Twinning (11/18/22)

Happy Friday, team. Welcome to the 398 of you who joined us in the last seven days. We're happy to have 'ya, and on an incredibly momentous week for space to boot.

For subscribers old and new, we’re running the third segment of our reader survey. Find the details below—and help us make Payload an even better experience for you.

In today's newsletter...🌎 Digital weather twins✈️ Hermeus engine test📢 Reader survey, pt. 3🗣️ Payload’s Picks

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A Digital Doppelganger for Weather

Lockheed Martin and Nvidia are joining forces to develop a global weather digital twin for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the two companies announced Thursday. The AI-driven earth observation system will help NOAA monitor and increase global weather conditions, including extreme events increasing in frequency.

Digital twin, you say?

Digital twins are virtual representations designed to accurately depict a physical object or system. The ability to run precise simulations, modeled on real-world environments, is the value driver here. Digital twin models are gaining popularity in fields ranging from product design to logistics, and applying them to planetary-scale phenomena is apparently no exception.

Why NOAA? The agency currently collects its Earth system data from a large number of disjointed sources, requiring vast amounts of work from administrators and researchers to stitch everything together and create a cohesive picture. The Lockheed-Nvidia digital twin will use satellite and ground-based sensor data to deliver a real-time, accurate, and high-res model of global weather conditions.

The first data point to come online will be sea surface temperature by September 2023. Sea surface temperature is an important indicator of ocean health, and can alter fish behavior, increase coral bleaching, and disrupt coastal weather.

More on the partnership: Lockheed Martin’s OpenRosetta3D platform will use machine learning modelsML to merge multiple data sources, while NVIDIA’s Omniverse Nucleus will convert the data to a universal simulation. The data will then travel to Lockheed’s Agatha, an Earth-centric 3D visualization platform, for NOAA to analyze.

This isn’t the first collab between the duo. Lockheed and Nvidia are already pairing these technology systems in an effort to help firefighters predict, detect, and fight wildfires.

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Hermeus Fires Up

Hermeus, a startup building a hypersonic aircraft capable of traveling five times the speed of sound, has completed a major milestone in engine testing. The company successfully demonstrated that its engine can transition from turbojet—like what’s used in passenger aircraft—to ramjet, a much more powerful engine technology.

Hermeus 101: The Atlanta startup is moving fast in every sense of the word. The founders came onto the scene in 2019 with plans for a hypersonic aircraft, won a $1.5M USAF contract a year later, and since then, have been heads-down building their technology.

Earlier this year, the company raised a $100M Series B to complete the development of this aircraft, which has its first flights slated for 2023.

Hermeus is building both military and commercial hypersonic aircraft. Its design, called Quarterhorse, would be the first reusable hypersonic aircraft.

Chimera: To reach Mach 5, the company has to design its engine to begin firing as a turbojet, then transition into a more powerful ramjet engine between Mach 2 and Mach 3.

The Chimera engine was built fast and on a budget. The company brought the engine from concept to testing in 21 months, and the whole process cost $18M.

• Using an off-the-shelf J85 turbojet engine as the foundation for Chimera contributed to the comparatively low price tag.

• About 15% of the engine is 3D printed, also helping to keep costs down.

In this engine test, the company successfully switched Chimera from turbojet to ramjet. The transition took about five seconds, as the engine redirected air around the turbojet, which shut down around Mach 3 so the ramjet could fully take over.

What’s next? The company is currently completing testing and gearing up to build its Quarterhorse aircraft ahead of planned flights next year. “We're not an airplane company till we start building airplanes,” Glenn Case, Hermeus CTO, told Defense One. “We're funded to flight—and we're gonna go fly.”

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In Other News

• LightSail 2 has reentered the atmosphere and completed its 3.5-year mission, The Planetary Society said yesterday. 🫡

• ispace is targeting no earlier than Nov. 28 to launch its Mission 1 lunar lander.

• Employees fired by SpaceX earlier this year for publicly speaking out about Elon Musk’s tweets have filed a complaint with the National Labor Relations Board.

• Two taikonauts—Chen Dong and Cai Xuzhe—conducted a spacewalk outside Tiangong yesterday.

• Meanwhile, two cosmonauts—Sergey Prokopyev and Dmitri Petelin—conducted another spacewalk outside the ISS.

• In a note to employees about layoffs, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy referred to Project Kuiper as one of the “newer initiatives that we’ve been working on for a number of years and have conviction in pursuing.”

• Boeing ($BA) recently tested an anti-jamming prototype for Space Force and DoD satellite communications systems.

• Twitter is censoring videos of rockets and space vehicles, and mislabeling them as adult content…and the company is owned by the CEO of a space company. 🤔

The View from Space

Well…this is what we imagine the view from space looks like. Snoopy is Orion’s zero-gravity indicator, currently on his way to the Moon. This photo was taken prior to launch.

Bon voyage, Snoopy! And to all the rest of you Earthlings, have a great weekend.