Today is February 24th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. T-minus. Five. Rocket Lab National Security has successfully completed its critical design review for the US Space Force Space Systems Command's tactically responsive space mission called Victus Haze. Four. EutelSAT has successfully carried out the first trial of 5G non-terrestrial network connection using OneWeb's low Earth orbit satellites. Three. The first Australian-designed and built rocket aiming for orbit is scheduled for its inaugural launch on March 15th. Two. NASA has selected SpaceX to provide launch services for the Near Earth Object Surveyor Mission. One. BAE Systems Space and Mission Systems has won a $230.6 million contract to build spacecraft for the Lagrange One Series project as part of NOAA's Space Weather Next program. And our guest today is Mark Lester, aerospace and defense consultant at Merrick. Mark provided me with some great insights on the space industry, drawing on his experience working at space ports and with launch companies. So stick around for more on that later in the show. Happy Monday everybody. We're kicking off with some federal contract news. And yes, despite things looking a little rocky with funding and jobs over here in the United States right now, NASA and NOAA have managed to finalize, build and launch contracts. So first, BAE Systems Space and Mission Systems have won a $230.6 million contract to build spacecraft for the Lagrange One Series project, which is part of NOAA's Space Weather Next program. The firm fixed price delivery order covers all phases of the Lagrange One Series project operations, including developing up to two spacecraft, instrument integration, satellite level testing, training and support for the spacecraft flight operations team, and mission operations support. The Space Weather Next program aims to maintain and extend space weather observations from various orbitally stable points such as Lagrange One, which is about a mere million miles from Earth. The first Space Weather Next Lagrange One Series launch, which is planned for 2029, will be the first observatory under the program and will provide continuity of real-time coronal imagery and upstream solar wind measurements. Space Weather Next will provide uninterrupted data continuity when NOAA's Space Weather Follow-On Lagrange One mission comes to its end of operations. And next, staying with contract news, NASA has selected SpaceX to provide launch services for the near-Earth object surveyor mission. The project aims to detect and observe asteroids and comets that could potentially pose an impact threat to Earth. The firm fixed-price launch service task order is being awarded under the "indefinite delivery indefinite quantity" NASA Launch Services to contract. The total cost to NASA for the launch service is approximately $100 million, which includes the launch service and other mission-related costs. The NEO surveyor mission is targeted to launch no earlier than September 2027 on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Florida. And we are interested in seeing how SpaceX founder Elon Musk's role with Doge will influence his federal contracts in the near future. Over to Australia now, and Gilmour Space Technologies has announced a launch window starting no earlier than March 15th for the maiden flight of ARIS. It is billed as the first Australian-designed and built rocket aiming for orbit. The company has already received final airspace approvals from the Civil Aviation Safety Authority and Air Services Australia, clearing the last regulatory hurdle before launch. Gilmour Space made history in March last year when its Bowen spaceport was granted the first orbital launch facility license in Australia and when it secured the country's first Australian launch permit for ARIS Test Flight 1 in November. Now with airspace arrangements finalized and mandatory notice given to the Australian Space Agency, the company is preparing for liftoff, and we wish them the best of luck. Moving on now, UTelsat Group, MediaTek, and Airbus Defense & Space have conducted the world's first successful trial of 5G non-terrestrial network, or NTN technology, over UTelsat 1-Web Low Earth Orbit satellites. The company say that the trial paves the way for deployment of the 5G NTN standard, which will result in future satellite interoperability within a large ecosystem. It's hoped that the service will lower the cost of access and enable the use of satellite broadband for 5G devices around the world. And finally, Rocket Lab's subsidiary Rocket Lab National Security has successfully completed its critical design review for the US Space Force Space Systems Command's tactically responsive space mission, Victus Hayes. Rocket Lab was selected for the $32 million US Space Force SSE mission led by Space Safari in partnership with the Defense Innovation Unit back in April 2024. The contract covers the design, build, license, launch, and operation of a rendezvous and proximity operations-capable spacecraft. Rocket Lab will configure its vertically integrated Pioneer spacecraft to meet the unique requirements of the Victus Hayes mission and launch it on the company's Electron rocket from Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand. . And that concludes our Top 5 stories for today's Intel Briefing. NTK Senior Producer Alice Cruz has more on what stories didn't make it to the Top 5 today. Over to you, Alice. Thanks, Maria. It's always tough to narrow down the stories we think you need to know about to keep you ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. So we've included four extra links today in the selected reading section of our show notes. The first is a story from Defense News on the Space Force cancelling its contract with one of four companies developing designs for its resilient GPS program. The second is a launch update on NASA's Sphere X. We've added a story on RedWire's technology that's included on the IM2 mission due to launch this week. And the final story is on Captor Space, which has emerged from stealth mode to work on spaceporn radar systems. Wow, that is a lot for today. So where can our listeners find those stories? We always include links to further reading on all the stories we mentioned throughout the show in the podcast show notes. Those links can also be found on our website, space.intuk.com, and click on this episode title. Hey T-minus crew, if you would like daily updates from us directly in your LinkedIn feed, be sure to follow the official NTK T-minus page over on LinkedIn. And if you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do here, we are @t-minusdaily on Instagram. And that's where we post videos and pictures from events, excursions, and even some behind-the-scenes treats. Links are all in the show notes for you. Hope you'll join us there. We are on our last week of sharing our chats recorded back at Spacecom 2025. And our guest today is Mark Lester, aerospace and defense consultant at Merrick. And I started by asking Mark about his work at spaceports and his thoughts on whether we need more of them to deal with the traffic problems we're seeing at Cape Canaveral. Access to space starts at spaceports. And we definitely need more of them. If we look at what we have today, and I'll focus more on vertical because that's really where the market is right now. But horizontal will be in the future. There's a lot of great opportunities there. But there's really only five places to go to space from the U.S. vertically. Boca Chica is SpaceX, so that's their private site. But then we've got Vandenberg and Cape Canaveral, which everyone knows is federal sites. And then Wallops and Kodiak are the other two. So state-owned, both been around for quite some time and really complement the federal thing. So a start of this model of how do we start to build out a network of spaceports, a lot like a network of airports. And so that's where I see things developing is not in isolation, but a diverse set of spaceports that can meet a growing need of operations. So we're starting to see re-entries starting to happen. And people are looking, okay, well, how do I make this work? How do I do this in the U.S.? And we've got some open space out west, but some companies are now going to Australia. So there's a good collaboration out that's broadening out internationally as well. And I know that there are always some challenges in establishing new spaceports. Those challenges are numerous. I feel like I don't even need to get into those because there are so many. But I feel like in response to some of those challenges, again, how people are trying to establish new spaceports is also shifting. I'm thinking of one company that's potentially trying to move spaceports out to sea, which I think is really interesting development. I'm just thoughts on maybe alternatives and things that we can do to open up capacity. Yeah. So spaceports, I think by definition, start with launch. And sometimes launch can be aspirational in the future, but it still is a core of where you launch or re-enter from. But what we're seeing is spaceports really need a diverse set of revenue streams, and that's like any business. And so you start to think about what other things can a spaceport do that brings an economic powerhouse to that community and brings value to the industry and brings jobs and really creates this growing space economy. So if I think about up at Kodiak, not only were we supporting government and commercial launches up there, but there was deployable telemetry antennas. So when a customer like Rocket Lab needed some temporary telemetry capabilities while they were first starting out, Alaska deployed their antennas down to New Zealand and supported their initial operations. And then they went to autonomous flight termination, and Alaska was able to bring those back. So it was a good opportunity for a new rocket company and a good opportunity for a spaceport to bring in some diversified revenue as well. And we see those diversified revenue opportunities at a lot of different spaceports. Houston's a great example where launch is in the future, and they've got a great set of tenants, our turrets done a great job of bringing in a diverse set that is space core, but it's not necessarily flight. Yeah, that idea of making a spaceport, that economic hub is really fascinating to me. And I feel like the many examples that I can think of that I've heard of over the years, they're very tailored to their location also, the customer and the location and what the sort of community needs. It's really just an interesting way of thinking of it. Yeah, absolutely. Geography is key, right? Yeah. I mean, to get to space, so geography is key for safety and for physics. But also what the community is willing to support, right? Sometimes that's easier than other places, and you've got to balance all of that. Also having an anchor, for example, if you've got a government agency or another academic institution that you can anchor operations to that's great, down in Houston is Johnson Space Center. It's a great natural connection with the human space flight. Alaska takes advantage of its geography of being on the north side of the Pacific Ocean, big open asmith for launches. And so you got to look for those opportunities that present themselves. I'm curious. We've been talking a lot about US spaceports. I'm curious your thoughts on the global growth of spaceports. You mentioned Australia. It's a great example. I'm thinking also the UK and Europe, India, there's a lot of examples. Thoughts? Yeah, absolutely. What I'm saying is much larger growth overseas than in US domestic market. And that makes sense, right? We're further along the US than other countries for the most part, so you would expect that growth to happen. And yeah, we're seeing, well, most spaceports pop up almost any place. There's a contingent here from Nigeria who is looking to build a spaceport. That's exciting. Australia, you mentioned New Zealand already has a spaceport in the UK. The one thing from a US perspective that's in a cumberment is the MTCR, so export control. So missile technology controls you, sorry for the acronym. ITAR, the whole world. But it plays, right? It plays as part of how we can one export rockets overseas. But also companies support spaceports. You've got to be careful about, because that is an export as well. But countries, a number of our allied countries already have agreements with the US, so we can make those exports. I see that expanding in the next several years. Because that diversity is important not only for our economy, but for national security. Well, you've got to be mindful these are big delivery systems. Absolutely. And we want space to be global. As more nations build out their space capabilities, it just makes sense that infrastructure needs to follow. Completely shifting, just thoughts. As I said, I kind of want to go down the rabbit hole with you. Your thoughts on what's different things going on in the space industry. So if you were to sort of pluck an idea out of the ether of what's interesting you right now in the space industry, I'm just curious where you would go with that. Yeah, so I think two things come to mind. One is, I think over the next 10 years, reentry is going to be the next big thing. And so how do we manufacture things in space and then bring them back? You know, Vardo's doing some groundbreaking work with pharmaceuticals. I think we're going to start to see that move forward. There's been a lot of talk about light manufacturing, fiber optics, for example, other pieces that you do it in space, bring it down. When we see the new space stations get established, I think that's going to start to grow. So the crude and uncrewed operations. But 10 years from now, we sit down and talk. I think we're going to have seen much of that starting to move forward in real economic ways. The second part is the space community embracing other sectors. So space tends to be insular. We tend to think of ourselves as special. There's a lot of unique things, right? But there's many industries that have gone before us. And in particular, that's really adjacent. We can leverage those lessons learned already, like from airports, but other sectors as well, to then accelerate our movement forward. And I think if we miss out on that, we're just going to slow our pace. So in addition to how airports operate and then say how we can optimize spaceports, there's things like biofuels, so sustainable aircraft fuels on the aviation side. As we get more rockets, we're going to need to look at those type of sustainable bio type of fuels or something to sustain in an environmentally friendly way. Absolutely. Right, a rocket. So there's what you think about bringing things down from space. Biotech starts to play, and all those unique facilities and capabilities come into play. Absolutely. Those are some opportunities. I'm going to do the whole opportunities challenge paradigm. You mentioned some really good opportunities there. I'm curious about challenges that you see on the horizon that maybe are of concern or care that you're keeping an eye on. Yeah, so they say space is hard. Getting to space is definitely hard. But yeah, this is not easy business. And when it goes south, it could be spectacular. So while there's been a tremendous amount of progress and success, we still have some hurdles there. So that's a pacing function. When you look at some of the existing spaceports being underutilized, that's why. But it's also the business side. And so I think that's the other challenge is we certainly transitioned over into more of mainstream funding, which didn't exist back in the '90s when we thought commercial space was going to start to move forward. But money moves things forward in progress. And so keeping that flow of investment and showing investors how they can make money in space, otherwise they're going to divert their money into other sectors, which makes sense. So moving that forward, I think the third piece that comes to mind going back to the export control, ITAR, is from a US perspective for us to move out into other parts of the world, we need some of those barriers brought down so we can make that trade more free. If I were to circle back on some of that leveraging of a broader-- where we've been in the past is good, right? We've learned a lot of lessons, and this industry stands on the shoulders of giants, if you will. But heading to the future, we've got to break some paradigms and really broaden out a diverse set of spaceports. That's going to take a broader set of industry to go do that. I've been doing some work with Merrick and some of their work in other sectors. In addition to aerospace, where they're doing biofuels, infrastructure and facilities, or the biotech, or even nuclear handling. Look at nuclear propulsion. You're going to know a lot at this conference. That's exciting to see. Because we get more vendors here. You start to say, "Oh, I need that. I need this." Five years ago, maybe you didn't. So I think leveraging this broader industrial base is going to strengthen space and accelerate that again. We'll be right back. Welcome back. It is not very often that we get to speak about the US Space Force's secretive space plane because, by design, it's a very well kept secret. The X-37B was launched for its seventh mission in December 2023. Yes, it is still up there in orbit doing things that we don't know anything about. However, just to remind us space nerds that it does exist and it's still in operation, the Space Force dropped an image captured on board the plane while it orbited high, and I emphasize high, above the African continent. It shows a rare glimpse of some of the equipment on board the orbiter. One of the plane's solar panels is visible on the left side of the photo, while what appears to be its open payload bay is visible along the top edge. Now, admittedly, it is not much to go by, and it certainly stands up to keeping the mission top secret. But it does go to show how high the vehicle is in orbit with the Earth in the background seemingly way further away than one might expect. Previous X-37B missions were flown in low Earth orbit. I thought that would be the same for this one, but no. The statement released with the image explains that the image was used to ensure the health and safety of the vehicle, and it was captured while in a highly elliptical orbit in 2024. As part of the X-37B's seventh mission, the vehicle executed a series of first-of-its-kind maneuvers called arrow-breaking to safely change its orbit using minimal fuel. The X-37B flew for a record 908 days on its sixth mission, and it is uncertain when we will see the vehicle return to Earth for this current test. And admittedly, we do hope they share some more images to continue to tease us about what exactly it is up to in orbit. That's it for T-minus for February 24, 2025, brought to you by NTUK Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.ntuk.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. 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@ntuk.com. We're privileged that NTUK 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, NTUK 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 NTUK.com. NTUK's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our 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. Peter Kilpey is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. T-minus. [MUSIC]
