CyberWire Daily - T-Minus Overview- Our Moon [T-Minus Radio Program]

Episode Date: June 19, 2024

Please enjoy this bonus episode from our T-Minus Space Daily team. The N2K CyberWire team is observing the Juneteenth holiday here in the US. Welcome to the T-Minus Overview Radio Show. In this program we’ll feature some of the conversations from our daily podcast with the people who are forging the path in the new space era, from industry leaders, technology experts and pioneers, to educators, policy makers, research organizations, and more. Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Miss an episode? Sign-up for our weekly intelligence roundup, Signals and Space, and you’ll never miss a beat. And be sure to follow T-Minus on LinkedIn and Instagram. T-Minus Guest Our guests are Science Writer and Author Rebecca Boyle, and CEO and Founder, Chair and CEO of Lonestar Space Holdings, Chris Stott.  T-Minus Crew Survey We want to hear from you! Please complete our 4 question survey. It’ll help us get better and deliver you the most mission-critical space intel every day. Want to hear your company in the show? You too can reach the most influential leaders and operators in the industry. Here’s our media kit. Contact us at [e-mail] to request more info. Want to join us for an interview? Please send your pitch to [e-mail] and include your name, affiliation, and topic proposal. T-Minus is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © 2023 N2K Networks, Inc. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. of you, I was concerned about my data being sold by data brokers. So I decided to try Delete.me. I have to say, Delete.me is a game changer. Within days of signing up, they started removing my personal information from hundreds of data brokers. I finally have peace of mind knowing my data privacy is protected. Delete.me's team does all the work for you with detailed reports so you know exactly what's been done. Take control of your data and keep your private life Thank you. JoinDeleteMe.com slash N2K and use promo code N2K at checkout. The only way to get 20% off is to go to JoinDeleteMe.com slash N2K and enter code N2K at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com slash N2K, code N2K. I'm Maria Varmazes, host of the T-Minus Space Daily Podcast,

and you're listening to T-Minus Overview. T-Minus, 20 seconds to LOS. In this program, we'll feature some of the conversations from our daily podcast with the people who are forging the path in the new space era. From industry leaders, technology experts and pioneers to educators, policymakers, research organizations and more. In many cultures, 2024 is the year of the dragon. And to us, it also seems to be the year of the moon. Over the last 12 months, there have been incredible breakthroughs in lunar exploration. In fact, just this January, the slim lunar lander made Japan the fifth nation to land on the moon, after India also touched down on the moon in the

fall of 2023. The first CLPS, or Commercial Lunar Payload Services mission for NASA, successfully landed on the moon in February by intuitive machines, after the astrobotic mission failed to make it to the surface in January. And we're still expecting big things for the moon in the coming months. And in this episode, we're going to be discussing Earth's nearest natural satellite. nearest natural satellite. First, we're going to discuss what the latest research has revealed about the origins of our moon and how it relates to life here on our planet. And then we're going to discuss the commercial companies making history by landing on the moon. Many of us know that the moon pulls on our oceans, drives the tides, but did you know that it also smells like gunpowder?

And have you ever thought about how essential the moon has been in the development of science and religion? Well, Rebecca Boyle has. I'm a science journalist and author of a new book called Our Moon. How Earth's celestial companion transformed the planet, guided evolution, and made us who we are. I interviewed Rebecca recently about her research and wanted to get her thoughts on the future of missions to explore the lunar surface. The origin of the moon is surprisingly still not totally understood. So we have a few good theories, mostly developed after Apollo, that sometime when Earth was pretty new, something the size of Mars now smashed into early Earth and both planets were totally

destroyed. And somehow after this happened, wecoalesced into the moon and the Earth system that we have today. And that's kind of been the broad outlines of the story that we've told since Apollo. So about 50 years now, but it's not quite that simple. initially made us think that the moon was the remains of this impactor. It was like the leftover piece. And then more recently, people have reexamined moon rocks with better technology and updated instruments and come to believe that the moon is totally indistinguishable from Earth on a chemical basis. And so that says that they must have formed from the same material at the same time, which would be very strange.

That would take very special. Like that would take very special circumstances for that to happen. So now we think that this collision was probably so extreme and so violent and so unique in the known universe that both planets were totally mixed and all their contents were sort of remade and the moon and the earth were born from the same material after they both were destroyed. So I'm just two giant debris clouds just coalescing and just happened to, I mean, wow. Yeah, so yeah, the most recent theories

are that it sort of formed one massive debris cloud and somehow in this cloud, earth and the moon sort of reformed. But we're so completely mixed that they're indistinguishable from each other anymore. And so the moon really is a part of Earth. Wow. On its own, if we weren't having this conversation,

just that phrase is very profound. Aside from the cool factor and because we're curious human beings, why do we want to study this? Like, what do we learn by learning more about the moon aside from like, it's there, we want to know more about it? Partly, I mean, we just want to know why it's here and why it's so large relative to Earth. I mean, it's a really unique thing. There's nothing else like this anywhere that we've ever found.

And that might be really important in terms of the development of life on this planet and how it's lasted for so long. We don't know, but it's worth asking. And also because the moon sort of serves as a time capsule for early earth because earth recycles itself. It consumes its crust and remakes itself anew in these long-term geologic and tectonic cycles. But the moon does not. And so we can look to the moon to find out what might have happened on early earth when it was being hit by asteroids after it formed, what the sun might have been like when the sun was younger and how active it was or wasn't and what sort of cosmic rays were hitting this inner solar system at the time and solar rays so we would learn a lot about the conditions on earth long

ago that we can't study directly on earth because earth has erased that past and so and that's a that's a good reason to go back just to like learn the early history of the solar system but then i think it's also just a more fundamental question, like looking at the moon and how it was made and how it came to be around this planet, how this planet came to be, what the moon still does to Earth, how they affect each other,

how they interact with each other today. All of these questions we can get better answers to by being on the moon and going back to get new samples. That's amazing. You mentioned the moon's going back to get new samples. That's amazing. You mentioned the moon's possible influence on life on Earth. Can you tell me more about that? That's fascinating. Yeah, so this was surprising to me when I wrote this book.

I mean, I kind of knew intuitively, I think most people have a sense that the moon plays a role in the tide. I mean, that's kind of the way that we think about the moon influencing Earth is through the tide. And the tide itself is so much more complicated than I ever imagined. Like, basically, it's all lies, what you've been told. The tide is not, it's not just like, oh, you have to move your beach towel because now the tide's coming in. You know, like, that's what I thought it was like.

It was like, oh, the water goes up, the water goes down, you know. And it's so much more profound than that. It's so much more fundamental than that. I mean, the entire planet is sloshing around every day, twice a day and bulging and stretching and, you know, contorting almost in response to the moon's tug and vice versa. And just once I kind of realized that it was like, well, what was it doing earlier on, you know, when it was closer and when it was a stronger gravitational pull, when it was nearby after it formed? And a few scientists also asked this question in the last few years. And I found this really interesting line of research that suggests that when the moon was first formed,

it was much closer. And so the day was a lot shorter. Earth was spinning a lot faster. There are all these different effects on the tide and on just Earth's systems because of the moon's proximity. And it would have created really powerful tides, especially in the early history of Earth. originated in the oceans, which most people think it did, either in the warm little pools, which is what Darwin called them, tidal pools at the water's edge, or more commonly of late, people have seemed to think that it was more like in the mid-ocean ridges, in the bottom of the ocean where the earth's mantle is leaking into the ocean. And there's this interesting exchange of minerals and water and heat that may have been where life first sparked into being.

But either way, the moon played a huge role in the movement and transport of these life forms early on. Either it was bringing in water and then making the water recede. So you'd have this cycle of hydration and dehydration and tidal pools, which can create more complex amino acid chains, which can lead to the building of proteins, which are the building blocks of life. Or even if it wasn't there, it was in the bottom of the ocean, the moon is what would have dredged these things up from the seafloor and maybe expose them to the sun for the first time, where they could learn to photosynthesize. And I don't think the moon's role in that has ever really been fully understood or, I mean or definitely not appreciated in my view.

And yeah, I think it really is important to consider when we think about looking for life on other planets or even other moons of the solar system, that this gravitational influence of our moon really plays a huge role in just the fundamental processes of life from the very beginning. You blew my mind a little bit. I was thinking about the admittedly cartoony model that many of us have from science classes of the static water at the shore, right? And you see the creature coming out of the water and maybe it's more something was yanked out of the water, dredged up. Well, yeah. So this is much later after life has evolved and become more complex in the oceans. Again, like looking at where the moon was, you know, 350-ish million years ago. This is in the Devonian period.

I found this line of research because I found a really cool study looking at coral growth rings, which are like tree rings. You can learn a lot about the oceans and the environment in the oceans by looking at these coral growth rings. And we found out that back then, 400 million years ago, the Earth spun every 20 hours. So a day was 20 hours long because the moon was closer. And so another physicist also looked at this problem

and figured out that 350 million years ago, so a little after the Silurian corals, the moon was still really close. Earth spun a lot faster. The tide was really powerful. And it turns out that at this time, this is when tetrapods are first emerging onto land. And the theory is that the moon is what put them there. There was this really high tide cycle at the time. At this time, Pangea is starting to form. So this is the famous supercontinent that gives rise to the dinosaurs

and kind of the most iconic landmass in Earth history. And it's beginning to close up at the time. So oceans are closing and ocean basins are getting shallow and long and narrow. And so the tides are really extreme. And in these land masses where this is happening, we find the first fossil evidence of tetrapods, of trackways even, of vertebrates coming onto land.

And the theory is that the moon sort of stranded them. I mean, if you're a fish and you're in shallow water and the tide is rushing out like feet per minute, like it's 80 feet between high and low tide, you know, every four or five hours. And so you better either get out of there or learn how to breathe the air and move yourself across the sand instead of through the water. And that's what happened. And I think, again, like the moon's role in this has not really been understood until really recently. I mean, the paper that sort of shows this connection that's in the book was published in 2020.

So this is like really contemporary research. Yeah, which I think is crazy because it's so intuitive. But, you know, it hasn't really been shown in the paleontological record until really recently. Yeah, I mean, what you're describing is almost like the ocean is a washing machine, just sort of churning stuff out and shipwrecking life. And it's got to figure its way out. Yeah. And if we didn't have the moon mixing the oceans, like, you know, stirring a pot of soup,

all of this stuff would sink to the seafloor and never be used and never generate this chain of marine life that powers the oceans and the currents and the atmosphere. Like all of these processes on this planet derived from the presence of life, especially in the oceans. Phytoplankton and algae and other species that generate our atmosphere, you know. And the moon is a huge reason why that happened. And it still is. I mean, more than half of the energy from ocean mixing comes from the moon's tide.

And so we owe it a lot. I just, I think it was even in Carl Sagan's Cosmos. He asked the question. I could be making this up, but I'm pretty sure he was saying, why did life emerge from the oceans? And it might be maybe they didn't intend to. It just kind of splashed out there. That's really an incredible thought.

Wow. So we've been talking a lot about the history of the moon. The moon's moving further away from us slowly. I mean, does your book cover anything about the potential future for the moon and its relationship to the Earth? so it's not very much over the course of human lifespans or human time scales I will notice it but in tens of millions of years it will be far enough away that it will no longer totally eclipse the sun we'll only ever have

these annular ring of fire eclipses in the future but that's far far into the future probably long after humans are uploaded into AI or just gone entirely. So it's not going to be our problem. But yeah, the moon is, it is leaving and that will play a huge role in a lot of things on this planet. I mean, from the tide to the overall climate of earth. I mean, the moon is one of the sort of stabilizing influences over our climate over millennia, because it keeps the axis of Earth relatively stable.

And if we didn't have the moon here with its gravity sort of guiding us, the planet could tip like 40 degrees. Some people think it could be even like 90 degrees. Like you'd have these really extreme wobbles of our axis, the precession of the equinoxes. And this happens on Mars. It happens on, I mean, Venus is almost pointed straight up. these really extreme wobbles of our axis, the precession of the equinoxes. And this happens on Mars. It happens on, I mean, Venus is almost pointed straight up.

You know, we know other planets have this sort of axial obliquity. And Earth would be more extreme if we didn't have this modulating influence of the moon. And imagine what that would do to the climate. You know, if Earth is pointed at 45 degrees or something, like the poles are pointed directly at the sun or directly opposite the sun during the equinoxes. And so the entire northern polar ice caps would probably melt or sublime and you'd have all this injection of carbon dioxide

and methane into the atmosphere. It would cause huge shifts in our climate in ways that I don't think we really fully understand. So again, like we should be grateful the moon is here. So that does not happen. So now we know a little more about the origins of the moon and why we should be exploring it. And on February 22nd, 2024, it. And on February 22nd, 2024, Intuitive Machines' IM-1 Odysseus Nova Sea Lander mission landed on the south pole of the moon. It was the first successful soft landing by a commercial space company on the moon, and it was part of the NASA Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, also known as CLPS. One of the payloads on board the Odysseus lunar

lander was Lone Star Data Holdings' independence demonstration. From the surface of the moon, Lone Star successfully completed the first ever data center test. I spoke to Lone Star's CEO and co-founder, Chris Stott, about the journey from idea to reality. My name is Chris Stott, founder and CEO of Lone Star Data Holdings. Chris, I greatly appreciate your time today. I have to say congratulations on a successful test. I mean, that has got to feel amazing. No, it does. Thank you.

And what a great team effort from all of our team at Lone Star and our lunar access provider at Intuitive Machines and SpaceX on the launch. I mean, everything came together wonderfully. Thank you. In cislunar space and from the surface of the moon. Data centers on the moon just went from science fiction to science fact. I've been reading a lot about your company. I'm super keen, but I'd love to hear it from you, if you don't mind. No, absolutely. We know lunar data centers or data centers on the moon sounds

crazy. Sounds lunatic, right? Every pun intended. But this is customer driven. This isn't technology push, it's demand pull. We're just responding to a group of customers who amazingly came to us and said, we need your help. We're in severe pain. We need somewhere to keep our data that is safe, secure, accessible, and that works under data sovereignty laws. And so we did. We took a long hard look. We looked underwater and mountains and deserts, jungles, and anywhere on the earth that we looked, it has network intrusion issues. That's people tapping cable fiber and putting bad things in and out of wireless of things. And it's all the way through to then nation state attacks, attacks on immutable data, ransomware, human error, then throw in climate and climate change and throw in storms and more. Here we are on earth when every day, the human race, all 8 billion plus of us, we create 2.5 quintillion

bytes of new information every day. Another way of looking at that, that's at 1 million MacBook Pros every 24 hours. And that clock goes to one second past midnight, and it's opened up the boxes of another million MacBook Pros. And this is doubling every two years. So we created it down here, and we thought, okay, where should we keep it that's nice and safe, secure, accessible, and works under data sovereignty? That's what took us to the moon. Not a small challenge to take on. I mean, it's just the pitch alone is so great, but also it's like you did it. So that's just, it's amazing to be talking to you right now after this success.

I actually kind of want to go back to that a little bit. Can you tell me a little bit about the experience? I kind of want you to relish the memory a little bit. It was fantastic. We sat there, we were watching, we were tied in to watch with Intuitive Machines. And ironically, we were watching Intuitive Machines. So we were not watching the news feeds, right? We're in mission control, we've got headsets on,

we're watching everything. And so we missed all of the speculation that was going on in the media, right? And so we were just like watching our friends and colleagues at Intuitive Machines, who were amazing, by the way, incredible group of people. And that was their super strength, wasn't it?

That was the absolute super strength, their superpower was mission operations. And so they pulled it off too, amazingly, right? And they really came together and did that in incredibly difficult circumstances and they made it look easy. The first ever soft landing on the moon by a private company on their first attempt, right? I mean, every superpower in history failed, including ours on their first

attempts. From us in the United States to the Soviet Union, to the Chinese, Indians, everyone failed. Not intuitive machines, not entrepreneurs. Fantastic stuff. So then we were watching this whole thing. We're like, oh my gosh, oh my gosh, oh my gosh. And then we were tracking the different ground stations around the world, seeing what was going on, looking at, I mean, just watching the whole thing. And then just that moment of, and if you watch the eyes of the people in the room at intuitive machines, you could see it on their faces, calm professionalism. And that's what you want. All right? And if they'd have looked panicked,

we'd have panicked, but they'd never looked panicked, not once. And they were really good. Tim Crane led that team. Amazing team of people. Michael Aliki and Colonel Fisher and then Steve Altomus was in the room. It was all, woof.

Daniel Springer and the team. That was fantastic. I'm going on and on. So I was sitting there with James Burns Montante, our chief engineer, and Will Hawkins, our chief engineer, and Will Hawkins, our chief data officer and chief information security officer.

We were both glued to our big projectors and mission control watching everything. It was a moment. And then, because the week before, we'd had our moment where we tested everything live in cislunar space on the roots of the moon, right? And then the week later, a couple of days later, the following Thursday, we got the word through that our test had been conducted successfully as well from the surface of the moon. And then a week later, a couple of days later, the following Thursday, we got the word

through that our test had been conducted successfully as well from the surface of the moon. In the last few hours that the lander was getting sunlight and intuitive machines were able to pull that off for us. And that was fantastic. I can absolutely believe it. It's truly amazing. And hearing about it second, third hand here, I was just like, that is just so cool. The vision that your company has for the long-term future is something I'm super curious about because the, I mean, to me, it's like the ultimate air gap is to put something on. Yeah. Vacuum gap. Exactly. Mark says, yes. Oh, that's awesome. I, it makes a lot of sense to me. I, I mean, we're not just doing, I mean, it is very cool. We're not just doing this because we can, there are a lot of

really interesting potential use cases. Can you walk me through some of those? Yeah. I mean, we're not just doing, I mean, it is very cool. We're not just doing this because we can. There are a lot of really interesting potential use cases. Can you walk me through some of those? Yeah, I mean, well, think of it this way. I mean, we're a vault tool using apes, and we're taking that next step forward, right? Small steps and giant leaps. I mean, we talk about a data loss so bad that happened 2,000 years ago, right?

It's still taught in our schools. We still feel the shock of the loss of the Library of Alexandria. I mean, burnt down to the ground, don't forget, by Julius Caesar's troops in the middle of the Roman Civil War, right? On purpose. And so you look at something like this and imagine if that happened today, where would we be? Hey, you and I wouldn't be able to talk. There'd be no power, there'd be no power stations, there'd be no internet, there'd be no communications, there'd be no nothing. So where would we be? Hey, you and I wouldn't be able to talk. There'd be no power. There'd be no power stations. There'd be no internet. There'd be no communications. There'd be no nothing.

So where would we be? And we've come so close so many times to that actually happening. And you're in cybersecurity. You know how close we've come a couple of times. Our customers first came to us in April 2018 after NotPetya had gotten loose in 2017. Right? That was the first ever weapon of mass destruction cyber weapon

that the Russians unleashed and it got loose into networks around the world. Maersk, FedEx, lots of articles and books, that Sandworm written about that by Andy and then Nicole's book, This Is How They Tell Me The World Ends. Fascinating, right? And that's why those customers came to us.

They said, oh my gosh, what are we supposed to do? Where do we keep this? How do we take a proactive step forward and make sure this actually works? And that's our goal is twofold. Number one, that people look out at night and they see the moon and they go, oh my gosh, our data is safe. The moon is such a perfect place, Maria, that if it wasn't there, we'd have to build it for data storage, right? It's incredible. The free cooling, it's so environmentally compliant,

the solar power, the legal regime, which enables all of this to happen. And that's a huge thing. All the way through to what we really want to do. And this vision that we see, the second part of that is we want the moon to be global backup, global refresh, global restore, right? And why not? It's there.

It's Earth's largest satellite. Let's put it to use. And I know that there's more that's coming. I mean, you all are busy. You must be in the middle of a lot of work for the next IAM mission. Oh, yeah. We're just waiting on the timing on the next mission. Our payload is built.

So this first one was our independence payload, where we transmitted the Declaration of Independence and pulled back, you know, refresh, restore, pulled back the Constitution and the Bill of Rights as the first ever documents in human history transmitted off planet for disaster recovery storage, right? Not just in flight to the moon, but as the first ever documents in human history transmitted off planet for disaster recovery storage, right? Not just in flight to the moon, but on the moon. And well, thank you, because a lot of people said, why are you doing that? And I'm like, you're kidding me.

I'm an American citizen. I would say we're American. That's why. Shine a light in the darkness. The world's not exactly in a great place right now. Let's remind everybody what free men and women can do, what American entrepreneurs can do, right? I mean, let's just get out there and just remind everyone, you know, kind of why we have these republics and democracies around the world, just a little bit. And then our next one is our freedom mission. And that is eight terabytes of storage. That's a PolarFi chip built for us by a company called SkyCorp. And that has been fully tested. Thermal vac, EMI testing,

vibration testing. It is literally sitting on a shelf at Intuitive Machines in Houston waiting to be integrated onto their second lunar mission.

Both of these missions were sold out, by the way, with customers. I believe it. I believe it. Yeah, I mean, I'm so eagerly looking forward to seeing what happens. I mean, when a physical data center on the moon is, I mean, that's just, again, like it makes my geek side go, wow, that's just, it blows my mind.

It's fascinating, isn't it? People think, oh, because it's nothing like a terrestrial data center. It'll be equivalent in its capabilities. But of course, for the last 60 years, we've been building and putting things in space that don't need people to go fix them. And everything from helicopters on Mars, right, running Snapdragon chips and Ubuntu and Phison SSDs, all the way through to what we do with geostationary satellites that operate in a really awful radiation belt up in the Van Allens at geostationary orbit. And so, yeah, these are super efficient, no moving parts. I mean, our next payload runs at peak power, all of eight watts.

Right? With space, we're really good at that. We have to be. And so we're bringing the best of space and the best of Silicon Valley to actually tackle this huge problem that humanity has and how do we know it's a problem because they're telling us the customers are going please help help help how soon can you get this done help and so yeah so and but doing it under sovereignty laws which is tremendous which is why the moon works i mean

under the 1967 outer space treaty the moon is not sovereign. But when you land something, as we just did, that lander and its activities are under American jurisdiction, American regulation, and American supervision under the 1967 treaty. The state of Florida has been a tremendous customer. And think of that, one of the fastest growing states in our great union, And think of that, one of the fastest growing states in our great union, in our great republic, taking the very avant-garde step, having the panache to go out and say, okay, we're going to try this, we're going to do this. Our big data centers are in Miami, our backups are in Winter Park, and we've got a huge amount of data in the state that makes the state run from city to county to our state level.

And for them to say, right, we need to do something. We need to be forward looking. We need to be the first state in the union to do this. And they did it. And they were our first customer. And fantastic group of people to work with, two up in Tallahassee and the guys at Space Florida who made that happen. Wow. But imagine that. Sometimes government does work. A huge, huge thank you to our guests today, Rebecca Boyle and Chris Stott. If you're interested in hearing more about the space industry, join me every day for T-Minus Space Daily. It's available on all major podcast platforms.

And you can find out more at space.n2k.com. We'd love to know what you think of the show. You can email us at space at n2k.com. Your feedback ensures that we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in this rapidly changing space industry. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth, mixing by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music and sound design by Elliot Peltzman. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. Our executive producer is Jen Iben. Our VP is Brandon Karp. And I'm Maria Varmozes. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. We'll see you next time.

T-Minus. Thank you.