Mike Gold (8:38)

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Maria Varmazas (9:10)

And our guest today is Mike Gold, Chief Growth Officer at Redwire. Redwire has had an incredible year of accomplishments on the International Space Station and so I asked Mike to walk us through just some of the work that they've completed on the ISS in 2024.

Mike Gold (9:29)

Our rollout solar array product, which is an amazing story that frankly I think doesn't get enough attention that we have rollout solar arrays that we developed for the International Space Station and they're compacted like a carpet when you launch so it saves a lot of fairing room and then when you reach orbit it rolls out providing a huge amount of volume and therefore energy and these roll out solar arrays were initially developed on contract Boeing, so thank you Boeing and to NASA and are now providing power for the International Space Station as we speak. And this technology is also being used for the Lunar Gateway, which these arrays, the rollout solar arrays that we developed for Gateway, may be the largest solar arrays ever deployed by humanity. So it's been amazing to do that work in this case with our customer Maxar who's developing the power and propulsion elements. So it's been terrific to see these arrays developed, yes, for government projects, but now being commercialized via our friends at Blue Origin and our wonderful customers at Thales, who are doing these incredible innovative satellites to really connect the world. So it's been a great story of technologies developed for NASA that are innovative. They're now going to the private sector. And then of course we have to talk about the incredible strides with microgravity. The first human meniscus being print the cardiovascular tissue being printed on the International Space Station live and then brought back to Earth while still live. These are incredible innovations being driven by our BFF Biofabrication facility. And that's to say nothing of what's occurring with Pillbox, which are microgravity drug developments that we're doing to use microgravity to create new drugs or different types of existing drugs that have better longitivity, increased efficacy, fewer side effects. So it's a whole revolution as we combine pharmaceuticals and biotech with with microgravity in space. And I'm so pleased to be at Red Wire where we are just blazing trails and creating this whole new era that can not only support exploration, but create a better world for all of us here on Earth.

Maria Varmazas (11:42)

When I think about the incredible innovations happening in low Earth orbit with pharma biotech, Redwire's name just comes up all the time. And it's just amazing to see where things are already. And I'm so curious to hear your thoughts on where you see things going because I mean, you all are there at that forefront.

Mike Gold (12:01)

Yes, absolutely. So there's really two ways that this is going. One is, as the president of our in Space Industries group says, make it, don't take it. And that's fabricating parts. Electronics. We have a system called Fab Lab. We're very good at naming things, as you can tell here at Red Wire and possibly some people spans involved in that, that will manufacture parts, components. We're the only company to have actually 3D printed parts and components on the International Space Station. We've done over 200. And while though it's a nice capability to have in low Earth orbit on the iss. The ability to print these parts, components, systems, tools, I believe will save lives on the Moon and particularly on Mars. The farther out you get, the more that capability is. So I'm thrilled with what we're doing and what we've done in that area. And then when it comes to Earth, we've got a couple of variations there with the regenerative medicine and the creation of the meniscuses of cardiovascular tissue. I believe we'll in the not too distant future be working with kidney tissue, liver tissue. Once you understand the basic principles of being able to print with human tissue, obviously you've opened then to a wide variety of tissue types that can really have some just phenomenal results. So that is going to be very exciting as we expand out the different types of tissues, types of potential organs, tissues that you're going to work with. And then the subset or a different line are the drug development. So drugs are developed from seed crystals and we create these seed crystals microgravity that are much more uniform, crystals are larger and that results or can result anyway to better, more enhanced types of the drugs. And I believe that's probably nearest to the boat is the drug development. We've flown close to 30 now pillboxes. Pillbox is the system that develops sea crystal in our ADCEP system which is on the iss. So it's an extraordinarily exciting time to be in the space industry. Even more exciting time to be at Redwire, which is leading the way globally on all of these activities. It's just an honor to be here and be a part of this amazing team.

Maria Varmazas (14:32)

I believe it. And just so much growth is happening at Redwire. Global expansions and as I mentioned, as I keep saying, every time I look at a mission, your name is in there somewhere. Redwire is a part of these incredible missions. And we're just talking about one section of the amazing things that Redwire does. I'm Proba three is something that's very recent from in my mind anyway. I'm sure it's taken a long time to get to where it is, but that was just another mission that I just was thinking of recently where it's just an incredible, incredible science happening. And Red Wire is a big part of that.

Mike Gold (15:04)

Absolutely. Proba simulating a solar eclipse and let's not sleep on Hera again. These are onboard computers that we're doing in Europe. So the rosas that we were discussing before were important part of powering the Dart mission. The double asteroid redirect test mission, planetary defense. Yeah, absolutely. Like had the dinosaurs, had Rosa and Dart, they'd still be around doing a podcast today. Very excited at Redwire to have contributed your job.

Maria Varmazas (15:33)

Being Chief Growth Officer, you're looking ahead, I imagine all the time at what's coming next. I'm so curious about your long term vision for growth. Maybe any markets you see Red Wire moving into or expanding into. Just your thoughts on like the long term. Long term, yeah.

Mike Gold (15:50)

So spoilers. There's constant growth at Red Wire. I wouldn't even be surprised if there's interesting news by the time this podcast goes up. And let me just say, generally, diversity is key. I think that's what Red Wire stands for. Diversity is not just the right thing to do. Generally, it's the right thing to do for business. Whether we're talking people or we're talking business cases, capabilities or technologies. The commercial space field can be such a roller coaster. And the fact that Redwire is so diverse in terms of capabilities, in terms of locations, geography, customer base, that's really why I think we're strong in for the long haul. And we'll succeed where other companies may fail that are more focused on a single capability or a single field or technology. So, looking to the future, I expect us to even further diversify our portfolio while of course leveraging the synergies that all of Red Wire's technologies can bring together. I'm certainly hopeful that we'll see movement and possibly under the new administration, even more alacrity relative to commercial space stations. As we've been discussing, these microgravity developments are dependent on the International Space Station, which by the way, deserves a Nobel Peace Prize. I always like discussing that because everyone involved is just the singular, extraordinary system. And I worry every day about losing that amazing platform. And we need to make sure that America, our international partners, that the world has access to a station like that moving forward. And I'm excited about opening up the commercial entrepreneurialism and the ideas that the private sector will bring to actually creating that platform. So I think in the years to come, you're going to see a significant effort there. And also as we talk more about the new administration, one aspect of Red Wire we haven't discussed is national security. And we do the link 16 antenna, literally helping bring the national security world together and a number of other products that we do for SDA and other entities and the customers that work for sda. And what I really like seeing with SDA in particular is how they're trying to grow the industrial base, a diverse industrial base, bring new ideas, new companies and new technologies to the fore. I think in many ways SDA is the intellectual inheritor of the COTS and CRS programs that NASA supported and resulted in such amazing commercial growth. And as we look at the next Trump administration, I think we're going to see even greater and more robust opportunities, particularly for companies like Red Wire that aren't as large as the big primes but still have real capabilities. I think we're going to be entering to a whole new realm of those possibilities in the defense world over the next four years. And I'm very excited what that can look like and I think we're going to have great capabilities to preserve ours and our allies freedom and to keep the world a safe and better place.

Maria Varmazas (19:05)

Absolutely. And as we're talking about the look ahead as a wrap up question, since this is the beginning of 2025, I have to ask the obligatory missions that you're looking forward to in this year, in 2025. I know again I'm asking you to pick amongst your children, but these children aren't there yet. So you have a favorite?

Mike Gold (19:22)

Yeah, yeah. V Leo very low Earth orbit. As we talk about protecting our freedoms, protecting our friends and allies in America. Resilience is key. Diversity, as I mentioned before, not just key for Red Wire, but key for our defense communications capabilities and having very low Earth orbit which Red Wire is working with. Tarpon, Red Wire has actual contracts with ESA on as well. I'm so excited of those missions moving forward and in US at least working on the contracts and the capabilities that we've got to mature that V LEO capability. I think again that's going to be, if not a whole new world, a whole new orbit that is going to be very important both for defense and I believe commercially as well. There's a lot of advantages on remote sensing that that will be important. And again I'm very excited about the additional pillboxes and the additional regenerative medicine activities that we'll be dealing with. Particularly as we believe vascular tissue is next up that we're going to be experimenting with. And as we go to kidney, liver tissue and different tissues as I mentioned before, very, very excited about those activities. Also in Belgium we're building the international birthing and docking mechanism, the ibdm that will literally bring the world together. It will bring Gateway together as we take those parts and dock them. That's just a few of the many missions that I'm excited about as we look towards 2025.

Maria Varmazas (21:04)

We'll be right back. Welcome back. It feels a bit like a cheat code for viewing extraordinarily distant objects in space. Gravitational lensing, that is when light gets distorted or bent or lensed by large masses in space, creating those circular sort of swirlish light patterns in images from the James Webb Space Telescope and Hubble. And like a camera or a telescope, you can use a lens, gravitational one in this case, to see super far away objects. Up until recently, this usually meant looking at one, maybe two super far away stars through a gravitational lens. But what's better than one gravitational lens? Well, two, when their powers combine. Astronomers took a closer look at images taken over time with Webb of galaxy cluster Abel370, which has a named gravitational lens phenomenon called the Dragon Arc. Massive dark matter in the galaxy cluster provided a 100x magnification macro lens. And when conditions were just right, it aligned with a 10x gravitational microlens made by a star in that same galaxy cluster. So that's two lenses stacking right there, allowing astronomers to peer through both at the same time to see A galaxy nearly 6.5 billion light years from us, looking back in time to when the universe was just a wee babe half its age. Now, not only that, the astronomers were able to see not just one, not just two distant stars, but over 40. So again, by peering through two gravitational lenses when they happened to be stacked in just the right way, thanks to Webb, astronomers found that they could look halfway across the known observable universe. Wow. The data collected by Webb for these findings was from 2022 and 2023. And you can read the peer reviewed paper about this remarkable achievement in astronomy, just published this month in the journal Nature Astronomy. That's it for T minus for January 7, 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 are 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. T minus.