Stay cool (12/20/22)

Good morning. Sadly, we received some not-so-great news from one of the few robotic residents of Mars and we’re crying in the club. Read on for the news.

In today's newsletter:❄️ ISS leak🎧 Pathfinder #0028 🔁 On the move

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Trouble at the ISS

Last week, a pair of cosmonauts aboard the ISS were all suited up for a spacewalk, ready to step out of the decompressed airlock, when flight controllers noticed that the Soyuz M-22 capsule docked with the station had sprung a leak.

Over the past week, NASA and Roscosmos have been investigating the leak, which spilled coolant from the craft. The agencies postponed two spacewalks while they reviewed photos taken by the crew and gathered information using the station’s Canadarm2 robotic arm.

What went wrong? Russia said yesterday morning that a small piece of debris struck an external cooling loop on the Soyuz, creating a hole about 0.8mm in diameter. All the coolant in that loop escaped out into the void of space.

NASA and Roscosmos say that the temperature inside the capsule is still within safe levels. The ISS crew is in no danger.

The big deal: In a few months, that Soyuz capsule is expected to ferry three members of the ISS crew—NASA astronaut Frank Rubio and cosmonauts Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin—safely back to Earth.

Soyuz capsules are hardy craft with lots of redundancies built in, but the lack of coolant could still pose a problem for flight computers. If they fail, then the capsule may not be able to autonomously reenter the Earth’s atmosphere, and the astronauts on board would have to manually pilot the craft.

That’s a worst-case scenario. As a backup, Roscosmos could send up another Soyuz to autonomously dock with the station in February.

What’s next? Right now, both space agencies are gathering data and considering what a Soyuz M-22 return trip might look like. The crew’s return trip is still up in the air, but Roscosmos said that it expects to make a decision on Dec. 27.

Pathfinder #0028, with Robert Lightfoot

What’s it like running an $11B space business at a publicly traded company, and managing a team of nearly 22,000? Another question: How’d it feel when a human-rated spacecraft you built recently splashed down in the ocean after a successful 25-day trip around the Moon?

In Pathfinder #0028, you'll get the answers to those questions and more with Robert Lightfoot, head of Lockheed Martin Space and NASA's former acting administrator.

Today’s episode is brought to you by Altek Space.

Resume in brief…Robert is coming up on his one-year anniversary as executive vice president of LM Space. Before the private sector, Robert spent 29 years at NASA. He held various leadership roles, including 11th director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, and eventually rose all the way up the ranks to serve as NASA’s associate administrator.

About LM Space: As one of its parent company’s four major divisions, the business unit builds space systems for military, civil, and commercial customers, and boasts a portfolio of capabilities that range from missile warning satellites to interplanetary probes to Orion.

A sneak peek…Though Robert is from Alabama, went to Bama, and led one of NASA’s key centers in the state, somehow we didn’t cover college football at all. But we did cover:

• Orion's flight on the Artemis I mission

• Leading large organizations, first in the government and then at a Fortune 500 company

• “Protect, connect, and explore” as organizational guideposts

• Building space hardware at scale

• Fixed vs. cost-plus contracting

• Recruiting and the importance of talent

• The near-future for the space market

While Ryan was of course excited to dive right into Artemis I, we covered a lot more than just the historic space mission. Give it a listen and let us know what you think.

Where to listen

🔊 Apple 📺 YouTube 🎧 Spotify

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In Other News

• AstroAccess completed its first weightless research flight with a crew of 14 disabled crew members from Australia, Brazil, Germany, Spain, and the US.

• Starlink, now at 1M active subscribers, is pacing to eclipse Hughes ~1.2M subs and become the largest space-based consumer broadband provider (h/t Caleb Henry).

• SpaceX also recently filed an FCC application on Dec. 6 seeking authorization to equip some Starlink V2 sats with “direct-to-cellular” hardware.

• iPhone 14’s emergency SOS feature led to another rescue, this time guiding first responders to two occupants of a car that had plunged some 300 feet into a canyon in California.

• Funding for European launch startups dropped by 60% between 2021 and 2022, according to a Europe in Space tally.

• Stoke shared a slick explainer video with more details on its rocket design.

• Eight spacecraft are now in a lunar orbit (h/t Jatan Mehta).

• Due to still-high upper-level winds—and looming holiday airspace restrictions—Rocket Lab won’t attempt the Virginia is for Launch Lovers mission until the new year.

The View from Mars

We’re not crying, you’re crying…