Dave (7:32)

Alice welcome back, Maria. We only have one additional story for you today. Yank Technologies has been selected for a two year follow on CIBber Phase 2 contract from NASA to advance dust tolerant resonant connectors for lunar and planetary surfaces. You can read more about that by following the link in the Selected Readings section of our show notes.

Maria Varmazes (7:52)

And as a reminder, those show notes can also be found on our website space.n2k.com just click on the episode title Hey T Minus Crew. If you are just joining us, be sure to follow T minus Space daily in your favorite podcast app. Also, if you could do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. 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 the show. Thank you. It means a lot to me and all of us here at T minus.

David Barnhart (8:40)

Foreign.

Dave (8:54)

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Maria Varmazes (9:47)

Our guest today is David Barnhart, CEO and co Founder of arcasis. Dave started by telling me about his background and how he came to start arcasis.

David Barnhart (9:59)

I have been lucky enough to have a bit of an eclectic career over time. Always been fascinated in space since I watched the moon landings many years ago and never looked back. So my background in particular at this point is a combination of US Government startups as well as academic endeavors all related to space. The latest activity related that I've created is arcasis. Our specific goal honestly is is to develop ports, same as you think of in nautical areas for space. The Whole point is that we need to make it as ubiquitous and easy as possible for arrivals and departures services, goods and cargo payload development so that we can get off world.

Maria Varmazes (10:49)

Excellent. Well, thank you, Dave, for joining me today. And the topic that we're going to be chatting about today is DARPA's Lasso program, which was really interesting to learn about. And the solicitation for that, I think, just went out. This is a really neat program and I was wondering, can you walk me through this? Can you tell me a little bit about it? What you know?

David Barnhart (11:09)

Yeah, well, we're sort of in the same position as everybody else from a solicitation standpoint, whether we, you know, support or not support. I can tell you, having been at DARPA and been a program manager and actually put out programs, this is the methodology by which DARPA and in particular offices will reach out to the industry to begin to uncover and explore completely new ideas and in many cases, highly challenging ideas. There's no question this particular case Lasso is ambitious, but again, that falls within DARPA's purview and sort of expectation. Just besides reading the solicitation and sort of taking a step back, looking at it, the goal is, I think, twofold. The challenge in particular is to be able to identify where there might be water ice on the surface. In order to do that, you really need to be low. But to be low, that means you have to understand the gravitational constraints around the entire moon. Now, why is that significant? Because there is no. It's a very amorphous gravitational field that's around it. The expectation is, I think, that if I read in the solicitation, they wanted to be low, low mean sort of kilometer size, and yet some of the differences in the surface are kilometer size. So that brings a rather unique potential challenge that if you want to stay low and do all the recording and do the sensing in as many places as possible, you also have to make sure you don't hit anything while you're flying, flying low. So that makes it interesting, right?

Maria Varmazes (12:55)

Absolutely. And one of the many end results from a program like this, presumably, would be that we would have a very, very detailed, complete map of the moon after something like this is complete. Does that sound right?

David Barnhart (13:06)

Yeah, absolutely. And that's there. There is significant value in that. Because right now one of the challenges from a navigational standpoint, as well as staying in an orbit, is that it's very hard to maintain a stable orbit when the gravitational pull around the body changes depending upon where you're flying. That's the Positive thing about the Earth, the Earth is fairly well stable relative to its gravitational pull, and therefore you can have reasonably stable orbits that occur. Moon, not so much. So that would be wonderful to be able to map that. The grail mission, honestly, that NASA put up was meant, was meant to do that, but it did it at a higher altitude. Right. And that makes it easier to fly, if you will, but it also limits how much sort of detail that you can get. And in this particular case, DARPA wants to combine not only sort of the mapping of the surface as well as the gravitational field, but also, hey, where's that? Where's the ice crystals that we can go for?

Maria Varmazes (14:06)

Yeah, yeah. You know, what struck me about this is this is not the kind of mission that I would have thought, oh, that's definitely something DARPA would be interested in. And it's just fascinating to hear that DARPA is going, you know, we want capabilities to search for water on the Moon. Can you connect the dots for me on that one? Like, why, why is this a DARPA mission specifically?

David Barnhart (14:23)

Yeah, well, so, I mean, there's no question that as sort of as history goes along here, the notion of sort of conflict and competition and congestion begins to grow further and further out from the Earth. So there's no question that the Chinese landing on the Moon sort of raised some hackles. Hey, how come those guys are doing it? Right? So part of DARPA's pre spec here prospect specifically is to go after things that are super hard from a technical standpoint and that basically to push the boundary of the technologies which may then be able to come back into whether it's related to the Earth, if we're talking about space, or whether it's something that we could support longer term relative to the lunar domain in particular. So this is not surprising. DARPA had put out a study, I think it was called the Luna 10 study, where they also had a bunch of folks sort of talk about what is the commercialization potential going out to the moon. So darpa's domain really is, while there is a D in front of it, that D also can be dual use. And dual use is both commercial as well as defense. So this one's not surprising. It is an incredibly challenging technical mission. And of all the sort of government agencies, it does make sense that DARPA might be the one to lead that.

Maria Varmazes (15:51)

That's fascinating. And I guess the question for me is also is why now, aside from maybe this is the only time we've actually been capable of even thinking of trying to answer this question. But maybe there's something else I'm missing.

David Barnhart (16:04)

No, I think it's a culmination from a historical perspective of not just the technology or wanting to push the technology, but also the great interest in sort of taking the next step from either commercialization or utilization, which is the Moon. So there was an incentive 10 years to do this, 10 years ago to do this. It now seems like sort of the right time. If you look at all the other government agencies that are interested, you look at the commercial missions that are interested, this feels like it's the right time. I think it's a fascinating mission. I think by DARPA pushing this, it'll open up some technology areas which honestly, multiple companies in the past have actually referenced or talked about. And so now this is one that they're going to hopefully put a mission to. And the hope is that it helps also expand potentially what the commercial sector would do. I mean, this is an area particularly that the commercial sector wouldn't necessarily say, hey, we're going to go map the Moon, right? You're going to make any money on mapping the moon? Well, you might if you got to sell it to somebody else. But that means you have to have a huge quantity of customers. So it really is sort of an infrastructure development process which, which makes the most sense because in general in history, nation states have been the one to sort of push that.

Maria Varmazes (17:43)

We'll be right back.

Dave (17:47)

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Maria Varmazes (18:20)

Welcome back. A shout out today to an article on Space.com by Thom Brown about NASA scientists honoring a departed colleague in space weather last year. Something that we didn't know about until today. So thank you Tom for writing this one up. Last year, you may remember, in late May, a lot of us saw magnificent aurora in the night skies in places that we often didn't. I enjoyed seeing a gorgeous light display from my front stoop in metro Boston, which was brilliant despite all the city lights. It was a phenomenal aurora, a once in several decades phenomenon. The first aurora of KP9 strength since 2003, in fact. And one scientist who researched geomagnetic storms is Dr. Jennifer Leah Gannon. At only age 45, she passed away on May 2, 2024, just a few weeks before last year's incredible aurora. Dr. Gannon, according to an in memoriam posted on Space Weather Quarterly Journal, was a leading figure in understanding geomagnetically induced currents and ground based magnetic field disturbance and had scientific expertise that also included radiation, belt electron dynamics and geomagnetic storms. Not long after Dr. Gannon's death, colleagues in space weather who work at NASA started to refer to the spectacular May 2024 KP9 Aurora as storm Ganon, the first time any kind of geomagnetic storm has received a name outside of the 1859 Carrington event. A White House press release also referred to the Aurora as Storm Gannon as well. Absolutely a fitting tribute to a scientist whose life, work and passion was to understand space weather and whose life was cut tragically short. And that's it for T minus for May 20, 2025, brought to you by N2K CyberWire for additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@space.n2k.com we're privileged that N2K and podcast podcasts like T minus are part of the daily routine of many 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 Senior Producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Peter Kilpie is our publisher and I'm your host Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

Dave (21:10)

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