← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
The Environmental Cost of the Space Race.
00:27:22
Viasat has been awarded a $568M GSA IDIQ contract. Redwire to develop AFRL software and hardware. DIU picks Aalyria to enhance defence applications. And more.
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- [00:02]
Maria Varmazas
You're listening to the N2K space network.
- [00:11]
Jonathan McDowell
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- [01:13]
Maria Varmazas
The Artemis Accords created and I quote here to establish a common political understanding regarding mutually beneficial practices in the exploration and use of outer space. Well, they launched on October 13, 2020 with seven signatories joining the United States at the outset. And here we are a smidge over four years later and we are on the cusp of signatory number 50 coming on board. T minus 20 seconds to Los. Today is December 10, 2024. I'm Maria Varmazas and this is T. Viasat has been awarded a $568 million GSA IDIQ contract Redwire to develop AFRL software and hardware, DIU picks Elyria to enhance defense applications and our guest today is astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. Jonathan co authored a paper on rocket launch and reentry, air pollutant and CO2 emissions at onset of the mega Constellation era. What we know and what we don't know, which he'll be talking to me about later in the show. We're kicking off today's Intel Briefing with a slew of contract news. The first big announcement comes from Viasat, who have been awarded a five year sole source, indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity or IDIQ contract through the US General Services Administration with a $568 million ceiling. The contract is an extension to a previous idiq issued in 2019 to deliver a diverse portfolio of technologies and services to help advance and enable the communications, security, intelligence and operations that are essential for U.S. warfighters. ViaSat's contract supports the rapid migration of command control, communications, computers, combat systems, intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, and best practices from special operations forces to general purpose forces. The new contract structure allows the U.S. department of Defense to address key priorities for enhanced mobility, resilient networking, cybersecurity and broadband satcom services. It also allows for the accelerated acquisition and adoption of new products, systems and services that the DoD requires and enables military users across services to access and benefit from these emerging technologies. Redwire has been awarded a $45 million plus five year cost plus fixed fee contract for the design, development and testing of prototype software and hardware for mission critical technologies. The contract will support the AFRL Space Vehicle Directorate's efforts to equip the joint warfighter with a spectrum of agile, effective, resilient and affordable space mission capabilities. Elyria has been selected by the U.S. defense Innovation Unit to enhance connectivity for defense applications. The contract was awarded by DIU for the Opportunistic, Resilient and Innovative Expeditionary Network Topology Project, also known as orient. Elyria will play a key role in advancing resilient command and control for all domain attributable autonomous systems. In support of the Replicator initiative, NASA on behalf of NOAA has selected the Southwest Research Institute of San Antonio to build the next generation Space Weather Magnometer for the Lagrange 1 Series project as part of NOAA's Space Weather Next program. This cost plus fixed fee contract is valued at approximately $26.1 million and includes the development of two magnometer instruments. The anticipated period of performance is from December 2024 through January 2034. Rocket Lab successfully launched a suborbital mission in November to test hypersonic technology for the Department of Defense. The mission provided hypersonic test launch capabilities under the multi Service Advanced Capability Hypersonic's testbed project, which aims to increase hypersonic flight testing for the United States in support of technology maturation. Rocket Lab's test platform showcased a new suite of technologies optimized for hypersonic technology tests with vastly increased payloads. Rocket Lab also designed, manufactured, assembled and integrated the experimental hypersonic instrumentation which was launched on this mission on a highly accelerated timeline. Lockheed Martin's US technology demonstration is complete and ready for launch in 2025 aboard a Firefly Aerospace Alpha rocket. The tactical satellite, known as tacsat, is an intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance spacecraft with a mission to provide specialized sensing and communications capabilities on orbit. The satellite will participate in exercises next year that highlight cross domain kill web connectivity enabling timely execution of tactical space missions. Earth observation company Planet Labs has announced financial results for the period ended October 31, 2024. The company reported that their third quarter revenue increased 11% year over year to a record $61.3 million. Planet has signed key contracts with domestic and international partners over the last year to provide satellite imagery to increase awareness for defense, maritime and deforestation situations. Sierra Space is collaborating with Nvidia to predict the future locations of orbital debris. Sierra Space says it's leveraging the power of physics informed neural networks to develop a solution that not only enhances prediction accuracy, but also significantly reduces computational overhead. The collaboration uses Nvidia AI and accelerated computing for both training and interference, providing Sierra Space with models that can achieve heightened computational efficiency and speed. Japan's ISPACE and lunar resources company Magna Petra have agreed to collaborate on future missions to the lunar surface. Magna Petra is aiming to prospect, extract and return to Earth helium three isotopes from the lunar surface. The two companies have agreed to collaborate on the development of a lunar economy that provides terrestrial economic value via non destructive sustainable harvesting of lunar surface resources. French space propulsion company ionx has raised 13 million euros in a funding round. The company's aiming to launch the industrialization of its ion thruster for small satellites and accelerate its development in France and internationally. The company plans to produce 200 ion thrusters per year by 2028 at its future production facility in the Ile de France region and Panama and Austria will sign the Artemis Accords at NASA headquarters in Washington tomorrow. NASA will be celebrating reaching 50 signatories after the event and we'll bring you more on that in tomorrow's show. Head to the selected Reading section of our Show Notes to find links to more information on all the stories that we've mentioned today and we've included the NASA vlog on the experiments being conducted on the ISS this week. Hey T minus crew, if you are just joining us, be sure to follow T Space daily in your favorite podcast app. Also do us a favor. Could you share the intel with your friends and co workers? Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday you can 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 crew. So if you find T useful, please share so other professionals like you can find the show. Thank you, it means a lot to me.
- [09:17]
Jonathan McDowell
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- [10:10]
Maria Varmazas
Our guest Today is astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell. Jonathan co authored a paper on rocket launch and reentry, air pollutant and CO2 emissions at the onset of the mega constellation era. And I asked him first to explain at a high level what the paper was about.
- [10:30]
Jonathan McDowell
For 50 years we've been using the upper atmosphere as an incinerator for old satellites. And the statement was always that there's tiny amounts and it won't affect the upper atmosphere, but the amounts aren't as tiny as they used to be. And so we thought it was time to sort of reevaluate that. So the paper that I own is really just an inventory trying to assess how much material of different kinds is reentering the atmosphere, burning up in the atmosphere, reaching the surface of the Earth, all of that stuff. And just to give a baseline input to the climate models. And so my collaborators, who are actual atmosphere scientists, who know about the atmosphere and I, who just know about rockets and how many are falling down, got together to make this. And what's coming in is a lot. It's a lot more than it used to be. It now exceeds in certain respects the natural influx of meteors and stuff, not in total amount, but certainly, for example, metallic elements like aluminum. And so that raises the question, okay, so now we know we can't neglect it relative to things that we already know are not a problem.
- [11:54]
Maria Varmazas
Right, right.
- [11:56]
Jonathan McDowell
For billions of years.
- [11:57]
Maria Varmazas
Right, right. That's usually the hand wave that people give, is that. Yeah, yep.
- [12:00]
Jonathan McDowell
Right. So now we have to ask the question, okay, so how much would be a problem? And we're not there yet. That's the short version. We don't know. But the fact that we don't know and you know, the answer may well still turn out to be no. You know, even with mega constellations and everything, it's not enough to be a problem for the ozone layer or other issues with the upper atmosphere. But we don't know that right now. We have to do the science, we have to do the climate models. And so this is sort of a wake up call of like, we really need to do this research now before we up the input levels by another factor of 10. Right. And there are, you know, there's a whole bunch of things happen when you reenter the atmosphere. I mean, one is that you melt and your component molecules enter the mesosphere and yeah, it's just another source of pollution. Right. But the mesosphere, which is like the upper layer of the atmosphere above 50 km is really thin. There's actually not that much of it. If you take the whole mesosphere and squish it down until it were ground level air density, right it will be about the size of a town or something like that. So the ability to perturb that is much easier than the ability to perturb the lower atmosphere. Right? Because there's just not that much of it. And so you're adding material but you're also putting in shockwaves. And the shockwaves of the reentry compress the nitrogen that's already in the atmosphere and make it react with oxygen and make oxides and nitrogen and so on, which can be problematic. And so there's a series of effects. There's also, by the way these reentries leave like what we call noctilucent clouds, the streaks of material in the upper atmosphere that you can see that could interfere with astronomy. And so there's a series of side effects of these reentries that until now we've kind of gone eh, it's not enough to worry about. And now we're going, we should check that it's not enough to worry about.
- [14:15]
Maria Varmazas
That is a very measured way of putting that. I do appreciate that. So some of the takeaways that I was getting from this and again this is way outside of my knowledge sphere, so please correct me here. There's sort of a multiplier effect because I'm sort of trying to do a sum up version of it's not just how much is going in but also being in the miso sphere that there's a multiplier effect of the sort. Certain materials that are there. Am I understanding that correctly or.
- [14:41]
Jonathan McDowell
Okay, now you're getting into the chemistry that I don't understand. But my limited understanding is that there are catalysts, right? That a small amount of certain materials can facilitate certain chemical reactions that are happening with the other materials that are there and make them go more quickly and so on. So I think that's what you're getting at. So that all goes into these fancy climate models that are kind of the same kind of models that we use for predicting climate change and things like that. But this is on a shorter time scale. And so it has. There are all kinds of inputs to the atmosphere. There's the solar X rays, right, that create the ionization state. There is the natural meteor impact, there's the stuff coming out from below, the radiant heat of the earth, there's various kinds of pollution. And so you have to sort of mix all these in as A function of latitude, longitude, time in the solar cycle, all the different parameters that can sort of influence the atmosphere and try and assess how this particular input changes the result compared to not having it in. So there's a lot of subtleties involved. It's going to take a while and I don't know how the answer is going to come out. I think it still may well be that the input is too small to worry about overly at the moment. But if it isn't, we've got a real problem and so we really need to know.
- [16:14]
Maria Varmazas
Yeah, get ahead of that for sure.
- [16:18]
Jonathan McDowell
Environmental effect. Let's get ahead of something. Right.
- [16:20]
Maria Varmazas
It would be nice. It would be really nice. I won't lie. We could use some of that refreshing change. They would. It truly would. Getting into. Just because I can't help myself, the hypotheticals, the conjecture part, putting more of the satellite hat on, taking the atmosphere hat off for a second. I mean, what if the conclusion is we have to stop re entering? How? I mean, my goodness, would everybody just go to graveyard orbit? Like what on earth would we do?
- [16:47]
Jonathan McDowell
Right. Exactly. So then I do know some people who are working on a nice idea for a recycling yard in space.
- [16:56]
Maria Varmazas
Okay. ICM's really happy about that.
- [16:58]
Jonathan McDowell
Yeah, yeah. You're not just going to send something to graveyard orbit, you're going to send it to Tom's scrapyard in orbit and they're going to collect the materials and hopefully reprocess them and reuse them for shielding for satellites and things like that. Right. It's probably unrealistic to think that you're going to get much active electronics out of such a recycling project, at least in the short term. In the long run. In the long run, we'll have our satellite factories in orbit and it'll be like, yeah, taking your satellite to the shop. But in the short run, you could imagine at least reusing the structures as shielding for deep space spacecraft that want radiation shielding or something like that, or Microsoft.
- [17:48]
Maria Varmazas
Right.
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Jonathan McDowell
Shielding. Right. And so maybe someone can make a business out of that or maybe it will have to be a requirement, you know, government tax funded or whatever to kind of do this to avoid, to, you know, but it'll be, it's an extra overhead on running your space business in the long run.
- [18:06]
Maria Varmazas
Yeah, yeah. And we know how that goes for a lot of businesses, truly. Yeah. I mean, what about materials changes? I mean, I don't even know. Again, who knows? Right. But I'm just curious what your thoughts are. Yeah.
- [18:18]
Jonathan McDowell
The Japanese just, I think just, just deployed their first wooden satellite.
- [18:22]
Maria Varmazas
Yes. Yep. I love that, I love that.
- [18:26]
Jonathan McDowell
Yeah, that's lovely. Although there have been uses of wood in other spacecraft in the past. And so, yeah, perhaps a different mix of materials would be more benign. So that would have to be. I mean, I think we have to understand the physics first before we can start redesigning things. But yeah, that would be one way to go. I think it's going to be limited in that, you know, for some purposes you're really going to need, you know, there's a reason we use the materials, we do put it that way.
- [18:57]
Maria Varmazas
Well, I do really appreciate that you and your colleagues are looking into this. I know that this is a, the dialogue around this is really just beginning and we're so in the preliminary stages and there's so much still to learn. But I'm just glad that these discussions are happening. This research is happening.
- [19:13]
Jonathan McDowell
It's important. Like I said, we don't know. And here's the thing about science, right? I mean, in my career, right, I've had so, you know, maybe of like 100 investigations I've done, you know, 80 have ended up with, okay, this isn't even worth the paper, right? Or. And you have to investigate all the possibilities to rule out the ones that, you know because you don't want to miss the one that's really important. And so when you hear about a scientific result in the media, you have to be a little, you know, a little careful. Okay, they wrote a paper, that's great, good for you. But doesn't mean it's the final word on the subject. And so very much in this case, this is like an early word on the subject. And I really hope that other researchers will plunge in and apply their own models and see if they can, you know, do something better and more quantitative. And the group I'm working with will be doing that for sure.
- [20:17]
Maria Varmazas
A link to Jonathan's full report can be found in our show notes. We'll be right back. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big roas man. Then he told everyone how much he loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B but with LinkedIn.
- [20:56]
Jonathan McDowell
You'Ll be able to reach people who.
- [20:57]
Maria Varmazas
Do get a hundred dollar credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com campaign to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com campaign. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be, to be. Welcome back. If it looks like an asteroid but behaves like a comet. It's a dark comet. No, it's not from a comic book, but it's a real thing. With the first dark comet discovered just less than two years ago, we're up to around a dozen dark comets known now. So what led to the discovery of dark comets? Well, in 2016, when asteroid or then what we thought was an asteroid, 2003 RM was being tracked, it ends up that its path was kind of odd, and 2003 RM was not moving in the way that an asteroid ought to. David Farnocchia of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory Co authored the study on 2003 RM and said when you see that kind of perturbation on a celestial object, it usually means that it's a comet with volatile material outgassing from its surface, giving it a little thrust. But try as we might, we couldn't find any signs of a comet's tail. It looked like any other asteroid, just a pinpoint of light. So for a short while, we had this one weird celestial object that we couldn't fully figure out. Kind of love it when space stuff is simply described as weird. When in 2017, Oumuamua, everyone's favorite interstellar object, came into the solar scene, it was also off gassing a little bit like a comet does, but moving like an asteroid. And that made scientists take a closer look at 2003 RM and later it changed its designation from asteroid to dark comet. And the latest in dark comet tree, just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences yesterday, in fact, is that there are small dark comets that roam the inner solar system in nearly circular orbits and larger outer system dark comets with highly elliptical orbits. So not only did we get a whole new brand new category of celestial object last year, there are now subcategories to that new category. That is it for T minus for December 10, 2024, 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 Team 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 Iban Our executive editor is Brandon Cr Harp. Simone Petrella is our president, Peter Kilpie is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.
- [24:14]
Jonathan McDowell
T minus it.