellite data acquisition program. Three. NASA has awarded Astrobotic a CBER Phase II contract to advance development of its extra-large vertical solar array technology. Two. Sierra Space has been awarded a contract by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to deliver key components for spacecraft docking on the ISS. One. The Axiom 4 crew splashed down off the coast of California in a SpaceX Dragon capsule. [MUSIC] And our guest today is Mustafar Mangi, co-founder and global business lead at FarmDAR. Mustafar spoke to T-minus producer Alice Carruth about how his company monitors agricultural production from space. Stick around to find out more about that and their partnership with Planet Labs later in the show. [MUSIC] Thanks for joining me on this Tuesday. Let's get into it. If you were an early riser or maybe you were up late last night and happened to be somewhere near the coast of San Diego, California, you may have caught a glimpse of the Dragon capsule Graces re-entry this morning. That SpaceX crew Dragon capsule was carrying the four-member AX-4 team as it parachuted into calm seas off of the Southern California coast at around 2.30 a.m. local time. The AX-4 crew was led by retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson. Whitson has now logged 695 days in space, which is a U.S. record, by the way. And all of that was done during her previous three NASA missions, a fourth flight to orbit as commander of the AX-2 crew in 2023, and her fifth mission to the ISS commanding AX-4. Whitson radioed to mission control that the crew was happy to be back moments after their return. A recovery ship was immediately dispatched to secure the capsule and hoist it from the ocean to the deck of the vessel. Completing the AX-4 crew were Shubhanshu Shukla of India, Swabosz Uznansky Vizhnevsky of Poland, and Tibor Kapu of Hungary. The crew returned with a cargo of science capsules from more than 60 microgravity experiments conducted during their 18-day visit to the International Space Station. Welcome back to TerraFurma AX-4. And speaking of the International Space Station, Sierra Space has been awarded a contract by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to deliver key components for spacecraft docking on the orbiting lab. This includes a passive common birthing mechanism, connection hatch, lighting system, and pressure sensor technology to enable spacecraft to dock at the ISS. The components will ultimately be used by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency for Space Station missions to the ISS. No details were shared about the contract's value or the deadline date for the component's delivery. NASA has awarded Astrobotic a Small Business Innovation Research Phase II contract to advance development of its extra-large vertical solar array technology known as VSAT XL. And the award follows the successful VSAT XL Engineering Study for NASA, and with this new award, Astrobotic will manufacture a prototype to test the solar array deployment system. Astrobotic says the VSAT XL is a solar-powered system that is deployable, self-leveling, and capable of sun-tracking for optimal energy capture, and is ideal for placement at the lunar south pole, where the sun circles the horizon at a low angle all year round. The VSAT XL's larger solar panel is designed to mount on top of Astrobotic's Griffon lander and will be a component of Astrobotic's Lunar Grid system. And Lunar Grid is designed to supply sustained lunar surface power for a range of missions. And the NewSIPR award will allow Astrobotic to mature VSAT XL's design and build and test a functional prototype. SPIRE Global has been awarded a $1.2 million two-month task order extension modification from NASA to continue participation in its Commercial Satellite Data Acquisition Program, or CSDA. The award is an extension to a $6.7 million 12-month task order awarded in August of 2024. Under the New Order, SPIRE will continue to deliver Earth Observation Data, including GNSS Radio Occultation, GNSS Reflectometry, and Space Weather Measurements. SPIRE has awarded Earth Observation Data to NASA's CSDA program since 2018. SPIRE's data will support U.S. government-funded research with the objective of enhancing global weather forecasting, atmospheric profiling, and climate research. And from our Better Late Than Never Desk, it's only five months late, but the much-awaited NASA ROSES 2025 is out. OK, so here is what that means. The NASA Science Mission Directorate is seeking proposals for its annual NASA Research Announcement, or NRA, the Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences, or ROSES 2025. The ROSES 2025 NRA is NASA's annual omnibus solicitation, which invites proposals for various basic and applied research projects in space and earth sciences. It has multiple individual program elements with specific topics and proposal due dates. This year's ROSES provides around 35 proposal opportunities with a total estimated fund of $125 to $150 million. A data point for contrast, ROSES 2024 had around 100 proposal opportunities with an estimated total award of over $600 million. And nonetheless, going back to the 2025 announcement, around 300 awards are expected for the omnibus notice of funding opportunity. Funding for each award will vary depending on the project, and most awards are expected to have, at least, a three-year performance period. [Music] And you can read more about that solicitation by following the link in our show notes, and speaking of those notes, N2K Senior Producer Alice Carruth has the other stories that we have included for you today. Alice, what have you got for us? Hi, Maria. We have added three additional stories along with the original sources of everything we mentioned throughout the episode in today's show notes. They cover the announcement that SpaceX has been welcomed as the 10th beta user for tracks, details about what China has sent to Tiangong in the launch of their latest medium launch vehicle, which we covered in yesterday's show, and the announcement from Space Force that 823 Guardians have been promoted. Congratulations to them. Indeed, and a reminder that those links can also be found on the episode page on our website, space.n2k.com. Hey, T-Minus Crew, if you are just joining us, be sure to follow T-Minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. Also do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and co-workers. Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday, please show three friends or co-workers 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 us. Thank you so much, everybody. It means a lot to me and all of us here at T-Minus. Our guest today is Muzaffar Mangi, co-founder and global business lead at Farmdar. Muzaffar spoke to T-Minus producer Alice Carruth and started by telling her about the origins of Farmdar. I'd like to kind of touch on the origins of Farmdar. So there's three co-founders. There's myself, there's my friend, Mohamed, and his younger brother, Ibrahim. And he's a fourth generation large-scale farmer on about 2,500 acres. And so this began as a way of optimizing his family business. So basically our product innovation is driven out of farming. If it's not going to make an impact, well, it's nice to have, unless the technology has a money trail before or after it really will the technology get adopted. That's how we view it, because everything we build has to kind of work on his farm first and at a reasonable scale. We don't have ambitions of going direct to farmers simply because a startup would need I'd say about 15 years and about 40 million dollars to burn before you'd make a serious dent in going direct to farmers, which we do not have that time or those kind of funds. So we thought that who would be motivated and has the infrastructure and the money to take this to the farmers. And that is your big agri company. So let's take an example of a sugar factory. Now they've got a team in place. They are very motivated to ensure that the farmers they buy from are doing exceptionally well. Because essentially that sugar cane is going to run their factory. And that was a concept which we wanted to try and very soon into our journey we realized that's the model. In terms of what FarmDAR does, you could put our products in two buckets. There's the macro and there's the micro. Now the macro is called crop scan. And with that choose a specific type of satellite imagery. And we have these AI models that consume that satellite imagery. So that's our raw material you could say. And those AI models from anywhere from 80% to 96.7%. Depending on the satellite imagery you get a different type of accuracy. We identify at scale what crop is on the ground. So a customer like Korteva might come to us and say, hey, we'd like a snapshot of everything that's growing in Pakistan. Or we'd like to know how much rice there is in Cambodia at this exact point in time. And once we know that there's a bunch of other things we can tell about the sugar cane or rice or whatever. So say a sugar factory comes to us and says, tell me how much sugar cane there is in Thailand. In terms of hectares or acres or dry. But then they would want to know what kind of tonnage they should expect per hectare. So the yield of the sugar cane. They might want to know how old is the sugar cane in terms of how many years it is. Or what the sewing date was thereby determining the peak maturity. So that's when the sugar cane should be harvested. There's a cut to crush window. Otherwise the sugar cane starts going still. Or determining how much sugar cane remains at a specific date. During the harvest season. And this information is used at scale. Scale meaning anywhere from say, you know, half a million hectares to up to 90, 100 million hectares in a single go. And this is used to plant supply chain, sales forecast, crop forecasts, commodity prices. So Thailand may want to know, does Indonesia have a surplus or a shortage of sugar cane? Thereby determining, will they be able to export there? And if so, for how much? You know, pricing decisions, sales team decisions, warehousing, distributors, what kind of money the distributors should be making and so forth. Yeah, that must revolutionise the way that farming is now approached. Not just from, like you say, that kind of end scale of being able to have that overview. But surely for the farmers as well, if they're able to access that information, they must be able to completely revolutionise the way that they are able to approach their work. So for the farming bit, right? I mean, contrary to popular belief, farmers are not falling over themselves to embrace technology. But there is clearly an understanding that technology is at play. But understand that for a farmer, this is not a new iPhone that you tinker around with for half an hour in an Apple store and decide whether you like it or not to actually see if this makes any impact or not. Number one, there's a bit of an acumen involved. Who's going to teach them at scale? And number two, it takes an entire crop cycle before they can even determine whether this was successful or not. So a trial is an entire year and they're dying. So adoption takes time. But when we went to farmers and we've spoken to a significant number of them, they said, if this technology is so fantastic, why aren't the big companies using it? So that's how the adoption is happening. For farmers specifically, knowing how much sugarcane there is in all of Thailand is not perhaps relevant. But for them, there's the micro products, which we call GIL Pro. And that is crop monitoring. So a farmer may want to know his crop health, his crop stress, where to irrigate, when to irrigate, where to apply nitrogen. Historically, what are the high, medium and low productivity areas or a soil organic matter comparison? This is relevant to a farm. So hence our micro range of products. But again, we are not the ones giving this to the farmer. So taking the example of the sugar factory again, it's in their best interest to make sure the farmer flourishes. So they take this information, re-equip their agronomy and farming teams with the knowledge on what to do with this or what interventions are required. And then they take it to the farmer. What kind of area are you able to cover with farm data? I'm assuming this is at quite a large scale of where you're covering. It is. It is. So we kind of refrain from releasing the actual number of hectares that we've scanned because it sounds a bit ridiculous, but it's in the hundreds of millions. Simply because if we need to scan 100 million acres for sugarcane and then scan it again eight times during the season for harvest, that's eight entire scans that we have to go through. So it's a massive number. But I think a better question would be what is the customer demand? And customer demand is usually state, province or countrywide. That is really where the data has a significant meaning. Because knowing what's happening in the entire country is where the higher state decisions can be made. Absolutely. That brings us to why we invited you to come on today. And that's your new relationship with Planet. Can you tell us a little bit about that? Absolutely. So when we started off just like any AgTech, we thought, oh, cool drones. And we sank a bunch of cash in some drones and we realized, no, that's not how it's going to work. Drones do other stuff, but scaling them is just not possible. So about four years ago is when we approached Planet. We were like, hey, we've heard you guys have planned satellite imagery. And our relationship with them has been fantastic. I mean, we've just announced a nice shiny contract with them, but we've been working with them since day one. And to tell you the truth, the sheer volume of support they've extended us in terms of educating us on the usage of satellite imagery. That's been there for day one. At least here in Pakistan, we've been there in largest buyer of three meter imagery for a couple of years. So it was a no brainer to get into a contract like this. In technology, I feel that kind of knowledge sharing comes from a relationship. If that foundation of the relationship is solid, then it flows quite easily. It's shared wisdom. And we're very happy to share whatever information we have on what we're doing with Planet imagery, whatever new use cases we're finding. And they work very closely with kind of customizing what our requirements are. That sounds like a really symbiotic relationship. And what a great way of doing things. What's the next thing for FarmDAR? Because I feel like you're scaling up in quite a vast way. You've gone from your friends farm to all of a sudden covering entire nations. What do you think is in the future for FarmDAR? There could be two answers to that, right? Like from a startup perspective, it's easy to get very excited about scaling. So we need to remain focused and we need to say no to a lot of things. Just because it's the next shiny thing, walking away from it is tremendously difficult. And I'm the commercial guy. So it's usually with a heavy heart. So really going to the markets where we are. So for example, Thailand and Vietnam or the US or some parts of Brazil, right, doing justice to what we were trying to do over there. I mean, it's imperative that we hit a home run, not just once, but every time. So that's really where we are right now. We've had good success. We've got some fantastic names who trusted us. Our products work. They've come back for more. We need to scale those relationships and really drive value. That's our marketing. In terms of the technology itself, we've got this fantastic D-look planet. They allow us to really drive value on micro level, acre level imagery. We're quite excited with the use cases and the different things we can do with that. So we've had a traditional set of plant health stress, nitrogen, and a couple of basic things. But some of our more discerning customers now want far deeper analytics. And the kind of packages that planet allows us to have and even experiment with allows us to create new technology which can be used on a micro level. So that's super exciting for us. And then on a macro level, the holy grail is sucrose detection. We've cracked yield prediction fairly well. It's competitive. But I'd like to say that we're doing okay. We've had some good moments, some great moments, and some perhaps, I'd rather not mention type moments. But in terms of sucrose detection, that's the holy grail. Nobody's managed to do that satisfactorily. And that's where satellite imagery really comes into play. [MUSIC] I'll be right back. Welcome back. As if partnering with Prada wasn't enough, Axiom Space is adding iWaremaker Oakley to its list of brands that it's collabing with for the Axiom space suit. And its full name is the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or XMU. And Oakley, which makes those ever popular wraparound sunglasses, will be working with Axiom on the Visor system. Unveiled during Oakley's 50th anniversary, this partnership brings the company's five decades of optical innovation into one of the most extreme environments yet, which would be the Lunar South Pole. The Visor will feature Oakley's high definition optics, gold coatings to reflect harsh sunlight, and multi-layer scratch and dust-resistant services. All those things are essential for astronauts working in deep shadows and brutal sun glare. No protective atmosphere to help take the edge off the sun's powerful light on the moon after all, so they are not kidding when they say that the solar glare can really hurt. Axiom says astronauts are elite athletes in a visual environment like no other, and Oakley's tech is built to help them see farther, clearer, and sharper than ever before. So when Artemis 3 astronauts step onto the moon, they will do it with Oakley optics helping lead the way. So yeah, just visualize a gorgeous, modern space suit with a gleaming gold-coat advisor. It'd be an impressive sight. If anyone lived on the moon to see it in person, they would undoubtedly be impressed. And that's it for T-Minus brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. We're conducting our annual audience survey to learn more about our listeners. We're collecting your insights until August 31st, 2025. There's a link in the show notes. Hope you'll help us out. 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 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 are mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Tre Hester with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpe is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening, everybody. We'll see you tomorrow. T-minus. [BLANK_AUDIO]
