Today is July 28th, 2025. I'm Alice Carruth and this is T-minus. NASA, welcome Senegal as the 56th Signatory to the Artemis Accords. 4. Tawaki has received $5.8 million from New Zealand to expand its role as a centre of aerospace innovation. 3. The Australian government invested $5 million in Gilmore space to accelerate the development of Eris' next-generation liquid rocket engine. 2. Telus Elania Space has signed a contract with the Italian Space Agency to carry out the preliminary design phase of a multi-purpose habitation module for the lunar surface. 1. Ariane Space launched the VV-27 mission from Europe's spaceport in French Guiana. 0. Stay with us after today's headlines for the Aerospace Corporation's monthly nexus segment. 0. Parker has guest Vanessa Clark from Catalyst Space, Jo Anderson from Northrop Grumman Space Logistics and Cosmix Greg Richardson on the show to talk all things ISAM. We're kicking off today's show with an update on Europe's launch schedule. 0. Ariane Space successfully launched Airbus Defence and Space's CO3D satellites as well as the CNES's microcarb satellite late on Friday. 0. The mission called VV-27 was performed using an Ariane Space-operated Vegas-E rocket launched from Europe's spaceport in French Guiana. 0. The four satellites in the CO3D constellation were placed into sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 495 km and were separated 2x2 54 minutes after liftoff. 0. The microcarb was placed in a sun-synchronous orbit at an altitude of 650 km and separated an hour and 41 minutes after liftoff. 0. Microcarb is designed to map sources and sinks of carbon dioxide on a global scale. 0. ESA coordinated and procured the launch of microcarb on behalf of the European Commission as part of its in-orbit demonstration in orbit validation programme. 0. And there's no downtime for Ariane Space. They've just announced that they plan to launch UMET-SAT's METOP-SGA-1 satellite with Ariane-6 as early as August 12. 0. The mission designated VA-264 will be the second commercial flight for Ariane-6. 0. The satellite will be the first of the next generation of European polar orbiting weather satellites. 0. METOP-SGA-1 will host a total of six atmospheric sounding and imaging instrument missions. 0. They will provide optical, infrared and microwave observations, essential data for weather forecasting, climate monitoring and a wide range of other services and applications. 0. Amongst its hosts, METOP-SGA-1 will carry the new Sentinel-5 atmospheric monitoring mission, part of the European Commission's Copernicus programme. 0. And we're staying in Europe for the next story. 0. The Italian Space Agency has signed a contract with the Italian Space Agency to carry out the preliminary design phase of a multi-purpose habitation module for the lunar surface. 0. Known as MPH, the module will be the first truly dedicated lunar surface habitation asset under the Artemis agreements between NASA and the Italian Space Agency. 0. The MPH module will safely house astronauts during their missions, provide support for surface operations, enable scientific research experiments both with and without a crew, and enable the ability to move on the surface. It will be designed for a 10-year operational life and will serve as a permanent surface habitat capable of operating with other elements of the Artemis architecture. 0. MPH is planned for launch in 2033. 0. We're heading down under now. Gilmore Space is preparing for the inaugural flight attempt of the Aeris rocket again. 0. The launch window runs all week starting on Tuesday, July 29th from 7.30pm till 5.30pm local time in Queensland. 0. Gilmore Space's Aeris Test Flight 1 will be the first Australian-made rocket to attempt orbit and the nation's first orbital launch in over 50 years. 0. The company also received new funding. The Australian government invested $5 million under the government's industry growth programme to accelerate the development of Aeris' next-generation liquid rocket engine. 0. Over in neighbouring New Zealand, Tawaki has received $5.8 million from the nation's government to expand its role as a centre for Aerospace Innovation and a hub for launching testing and developing technology. 0. With permanent special-use airspace now in place, companies like Kia Aerospace, CyOS Aerospace and Dawn Aerospace are already testing next-generation technologies. 0. Tawaki says that the new funding will help scale operations, attract new customers and strengthen the region's position in the global space and advanced aviation sectors. 0. And NASA welcomed Senegal as the latest signatory to the Artemis Accord late last week. Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy said in the press release quote, "With Senegal as the 56th signatory, I am proud to further President Trump's strong legacy of global cooperation in space." 0. The director general of the Senegalese Space Agency signed the Artemis Accords on behalf of the nation at an event in Washington, D.C. 0. With the senior bureau official for African Affairs at the U.S. Department of State and the ambassador of Senegal to the U.S. also participating in the event. 0. And that wraps up today's Top 5 Stories, but there's always more going on in the industry. Our producer Liz Stokes joins us now with the other stories that we're watching today. Happy Monday, Liz! What do you have for us? 0. I have three additional stories today. Reuters is reporting that NASA expects 20% of its workforce to depart the agency. 0. SpaceX crew 11 astronauts have arrived in Florida ahead of their launch to the ISS, and BAE Systems has delivered NOAA's SWFO L1 and NASA's Caruther's GeoCorona Observatory satellites ahead of their launch. 0. Is that last one related to you, Alice? 0. No, Liz. I'm a Caruth, not a Caruthers, but both clans hail from Scotland. I wish I had a space observatory named after me, though. 0. Please remind the crew where they can find out more about those stories. 0. We include links to the original sources of all the stories mentioned throughout the show in the selected reading section of our show notes. 0. Those links can be found on the episode page of our website. Simply head to space.m2k.com and click on today's title. 0. Hi, Team Miners crew! If you'd like daily updates from us directly in your LinkedIn feed, be sure to follow the N2K Team Miners page over on LinkedIn. 0. And if you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do here, we are @teamminersdaily on Instagram. 0. That's where we host videos and pictures from events, excursions and even some behind-the-scenes treats. 0. Links are in the show notes and we hope you'll join us there. 0. I'll hand you over to Parker Wyschik from the Aerospace Corporation for this month's Nexus segment now. 0. And you're in the Nexus courtesy of the Team Miners Space Daily podcast. 0. My name is Parker Wyschik with the Aerospace Corporation. 0. And today we're talking I, Sam, with an All-Star panel from industry. 0. We're joined by Joe Anderson, Vice President of Northrop Grumman Space Logistics. 0. Vanessa Clark, former founder and CEO of Atomos, 0. Which was acquired earlier this year by Catalyst Space Technologies, 0. Where Vanessa is now Vice President of Program and Mission Management. 0. Both are leaders within the Industry Consortium, the Consortium for Space Mobility and ISAM capabilities, or COSMIC, 0. Of which Greg Richardson is the Executive Director, who's also joining us today. 0. And full disclosure, Aerospace is the Consortium Management entity for COSMIC. 0. So, Joe, real quick at the top, could you kind of characterize the ISAM market for us, please? 0. To characterize ISAM market, I think we've got to look at both the supply side and the demand side. 0. On the supply side, our company Space Logistics is still the only company with services actually in orbit. 0. We've got two of our mission extension vehicles in orbit today that delivered in excess of nine years 0. Of life extension to satellites in geo-orbit. So, showing great demand in that regard. 0. It only covers one small subset of ISAM. We talk about ISAM, it's servicing, assembly, manufacturing. 0. And so there's a broad spectrum of the technology readiness across that entire term. 0. On the demand side, there is ample demand from our customers for these types of services. 0. The issue is there's very limited supply. There's been no supply in Teller at MEVs a few years ago. 0. Vanessa, how do you characterize the ISAM marketplace from your perspective as Industry Caucus Chair of COSMIC? 0. Yeah, so very similar to what Joe said. Like, there is a lot of bend-up demand, 0. But there is really only one player in the market delivering services. So, there is so much room for growth. 0. ISAM is really a movement. It's a collection of potential missions that we do, but it shifts the paradigm in the industry 0. Where we are no longer constrained by launch. We are no longer constrained by the inability to repair, upgrade, relocate spacecraft. 0. So, it has the potential to totally change how we do space missions. 0. So, ISAM that revolutionizes the industry, allows manufacturing assembly of systems on orbit. 0. Is what I really see as next-generation stuff. So, when we look at the marketplace today, there are a whole bunch of companies who have focused on the here and now, 0. Like, what mission sets do customers want today, and there are a lot to them. 0. And then there are also companies that are looking further afield as to what comes next. 0. Once we master the technologies and make this commonplace, once we overcome some of the barriers to entry to this sector, 0. What should we be building? So, where is the path going and where should we be? 0. So, it's very exciting, but we are very much in stage one, which is do initial missions that have desperate customers today. 0. Greg, you are the executive director of Cosmic. 0. Talk about how Cosmic the community has grown over time since it was established by NASA a couple of years ago. 0. Cosmic is the nationwide consortium for ISAM in Space Servicing Assembly Manufacturing. 0. And as a nationwide consortium, we try to bring together government industry academia to talk about who's out there, 0. What are they doing? Where are their challenges they're facing? What are the challenges they're seeing in the road coming up? 0. And then by combining all those perspectives, by combining forces, by working shoulder to shoulder on identifying problems and figuring out how to solve them, 0. We can see where we as the USISAM community need to go to make sure that these services become available, reliable, routine, safe and effective. 0. There's a whole spectrum of missions the way that Joe and Vanessa just described it. 0. Some of those missions are things that happen today with today's technology on today's spacecraft. 0. I think continuing to invest in both technology maturation so that the type of missions that we can do expand into the future, 0. as well as investing in on-orbit demonstration to provide heritage to show that these are as safe, reliable and effective as the operational users need to be. 0. Those are both areas where investment from the government side is needed. 0. And that will create the number of players that Joe is talking about so that the supply matches the demand. 0. It will create the new capabilities that Vanessa is talking about to try to expand what's possible in the future. 0. So I want to quote the GAO report here, which says that ISAM is a potential paradigm changer in space. 0. Development of ISAM technology faces challenges largely related to what experts call the chicken and egg problem. 0. ISAM service providers are hesitant to develop technology into servicing products until there is a user base, i.e. buyers, 0. and users, i.e. buyers, are hesitant to design and deploy satellites that can be serviced until those products are available, 0. means tested and proven with some of that heritage you just described. 0. So we talk about the risk, we talk about the technology needing to be proven first. Joe and then Vanessa, how do you respond to that? 0. Yeah, so when I think about risk, there's really two key pieces to it. There's the technology risk itself for the services we're providing. 0. And looking at the types of services we're providing today in orbit, rendezvous and docking is not new. 0. Rendezvous and docking has been done since the 1960s. The second part of the risk, not just the technology, it's the heritage piece. 0. My company is fortunate that we're part of a business that has already matured their capabilities of performing those technologies. 0. Of course, it's a big challenge for other startups that are just coming into the industry. They have a different hurdle, a different challenge to now also prove their heritage. 0. Agree. And, and Vanessa, we heard that from you at Cosmic Convergence in June. You kind of foot stomping the need for test beds, need for more testing capacity. 0. What would you like to see to advance the industry from a testing improving standpoint? 0. So I do think we need a nationally owned test asset on orbit for ice emissions. 0. So this doesn't have to be a dedicated system that we design, build, launch. This could be a US government satellite. It could be semi-retired. 0. And in its semi-retirement, it could be a target for rendezvous proximity operations and capture testing. 0. And then in the future, we could expand that platforming capabilities to add additional upgrades, interfaces, systems. 0. So there is really an on orbit test bed that is very analogous to near term targets for ICAM. 0. Now, the reason I think we need this is not just for technology maturation. It's also to remove a lot of the barriers to entry. 0. So for ICAM missions, a lot of the customers who want services today, they always ask the question, when you go demonstrate this mission on a different spacecraft before you come and do it on our operational asset. 0. The reason why I'm recommending this is right now, the cost to not just get to orbit, but to demonstrate these technologies is effectively a barrier to entry. 0. That right now, some of the larger players, certainly Northrop Grumman Space Logistics, is enjoying as a competitive advantage. 0. I want us to all compete based on the quality of services we provide in pricing, not who got that first and got over this huge hump, this activation energy to provide services first. 0. So this is essentially lowering the activation energy for future ICAM missions. 0. People coming to space, more capabilities in space systems coming into space. Greg, I think this for you is the point. 0. Absolutely. One of the things that Cosmic has as our mission statement is making ICAM services and operations routine. 0. We want to get out of this language of technology demonstration and into this language of operations. 0. The way to do that is to make sure that you've got sufficient heritage, that make sure you've got safe, reliable and effective systems, so that the operational users who want to buy services have confidence that that service will be there when it's needed, at the price that's needed, at acceptable risk, to perform the services that allow them to make their spacecraft better, longer, and just continue to operate the way that they need to. 0. I want to home in on what may be the actual chicken and egg point, which is the lack of test opportunities and the lack of sustained investment. 0. And these are both listed in this GAO report as rationales for the lack of demonstrated capability. So which comes first, the investment or the test opportunities? 0. I think that the financing side needs to be improved fast. Early stage companies in particular, they have two types of capital that they can draw on right now. One is customer revenue, but customers want to see heritage already. They don't want to fund the development. 0. So companies like Catalyst are really reliant on venture capital investment. Now, that's only one small pool of money. I think we have an opportunity now to, particularly with things like the Office of Strategic Capital, particularly with a lot of the changes that are going on in the global financial markets. 0. Why do we diversify the financial mechanisms by which we can invest in technologies like this? Things such as program financing, not just underwriting government contracts, which quite a few lenders do today, but underwriting and capitalizing commercial contracts. 0. What is a good form of a commercial ICEM contract that would allow a lender to provide the upfront capital for that mission? I think this is work that OSC and the government could be doing to make sure that America stays at the forefront. 0. So we want to get to a point where a lot of these companies have enough heritage that customers are willing to fund delta development and fund those missions. So it's going to be a national fight. 0. And this is why I really am excited to participate with Cosmic and try to bring the consortium forward together to solve some of these problems as a group. Because one company can't solve it alone. 0. So testbeds are really, really crucial. I agree with that. And there are lots of different opportunities for testbeds. One of them in the near future will be our mission robotic vehicle that we've been building in partnership with DARPA. 0. It will be launching a year from now. It'll be in geo orbit a year after that. Unfortunately, very slow electric propulsion orbit raising takes it a little longer to get up to geo orbit. 0. But once it's there, it's a great platform. It's a 13 year lifetime for us and we'll have opportunities to utilize that robotic vehicle to demonstrate new servicing technologies as well as help new companies get their heritage by delivering their tools, their capabilities to the MRV. 0. And then we can demonstrate them, use them in geo orbit and thereby help grow that heritage for those customers. Greg, we've talked just now about some of the results and outputs that converging in a Cosmic community that you've assembled and are leading. The value statement there. What has been your kind of main takeaway watching all of these diverse players and the three sectors of the space enterprise come together in this way? One of the things that I see in hearing all this different perspectives is that we have more in common. We have more things that we want to do together. And that's true whether you've got government demand, whether you've got industry supply or even industry demand. We've got things that we all know we need to do. And Vanessa talked about that in terms of on orbit test beds and the ability to expand the number of providers that can operate through those test beds. And that's one of those offering one of those test beds. I think one of the challenges that we can address together is this idea that we need more systems that have flight heritage. And so that in having that it provides US systems what they need to continue to operate in a resilient, reliable and robust way. Whether that test bed is something that is developed on the civil side, a defense side, a commercial side, that test bed is needed. And not just one, but a variety of test beds that are unique to different applications and operation modes. If commercial develops that and offers that as a service, you know, you can rent space on a test bed, you can perform operations with that. That's one mode of operations. Another is government says this is something that benefits all of us and they decide to invest in something that can be opened to the entire community. Each of those are viable models. And I think as we continue to talk, we can figure out what's the path that makes the most sense. Is there just one path or could we take more than one of these paths? Because we don't want just one single instance to be the center of the hourglass when everything has to flow into it. We want a variety of different capabilities. We want enough capacity to deal with that latent demand that all wants on our demonstrations. All of those are goals that we're working together through Cosmic. To close, to offer your main points, I'd like for you to build off a tagline. ISAM is real today. What's the next one liner? ISAM is real today. We just need to reduce that activation energy for more companies to be on orbit and deliver these services. ISAM is real today. We have to help our customers understand that there's a new capability that this is bringing to service and maintain assets in orbit that has never been available before. So we need the government, we need our commercial entities, all to be thinking about their basic budgets and principles of how they do things in this new way that they can now service and maintain assets in space. ISAM is real today. It lets us make the space systems of today and tomorrow more resilient, more reliable, more robust, more flexible, more cost effective. Let's move beyond demonstration. Let's move to operations. Let's make this a routine part of space missions. Let's move. Let's do it. That'll be all for us today here in the Nexus. Thanks to Joe Anderson. Thanks Vanessa Clark and thanks Greg Richardson. Thanks to T-Minus as always and thank you, the listener, for continuing to join us. We'll see you next time in the Nexus. We'll be right back. Welcome back. A few short months ago, we observed what we thought was the demise of Space Tourism Company space perspectives, but it seems that the high altitude balloon company has been thrown a lifeline from Spain. Madrid-based company EOSX Space has acquired what was once its US rival space perspective. Space perspective had built momentum with its spaceship Neptune capsule and its successful test flight name Excelsior reaching nearly 100,000 feet in September 2024, but severe financial issues in early 2025, staff furloughs, loss of facility access and operational silence, left its future in doubt. EOSX space has been developing its own helium balloon system to lift pressurized capsules carrying seven passengers and a pilot to roughly 40km, which is around 131,000 feet, offering multi-hour luxury experiences with panoramic windows, mood lighting, onboard bar and ALU, all without rocket fuel emissions. EOSX plans to operate from Seville, Spain and Abu Dhabi, targeting commercial flights by mid to late 2025, with ticket prices between $160,000 to around $240,000. With the new acquisition, EOSX space gains space perspectives technology and test flight heritage, while pledging that the US entity will continue operations with four autonomy under US leadership and retain part of its existing team. The deal includes plans for a US launch facility at Kennedy Space Center and a new R&D hub in Silicon Valley. This move positions EOSX to combine European and American expertise in luxury balloon tourism, potentially shaping the next era of calm, sustainable journeys to the edge of space. We wish them all the best of luck and hey, we're open to a flight if you ever need some media coverage and if you don't ask, you don't get, right? [Music] That's it for Team I in a Space for Today, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd 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 the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes before August 31st or you can send me 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, technology and ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how at N2K.com. N2K's producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and the amazing Tre Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben, Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I'm N2K senior producer Alice Carruth. Our incredible host Maria Varmazis will be back on the air tomorrow so please stop complaining about the British voiceover. I'm sorry. Thanks for listening. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. [BLANK_AUDIO]
