Today is January 6th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmasus, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] SpaceX launched its first flight of 2025, carrying the Space 42 Teraiya 4 mission to a geosynchronous transfer orbit. SpaceX has outlined its plans for the seventh test flight of the upgraded Starship rocket. The Swedish military has tasked the Swedish Space Corporation with creating a capability to launch satellites into orbit from the S-Range Space Center. New data shows funding for the space industry in India fell 55% in 2024. Blue Origin has pushed back the inaugural launch of the new Glenn rocket until January 8th at the earliest. [MUSIC] And today I'll be speaking to Bailey Reichelt and Jack Shelton from Aegis Space Law about a new space law segment that we're going to be launching next month here on T-minus. So do you have a space law question that you want them to address? Just send them our way at space@n2k.com, and each month the team at Aegis will explain everything from licensing and regulation to ITAR compliance. Find out more later in the show. [MUSIC] We're kicking off Monday's Intel Briefing with a correction to our top story from Friday. Over the weekend, Blue Origin announced that it was pushing back the launch of its new Glenn rocket again to January 8th at the earliest. The hotly anticipated inaugural flight of the 320-foot Blue Origin rocket is expected to be earlier than 1 a.m. local time in Florida on Wednesday, January 8th. Anyone living on the East Coast will tell you that we're dealing with a bit of cold weather at the moment. And although Blue did not share that as the reason for the delay we expected the wintry conditions all the way up the coast had something to do with the rescheduling, the launch will occur from Launch Complex 36 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station when conditions are expected to be more favorable. According to data from Market Intelligence Platform Traction, funding in India's space sector fell by 55% in 2024. The news comes as many investment firms raised concerns over global declines in the space sector. Globally, space companies raised about $28 billion over the last five years while their India counterpoints secured approximately $354 million in the same period. India's government sought to stimulate that space sector by approving a $119 million fund in October of last year to support space startups. Will it be enough to see India compete in the rapidly changing space industry? We shall see. The Swedish military has tasked the Swedish Space Corporation with creating a capability to launch satellites into orbit from the S-Range Space Center. The move comes after the Swedish government allocated $1 billion, which equates to about 85.4 million euros, to its armed forces to strengthen the country's space capabilities in the fall. One of the key elements of the project is to establish a basic satellite launch capability from S-Range. Could this be the first move before becoming anchor tenants at the space port? We'll be watching the space, metaphorically and literally, as things unfold. SpaceX has shared some of its mission plans for the seventh Starship test flight, say that five times fast, which is expected at some point this month. According to their website, the upcoming flight test will launch a new generation ship with upgrades, attempt Starship's first payload deployment test, fly multiple reentry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse, and launch and return the super heavy booster. Starship will deploy 10 Starlink simulators, which are similar in size and weight to the next generation Starlink satellites, as the first exercise of a satellite deploy mission. The simulators will be on the same suborbital trajectory as Starship, with splashdown targeted where else but in the Indian Ocean. A relight of a single Raptor engine while in space is also planned. SpaceX says this new year will be transformational for Starship, with the goal of bringing reuse of the entire system online and flying increasingly ambitious missions as the company progresses towards being able to send humans and cargo to Earth, orbit the moon, and of course to Mars. And SpaceX held its first launch of the year, carrying the Teraiya 4 communication satellite for UAE AI-powered space tech company Space 42. The satellite was built by Airbus and was deployed into geostationary transfer orbit by a Falcon 9 rocket from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station. Teraiya 4 is equipped with a 12-meter L-band antenna and is aiming to provide narrowband connectivity across Europe, Africa, Central Asia, and the Middle East, replacing aging Boeing-built satellites. Space 42 was formed through the merger of YASAT and AI provider BIONAT, and is also planning a broader satellite expansion with future launches, including the Aliyah 4 and Aliyah 5 satellites by 2027 and 2028, respectively, and is exploring multi-orbit strategies, including low Earth orbit deployments. And that concludes our T-Minus Intelligence Briefing for you this Monday. As always, you'll find links to further reading on our show notes. We've also added a story on the Space Launch Delta 45 Record Breaking 2024, AST Space Mobile's latest agreement, and a story on L3 Harris completing the sale of its specialized materials business. Hi, T-Minus Crew! If you would like daily updates from us directly in your LinkedIn feed, be sure to follow the official N2K T-Minus page over on LinkedIn. And if you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do here, we are also @t-minusdaily on Instagram. That's where we post videos and pictures from events, excursions, and even some behind-the-scenes treats. Links are in the show notes. Hope you'll join us there! Next month, we're going to be changing things up here at T-Minus, along with our new daily headline countdown that we've been starting this month. We will also be introducing new monthly segments. And the first segment we're going to be introducing to you will be a Space Law segment from our friends Bailey Reichelt and Jack Shelton over at Aegis Space Law. It's my pleasure and honor to introduce to our audience that the two of you are launching a segment on T-Minus that's going to be running regularly about Space Law. Without further ado, who wants to introduce the new segment? Hi, I'm Bailey, and this is my partner Jack, and we're co-founders of a Space Law firm, Aegis Space Law. We've been around for about four years now, and we serve a broad base of clients, a whole bunch of them in the space industry, and quite a few of them in startups and small to medium-sized companies. And we are doing this segment because we need to answer some of the hard questions that we get all the time from these companies. We need to answer them publicly. So everyone has these resources. So the whole space industry can thrive and succeed, because we have unlocked the mystery of Space Law for you. So that's the goal here. Would you like to add, Jack? What are we going to be doing? Yeah, I might have a little bit. So again, these are the questions we get all the time, and many of these we answer in webinars, many different forums. But we just want to have a nice consolidated place where we can answer a lot of these questions and get the information out so that we can make sure that the industry and not have to keep answering the same questions over and over again. We can just direct people to the podcast. That makes a lot of sense. So not to give it away too much, but what kind of questions are we talking about? Like what realm within the whole legal sphere are we speaking about? What realm? We get a lot of questions about export controls, ITAR, and the Export Administration Regulations with respect to spacecraft and spacecraft technology. Gosh, how does structure, if companies are going to be involved in what's called a CIDR or CIDR arrangement, which is a special type of government contract, we work with a lot of foreign companies who come to the United States trying to get involved in those contracts and have to structure in a certain way. What else, Bailey? FCC, NOAA, all these different licensing and regulatory issues that space company have to deal with. If you need to talk to your spacecraft, you're going to be dealing with the FCC. You want to talk to a launch vehicle FCC. You're going to be doing remote sensing. That's NOAA, which is part of the Department of Commerce. There's a lot going on there. A lot of fees people don't know about. So I think getting people acquainted with how much things cost and what the time periods are of working with the government, that's been a lot of our mission just because knowing those things, they feel like a black box, I think, to entrepreneurs starting out. There's this void of questions that no one seems to have a real solid answer to. We've made a concerted effort to try to come up with answers to just telling you how much things cost and how long they take to help you plan your business accordingly and have effective strategies from getting your mission off the ground to literally mission completion. We used to say launch, but we actually serve quite a few companies. You're just in the supply chain of satellites now. If your mission is getting your thing incorporated into a satellite, we want to help you do that by understanding export controls, use of foreign employees, any licensing through the FCC, NOAA, FAA payload reviews, the whole gamut of regulations that affect the space company. We want to help you get a strategy together so you get mission success. Yeah. So in addition to all those regulatory issues we were just talking about, we also work with companies quite a bit in government contracting as well as commercial contracting. We work with a lot of hosted payload agreements, ride share agreements, just basic supply chain agreements for the space industry. And of course we work with government contracts as well. So contracting with the DoD, contracting with NASA, space act agreements, all sorts of fun things. We try to be a one-stop shop for the space industry. And it's pretty much anything that's at a federal level for the space industry we're helping companies with. That's awesome. And what I love about this segment is that I'm not going to be involved in it because I know nothing about space law. So the two of you will be talking to each other, which I just want to let our listeners and viewers know that because I am so out of my realm with all of this that you just mentioned. No worries. That's what we're here for. Yeah. I appreciate that. So Jack and I discussed a tentative format. I think one of us is going to be covering a topic. Like we're going to play this role play of attorney-client and switch it off, asking the questions we think that the client asks the most or trying to ask the questions we think you want answers to. So if you have questions you want answers to, submit them ahead of time. And maybe we can answer them live. But yeah, I think we're going to try to put ourselves in kind of a little role play scenario. And I hope that it's fun and interesting. We kind of pride ourselves on not being super boring attorneys. That's not our identity. So you're not going to get that from us, we hope. I love that idea of the role play. So I think that's going to be a fascinating listen, again, for folks like myself who are going to be listening out of curiosity. Because certainly this needs to be, this is going to be really useful for people who are in the weeds of getting, you know, dealing with all these things. But for folks like myself who are just interested, but not necessarily going through all these different processes right now, I'm going to be really interested to learn more from the two of you. So there's also really neat hearing sort of a sample of what kind of conversations you all are having to be a fly on the wall, metaphorically speaking, I suppose. This is really neat. So yeah, I think we're kicking off next month, right? So anything we want to leave the audience with before we conclude. Yeah, really excited to start doing this. Our mission with the firm has always been to just help the industry grow and help small businesses get their tech to market, have more sustainable strategies, less overhead spend. So I think this is going to help us in our mission to accomplish that. And I'm looking forward to hearing back from people on what their questions are and getting even better at answering them and providing that really vital information that the industry needs to be sustained and to achieve mission success. So we're excited to talk to you guys and help you guys and looking forward to it. Yeah, just to add to that, Bailey, you know, being a lawyer isn't always fun. There's a large part of my career that I've been to enjoy so much until we got into the space industry. And I have loved everything about this industry and getting to work with startups who are doing these incredible things and getting to be a part of that and getting to educate people about all these things so that they can actually succeed has been a lot of fun. And we really enjoy it. We're looking forward to this. We'll be right back. Welcome back. If you've been paying the social media over the last few weeks, I'm sorry. Well, we're pretty sure you've come across the story that there's this rare astronomical event coming up this month. The planets are coming into alignment on the surface. It sounds like some rare extraordinary event on specifically January 25th. But I know, I know, stop shouting at me. Is that the full picture? As you know, it is not. Firstly, yes, there will be six planets in our evening sky throughout January. And yes, they're in a line. But as with many stories like this one, there are some truth and then there's some adjacency to truth. What's missing is the fact that this isn't an extraordinary event. The planets in our solar system orbit our sun more or less on a flat plane so that planets always travel in a line across our skies. So that means if there is more than one planet in view, it lines up with any other planet along with the moon and sun. So if you're lucky enough to have a clear sky this month, you should be able to see at least four bright planets and two faint ones in a line in the evening sky. But no, they will not be in alignment lining up behind the sun as if they're in line to get into an event. That is such an extraordinarily mathematically nigh impossible event. That is not what's happening. And so while they will be in a line in our skies from our point of view, not in space. We always encourage people to get excited about looking at the night sky and into space, but we want you all to know all the facts. The more you know, you know. And that's it for January 6, 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 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 near 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're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iban. Our executive editor is Brandon Karth. Simone Petrella is our president. Peter Kilpey is our publisher. And I'm your host Maria Varmausus. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
