Nothing like a deadline to motivate, and timelines in the future are closer than they appear. 2025 is awfully close now, and when calendars change over, we will be officially five years to go for the ISS deorbit. That's pretty darn soon when we're talking space timelines. Full speed ahead on commercial space stations in the meantime, there really isn't much time to lose. Today is December 18th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmasus, and this is T-minus. Axiom revises its space station schedule. The new Telsat taps Airbus for new one-web satellites. SES launches two new O3V M-Power satellites. And T-minus producer Alice Garouth will be speaking to Ryan Brown, Executive Director of Spacecom, and they'll be sharing what's to come at that conference. By the way, we here at T-minus will be at Space Week in Florida late January, so see you there! Happy Wednesday, everybody! Let's get into it! Yesterday, our top story was about Voyager Space's Star Lab hitting some key milestones in support of NASA's post-ISS plans in low-Earth orbit. And today, Axiom Space is announcing changes to its Axiom Station module sequence, in alignment with those NASA goals. This change will allow Axiom Station to operate independently of the ISS by 2028, which is two years earlier than planned. The original plan was for the Axiom Habitat 1 to go to the ISS first before the Power and Thermal Module attached. Now the Power and Thermal Module will go first, with the Habitat next, and other modules to follow. This revised plan will also make space for the deorbit vehicle on the ISS. This approach enables the station to transition to a free flying platform after the Power and Thermal Module, or AXPPTM, is operational, which will ensure uninterrupted human presence and advanced commercial space goals. The AXPPTM is currently being constructed by Telus-Alenia Space in Italy, with final integration planned in Houston by 2025. Staying in Europe, though, for a bit on these next few stories, UTelsat has selected Airbus Defense and Space to build the extension of its one-web, low-Earth orbit constellation. Airbus will build the first batches of the extension, totaling 100 satellites, with delivery targeting the end of 2026. The new satellites will have technology upgrades, notably 5G on-ground integration. They will be technologically compatible with Europe's IRIS-squared constellation, which we talked about earlier this week on the show, by the way, heaving the way for its entry into operational service in 2030. SES successfully launched its latest pair of O3B M-Power satellites on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Kennedy Space Center last night. Both satellites will join the first 6 O3B M-Power spacecraft already in operation at medium-Earth orbit, adding incremental capacity to the initial O3B M-Power constellation. The 5 remaining O3B M-Power satellites for that constellation are currently being manufactured and are scheduled for launch over the next 18 months. Earth Observation Company ICE-I has closed a $65 million extension to an existing growth funding round. The financing consists of a mix of debt and equity instruments, and will increase investment in further developing ICE-I's leading SAR satellite constellation, its intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance platform, and related systems. The extension brings the total amount raised in 2024 to $158 million. In total, ICE-I has raised over $500 million to date. CITUS Space has raised $14 million through shares of its common stock. CITUS has entered into definitive securities purchase agreements with accredited and institutional investors, for the issuance and sale of units consisting of shares of Class A common stock, together with warrants at a price of $2.07 per unit. The company attends to use the proceeds from the offering for working capital and general corporate purposes. Japan's commercial space sector experienced a setback earlier today after Space One failed to successfully launch. Tokyo-based startup Space One was aiming to become the first private Japanese company to place a satellite into orbit. Space One failed for a second time after the 18-meter 23-ton solid fuel Kyros #2 rocket experienced a malfunction during the ascent. The launch was automatically terminated three minutes and seven seconds after liftoff during the combustion of the second stage rocket. Space One president Masakazu Toyoda apologized for failing to meet the expectations of those who supported the launch, stating, "We will quickly investigate the cause of this outcome and clarify measures to prevent a recurrence." Toyoda also added that Space One does not consider this incident a failure. He told a news conference that the data and experience gained from this event are extremely valuable. Space One is planning on a third launch attempt in the near future. Fiasat has been awarded a new contract by the U.S. Defense Innovation Unit to deliver networking capability in support of the Replicator Initiative. The contract for the DIU Opportunistic Resilient and Innovative Expeditionary Network Topology project, which is also known by the acronym "Orient," covers resilient command and control connectivity across unmanned systems. Fiasat will provide multi-domain, uncrewed, secure, integrated communications architecture, which is also known as the acronym "Music." Now, Music includes software-defined networking to enable the seamless and resilient connectivity of autonomous systems using multi-transport pathways. Momentus has signed a contract with SpaceX to join an upcoming transporter rideshare mission launching as soon as early 2026. The company says it plans to use this port for the launch of its Orbital Service vehicle to transport a mix of payloads from the U.S. Department of Defense and commercial customers to low-Earth orbit. [Music] And that is it for today's Intel Briefing. Thank you for listening. As always, links to further reading on all the stories mentioned are included in our show notes, along with information on the ISS National Lab-sponsored experiments due to return on the next cargo resupply mission, and a story from the New York Times on Elon Musk and SpaceX facing federal reviews. Hey, T-Minus Crew, if you find this podcast useful, please do us a favor and share a five-star rating and a short review in your favorite podcast app. That'll help other space professionals like you to find the show and join the T-Minus Crew. Thank you so much, everybody. We really appreciate it. [Music] T-Minus producer, Alice Carruth, spoke to the executive director of SpaceCom earlier this week, but Florida's Space Week, which is January 27th through 30th, 2025. And yeah, as we mentioned at the top of the show, T-Minus will be participating in the events that week, and we'll be recording from a booth on the convention floor. So let us know if you're going to be joining us and definitely come by and say hi. My name is Ryan Brown. I'm the executive director of SpaceCom, the Space Building Conference and overall commercial space week. The Global Spaceborne Alliance is on January 27th, 2025. The Space Building Conference is January 28th, 2025, and SpaceCom is January 29th to 30th, 2025. I've been involved with the SpaceCom conference since it was founded 10 years ago in the city of Houston. It took over as an executive director in 2022 when we brought the event to Orlando, and I've been trying to grow this ever since. So tell us a little bit about SpaceCom. You sort of summed it up as three different events all under one week, but what is it we can expect for 2025? We anticipate this event to be our largest event to date. The Global Spaceborne Alliance's Spaceport Summit is on pace to double again from last year and it doubled last year from the year before, so that event continues to grow and has an incredible, it's incredibly important to that particular segment of the industry. The Space Building Conference is locked and loaded with speakers ready to tackle some of the toughest questions and challenges facing space logistics in terms of our national security missions. And then SpaceCounter will once again be bringing together industry, civil space, DOD space, international ally partners and more, and continuing to push the commercial space industry towards an integrated future. So all together, those three events, in a commercial space, we bring together an audience in Orlando that you really don't see anywhere else. So it's a very unique opportunity for all elements of DOD space, commercial space, civil space to get together and, you know, like I said, have the tough conversations about how are we actually going to move forward? How are we actually pushing towards a trillion dollar economy that everybody keeps talking about? We want to be the place where those conversations happen and we leave with action items and everybody's able to go and do and come back the next year and talk about the progress that's been made. And then additionally, because of the enthusiasm behind the event, we are adding several new engagements and co-located events this year to commercial space week. There's too many to list here and in the short time that we have. So for more information on that, visit www.spacecomexpo.com to see a full list of everything that's going on. But we have women in defense events, we've got war gaming and lunar scenarios, we've got spaceworks, things happening on space, Florida government, I mean, there's all kinds of co-located things happening. It really is a very, very busy week and hopefully a lot of productivity coming out of everything that's coming together in one place at one time there. Yeah, I've been very lucky to have come to Spacecom for several years, including 2022 when you first came out to Florida. And I do see it's a huge growth that we're seeing coming up. Who are some of your keynotes that you're using in this year? Because I'm sure there's some big names out there that people will be interested in coming to listen to. Yeah, we're very excited about our keynote lineup this year. And we still have six weeks to go, so we're still working on bringing more in. But the folks that we've had that agreed to come speak to our audience, I think are going to be informational and inspirational and we can't wait to see them. So we kick off the first morning of Spacecom there with Jim Free, the associate administrator for NASA will have a digital talk for us and then immediately followed by AC Terania, the chief technologist in NASA, talking about the future plans for research and development that NASA is going to tackle here coming up in the near future. And I'm sure there will be some interesting outlooks and things to be said there with NASA's leadership change coming up here. So everybody be looking forward to hearing from the seeing leadership from NASA there. We've got Kelly Kiedes-Oggborn, the vice president of Space Commerce and Entrepreneurship from the Space Foundation is going to give us her perspective on the commercial space economy based on the space report that the Space Foundation produces. So I'm sure all of you get heard here some of the information and data that the Space Foundation is putting out and Kelly's unique spin on everything that she does is going to be entertaining, I'm sure. And then we're very excited to bring Tom Weiss, the CEO of Sierra Space and to talk about his vision for the future of integrated on-orbit logistics with everything that they're working on and their own integrated technologies, how they're going to start to work with the DOD in civil space and really become a major, major player in the future of, like I said, on-orbit logistics. Day two, we've got an awesome NASA panel and we've got center directors from Stennis, Johnson Space Center, Kennedy Space Center, Marshall Space Flight Center. We've got executive officers from NASA Space Sustainability, the deputy associate administrator for integration. So this is going to be an extremely senior level panel from NASA talking about the top or the title of their topic is doing what we've never done to do what we've never done. So again, I think NASA is really pushing hard into the future and looking at the future of space operations for themselves. And so we should hear from them on that panel. And then lastly, Dr. Sion Proctor will be coming in following that panel to share her extremely inspirational story of how she got into space, tell a little bit about herself and then also leave the audience and everything she does as a National Space Council member globally to talk to our audience about everybody working towards a global diverse and integrated future. And I think everybody's going to leave that room after hearing her. She's a great speaker, just feeling really pumped up and inspired to go. So you've mentioned a few times the audience of who's going to be there. Who is it you think would benefit most from coming to Space Week in Florida? And what is it that you think that they will take away from coming to the Space Com Conference? So yeah, like I said earlier, there's very, very few places globally in terms of an event where you get this many people from this many different facets of the commercial space industry to come together in one place at one time. And that's the uniqueness of the audience. There's a lot of events out there right now. Space is a hot topic for sure. But a lot of them are focused on particular elements, one thing or another. And having all three events located together in one place at one time, bringing it together, UD space, civil space, commercial space, international allied partners. We've got large space companies, small startup companies. We have venture capital coming to talk and check out the technology that's on the floor. It's going to be our largest exhibit hall ever this year with over 200 exhibitors. So the benefit of that is you're able to knock out so much and hear so many different perspectives meet with so many different people in just one week. I'm sure you're going to leave feeling like, man, I don't feel like I got anything done. I have so many more people here that I wish I could talk to and I just didn't have time. So that's the beauty of this and then the ability to just be face to face with these folks and have the real conversations and shake hands and experience emotion and frustration and excitement and pride is all things that happen at Commercial Space Week. And so if any of that is valuable to you, getting a chance to meet senior leaders from NASA or the Space Force, program executive officers from NASA or the Space Force, prime contractors from the commercial industry, everybody is there. So there's really no other place like it. And so we hear stories all the time after the show. We're talking to folks and they're like, man, I met somebody there that I didn't expect to see and it turned into a massive deal or it turned into a new job for me or it turned into some opportunity that I didn't even expect to get out of the event. So sort of that serendipity that comes with just all the right people being in that at the same place at the same time is what we're all about. It's what the event is all about and what we hope to see this coming January. Absolutely. And T-minus is really excited to come. We're going to actually have a space on the floor to do our podcast. So we're hoping to get to speak to a lot of those people that are going to be there in the audience. If people are still interested in coming to the conference, how can they find tickets and what are the details that they need to know? Yes. We have lots of ways to register. We have three different websites for all three shows. There's a giant registration button on each website. The easiest one to get to is www.spacecomxpo.com. Click on that register button and you'll be able to register. You can register for all three events. You can register each individual event, whatever fits your particular level of expertise and budget approval you're able to sign up for. We love to see you come for all four days. Absolutely. You can register on-site. If you get up that morning and feel like you need to be there driving over and we can take you on-site. So, yeah, we'd love to see everybody out there. Keep an eye out for commercial opportunities to help you save a little bit of money along the way here. We have a queue coming up over the holidays and end of the new year. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Calling all American educators and particularly those who know a great educator. Crayola, yes, the crayons guys, are partnering with Blue Origins Club for the Future and Kennedy Space Center to offer educators a once in a lifetime opportunity. They're collaborating on Creativity Launches the Future, which is a national initiative for parents and community members to nominate exceptional educators for a chance to win a VIP trip to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex. The experience is designed to grow educators' knowledge of space and encourage them to inspire students about the benefits and possibilities of space. Twelve educators will be randomly selected from the nominees and announced as part of Crayola's Creativity Week in early 2025. The winners will tour Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex and Blue Origins New Glenn Rocket Factory. They'll also take home space-themed lessons for their classrooms and might have the opportunity to witness a rocket launch. We know how those go, so it's a might. But if that wasn't enough, Crayola and Blue Origins Club for the Future are also offering free education resources available now online. The whole campaign aims to support and engage educators and students across the country with hands-on activities to help students envision themselves in space-related careers and learn about the amazing innovations that have come out of the space program. Honestly, we really love it when creativity and space come together like this. [Music] That's it for T-Minus for December 18th, 2024, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Our feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. N2K's strategic workforce intelligence optimizes the value of your biggest investment, your people. We make you smarter about your team while making your team smarter. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. Remixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben. Our executive editor is Brandon Karpf. Simone Petrella is our president, Peter Hilpe is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
