Blue Ghost and RESILIENCE head to the Moon.

Today is January 15th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmausus and this is T-minus. T-minus. Twenty seconds to alloy. T-minus. Twenty seconds to alloy. T-minus. Go for the floor. Five. Space X has moved the seventh test flight of its starship to know earlier than Thursday, January 16th, with the 60-minute launch window opening at 4pm central time. Four. Varta Space, Icy, Pixel and Planet are among the companies that had spacecraft deployed on yesterday's Transporter 12 mission. Three. Slingshot Aerospace has been awarded $1.9 million from the USSF's Space Systems Command to further develop the company's existing GPS jamming and spoofing detection. Two. Loft Orbital has raised $170 million in a series C funding round. One. Space X has launched lunar probes for Firefly Aerospace and Japan's ice space destined for the lunar surface. Let's go. And today's guest is Chad Anderson, founder and managing partner at Space Capital. Space Capital is a sea stage venture capital firm investing in the space economy. And I spoke to Chad about trends he's seeing in the space economy and what he predicts we will see in 2025. Stay with us for that chat. Happy Wednesday, everybody. Once again, it has been a busy 24 hours for Space X. In addition to the Transport 12 ride share mission that we'll be talking about later in the show, the space giant launched not one but two commercial lunar landers to space earlier today. A Falcon 9 rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center in the early hours of this morning, starting Firefly Aerospace's Blue Ghost 1 and Japan's Ice Space's Resilience Lunar probe on their journeys to the moon. Firefly's Blue Ghost is one part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services Program, or CLIPS, and is carrying 10 NASA scientific payloads to the moon. The company says it successfully acquired signal and completed on orbit commissioning. Firefly has a target landing date of March 2, 2025. And as for Japan's Ice Space, they say they too have established a communication link with their resilience lunar lander and confirmed a stable attitude as well as stable generation of electrical power in orbit. That lander is carrying six payloads, including the tenacious micro rover developed by Ice Space Europe. They're expecting to complete a lunar flyby in one month, with the lunar probe expecting to land some time later than Firefly's Blue Ghost. We wish both missions the very best of luck. Loft Orbital have raised $170 million in a series C funding round. Loft Orbital expects to reach fleet scale this year. They have currently five satellites in orbit that host payloads for over 25 companies. Loft Orbital has operations on three continents that serve their global customer base, including being part of a joint venture with Abu Dhabi-based Marlin Space on orbit works. They say that the new funding round gives the company the fuel to meet the challenge to build a durable, trusted commercial space company. Loft already operates the Yam 6 platform dedicated to AI experiments, and they say that they're looking to increase their focus on growing the ecosystem of AI application partners and making it seamless and eventually self-serve for anyone to deploy and run AI apps on Loft's infrastructure. Slingshot Aerospace has been awarded $1.9 million from the United States Space Forces Space Systems Command to further develop the company's existing GPS jamming and spoofing detection. The contract also covers updates to more precisely geolocate the sources and predict patterns of interference. The new program, called PNT Sentinel, which stands for Position Navigation and Timing Secure Electronic Navigation Threat Intelligence and Location, provides Slingshot new funding to enhance its already operational technology by incorporating AI, what else, and predictive analytics to rapidly share insights to warfighters and support faster, more informed decision-making. The PNT Sentinel contract was awarded as a Small Business Innovation Research, or CBER, Phase II contract by Spaceworks. SpaceX's Transporter 12 lifted off at the time of recording yesterday, so we didn't get the opportunity to dig too deep into the many over 130 payloads that were included on this incredible rideshare mission. VARDAS Space's W2 orbital vehicle was on board the rocket, and the W2 capsule carries payloads from VARDAS partners, including a spectrometer from the Air Force Research Laboratory, and employs a heat shield with a thermal protection system developed in collaboration with NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. These payloads are in addition to VARDAS' expanded pharmaceutical reactor. Also deployed on Transporter 12 were Endless Sky and Ascend, the 15th and 16th commercial missions of Deorbit's Orbital Transfer Vehicle Ion Satellite Carrier. With this launch, the company will have transported to space almost 180 payloads collectively. Many Earth observation companies had their satellites on board as well. ICEI added four new satellites to their constellation. Planet announced that their high-resolution Pelican-Sue satellites and 36 Super Doves of Flock 4G were also successfully launched. Pixel announced the first three satellites of its Firefly constellation were also on board, along with Germany's Constellar's first satellite, the SkyB1. And SpaceX's Starship was due to launch for its seventh test flight this afternoon, but they've moved the launch to Thursday, January 16th now. The 60-minute launch window opens at 4 p.m. local time in Texas, so that's central time. Tomorrow's launch will see a new generation ship with significant upgrades. Attempt Starship's first payload deployment test. By multiple re-entry experiments geared towards ship catch and reuse. And launch and return the Super Heavy booster. We will have more on that story once the test is complete. And that's it for today's Intel Briefing. I'm talking to Chad Anderson shortly about space finance predictions for the year. And we've also included a story from Reuters on space startup funding set to get a boost from US-China rivalry in the show notes. Additionally, we have a story on China's planned space solar array for you to digest as well, along with links to further reading on all of the stories we've mentioned throughout the show. Hey, T-Minus Crew, if you find this podcast useful, please do us a favor and share a five-star rating and 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 for your support. We really appreciate it. Our guest today is Chad Anderson, founder and managing partner at Space Capital. Chad recently shared an article, which we've included for you in our show notes, that looks at the trends in space and particularly in investment that he sees for 2025. He and I started off talking about how the new US leadership may impact the space industry. I think under the new administration, there is going to be a greater focus on the space economy and in integrating commercial capabilities into government programs. I think SpaceX is likely to be the biggest beneficiary here, but it's not just because Elon is first buddy and what's a big donor to the campaign is obviously very involved in the administration and influential in the administration. All that's going to help. But I think the biggest factor here is that there's more of an emphasis on leveraging commercial capabilities for lower cost. And SpaceX has the best solutions out on the market. So it's kind of hard to argue that you should not, when you're looking for these things, that SpaceX isn't the obvious choice. And so I think a lot of benefits going to go their way, but at the same time, there is more competition coming online. There's more competition from Rocket Lab and Blue Origin on the launch side. There is more competition on satellite communications. We're seeing Amazon, Apple and other big telco companies getting into that scheme as well. So there's more competition at the same time and competition is good for everyone. Absolutely. The Rising Tide lifts all boats, but really ships in this case indeed. And you have a really fantastic roundup on Yahoo Finance about some of your predictions for the coming year. I'm going to make sure we link it for our listeners and viewers so they can take a look for themselves and get an in-depth look at what you've written. I want to just pull a few things out of it because it was a very fascinating analysis. One of them was about the implication of Starship coming online. We're yearly awaiting the next test as we record this one, this episode. Starship is amazing. I mean, how much hyperbole can one say about it? But we're expecting a lot of cool things to happen with Starship this year. Give me a sense of what you're predicting. The entire space economy as we know it today is underpinned, was enabled by SpaceX. We've been operating in space for decades. It's only recently become a category for investment entrepreneurship by SpaceX and their Falcon 9. That Falcon 9 is ushered in $300 billion of investment capital, 2,000 unique space companies, all in the heels of what SpaceX has done. And Starship promises to have the same type of impact. So things are accelerating, things are growing. The space economy is on a big growth trajectory. And Starship is really just going to throw gas on that fire. This is like nothing we've ever seen before in space. The amount of payload capacity that it can launch at the price points that they're talking about launching them with a fully reusable system is really going to change the game. It's going to accelerate growth in existing markets. It's going to enable entirely new markets, and it's going to make a lot of existing infrastructure obsolete. And on this next, they got to a monthly launch cadence on this test program, which is pretty wild to think about and unparalleled. And they're looking to double that this year. I believe it. It's going to be quite amazing to watch this year. When I think of Starship, I can't help but also think of SLS. Is SLS in trouble? There is a philosophy that's gone through NASA for decades. And I think there's a lot of sense in it that you want to have a dual path approach where you want to work with trusted partners who have delivered for you before. That might cost a little bit more money, and that might be slower approach. But then you also want to explore and experiment and see if you can do it with new partners leveraging new capabilities for lower cost. That has changed over the years with the commercial orbital transportation services, cargo and crew, i.e. the contracts that brought SpaceX online. The incumbents have really been struggling. I mean, they have failed to deliver. And I think the Boeing Starliner, when they finally launched astronauts years behind schedule to the space station last year, and then their Starliner vehicle was deemed unfit to bring those astronauts back, I think that was a very symbolic monumental shift pointing to the future of what's going on in the space economy that the incumbents have really struggled to keep up with the pace of innovation. I think that Congress and the US government are not interested in spending a lot of money for capability that continues to just be over budget and behind schedule. I think there's going to be a big re-architecting and rethinking of these big programs like Artemis. I think that there's already been conversation from Trump and Elon both talking about, do we want to go to the moon or do we want to go straight to Mars? And I think that's on the chopping block for sure. It'll be very interesting to see what ends up happening there, certainly. I want to just completely shift to thinking a bit more about space sustainability. This is an area where we've been tracking a lot with the private sector and just so many companies working in space sustainability. One of the points that you made, and please correct me if I'm summarizing this poorly, is that we're going to see the commercial sector step up even more to the point that maybe tracks in the Commerce Department may be deprecated. I don't want to put words in your mouth if I'm saying that incorrectly. I just want to hear more of your thoughts on where you think that might be going. Yeah, it's, look, there's, if you look at the number of satellites that have been launched into orbit, it is, you know, over time, it is a straight line up in 2024. The growth is exponential. Whereas just a few years ago, there were relatively small number of satellites in orbit. You could really sort of manage things using Excel spreadsheets and emails and Slack notifications. That's how it was happening. Today, there's just too much activity, too much going on. I don't know what the estimates of Starlink maneuvers or something like 50 to 100,000 maneuvers a year or something. They're constantly, continuously moving around to dodge debris and maintain safe orbits. So this is no longer an elective thing. This is essential. At Space Capital, we've been investing in companies focusing on like, well, first of all, where are things in orbit? Let's understand where things are first. And then let's try and coordinate between each other, between companies and between countries to make sure that we maintain safe operating orbits. There was a government initiative. The TRAX program was, Commerce Department was going to help fund this capability and provide this data to the market. Turns out that the market has blown right past them. That capability is now commercially available. And so there's not really a need for TRAX, a need for a government program to fund this thing because private companies have already built it and it's out there and you can just buy it off the shelf. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. I have to ask, I mean, so your list here is very comprehensive. I'm wondering if there's anything that didn't make it in. Well, I think the interesting thing that didn't actually make the list because we were talking more about innovation and technology in markets, but on the investment side, right? So we saw, everyone knows we had the big run up in 2021 when capital was cheap in the zero interest rate period. And then over the last few years, things have been really tough. Fundraising has been difficult. So a lot of startups have run out of cash. There's been a very sort of healthy tightening of belts. Some companies haven't made it. And you can see the date, you can see that in the data. The investment has fallen from 2021 to 2022 and 2023. It appears that 2023 was the bottom. Year over year, the data shows that we're now up 30% in 2024 than we were in 2023. So that's a very positive sign. We think that that trend is going to continue. We think we're going to see a lot of activity in 2025 in the capital markets. And this is all really without SpaceX propping it up. SpaceX has raised a lot of capital over the last decade and they haven't had to tap the capital market since 2022 because their business is going so well that they're funding their growth with revenue. So what that means is that other companies are now coming in, raising capital and building solutions on the coattails of SpaceX and this increased access to orbit. So that's another, I put that as prediction number 11 that we're going to see that growth in 2025. I love that. Thank you. I appreciate that. I have to ask, so taking SpaceX out of the conversation, as you said, it is such a strong outlier because it does just skewer everything. I'm curious if there are companies that you are concerned about keeping an eye out in an eye out for in a kind of way and companies that you are really excited about keeping an eye on for really strong growth. Yeah. So we've seen a lot of companies that haven't made it. So companies that maybe didn't have great business plans or great unit economics, sometimes it costs more to build the thing than people were willing to pay for it. Those companies that by and large, mostly have gone away. The tide has come in and the tide has gone out. But there are a few that we're going to see in 2025, some big ones, I think. These are the companies that raised a lot of capital in 2021 that have not had to go back out to the capital markets to raise again, which means that you haven't seen their valuations decrease. So let's say a launch company went out and raised a billion dollars at a four and a half billion dollar valuation and they're still pre-product. They know how many, they're not launching anything. Can they justify a four billion dollar valuation in this market? Probably not. But they raised so much capital that they've been able to survive for the last few years. The rubber's going to meet the road there on a few big, big high profile companies. So there's still some more pain that we're going to see in 2025. Probably one that's worth keeping an eye on. So we talked about space traffic management and you should keep an eye on Leo Labs and Keahan Space. Both of those companies are doing really great work on domain awareness and coordination. But given what's going on in LA with the wildfires, I think I got to mention Muon Space. So this is the best satellite team in the world. A lot of them come from Skybox Imaging. They built Methane satellite for the Environmental Defense Fund that launched last year and they're now working on Firesat, which is going to be built by Muon. It is a constellation of satellites that is going to be able to detect wildfires the size of a classroom within 15 minutes anywhere on the planet. That means that you will know what's happening with enough time to actually take action and do something to prevent its spread before it gets out of hand. And this is an initiative that's funded by Google.org and they're leaning in and providing a lot of their AI capabilities to help here, the Moore Foundation Environmental Defense Fund. And that's just one initiative that Muon's working on and they're doing a bunch of other really interesting things too. That is incredibly important. As you've seen, a lot of the data that's telling us and giving us updates of what's going on in LA is coming from satellites and step change and capabilities coming online very soon. We'll be right back. Welcome back and a shout out today to NASA astronaut Don Pettit who has definitely become one of the legends of astrophotography. His vantage point on the ISS is enviable for those that love to photograph the stars. And when you are in space looking out at Earth and the great cosmos beyond, you might be tempted to think, truly, what else is left to photograph? How many versions of the great blue marble against inky blackness can one appreciate? And Pettit is showing us all that there is still so much more for us to see. Through his lens, he transports us to his incredible vantage in Leo and he recently shared this just amazing long exposure photograph that he took from the ISS with the Earth below surrounded by a radiant blue, orange, white and even red in the atmosphere, a heavy blanket of stars in the Milky Way above, and even some streaks from Starlink satellites passing in the distance. They should have sent a poet, right? Well, this time they sent an amazing photographer with a strong artistic eye and the result is visual poetry. We'll link this stunning shot for you in our show notes. Definitely do not miss this one. If you are interested in hearing more detail about the art and science of astrophotography aboard the ISS, the chat between Don Pettit and NSF's Jack Beyer is not to be missed. We ran that chat here on T-minus in late December. You may have missed it because of the holidays, but we'll link that for you as well in case you haven't heard it yet. [Music] That's it for T-minus for January 15th, 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. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your 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. We're 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 Kilby is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We will see you tomorrow. [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]