Happy Birthday, Space Force!

[Music] Happy fifth birthday Space Force! On December 20th, 2019, Congress established the US Space Force within the Department of the Air Force, and today we're going to be discussing its first mission with K2's mega-class satellite. [Music] Today is December 20th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmazes. I'm Alice Carruth, and this is T-minus. [Music] The US Space Force awards K2 Space a contract for a new MEO mission. New Glenn runs through a wet rehearsal. SpaceX crew 10 delayed until March. And NSF will be bringing us the last Space Traffic Report of 2024, rounding up the launch news from the last seven days, and previewing what's on the schedule over the holidays. [Music] Happy Friday, everybody! With apologies to the SpaceX drone ship, there is no shortfall of Gravitas for K2 Space, as they've been awarded a $60 million stratify contract by the US Space Force for a new mission code named Gravitas. That'll take place no earlier than February 2026. The spacecraft to be launched will be K2's mega-class satellite, and the demo will test the mega-class in both lowers and medium-Earth orbits, setting the stage especially for future proliferated MEO constellations, namely in support of the resilient GPS program. And speaking of the Space Force, the military branch is on track to field its first batch of new ground-based satellite communication jammers in the coming months. The systems are designed to disrupt signals from enemy spacecraft. A spokesperson told Defense News this week that Space Operations Command just approved the remote modular terminals for initial fielding. The Space Force plans to field 11 systems as part of the first release, giving units a chance to use the system before it's accepted for operations. Social media lit up like a Christmas tree yesterday when venting was spotted coming from the New Glenn pad at Cape Canaveral. Blue Origin put its 320-foot-tall New Glenn rocket through a wet rehearsal, fueling the rocket but not launching it. The practice was set ahead of the planned hot-fire test over the holidays. There's been no official word from Blue Origin about the rehearsal, but if all went well, we could be seeing the New Glenn launch ahead of schedule, even maybe as early as December 30th. That's super exciting. NASA has announced that it's delaying the SpaceX Crew 10 launch until no earlier than March. The move will keep astronauts Butch Wilmore and Sonny Williams, who we're sure you remember, have already had their stay on the ISS extended multiple times in orbit even longer. Crew 10 is scheduled to launch at least a month later than expected because NASA and SpaceX teams say they need time to complete processing on a new Dragon spacecraft for the mission. The new spacecraft is set to arrive at the company's processing facility in Florida in early January. A three-hour tour. Reuters is reporting that SpaceX lost communications with the Polaris Dawn mission for at least one hour during their recent spaceflight. According to the report, the SpaceX facility in California suffered a power outage which caused a loss of ground control. The outage, which had not been previously reported, meant that SpaceX's mission control was briefly unable to command its Dragon spacecraft in orbit. It's unclear if the outage was reported to the FAA. The spacecraft, which carried the newly nominated NASA administrator Jared Isaacman and three other SpaceX astronauts, remained safe during the outage and reportedly maintained some communication with the ground through the company's Starlink satellite network. China launched four new satellites for the Tianchi constellation on Thursday. The satellites lifted off a top-of-sea base version of the series one rocket developed by commercial company Galactic Energy. The Tianchi constellation is China's first low-albit Internet of Things data communication network which has been widely applied in industries such as forestry, agriculture, emergency response and more. NASA's Space Technology Mission Directorate and the Department of Commerce's US Patent and Trademark Office are working together to strengthen collaboration in transferring federally developed technology into the private sector, also known as a tech transfer. The organizations are collaborating to share information and cooperate in mutual areas of interest, find ways to advance both agencies' technology transfer missions, identify barriers to technology transfer and coordinate initiatives to overcome those barriers. The partnership is aiming to drive inclusive innovation and adoption of best practices which will advance commercialization of the space agency's most cutting-edge technology. That concludes our briefing for today. Head to the selected reading section of our show notes to find links to further information on all the stories we mentioned throughout the show. Now Maria, I have a question for you. Okay. If athletes get athletes' foot, what do astronauts get? Uh... Not astrophoet. That doesn't sound right. Misaltoes. Ah! Nice, nice. It's seasonal too. I like it. Yes. A programming note, everybody. We're quickly approaching the holidays and we wanted to let you know what we have planned for the next two weeks. All of us here at NTUK, and that includes T-minus, will be taking a break from the daily program starting on December 24th and will be returning to daily Intel briefings on January 2nd. But don't fret, you'll still find programs in your podcast feed from us. We have a few radio programs and deep space episodes for you to enjoy and on December 31st, we'll be sharing our thoughts on events from 2024 and looking ahead to what's to come in 2025. Hey T-minus crew, tune in tomorrow for T-minus Deep Space. I'll show for extended interviews, special editions and deep dives with some of the most influential professionals in the space industry. Tomorrow our friends at NSF will be bringing us a special program with NASA astronaut Don Pettit on the ISS talking about his astrophotography. Check it out while you're last-minute holiday shopping, wrapping your holiday gifts, or just enjoying the calm before the storm next week. You don't want to miss it. [Music] NASASpaceFlight.com brings us the Space Traffic Report rounding up the launches from the past week. I'm Alicia Segal for NSF and this is your weekly Space Traffic Report for T-minus Space. It's once again been a very active week, so let's begin at the start with, of course, a Starlink launch. Lift-off took place on December 13th at 2155 UTC from Vandenberg, carrying 22 Starlink V2 mini satellites into low Earth orbit. This mission was supported by First Stage B-1082, which flew for a ninth time and successfully landed on the drone ship, of course I still love you. Just a few hours after that, Rocket Lab launched another haste mission from Wallops on December 14th at 1 o'clock UTC. Unfortunately, we don't have any details about the mission, and the company only released a streak shot of the launch. This, however, did mark the company's 15th launch of the year. Quite a step up from last year. From the US, we now go to China, where the country's most powerful rocket took to the skies this week. The Changjiang 5B lifted off on December 16th at 10 o'clock UTC from Launch Complex 1 at the Wenchang Space Launch Site. The rocket was carrying 10 GuoWang Internet satellites into a polar orbit. The GuoWang satellites are part of China's own national satellite Internet constellation built in response to other satellite constellations like Starlink or OneWeb. The constellation, which often goes by the nickname of "SatNet", is managed by China Satellite Network Group Company, a company created by the Chinese government in 2021 to kickstart this project. This is far from the only Internet satellite constellation coming from China, though. Shanghai Spacecom Satellite Technology is another government-backed company which has already started deploying its QianFan Satellite constellation, this one more commonly known as the G-60 constellation. Both constellations are planned to be massive, with 13,000 satellites planned for GuoWang and up to 14,000 satellites planned for QianFan. Half of those satellites need to be launched by 2032 to comply with the rules of the International Telecommunication Union, so that means China is going to need a lot of launches. In fact, one thing that surprised a lot of people was that despite using the largest rocket in China's inventory, with a capability of more than 20 tons to low Earth orbit, only 10 satellites were launched on this mission. Now, it's possible that it might have been a test run since it was the first batch of GuoWang satellites being launched, and also because this rocket was carrying a new Yongzheng upper stage to insert the satellites into their roughly 1,100 kilometer orbit. This rocket was famous in the past for leaving its large 20-ton core stage in orbit, but thanks to this new upper stage, that didn't happen this time around. The other possibility is that these are monster satellites, each one being well over a metric ton each, in which case, then we're bound to see a lot more launches like this one in the future. This week, we also had another launch from China. A ChangJung 2D rocket lifted off on December 16th at 1850 UTC from Launch Complex 9 at the Taiwan Satellite Launch Center. It was carrying four PiSat-2 satellites into a sun synchronous orbit. These satellites are synthetic aperture radar satellites in X-Band, flying in a wheel pattern formation around the Earth, which allows the satellites to perform interferometric radar observations of the ground. Coming back to the US, we had another Falcon 9 launch. Lift-off took place on December 17th at 52 minutes past midnight UTC from Space Launch Complex 40 in Florida. The rocket was carrying the GPS-3 Space Vehicle 7 satellite into a medium Earth orbit for the US Space Force. This mission was officially known prior to launch as RRT-1, which had everyone, including us, scratching their heads, trying to guess what it stood for. After the launch, the US Space Force revealed that RRT stands for Rapid Response Trailblazer. This GPS-3 satellite, the 7th in the fleet, was originally supposed to launch on ULA's Vulcan rocket, but in the middle of the summer, the Space Force decided to move it to SpaceX's Falcon 9. This move would also work as a rapid response test in which the satellite would be quickly processed for launch, going from vehicle assignment to launch within just a few months, rather than two years or more. This might be the reason behind all of the secrecy surrounding the launch prior and during the flight, from what the actual payload was, to even not covering the second stage activities, as has been done on all of the previous GPS flights on Falcon 9. The first stage for this mission, B-1085, was flying for a fourth time, and it successfully landed on SpaceX's drone ship, a shortfall of Gravitas. The faring halves for this mission were also flight-proven, having previously flown on the Europa Clipper mission, and after launch, they were scooped up from the ocean by the Intrepid Faring Recovery Vessel, Doug. This week, we also had a spacewalk from the Tiangong Space Station. The spacewalk broke the record for longest spacewalk with a total duration of 9 hours and 6 minutes from start to end. The EVA was performed by astronauts Tsai Shuja and Song Lingdong, who were assisted by the station's robotic arm. They carried out multiple tasks on the exterior of the station, including inspections of its exterior shielding and installation of debris-protective panels. This spacewalk's duration beats the previous record set during the STS-102 mission by Susan Helms and James Voss, whose EVA duration clocked in at 8 hours and 56 minutes. Coming back to the ground, we had another two more Falcon 9 launches this week. The first of these lifted off on December 17th at 1319 UTC from Vandenberg, carrying another batch of Star Shield satellites for the NRO's proliferated space architecture constellation. The first stage for this mission, B-1063, was flying for a 20-second time, and it successfully landed on SpaceX's drone ship, Of Course I Still Love You. This mission marked another record turnaround time for both the launch pad and drone ship at SpaceX's West Coast facilities, shaving 9 hours off the previous record down to about 3 days and 15 hours. Another Falcon 9 launch took place on December 17th at 2226 UTC from Launch Complex 39A in Florida. The mission was carrying the fourth pair of SES's O3-B M-Power satellites into medium-Earth orbit. These are high-throughput broadband satellites operating in medium-Earth orbit, about 8,000 kilometers over the equator. SpaceX has already launched six of these O3-B M-Power satellites between 2022 and 2023, but power issues with the early satellites prompted SES to request a change of design from Boeing, the manufacturer of these satellites. This fourth pair of satellites is the first with this new redesigned power system, which should prevent the issues encountered on the earlier satellites. Two more launches for this constellation are scheduled for the future, with three satellites scheduled for launch in mid-2025 and two in late 2026. This mission was a rare one as it was supported by a new Falcon 9 booster, B-1090. The booster performed its debut flight without a hitch and successfully landed on SpaceX's drone ship Just Read the Instructions. This week we also had a launch from Japan, the Kairos rocket by private space company Space One. Lipped-off took place on December 18th at 2 o'clock UTC from the company's launch pad at Spaceport Key in Japan. The rocket was carrying five payloads into a sun synchronous orbit. Those payloads, however, never reached orbit. The rocket's initial liftoff and ascent seemed to go well, but according to the company, the first stage lost thrust vector control about 80 seconds into flight. The vehicle then began to cartwheel in the air for another minute or two before being terminated. This was the second launch of the Kairos rocket, the first having previously launched in March. That flight also ended in failure a mere few seconds after liftoff when the flight termination system was activated by error. This now marks the first launch failure worldwide since Falcon 9's launch failure during the Starlink Group 9/3 mission back in July. Here's hoping Space One can quickly address this issue and come back to flight in 2025. And believe it or not, there were even more launches from China this week. A Series 1S took off on December 19th at 10.18 UTC from the Dongfanghang Tianjiang barge off the coast of Rijiao in China. The rocket was carrying four Tianxi Internet of Things satellites into a low Earth orbit. And in low Earth orbit, we also had another spacewalk. Yes, even those seem to be multiplying lately. This one, however, was from the Russian side of the International Space Station. The spacewalk was conducted by cosmonauts Alexei Ovchinin and Yvonne Wagner, who installed a new experiment package to monitor celestial X-ray sources and retrieved other older experiments from the exterior of the station. The cosmonauts also had another task, which was to relocate a control panel for the European robotic arm, but this wasn't completed due to time constraints. This spacewalk marked the 272nd in support of the ISS. Going into the final week of the year, we have a ton more launches, but let's be real, what else were you expecting, right? SpaceX wants to launch a total of 136 Falcon flights this year, and they've completed 129 so far, which means they're gonna try and crunch seven launches into the last 10 days of the year. The first two of these launches are coming up this Saturday, one from Florida and one from California. The one from Florida is set to launch four satellites for astronomers into a geosynchronous transfer orbit within a nearly four-hour window that opens on December 21st at 339 UTC. The one from California is set to launch SpaceX's second bandwagon mission as part of the company's small sat ride share program. That launch is set to occur on December 21st at 1134 UTC. Shortly thereafter, another Falcon 9 launch is set to take place from Florida carrying a batch of Starlink satellites into orbit. The four-hour launch window is set to open on December 23rd at 5 o'clock UTC. And on Christmas Eve, while many places on Earth will be cold and snowy, NASA's Parker Solar Probe will get the hottest and closest it's ever been to our star, the Sun. After over six years of operations near the Sun, the probe will reach its closest approach to our star on December 24th, coming just 6.16 million kilometers from it. This will be the first of three close encounters in which the spacecraft will face temperatures of nearly 1,000 degrees Celsius or 1,830 degrees Fahrenheit. While there, deep in the Sun's corona, the Parker Solar Probe will measure its atmosphere and dynamics to better understand how solar wind is produced and emitted by the Sun. Now, if that really made your temperature rise, I bet a launch from Baikonur will bring it back down because it's been pretty cold there lately. A Soyuz 2.1B rocket is set to take off from Baikonur on December 25th at 745 UTC, carrying the fifth Resource-P satellite into a Sun synchronous orbit. We'll then have another three Falcon 9 launches, the first carrying the Theraya-4 NGS satellite into Geosynchronous Transfer orbit. The one and a half hour launch window for that mission is set to open on December 27th at 5 o'clock UTC. The second will launch from Vandenberg carrying a batch of Starlink satellites. The four hour launch window is planned to open on December 29th at 135 UTC. Another four hour launch window is set to open on December 30th at 5 o'clock UTC for another Starlink launch from the Cape as well. And one of the final launches of the year could come from India with the launch of a PSLV rocket carrying the Spade X mission into low Earth orbit. The four hour launch window is set to open on December 30th at 1600 UTC. Now, there are, of course, many more things that could happen between now and the end of the year. There could even be an extra Falcon launch here and there. And there's probably other unannounced launches that might pop up unexpectedly as well. We're keeping an eye on Blue Origin's new Glenn, which is trying to get its pre-launch hot fire test done before the end of the year. And the company may try a quick turnaround from hot fire to launch attempt as well. Also in our minds is Starship, which recently got a license for its seventh launch. So, SpaceX could give us a surprise with that one as well. As always, be sure to check out nextspaceflight.com for real time updates on the launch schedule. I'm Alicia Segal for NSF, and that's your weekly Space Traffic Report. Now back to T-Minus Space. We'll be right back. Welcome back. We're often guilty, along with other news outlets, of skimming over the news of the payloads that head back and forth to the International Space Station. In our defense, there are a lot of them. In fact, the ISS National Lab supported the launch of 110 payloads across seven missions this year. And those payloads have enabled advancements in biotechnology, fundamental science, advanced materials in space manufacturing, and other areas. And we couldn't round up the year without highlighting just some of those advancements. Red Wire Corporation's biofabrication facility printed test patches of cardiac tissues that could one day be used for drug testing and tissue repair for patients on Earth. Then there was the BioCrystal Optimization Experiment to crystallize small organic molecules in microgravity, enabling pharmaceutical companies and researchers to grow small batch crystals for protein-based pharmaceuticals. And then the ISS crew enabled the manufacturing of high-value Z-Blan optical fiber in microgravity. And the student spaceflight experiments program sent its 18th mission to the orbiting lab, engaging students from 38 communities in the scientific process to spark an interest in STEM career fields. I mean, the list just keeps going, and we want to thank the work of all of the teams that make these experiments happen and ultimately are working to improve life here on the Earth. Here, here. That's it for T-Minus for December 20, 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. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com. We're privileged that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector, from the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. N2K makes it easy for companies to optimize your biggest investment, your people. We make you smarter about your teams while making your teams smarter. Learn how at N2K.com. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpey is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Formazis. Thanks for listening. Have a wonderful weekend.