Building safer spaceports & smarter satellites.

[MUSIC] Today is December 4th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] NASA has selected the University of Alabama at Birmingham to provide the necessary systems required to return temperature-sensitive science payloads to Earth from the moon. [4] Applied Aerospace and PCX Aerosystems are merging to establish applied Aerospace and Defense. [3] Shield AI and CEDARO are partnering to advance autonomous operations in orbit. [2] SLI has signed an agreement for the purchase of two of Ascend Arc's KA-BAM satellites with a combined value of over $200 million. [1] NASA Administrator nominee Jared Isaacman faced questioning on Project Athena and future NASA priorities at his Senate confirmation hearing. [3] Our guest today is Jenny Ginsburg, Fire Protection Section Manager at Burns and McDonnell, and Jenny will be talking with me about her work supporting a new safety framework for spaceports. Take a round for more on that after today's headlines. [MUSIC] Happy Thursday, everybody. Thank you for joining me. I am back from my trip to Estonia, and no worse for where. I'm glad to be back on the show. Let's get into our intel briefing, shall we? During the time of recording yesterday's show, NASA Administrator nominee Jared Isaacman was appearing in front of Congress for his confirmation hearing, and we alluded to some of the themes that Reuters was able to cover ahead of that testimony, but we wanted to share all that was covered today. And Isaacman certainly set the tone early. The last time I sat before you, I introduced myself, my qualifications, and the challenges and opportunities ahead. This time I'm here with a message of urgency. Yes, indeed. Isaacman has been here before. He was first nominated for the NASA Administrator role in April and appeared in front of Congress back then before Trump withdrew his nomination. He was then asked again last month, and there were nods by some of the committee members, namely Texas Senator Ted Cruz, who chaired the hearing and joked that it felt a little bit like Groundhog Day, the day where things repeat themselves for folks who don't know. Anyway, over the course of two hours, Isaacman was questioned by the committee about everything from how he would spend the budget, and he stated that he would absolutely maximize every dollar that Congress affords to the agency to thoughts on how Sean Duffy, the current acting administrator, has reopened the Artemis Lunar Lander contract, to which Isaacman said this. Both SpaceX and Blue Origin were already awarded contracts through a competitive process to build the Lander, and I don't think it was lost on either one of those organizations that the first company that is capable of delivering a Lander to take American astronauts to the lunar surface and back is the one that this nation is going to go with. I think that competition is fantastic. I think the best thing for SpaceX is a Blue Origin right on their heels, and vice versa. And when asked about the Project Athena document, which was leaked right before Isaacman's denomination, he said that it was "always intended to be a living document refined through data gathering post-confirmation," and that he does "stand behind everything in the document even though it was written seven months ago." He believes it to be, and these are his words again, directionally correct. Among the proposed goals in Project Athena are revamping some NASA centers to focus on nuclear electric propulsion, establishing a new Mars exploration program, and embracing an Accelerate Fix Delete philosophy to reshape the agency. The document did also allude to downsizing some areas at NASA in the future. Now it's not known if Isaacman will be confirmed or when that could even happen at this point. Senator Ted Cruz did say this, "We need to confirm your nomination as expeditiously as possible," and that his hope is, and I quote, "that you will be confirmed and in this role before the end of this year." And we believe many are pushing for a permanent administrator ahead of the Artemis II launch in the spring. Fingers crossed, everybody. We will keep you posted. Aerospace Asset Finance Specialist Space Leasing International, known as SLI, has signed an agreement for the purchase of two of Ascend Arc's KA-band satellites with a combined value of over $200 million. The deal is part of a wider partnership that allows Ascend Arc to offer its satellites on leasing terms instead of requiring an outright purchase. SLI and its parent company, Libre Group, bring a long history of success in high-value asset leasing. SLI says that through their finance platform, satellite operators can then access the latest technology as operating expenditure rather than capital expenditure. So there you have it, folks. No need to buy a satellite anymore. It's rent one. The world we live in. Moving on. Shield AI and SIDARO are partnering to advance autonomous operations in orbit. The partnership paves the way for Shield AI's HiveMind pilot as SIDARO's preferred autonomy software for on-orbit demonstrations, extending the company's proven edge autonomy from air and sea into space. Shield AI will use the SIDARO platform as its primary environment for developing testing and demonstrating HiveMind in space-relevant scenarios. The company say that the combination of HiveMind's battle-proven autonomy and SIDARO's high-fidelity simulation platform will accelerate the design, simulation, and validation of autonomous behaviors for orbital missions. Applied Aerospace and PCX AeroSystems have announced that they are merging to establish a unified supplier of precision hardware and systems for aircraft, rotorcraft, satellites, launch vehicles, and missile defense. The combined company will be known as Applied Aerospace and Defense. And the combined workforce includes over 1,300 dedicated team members, along with 1.3 million square feet of production and integration facilities across nine locations in five U.S. states. The new combined company will leverage the capabilities of two well-established industry leaders, each with proven heritage, delivering highly engineered solutions for military, commercial, and scientific applications. And have you ever thought about who stores temperature-sensitive scientific payloads for NASA? No? Well, I hadn't either, but NASA shared that they have selected the University of Alabama at Birmingham for this job. And the Lunar Freezer System contract is an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity award with cost-plus fixed fee delivery orders. And that contract begins today, Thursday, December 4th, with a 66-month base period, along with two optional periods that could extend the award through June 3rd, 2033. Well, the contract has a total estimated value of $37 million, and the University of Alabama will be responsible for providing safe, reliable, and cost-effective hardware and software systems that NASA needs to maintain temperature-critical science materials, including lunar geological samples, human research samples, and biological experimentation samples, as they all travel on the Artemis spacecraft to Earth from the lunar surface. And that, my friends, wraps up today's top five stories for you, but we are always keeping an eye on other stories making the headlines. And 2K Senior Producer Alice Grooth joins me now to let us know what else we can find in today's selected reading section of the show notes. What do you have for us today, Alice? Welcome back, Maria. Intuitive Machine shared an update on their work with the John Hopkins-applied physics lab, and Crossbow has been awarded a contract to supply RocketMoto igniters to V2X. Links to those stories, along with the original sources of all the others mentioned throughout this episode, can be found in our show notes and on our website, space.intuk.com. Hi, Team Minus Crew. If you are a regular listener of this show, you know that every day at the end of each episode, I read the names of all of the people who work on this show. People like N2K Senior Producer Alice Grooth. It is a big team effort to get this show published every day, especially when I'm out. Thank you again, Alice, for covering me on the microphone. And you, dear listener, also play a very important role, because every time you share an episode of T-Minus with your colleagues or just out there on social media, that helps us grow, and it also shows us how our work is useful and interesting to you. So, if you enjoy T-Minus, please don't keep us hidden. Please share our show in your social and professional networks, because that helps us grow and it makes T-Minus even better every day. And thank you so much for being a part of the T-Minus Crew. Today's guest is Jenny Ginsburg, Fire Protection Section Manager at Burns and MacDonald. And I will let Jenny explain more about her background and her role. So I grew up in Florida, kind of a product of the Space Coast. Grew up in Jacksonville, so just a little bit north of there. Grew up watching space shuttle launches from the neighborhood park, and really it was the self-reported space nerd. Loved going to space camp, space academy, any sort of summer camp with the word space in it. You could typically find myself there. Star Trek was a huge influence on me growing up as well. So loved the space industry, got into college, studied mechanical engineering, and went a different direction with where my interests lie. Went into more facilities engineering side of the house, and ultimately ended up in fire protection, got a master's degree in fire protection engineering. But then I wound up in my professional environment at Burns and MacDonald, which has been a great place to kind of marry those two loves of facility engineering and space, because it allows me to support aerospace and space clients like intuitive machines and others with their facilities that they need to build the really cool things to get to space. So it's kind of been a nice marrying of the two backgrounds. Oh, that's so cool. I'm so curious about how you found this interesting niche within the space realm. What about it spoke to you? So I kind of fell into fire protection by chance. I was doing some work at Kennedy Space Center out of college as a contractor, and they had an opening in their design group in fire protection engineering, and I knew nothing about it. So I joke it was a trial by fire. Yeah. I transitioned over and really fell in love with it. I love the nuances that codes and standards present and like trying to read through those and kind of almost like lawyer-esque nature of them. And so it's an interesting challenge, and especially in the aerospace and space industry where you're dealing with some pretty exotic hazards. It's just a every day is different, and I love that challenge. That's so awesome. So for those of us who love edge cases, it's like the ultimate edge case. That's so cool. So I fast up to you before we started chatting, and I will say this for the audience. I know nothing about fire protection. Absolutely nothing. Jenny, my understanding is that you recently wrote a blog post about updated fire protection standards for spaceports specifically. And again, within my complete ignorance here, if you wouldn't mind trying to boil down something that I'm sure is extraordinarily complex for our audience who is thankfully much smarter than me, what do you want people to know about these updated standards? And maybe we set the scene first about like what it was like before things were updated and what we're looking at now to contrast. Yeah. So originally back in the day, launches were mostly by government entities, right? So you're looking at like NASA and the shuttle launches and things like that. But we've had this evolution with launch providers where we have a lot more private companies coming onto scene, and that's kind of changed the way we approach launches. And so in 2018, the fire protection research foundation did a study that looked at the codes and regulations that were out there for these types of large scale launches. And it was really interesting. They came back and said there's really nothing that tells people how to do things and how to do them safely. So NASA actually went to the National Fire Protection Agency after that study and said, "Hey guys, can you help us out here? Can you get us a code and a standard that kind of fills this regulatory gap?" And so NFPA convened the technical committee on spaceports, which I'm a member on, and it consists of what they call special experts and then enforcers. So authorities having jurisdiction like your fire department, as well as launch operators or users. So think of like Blue Origin, SpaceX, things of those variety. And so we kind of all sat down together and built from the ground up a completely new standard for spaceports and supporting facilities. And it's because they deal with a lot of really unique hazards. Like hypergold aren't used in any other industry. And so there's an interesting challenge that's presented with those. How do you operate with something that's inherently not safe, but do it in a safe manner? And so this new standard, NFPA 461, kind of fills that regulatory gap. Okay. So I'm hearing all the time about different propellants being tried. Is the private industry just going, "Hey, we're trying this thing." And then spaceports are going, "We have to figure out how to do that safely." Is it, "I would hope more of a conversation." How does that work? It's a little bit of both. It's them kind of wanting to try something new from what I've seen and then having that conversation with spaceports about how do we do this safely? And that's kind of the gap that NFPA 461 fills. There's this challenge for developers and enforcers of, "We don't do this every day." NASA, Cape Canaveral, they're used to it, Vandenberg, but as other places come online like Spaceport America, how do we kind of help guide that conversation and from an enforcer standpoint or an owner standpoint and then a launch provider standpoint? And so 461 gives them the framework to do that. It covers siting analysis between adjacencies for operators, the facility hazard analysis, operational procedures and documentation. So it's kind of like a three pillar approach. And it kind of just helps build those conversations out and make sure that you're looking at the right things as you're approaching setting up a launch site. And is this something for, say, a more established spaceport, something where it's an updating to existing standards that's relatively kind of plug and play or is this almost like a rip and replace situation? It could be a little bit of both. It's meant to be from the ground up a completely new standard. So you could take it off the shelf and start using it now if you didn't have anything in place. If you've got something in place and you like the way it's working, it can be a supplement. And so it can be a kind of a marrying of the two documents if there's already something specific to the site. But this is really meant to be like from the ground up, new standard kind of just driving the whole conversation. Okay. So for our listeners who are in the space industry who are more on the launch provider side of things, what do they need to know? Yeah. So like I mentioned a second ago, it's kind of the three pillar framework approach. And it starts from big picture, citing analysis down to operations. And so if you're looking at complying with this new standard, you're going to need to kind of know a little bit about everything with what you're doing and what your operations are. So the citing analysis kind of starting with that big picture looks at adjacencies to different launch sites. So before it was one launch provider, typically at a location, now you have multi-users. So we have the proxies that we're looking at. So looking at proper setbacks and separations, depending on what each launch provider is doing, things like toxic cloud dispersion. So if there was an incident, where is that going to go? How do we keep the neighbors safe? And then with energetics, there's something called explosive quantity distance arcs, which is where you're getting that shockwave kind of where blast fragmentations occurring. So all of that goes into the citing analysis, just making sure from the get go, like let's start talking about putting a launch pad here or processing with energetics here. Are we even in the right location or do we need to consider moving because it's just not going to be a safe location? And then it kind of gets down into the facility hazard area where we look at what you're actually doing in the facility as part of the analysis. So what hazardous materials are you working with? Is it hypergalls, combustibles, things of that nature? And it looks at the quantities of them. And so it looks at how to build the specific building from a safe standpoint. Do you need fire barriers? Do you need firewalls? Do you need to separate things from each other just for a safety standpoint? And it also looks at the local capabilities of the fire department and the emergency responders. And the last kind of framework is the operational procedures. And that's kind of like the how more or less of what you're doing for your operations. So it looks at launch sequencing, fueling operations, training and documentation. Like, how do you train your people to be around these processes in a safe manner? And how do you do personnel accountability on the site too? So if you had an incident, do you know who's there? Do you know where they're supposed to be? How do you get them out? And so those three kind of core items is really what the launch providers need to start looking at. And a lot of them already do. This just kind of gives a more formal framework of, you know, how do we fill out this documentation? How do we work with the enforcing agencies to make sure that we're all working together towards an end goal, but in a safe way? Fascinating. Okay. So when I zoom out a little bit, when I've had conversations with folks like yourself with a very deep area of expertise and building a framework, there's usually something where that didn't make it into this iteration, but will probably be in the next one because of the way things are going. I'm so curious what those things are in your point of view. So we definitely have those as a committee where the first round, we weren't sure if it needed to be in there or not. It's a living, breathing document. They come through on revision cycles. We intend for them to change as people use them and we learn more. The industry evolves. We want the document to evolve with the industry as well, and it's not stagnant. So this next one, it was released in 2025. It will come back out for revision in 2029. And so we will be meeting again as a committee in that timeframe, looking at where areas of improvement, things that have been changed, what do we need to include, and then taking public comment as well. So if you go on the NFPA website for 461, there's actually a spot to provide public comment. So as people start using this document, we want that feedback. Fantastic. Is there anything else that I know I missed a lot? Is there anything that you want to make sure that you tell the audience as part of our conversation today that I definitely missed? I know it's very detailed and very technical, and it's a very special topic. And so I think as people start to use this document and comply with it, one of the most important things is to look for a partner with proven industry experience in this area. Places that you can go and look are engineering news record, like ENR. Look at the top design firms in the industry-specific rankings to kind of see who understands the market and ask for references and portfolio examples. Proven partners are going to be willing to share case studies and client references and project examples in the industry. And so you're going to want to make sure that you're aligning with a company that understands the processes and the risks because it's a very exotic industry, and make sure that you're getting steered in the right direction with somebody who understands what's going on. [Music] We'll be right back. [Music] Welcome back. For our last story in today's T-minus, let's talk about the impact of the rapid proliferation of satellites on astronomy. This will surprise absolutely none of our listeners who work in astronomy, but all of those proliferated satellite constellations in low Earth orbit, either existing or planned, are having a massive negative effect on ground-based astronomy. And no, I do not just mean Starlink, but yes, definitely including Starlink, as well as larger satellite buses that are notoriously shiny and bright. Well, while we see those satellite trains in formation across the sky at night, and maybe we marvel at the sign in passing, let's take it all in aggregate. Right now, we are at around a little over 10,000 satellites on orbit, and that number is growing quickly all the time. We are well beyond satellite interference being merely a nuisance. All of those satellites are now causing a massive headache for scientists and even the casual stargazer who wants to be able to see the stars without man-made satellites streaking across their field of view. And those streaks are called satellite trails when they show up in imagery. Now we have had many astronomers and researchers here on the show sounding the alarm for years now about the impact that satellite interference is having on their work and how much more work needs to be done to mitigate these effects by the satellites. So with that said, let us add to our knowledge today and take a peek at a new study that comes directly from NASA about the negative impact of satellites on not just ground-based astronomy now, but space-based astronomy. Yes, you heard me right? Space telescopes are now ever-increasingly dealing with interference from satellites. The new study from NASA just published in the journal Nature says that if all of the planned satellite constellations for Leo come to fruition, about one-third of future Hubble telescope images will be contaminated by satellite trails, and three future planned space telescopes, and those would be NASA's Sphere X, ESA's Arrakis, and China's Shunchan, will have 96 percent of their future images contaminated. And it makes sense when you think about it. When we're talking about space telescopes that are in Earth's orbit, Hubble, for example, is just 300 miles above us, and that is well within the bounds of what we call low Earth orbit. And Starlink satellites, just for an example, are regularly over 320 to 340 miles in altitude above Earth. And the study says that while Leo satellites are a problem because of their sheer number, it is not just them. Even satellites in much further out orbits are going to pose a problem for orbiting space telescopes because, unlike Leo satellites that tend to come and go pretty quickly, a distant satellite in say, Geo, can hang around much longer in an image, making them even harder to later remove in decontamination efforts. By the way, images from observatories way out in space like Webb that's hanging out at L2 do not need to worry about satellite contamination, at least not for the foreseeable future. Same with any moon-based observatories that a nation might plant on the lunar far side one day, at least that is until lunar satellite orbits start getting crowded themselves, and then we'll have the same problems all over again. But perhaps by the time a moon observatory is something real and operational, maybe we will have learned our lesson on how satellites and astronomy can better coexist, maybe, maybe. At least, I hope so. And that's 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 this show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to 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 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 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 Kilpie is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. T-minus. [BIRDS CHIRPING] [BLANK_AUDIO]