← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
SpaceX launches Transporter 12.
00:26:39
SpaceX’s Transporter 12 rideshare carries 131 payloads to LEO. Starlab Space opens a European subsidiary. ispace completes mission 2 milestones. And more.
Loading summary
Transcript20 lines
- [00:02]
Maria Varmazes
You're listening to the N2K space network.
- [00:11]
Sponsor Announcer
Cyber threats are evolving every second, and staying ahead is more than just a challenge, it's a necessity. That's why we're thrilled to partner with ThreatLocker, the cybersecurity solution trusted by businesses worldwide. ThreatLocker is a full suite of solutions designed to give you total control, stopping unauthorized applications, securing sensitive data, and ensuring your organization runs smoothly and securely. Visit threatlocker.com today to see how a default deny approach can keep your company safe and compliant.
- [00:54]
Maria Varmazes
Today is January 14, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazes and this is T minus.
- [01:02]
Christopher Morrison
T Min.
- [01:03]
Maria Varmazes
20 seconds to LOS Space Systems Command expands partnership with the University of Southern California for workforce development effort China launches 10 navigation satellites into orbit ispace completes mission two milestone ahead of the launch of its lunar probe star labs space opens a European subsidiary SpaceX launch launches the transporter 12 rideshare, taking 131 payloads to Leo. And our guest today is Astronuclear engineer Christopher Morrison. Chris is a manager at Nuclear Methods and walks me through why he believes nuclear power is the answer for many space missions. Stay with us for that later in the show. Happy Tuesday everybody. Can you believe we're up to the 12th transporter mission by SpaceX already? Transporter 12 lifted off from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California this morning, carrying 131 payloads to low Earth orbit. Onboard the mission were cubesats, microsats and orbital transfer vehicles carrying 30 of those payloads, 14 of which will be deployed at a later time. To date, SpaceX has launched more than 1,100 payloads to orbit for 130plus customers across the entire rideshare program. That is incredible. And we know many commercial companies and sovereign states have spacecraft onboard this mission and we will bring you more on their deployments in the coming days. Starlab Space has opened a new European subsidiary in Bremen, Germany. Starlab says the German office will extend the company's capabilities and demonstrate its commitment to its international partners. The company aims to maintain global cooperation and permanent human presence and expand microgravity research opportunities in a commercial LEO economy. Starlab's joint venture partners currently include Voyager Space, Airbus, Mitsubishi Corporation and MDA Space. Strategic partners also include Palantir Technologies, Hilton, Northrop Grumman and the Ohio State University. Starlab CEO Tim Capra said in the press release that we are thrilled to launch starlab Space Europe, a regional hub that will facilitate industrial efficiencies and expanded partnerships with allied space agencies, including the European Space Agency and its member countries. More importantly, joining American and European presence sets the stage for life beyond the iss, one that has a global permanent crew thriving in low Earth orbit and leading research that can transform all of humanity. Ispace says it has completed all its launch preparations ahead of the liftoff of its SMBC X Hakuto R Venture Moon Mission two Now Mission two, which includes the Resilience Lunar Lander and the Tenacious Micro Rover, is scheduled to launch tomorrow, January 15th at 6:11 UTC. Also on board the Falcon 9 rocket that will be transporting the I Space Mission will be Firefly spaces Blue Ghost Mission 1. Now Blue Ghost is targeted to land on the moon in early March after an approximately 45 day transit to our nearest natural satellite. That mission is part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract, or CLPS, and will transport 10 NASA science investigations to the moon's surface, and we hope to bring you more on that tomorrow if liftoff goes as scheduled. Fingers crossed China launched a Jielong 3, or Space Dragon 3 solid rocket earlier this week, carrying 10 navigation satellites into low Earth orbit. The vehicle lifted off from a converted sea barge off the coast of Haiyang City in the eastern province of Shandong. According to the Chinese Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, who announced the launch. The satellites were developed by the commercial company Beijing Future Navigation Technology, and the spacecraft are part of the Centispace system, which is designed to feature 190 satellites in low Earth orbit. Space Systems Command is expanding its partnership with the University of Southern California as part of its initiative to enhance its workforce development effort. The partnership is updating their USC Shield Executive Program in Global Space and Deterrence. The eight month educational program is a joint effort by the USC Price School of Public Policy and the USC Viterbi School of Engineering and stems from an initial partnership with the Missile Defense Advocacy Alliance. Along with serving officers, the Shield program is open to government, civilians, academics and industry experts. And that concludes today's intel briefing. As always, you'll find links in our show notes to further reading on all the stories I've mentioned and Today we've included two additional stories for you. One is on NASA's cubesat summer program and another's on a new 3D printer developed for space applications by researchers at the University of Glasgow. Hey T minus crew, if you're 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 coworkers. 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 it so other professionals like you can find the show. Thank you so much everybody. It means a lot to me.
- [07:32]
Sponsor Announcer
And now a word from our sponsor, the University of Alabama in Huntsville College of Business. The Business of Space conference is your chance to connect with leaders shaping the new space economy. Held February 23rd through the 25th at the University of Alabama in Huntsville. This year's theme, creating Solutions with Partnerships, highlights the power of collaboration to address challenges and unlock opportunities. Don't miss this opportunity to drive innovation and shape policies. Early bird rates end January 24th. Learn more at opce.uah.edu birds Business of Space.
- [08:21]
Maria Varmazes
Our guest today is astronuclear engineer Christopher Morrison. Chris is a manager at Nuclear Methods and I asked Chris to walk us through why nuclear power isn't as widely used in space and his thoughts about why it should be.
- [08:38]
Christopher Morrison
Going back to the 1960s was just this huge topic of abundance and hope and optimism. And you had Eisenhower in the 50s going around, they built a nuclear cruise liner and he sailed around the world atoms for peace. At one of the UN conventions, they actually brought a nuclear reactor to the UN convention so they could show all the delegates all this optimism and hope and what wow. Yeah, like it was going to be the great source of power. And unfortunately it had a connotation with nuclear weapons that as time went on, the cold war went on and instead of developing the technology freely, you had to worry about non proliferation that caused a lot of constraints on the technology. You have this viable technology that can be scaled, gigawatt scale technology. You know, we were 20% nuclear powered in the United States and we were actually going to 100. In the late 70s and 80s it was like a full stop on nuclear. Cost wasn't a problem back then. It was all kind of just fear mongering. You know the you go fast forward to today and now the political will is there, but the real challenge is cost. Right. You know, we were restarting these technologies, you know, going into the space reactor pieces of this. Is that the space nukes? I've known them since 2013. They were a group of national lab folks that had been working on nuclear energy for space, you know, one you know, since the 80s really for a lot of them. And they were, you know, getting towards, you know, their 50s and said we're tired of nothing happening and we're going to make something happen. So they started with a small experiment that was funded out of internal discretionary funds for less than a million dollars. They did what's called the Duff test, which was a critical test where they lit a light bulb up. They didn't really build anything new, but they wanted to show NASA that hey, you don't need a billion dollars to do a nuclear system. You can do it quickly and easily. So with less than a million dollars, they did this test that got them greenlighted for an $18 million project where they actually built and tested at full power the Kilopower reactor. They used a lot of existing infrastructure. They knew how to make it work. They had the connections. And basically the thinking was at the time it was a 1 kilowatt reactor and uranium is actually very plentiful. It's a common, you know, material versus you look at RTGS which use plutonium 238. And you know, back in the weapons days we had a lot of plutonium 238. So we used it as a basis for our RTGS and radioisotope heaters as well, like little pellets that not a lot of people know this, but actually on the solar powered Spirit and Opportunity, you still had plutonium little heaters on them even though they were solar powered. They had plutonium 1 watt plutonium heaters. So plutonium is a great heritage, but its issue is that it was being produced for a while, then we stopped producing it and we said in the 90s, oh, we'll just buy it from the Russians.
- [12:11]
Maria Varmazes
What could go wrong?
- [12:13]
Christopher Morrison
Right? So, you know, you can still think of like, yes, we can do flagship science missions, but man, we can't do very many of them. And each one of those is, you know, on paper they're $300 million, but really the cost is much higher for an RTG. The 100 watt kind of, the 120 watt systems, because they don't include all the infrastructure costs in that price. So, you know, I've heard numbers all the way up to a billion dollars per rtg. And unfortunately in our science missions, if the science mission is $5 billion, they're so worried about reliability, they don't necessarily want to consider new technology. Which this was what Kilopower was originally designed for is it was a 1 kilowatt, so 10 times the power. Now it was 4 or 5 times the mass. So it was larger, but the power per unit mass was very competitive. And the idea was, oh, this can empower the science community. And they can do more missions with, you know, instead of a billion dollars, they might be able to do it for 100 million. Right. So 10 times cheaper cost, 10 times more power, maybe you're a couple times more in weight. And unfortunately, just the nature of our science missions that didn't really go anywhere. And NASA didn't pick up kilopower to become a major. You know, there was talk about a flight program under Steve Jurczyk and some of the NASA administrators, but ultimately that didn't happen. And right now they have a flight program with the Space Force, or I shouldn't call it necessarily a flight program yet, but it's a. It can move towards a flight program. And certainly there are other companies out there that are, that are doing well. And now we have, we have political will. We have, we have, you know, about 2/3 of Americans, about 2/3 of politicians that are very supportive of nuclear energy, whether it's for climate change or energy independence or, you know, various reasons. So that, that's promising and that's led to more focus on developing these systems. So you have companies like TerraPower and Kairos and X Energy that are all pretty big companies that have signed to basically build power stations for AI. AI is the new trend. So you had climate change, but now the difference with AI is that you have these very compact data centers that need incredible amounts of energy. And a very compact power source, such as nuclear, is very complementary to that. So it's now become, you know, very interest. You know, a lot of, a lot of these tech companies are very interested now in nuclear in a way that they were never interested before. Right. But it's challenging. So a lot of the regulatory environment is, is a bit slow and confusing. And I think we finally reached a point where most of the people that are actual appointees and in charge of the NRC are genuinely interested in both safety and, you know, not trying to, like, hobble the industry, more or less.
- [15:22]
Maria Varmazes
Yeah. So you gave this really great historical context about, you know, how we got to where we are now. But I mean, are these power sources able to sort of work in conjunction with solar at this point? Or can they stand alone or is that what we're working towards?
- [15:35]
Christopher Morrison
There's a space where only nuclear power works, and that includes things like permanently shadowed regions during the lunar night anywhere in the outer solar system, if you want to go on Mars, this is where I think there's a great case for solar plus nuclear. Right. You know, but a benefit of nuclear as well is it's a nice, simple System, you can fly there and it doesn't require a lot of setup. With solar, there's a lot of setup. You got to roll out your panels, you got to build stuff. With nuclear, you might have to dig a hole, you might have to build a little bit of a wall. But in general it's a very compact. And another benefit is it's uranium is so dense. So a reactor itself, it might have mass, but its volume is extremely compact. So it's actually volumetric footprint is very small. So it's really beneficial in that way. So when you look at with solar, there's certainly areas again where only nuclear works. There's areas where solar and nuclear are very complementary. And then there's a few areas like orbiting Earth, where there's some interesting use cases where there's radiation belts, like if you know the geostationary transfer orbits. The reason they do that is if you don't quickly get into your geo orbit, you'll get fried by our radiation belts. So you have these radiation belts with trapped protons and electrons and they hit the solar panels. And to protect your solar panels you have cover glass. And some of the military grade satellites have a lot of COVID glass, but it's so incredibly heavy. So if you want like an orbit that's in medium Earth orbit, and for context, the Van Allen belts go from like 2,000km up to I think it's a 10,000km. There's this whole orbital space where there are no satellites because of the radiation. But nuclear, who cares. Nuclear already has the radiation it deals with. So there's these niche, I could open that up.
- [17:47]
Maria Varmazes
Yeah.
- [17:48]
Christopher Morrison
And really with nuclear I also have to talk about scaling. With solar it's linear, like you just add more panels, right? You know, you want twice the power, you want twice the panels. With nuclear it's different because once you've achieved that critical mass of reactor, you don't really need to make the reactor bigger. Where I see nuclear coming in is if you want reliability, you want to go to the moon with people like nuclear. Sure makes a lot of sense if you're worried about a solar flare as well. You know, there was the Hayabusa 1 mission that got hit by a solar flare and its efficiency dropped by over 50% on its panels. So it somehow they still made the mission successful. It just took a lot of extra time. You know, I don't want to send humans somewhere where, you know, go to the moon and all of a sudden you get a solar flare. You know, you go to Mars, you get a Dust storm. So I think reliability is a key feature now once you're on the moon and Mars and maybe you can produce your own solar panels. Like there might be a case or, you know, some people have talked a lot about beamed energy. And what I'll talk about with beamed energy is you can beam nuclear energy just as well as you can beam solar energy. So there's no.
- [19:02]
Maria Varmazes
Yeah, at that point. It's the delivery system, not the source. Right. I mean it's.
- [19:06]
Christopher Morrison
Yeah, so, so those are just some of the, like, differences between solar and nuclear. And again, I'm, I'm a fan of both, but you know, I think there's, there's 100% development and good opportunities for both. And you know, I want to say I've been impressed with like the rollout solar arrays that they're looking at for the space station that they're going to continue to get, get a bit better. But I would still make the argument that nuclear is a key technology for space. It's not a key, it's not the only key technology. There are many key technologies, but it's a key technology technology.
- [19:55]
Maria Varmazes
We'll be right back.
- [20:02]
Sponsor Announcer
And now a message from our sponsor, zscaler. The leader in cloud security. Enterprises have spent billions of dollars on firewalls and VPNs. Yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year over year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Zscaler 0Trust AI stops attackers by hiding your attack surface. Making apps and IPs invisible, eliminating lateral movement. Connecting users only to specific apps, not the entire network. Continuously verifying every request based on identity and context. Simplifying security management with AI powered automation and detecting threats using AI to analyze over 500 billion daily transactions. Hackers can't attack what they can't see. Protect your organization with Zscaler Zero Trust and AI. Learn more@Zscaler.com Security.
- [21:21]
Maria Varmazes
Welcome back. Now, I cannot possibly start this story without first playing you this sound. Hmm. Now, is that a lone hailstone, A tiny explosion, A flower pot shattering as it falls off the top of a tall ledge. It's odd, isn't it, that it's kind of both familiar and unfamiliar. But no, it's not hail, an explosion or a falling flower pot, but rather a small meteorite meeting its inevitable conclusion. As it smashes into earth right at the top of the driveway of a homeowner on Prince Edward Island, Canada. That is the video from their home security camera, which captured both the sound and video of the impact when it happened this past July. In all, researchers were able to collect 95 grams of chondrite debris, and the largest chunks easily fit in the palm of your hand like a large chunk of stone gravel. But it's estimated that this meteorite was traveling at approximately 200 kilometers a second, so something even that small would be extremely deadly, of course, if it hit somebody. But thankfully nobody was hurt in this meteorite crash, though the homeowner who captured this smashing incident, Joe Valatum, had been standing in that exact spot just a few minutes prior before he took his dogs out for a walk. Had he lingered a little longer, or had one of his pups found something particularly interesting to smell nearby, this would indeed have been a very different story. But thankfully, luck was very much on his side, and now we know what it sounds like when a meteoroid smacks the pavement and goes smashy. That's it for T minus for January 14, 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 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. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpe is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.
- [23:57]
Christopher Morrison
T Min.