<img height="1" width="1" src="https://www.facebook.com/tr?id=205228923362421&amp;ev=PageView &amp;noscript=1">
SATELLITE TECH

New Glenn scheduled for launch.

Blue Origin’s New Glenn could launch as early as January 6. Slovenia joins ESA. Russia celebrates its 2000th launch of the R-7 family of boosters, and more.

Follow

Subscribe

Summary

Blue Origin’s New Glenn is scheduled for its inaugural launch as early as 1am Monday, January 6. The European Space Agency just added a 23rd member state with Slovenia joining the alliance. Russia reached a major milestone with its 2000th launch of a rocket from the "R-7" family of boosters, and more.

Remember to leave us a 5-star rating and review in your favorite podcast app.

Be sure to follow T-Minus on LinkedIn and Instagram.

T-Minus Guest

Elysia Segal from NASASpaceflight.com brings us the Space Traffic Report.

Selected Reading

Blue Origin counts down to inaugural launch of New Glenn rocket- Fox Weather

Slovenia full member of European Space Agency

Russia just launched the 2,000th Semyorka rocket—it’s both a triumph and tragedy - Ars Technica

Eutelsat Statement on OneWeb Temporary Outage- Business Wire

Varda Space Industries on LinkedIn: Happy new year, happy new license! We are pleased to announce that Varda…

Supercharged auroras possible this weekend as colossal 'hole' in the sun spews solar wind toward Earth

T-Minus Crew Survey

We want to hear from you! Please complete our 4 question survey. It’ll help us get better and deliver you the most mission-critical space intel every day.

Want to hear your company in the show?

You too can reach the most influential leaders and operators in the industry. Here’s our media kit. Contact us at space@n2k.com to request more info.

Want to join us for an interview?

Please send your pitch to space-editor@n2k.com and include your name, affiliation, and topic proposal.

T-Minus is a production of N2K Networks, your source for strategic workforce intelligence. © N2K Networks, Inc.

Today is January 3rd, 2025. I'm Maria Varmausis and this is T-Minus. Vartis Space welcomed in the new year with a new reentry license. The Nutelsat Group says its one-web service is back online after experiencing a 48-hour outage. Russia reached a major milestone with its 2,000th launch of a rocket from the R7 family of boosters. The European Space Agency just added a 23rd member state with Slovenia joining the Alliance. Blue Origin's New Glenn is scheduled for its inaugural launch as early as 1am on Monday, January 6th. Welcome to T-Minus Space Daily. Stick around after the headlines for the nasa spaceflight.com space traffic report, bringing you an update on the launches from the last seven days, and looking ahead at what we can expect in the coming week. And we're starting off with the big news that feels like it's been a long time coming. New Glenn is ready to lift off. Blue Origin received its launch license before the festive period and then held a hot fire for its New Glenn rocket at its launch pad on Cape Canaveral. Following the hot fire on December 27th, Blue Origin's CEO Dave Limp said on X, "Well, all we have left to do is mate our encapsulated payload and then launch." There were rumors of a lift-off date as early as December 30th, but that milestone was quickly dropped. According to FAA, "Notices, Blue's 320-foot rocket is scheduled to launch as early as Monday, January 6th at 1am local time in Florida. Its back update is on January 7th. What a start to 2025 for Blue Origin. Go, New Glenn!" The European Space Agency just added a 23rd member state with Slovenia formally joining the Alliance. Slovenia has been working with ESA since 2008, when it first signed a cooperation agreement followed by a European cooperation agreement. The latter cooperation agreement was strengthened with its accession to associate membership in 2016, which it upgraded in 2020 with a new agreement for an enhanced association. Get all that? This included a provision that after its expiration in 2025, Slovenia could apply for ESA membership. Slovenia sees the membership as an opportunity for business and science and hopes it will strengthen the country's competitiveness in the global space industry. Full membership also paves the way for a Slovenian space agency to be established." On December 25th, Christmas Day, Russia reached a major milestone with its 2,000th launch of a rocket from the R7 family of boosters. The rocket design, also known as a Semyorka family of vehicles, has a long heritage, dating back to 1957. Yes indeed, they launched Sputnik with it. I guess the old saying, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it," really applies to these vehicles. The most commonly flown variant of the Semyorka rocket is the Soyuz-U, which flew 788 missions from 1973 to 2017. The Christmas Day launch saw an R7 rocket lift off, carrying a remote sensing satellite from the Baikonur Cosmodrome. UTELSAT says its one-web service is back online after experiencing a 48-hour outage. They identified the root cause as a software issue within the ground segment. The company was fully mobilized and worked with the vendor to restore full service, while maintaining a constant dialogue with affected customers. The 2024, yes, last year, leap year, seems to be the most likely cause for the outage, which started on New Year's Eve, all those darn calendars. UTELSAT operates the one-web LEO constellation, which has more than 630 satellites in orbit. UTELSAT recently placed an order with Airbus for a 100-satellite update to the constellation. And VARDASpace welcomed in the new year with a new license. The company shared on their social media account that they had received an FAA reentry license for VARDAS' third mission, which is planned for launch in March. VARDAS says this flight, like the second mission, will advance pharmaceutical research as well as fly several payloads in support of NASA and other government partners. [Music] And that concludes our intelligence briefing for today. Stick around for the Space Traffic Report from NSF. You'll find links to further reading on all the stories that I've mentioned in the selected reading section of our show notes. Hey, Team Minus Crew, tune in tomorrow for Team Minus Deep Space. It's our show for extended interviews, special editions, and deep dives, with some of the most influential professionals in the space industry. And tomorrow we have Mark Baskinger talking about the Moon Arc project. Check it out while you're taking down the festive decorations, starting your new year's resolutions, or simply recovering from all of the holiday fun. You don't want to miss it. [Music] [Music] On Friday, our partners at NSF have the Space Traffic Report for you. [Music] I'm Alicia Siegel for NSF, and this is your weekly Space Traffic Report for Team Minus Space. Starting off the last week of 2024, we had an electron rocket launching from Rocket Lab's Launch Complex in New Zealand. The rocket lifted off on December 21st at 1417 UTC, carrying another strict satellite for SynSpective into a sun-synchronous orbit. The mission, called Owl the Way Up, is the sixth out of 16 that SynSpective has booked to fly on Rocket Lab's electron rocket. SynSpective's strict satellites are synthetic aperture radar satellites designed to deliver imagery capable of detecting millimeter-level changes to the Earth's surface from space. After electron, we had a Falcon 9 launch from Launch Complex 39A in Florida. Lift-off took place on December 23rd at 535 UTC, carrying a batch of Starlink satellites into low Earth orbit. This batch consisted of eight Starlink V2 Mini and 13 Starlink Direct-to-Sell satellites. The booster for this mission, B-1080, was flying for a 14th time, and it successfully landed on SpaceX's drone ship, Just Read the Instructions. And while many were preparing for the holidays, NASA's Parker Solar Probe made its closest ever approach to the sun. On December 24th at 1153 UTC, the Parker Solar Probe spacecraft came within 6.1 million kilometers of the sun, swooping by it at about 192 kilometers per second. During that historic pass, it came closer to the sun than any other spacecraft before it, and collected large amounts of data about the sun's corona. The Parker Solar Probe arrived there after seven flybys of Venus, which effectively reduced the spacecraft's distance from the sun on each pass. That last pass, performed in November of last year, brought it to the closest that it will ever get, facing temperatures of up to 980 degrees Celsius. While in this orbit, the Parker Solar Probe will once again come close to the sun on March 22nd and on June 19th, collecting more data about our star's corona and its dynamics. These, however, will be among the last few close swings that the probe will make around the sun. The spacecraft has been operating in space for over six years, consuming its fuel to operate its attitude control system, which means that at some point, it won't be able to point itself to transmit data to Earth or keep its heat shield facing the sun for protection at close approaches. But NASA has a really interesting plan for when that time comes. Once the Parker Solar Probe is low on fuel, the agency plans to turn it around, exposing its instruments to the full blast of the sun, and conduct one last data gathering before it melts away and vaporizes around the sun. Coming back down to Earth, we had a milestone lunch out of Kazakhstan. Lift off of the Soyuz 2.1B happened on December 25th at 745 UTC from Site-31-6 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The rocket was carrying the "Resource P" number 5 spacecraft into a sun-synchronous orbit. The "Resource P" satellites are a constellation of Russian Earth observation satellites capable of high-resolution imagery in multiple wavelengths. This was the fifth of those after the first three launched between 2013 and 2016 malfunctioned in orbit. But this launch wasn't even notable for the payload itself, rather because of the rocket. This was the 2,000th launch of any rocket derived from the R-7 intercontinental ballistic missile that the Soviet Union developed in the 1950s. Members of this family were famously named after the first payload that they launched, so they have names like Sputnik, Vostok, Voskhod, Molnia, Luna, and of course the most famous of them, the Soyuz rocket. There were other lesser-known ones as well, but if we were to add up all of the launches that they've made, this one was the 2,000th launch. In fact, Roscosmos added a sticker to the rocket to make note of this, and even made infographics on the launches that make up that 2,000 number. It'll be interesting to see whether any other rocket family will ever come close to this number in the near future. Up next, we go to China, where unfortunately we had another launch failure, this time with a Connecticut-1 rocket. LFT took place on December 27 at 103 UTC from Site 130 at the Zhouchuan Satellite Launch Center. The rocket was carrying the DEAR 3 research platform and 10 other rideshares into a sun-synchronous orbit. The 11 payloads, however, never made it there. Cast Space, the launch operator of the rocket, confirmed on social media shortly after launch that the rocket suffered an issue with its third stage, resulting in a launch failure. According to the company, preliminary results show that the third stage lost attitude control three seconds into its burn, triggering the self-destruct system. The mission was the sixth launch of the Connecticut-1 rocket, the fourth of the year, and its first failure overall. The company was aiming to ramp up production and launch cadence of this rocket, targeting eight launches of the Connecticut-1 rocket in 2025, with the goal of debuting a new and larger rocket, the Connecticut-2, also in 2025. But safe to say, those plans may now have to change in light of this failure. Coming back to the U.S., we had two back-to-back launches of Falcon 9 rockets. The first took place from a foggy Vandenberg in California on December 29 at 158 UTC. The mission was carrying a batch of Starlink V-2 mini-satellites into low-Earth orbit as part of the Starlink Group 11-3 mission. The booster for this mission, B-1075, was flying for a sixteenth time, and it successfully landed on SpaceX's drone ship, of course I still love you. Just a few hours later, from humid Florida, we got another Falcon 9 launch, and this one had no Starlinks. Lift-off happened on December 29 at 5 o'clock UTC from Space Launch Complex 40, carrying four Astranus satellites into geosynchronous transfer orbit. The mission, nicknamed "From One to Many," was the first dedicated launch from Astranus satellites on a Falcon 9 rocket. These satellites are based on the company's microgeosatellite bus, which has a mass of roughly 400 kilograms and dimensions of roughly 1 meter by 1 meter by 1 meter. These are a departure from the typical geosatellite, which is often several tons in mass, the size of a school bus, and needs a rocket like Falcon 9 all by itself. Those kinds of satellites often cover entire continents, or maybe half of one and half of another, but Astranus's microgeosatellite bus is intended for a more localized market, and it's tailored for the needs of the region that they're going to cover. The mission name, "From One to Many," is a reference to the satellite that Astranus already has an orbit, which launched last year as a rideshare on a Falcon Heavy mission. The company hopes to launch many more of these smaller satellites into geo in the future, therefore going from one to many. The booster for this mission, B-1083, was flying for a seventh time, and it successfully landed on SpaceX's drone ship, a shortfall of Gravitas. However, this wasn't the booster originally intended for this mission. During the first launch attempt on December 21, there was an abort at engine ignition, something that happened with booster B-1077. The booster was replaced by B-1083, which flew in its stead so the mission could still launch relatively quickly. The penultimate launch of the year took place from India with a PSLV rocket lifting off on December 30 at 1630 UTC. The payload for this launch was Spade X, which stands for "Space Docking Experiment," and it was inserted into a low-Earth orbit. The Spade X payload consists of two nearly identical satellites fitted with rendezvous and docking mechanisms to test these systems in orbit. One of the satellites, called the Chaser, will approach another satellite, the target, and will try to dock to it while in orbit. Once docked, the mission will also aim to perform secondary test objectives like transfer of power between the spacecraft or joint operations in orbit. This test mission is key for India to be able to rehearse and gain experience with docking spacecraft while in orbit, something that only Russia, the United States, and China had been able to do thus far. This type of technology will be important for the country's future ambitions, as India is aiming to launch its own space station into orbit by the end of the decade, and will need on-orbit rendezvous and docking to assemble it in space. Its upcoming human spaceflight capsule, Gaganyan, will also need to rendezvous and dock with that station as well. The country is also targeting a lunar sample return mission, Chandrayaan-4, later this decade, which will need multiple encounters and dockings while in different orbits around the Earth and the Moon. Ultimately, India wants to land its own astronauts on the lunar surface by 2040, so the hope is that all of this new knowledge will help to bolster them towards that goal. And to wrap up the year, we had, of course, a Starlink. It's always the ones Yeliztik's back right. Lift-off took place on December 31 at 539 UTC from Launch Complex 39A in Florida. The mission was carrying eight Starlink V-2 Mini and 13 Starlink Direct-to-Cell satellites into low Earth orbit. The first stage, B-1078, was flying for a 16th time and it successfully landed on SpaceX's drone ship, just read the instructions. With the Starlink launches this week, the total tally of Starlink satellites launched goes up to 7,632 since the first one back in 2019. Of all of these, 737 have re-entered and 6,176 satellites have moved into their operational orbit. That Starlink launch was the 259th and last launch of 2024. This is up from the 221 launches that we had in 2023, all thanks to SpaceX's record-breaking cadence. In fact, SpaceX performed so many launches this year that if you add up all of the launches from everyone else in the world, they still don't surpass the number that SpaceX carried out. And they did it despite suffering three mishaps to its Falcon family of rockets, one on launch, another at landing, and a third one during second stage disposal. And the amazing thing is that they're aiming for even more launches in 2025 of both Falcon and Starship rockets. Amazingly, unlike last year, no launches have taken place so far in 2025, at least as of the time of recording. That may change soon, though, with the launch of the Falcon 9 carrying the Thuraya-4 NGS satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit from Florida. The four-hour launch window is set to open on January 4th at 127 UTC. Also next week, we may finally see the first launch of Blue Origin's new Glenn rocket. With its pre-launch static fire test now complete, everything is being ready for that launch. The rocket went horizontal, rolled back into its hangar, and it should have received its blue-ring Pathfinder payload by now, assuming all went well, of course. Jacqueline, the landing barge for New Glenn, also departed Port Canaveral just yesterday and is on its way to the landing zone, located approximately 620 kilometers downrange. Hazard notices are also starting to come out and all point to a potential launch as early as January 6th within a three-hour window that opens at 6 o'clock UTC. After New Glenn, we'll have, of course, another Falcon 9 launch, this time from Launch Complex 39A carrying a batch of Starlink satellites into orbit. The four-hour launch window is set to open on January 6th at 1619 UTC. If schedules hold, another Starlink launch could take place from neighboring Space Launch Complex 40. The four-hour launch window for that one would also open on January 6th, but at 1644 UTC, just 25 minutes after the one from 39A. Next week, in deep space, we'll also have the sixth and final flyby of Mercury by the Beppi Colombo spacecraft. This flyby will see the spacecraft pass as close as 345 kilometers from the surface of the planet. This will alter its orbit enough to bring it back for another encounter in November of 2026 when the spacecraft will enter orbit around Mercury and begin its science operations. Coming back to Earth, we'll have another couple of Falcon 9 launches near the end of the week. The first of those will be a Starlink launch from Florida, which is planned to take place within a four-hour launch window that opens on January 9th at 1555 UTC. The second launch won't be a Starlink, but it'll be kind of like a Starlink. That's because it'll be the launch of the NROL 153 mission carrying a batch of Star Shield satellites for the National Reconnaissance Office. The one-and-a-half-hour launch window is set to open on January 10th at 319 UTC. And another big launch that will take place next week will be of Starship. And I said "big" in the literal sense, because it is, of course, the biggest rocket in the world, and in fact, it's going to be even bigger than it was the last few flights. That's because this will be the first launch of a Block II ship, which means that this Starship rocket will be 1.8 meters taller than five of the six previous Starships. This will be the seventh launch of Starship, and according to hazard notices for this mission, it appears that it'll be another afternoon one with the launch window opening on January 10th at 2200 UTC. I'm Alicia Siegel for NSF, and that's your weekly Space Traffic Report. Now back to T-Minus Space. We'll be right back. Welcome back! Sound the Aurora Alert Claxon yet again? We are in a solar maximum officially, after all. As the Space Weather Prediction Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, aka NOAA, says a G1 or minor geomagnetic storm is likely this weekend, January 4th and 5th. This solar storm is coming to Earth thanks to something that might seem maybe a bit counter-intuitive, a hole in the Sun's corona. Think about it, though. A weak spot in the Sun's atmosphere can make it easier for solar wind to punch its way through, and when things align just right, that solar wind can then make its way to us and result in a geomagnetic storm. A reminder that the Aurora that made headlines last May was a G4 or G5 on the severity scale, basically the maximum severity possible for a geomagnetic storm. That is not what we're getting this weekend. Just, just a G1. And a G1-level storm impact means weak power grid fluctuations could happen, some satellite operations could be impacted, and Aurora might be visible at higher latitudes. So, Alaska, Canada, Northern Michigan, and Maine? For those of you in the North American region anyway, here's hoping you have some clear skies for a lovely light show this weekend. [Music] And that's it for T-minus for January 3rd, 2025, 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 team smarter. Learn how at n2k.com. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth, our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Vermazis. Thanks for listening. Have a wonderful weekend! Bye! [BLANK_AUDIO]

Similar posts

Stay in the loop on new releases. 

Subscribe below to receive information about new blog posts, podcasts, newsletters, and product information.