Take aim (7/17/23)

Good morning. 54 years ago today, the Apollo 11 crew was on its way to set foot on the lunar surface for the first time in history. Shout out to Neil, Buzz, and Mike for their instrumental role in forging humanity’s path to the cosmos.

Today’s newsletter:
🧪 Mars Sample Return blues
♻️ Kall Morris x Air Force
🗓️ The week ahead

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Senate Takes Aim at Mars

The Senate has unveiled its initial ~$25B FY24 NASA budget, roughly maintaining YoY funding levels, but coming in significantly below the White House's $27.2B ask. The budget plateau results from an eleventh-hour debt limit deal struck at the end of May that keeps non-defense spending flat YoY.

The most notable casualty is Mars Sample Return (MSR).

On the chopping block: MSR aims to collect samples from Mars and bring them back to Earth for detailed analysis. NASA’s Perseverance rover has already started the collection process, stowing samples of Martian sediment at various points on its trek across the planet’s Jezero Crater. Over the past few years, Congress has provided $1.74B to the program.

However, despite the support to date, Senate appropriators are now alarmed at NASA’s repeated delays for the retrieval mission and skyrocketing costs.

• A recent report from Ars Technica revealed that projected costs for the program have doubled from $4.4B to nearly $9B.

The Senate committee recommended allocating just $300M to MSR for FY24, significantly less than the $949M the Biden administration asked for and the $822M the program received in FY23.

In an even stronger rebuke to the program, the committee instructed NASA to detail a plan limiting the total MSR budget to under $5.3B or face cancellation. In the event of a complete MSR cut, the majority of the $300M would be rerouted to the Artemis program.

Save the Moon: Trimming the Mars Sample Return budget allows the US to protect its high-profile Artemis program, keeping it fully funded despite overall NASA budgetary pressures. Artemis has also experienced enormous cash overruns and heavy criticism from politicians, with its SLS launch vehicle topping $4B a flight.

Deterrence By Observation: A New Era of Geospatial Intelligence

During the first two weeks of the Russo-Ukrainian War, the Ukrainian government received data covering more than 15 million square miles of the conflict zone, and national intelligence agencies more than doubled their procurement of commercial electro-optical imagery.

But it wasn’t just the government who improved their understanding of what was happening on the ground – researchers, humanitarian organizations, and journalists utilized this data too – creating what has become the most documented invasion in history.

This new age of geospatial intelligence has transformed how we understand the physical world and take action.

How we arrived here, how it’s impacting our world today, and where we’re headed, is outlined in a new article in Payload, focusing specifically on the involvement of Planet Labs PBC in this journey.

Kall Morris Wins USAF Debris Removal Contract

This morning, Kall Morris Inc. ($KMI) announced that it notched an agreement with the US Air Force to explore its proposed method to dock with uncontrolled pieces of debris in orbit for removal.

TumblEye-ing: Under the contract, Kall Morris plans to test its TumblEye system for active debris removal (ADR) applications for USAF.

Removing a piece of debris from orbit that is A) not designed for retrieval and B) tumbling uncontrollably through space is technically difficult and risky.

• KMI’s TumblEye system is designed to use data collected by a camera onboard a servicing spacecraft, put it through a machine learning algorithm, and determine how the target object is spinning in each axis.

• From there, the servicer’s operator can determine the best approach for capture.

“By predicting the behavior and telemetry of in-space objects, we will enable existing docking procedures for targets like the ISS and spacecraft to be used for docking with debris,” Adam Kall, KMI cofounder and director of science, said in a statement.

The DoD angle: As Earth’s orbit becomes more congested, the DoD is considering multiple avenues to protect its space assets, and it’s exploring adding ADR technology to its toolbox. This award from USAF slots into that larger Pentagon initiative.

In Other News

• Evelyn Boyd Granville, a trailblazing mathematician who worked with NASA in the early days of the space program, died at 99.

• xAI, Elon’s new artificial intelligence company, will search for answers to some of the universe’s greatest mysteries.

• Chandrayaan-3 nailed its first orbit raise firing.

• Rocket Lab ($RKLB) delayed its “Baby Come Back” mission to today due to weather.

• Portugal approved €9.2M ($10.3M) in funding for its space agency between 2023 and 2027.

• USSF plans to choose three launch providers for future NSSL missions.

The View from Space

India’s third attempt at a lunar lander mission blasted off on Thursday and is currently en route to lunar orbit, where it’s scheduled to arrive on Aug. 5. We’re hoping the third Chandrayaan’s the charm!