Rocket Lab’s ROI for Neutron.

Today is February 28, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. T-minus. Twenty seconds to alloy. T-minus. Five. The Aerospace Corporation has demonstrated the first optical crosslink between a pair of 6U CubeSats in low Earth orbit. Four. Sierra Space and Merck plan to conduct experiments to identify new ways to deliver cancer therapies to patients on Earth during the Dream Chaser's inaugural mission to the International Space Station. Three. Varta Space has retrieved their W-2 capsule from the Kuniba test range after completing the first commercial space re-entry in Australia. Two. Skylo has raised $30 million in an oversubscribed funding round. One. Rocket Lab shares financial updates and pushes back the neutron's inaugural flight to the second half of the year. [Music] And on Fridays, our partners at NSF bring us the Space Traffic Report, rounding up the launch news from the last week and taking a look at what we can look forward to in the coming days. Stick around for the latest launch news after today's intelligence briefing. [Music] And we're kicking off this Friday Intel Briefing for you with a financial update from Rocket Lab. Despite the company posting a 121% increase in revenue year over year, stock in the launch company dipped after trading. I'm sure you're all asking what I'm asking. Why? Well, it seems that investors were not happy with 2025 Q1 guidance, or the fact that Rocket Lab's medium lift vehicle, Neutron, has had its inaugural launch pushed back into the second half of the year. But it's certainly not all doom and gloom for Rocket Lab. They used the investor's call to share details of a new ocean landing platform and announced a multi-launch deal with IQPS. Rocket Lab has purchased a barge that will serve as a landing platform for the Neutron, which they have dubbed Return on Investment. And that is a great name. We have come to expect that from Rocket Lab after all. The barge is about 120 meters long and will be converted into a landing platform for missions starting in 2026. As for the deal with Japan's Kyushu Pioneers of Space, or IQPS, the newly signed deal follows an earlier multi-launch contract from 2024 and brings the total number of booked, dedicated, electron launches for IQPS to eight. Across both bulk orders, six missions are scheduled for launch in 2025 and two in 2026. Can we also note that the pushback on the Neutron's launch schedule is minor? It was due to launch this summer, and we believe that the stock will bounce back for Rocket Lab very soon. Skylow has raised $30 million in an over-subscribed funding round. The company is working to deliver commercially available, seamless, direct-to-device satellite connectivity. And the US-based company has expanded its commercial coverage area with the addition of Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand, plus additional regions, after having just introduced its service on major Tier 1 smartphones and partner carriers. Skylow says it has the world's largest standards-based direct-to-device network, enabling smartphones, vehicles, and IoT devices to connect via satellite when cellular networks are unavailable. Let's head on over to Australia now, and VARDIS Space has retrieved their W2 capsule from the Kunibu test range after completing the first commercial space re-entry in Australia. The recovered capsule is undergoing processing with VARDIS payload partners at Southern Launch's facilities before it has returned to VARDIS Los Angeles headquarters for further analysis. The W2 capsule carried a spectrometer built by the Air Force Research Laboratory and employed a heat shield developed in collaboration with NASA's Ames Research Center in California Silicon Valley. The AFRL Spectrometer, known as OSPRI, which stands for Optical Sensing of Plasmas in the Re-entry Environment, recorded spectral emission measurements of the re-entry plasma environment around the capsule as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere at speeds in excess of Mach 25. Hot dang! We look forward to hearing more on that research once it is shared. Sierra Space is working with Merck to conduct experiments that could identify new ways to deliver cancer therapies to patients on Earth during the Dream Chaser's inaugural mission to the International Space Station. The companies plan to conduct an investigation of experimental formulations of monoclonal antibody therapies for cancer. The research aims to leverage the effects of microgravity to develop high concentration amorphous suspensions, paving the way for improved therapeutic drug delivery methods. New formulations could allow for injections administered subcutaneously rather than through intravenous transfusion. Additional potential benefits include the creation of therapies with greater stability, potentially enabling storage without the need for refrigeration. Dream Chaser is expected to launch no earlier than May of this year. And the Aerospace Corporation has demonstrated the first optical crosslink between a pair of 6U CubeSats in low Earth orbit. Aerospace Corp. says the outcome of the test enables small satellites to operate collaboratively in formations, unlocking new possibilities for commercial and government missions. The demonstration used primarily commercial off-the-shelf parts and a 2.5-unit laser communication terminal to perform bi-directional data transfer between two CubeSats at distances of up to 348 miles. Data rates of 312.5 megabits per second uncorrected were achieved with error-free transmission at 25 megabits. And I know people unable to get that while firmly on the ground. So congratulations to the Aerospace Corporation. And that concludes today's Top 5 Intelligence Briefing. And 2K Senior Producer Alice Grewth has more on the stories that we didn't have time to mention. Alice? Thanks, Maria. We've included links to three additional stories today in the selected reading section of our show notes. Two are on upcoming launches, which NASA Space Flight will be covering in the Space Traffic Report, which is coming up shortly. And the other is on Auburn University's Applied Research Institute's $11.4 million DoD contract for a critical space defense project. And Alice, where can our listeners find those links? As always, you can scroll through the podcast notes to find links to further reading. We also have those links featured in the lower half of the page for each episode that can be found at space.ntuk.com. Hey T-minus crew, tune in tomorrow for T-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. Tomorrow we have Liam Kennedy talking about Sen's new 4K live streaming service from the ISS. Check it out while you're spring cleaning, running kids to their various activities, or just catching up on some much needed rest time. And by the way, this video from Sen is really cool, you should check it out on YouTube if you have a moment. You don't want to miss it. Alicia Siegel from nasaspaceflight.com has our latest Space Traffic Report. I'm Alicia Siegel for NSF, and this is your weekly Space Traffic Report for T-minus Space. It's been quite a busy week. Let's start off from China with our first launch. A Changjiang 3BE took off on February 22 at 12-11 UTC from Launch Complex 2 at the Shichang Satellite Launch Center. The rocket was carrying the ChinaSat-10R communication satellite into a geosynchronous transfer orbit. ChinaSat-10R will replace the aging ChinaSat-10 satellite that was launched back in 2011. From China, we go to the US at Vandenberg, where SpaceX launched the first of three Falcon 9 missions this week on February 23 at 138 UTC. The rocket was carrying 22 Starlink V-2 minisatellites into low Earth orbit. This was the first launch of a new group of Starlink missions, Group 15, which is characterized by launching batches of Starlink V-2 minisatellites into a 70-degree inclination orbit. This is the first time SpaceX has dedicated a launch of Starlink V-2 minisatellites into this orbital inclination, as it's not part of the current Starlink constellation, but rather from the original one. Between 2021 and 2023, SpaceX launched eight missions into this shell using Starlink V-1.5 satellites under the umbrella of the Group 2 missions. These higher inclination orbits allow Starlink satellites to cover locations on the globe closer to the poles. With the Group 15 missions, SpaceX will be able to replace the old V-1.5 satellites with the new and much more improved Starlink V-2 minis, offering better coverage to those higher latitudes of the globe. The first stage for this mission, B-1082, was flight-proven, as usual, and was flying for an 11th time. It successfully returned to Earth, landing on SpaceX's drone ship, of course I still love you. After that, we had another launch of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket from the company's launch site in West Texas. The 30th launch of New Shepard started off on February 25th at 1549 UTC, carrying six passengers on a suborbital ride to space. Five of the six passengers for this mission were Jesus Kayaeha, Elaine Hyde, Tushar Shah, Richard Scott, and Elaine Bess. The sixth passenger decided to not disclose their identity, although they can be seen wearing Blue Origin's flight gear with stitching that says "R" Wilson on it. But one of the passengers were first-time riders of New Shepard, with Bess having flown previously on the NS-19 mission back in December of 2021. Blue Origin was flying an older New Shepard booster from the fleet, Tail-4, flying for a 13th time on this mission, along with the crew capsule RSS first step. After those three launches, most of the space traffic activity of the week fell on February 27th, with four launches and one re-entry. What's even more amazing is that the first of these launches went to the moon. A Falcon 9 rocket took off on February 27th at 16 minutes past midnight UTC from Launch Complex 39A in Florida. It was carrying the second Intuitive Machines lunar lander and three other rideshares into Translunar Injection. Intuitive Machines second Nova Sea lander, nicknamed Athena, is the fourth in a series of missions under NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services contract, also known as CLIPS, and is headed for the southern polar regions of the moon. The company is building upon its experience on the first Nova Sea mission from last year to deliver another suite of instruments and payloads to the lunar surface for NASA and commercial customers. The main payload flying for NASA is Prime-1, a drilling arm and mass spectrometer experiment slated to gather and analyze samples of lunar soil at a depth of up to one meter. Athena also carries a number of private customer payloads, including a lunar surface communication system developed by Nokia, which will test 4G LTE communications on the moon. This system won't just be a mere test article, but will also be used to communicate with one of the other payloads on board Athena, a lunar hopper. Intuitive Machines has developed a small hopper called Micronova, a nickname Grace, that is set to launch off of Athena and hop around the lunar surface using its own propulsion system. Grace will perform a series of hops up to a few kilometers away from Athena and up to 100 meters in altitude. During these hops, it will be using Nokia's communication system to transmit data back to the lander, which will then relay that information back to Earth. This tiny 40 kilogram hopper also aims to hop into a permanently shadowed crater where Intuitive Machines hopes to find pristine water ice that has never seen the light of the sun. After some initial communications issues post deployment, Athena has successfully been communicating back to Earth, sending pictures of our own planet and starting up its propulsion system. Unlike some of the other recent lunar landers, Athena will take a direct route to the moon, arriving there on March 3rd. Once in lunar orbit, it will spend some time performing checkouts and final corrections to align itself with the target landing site on the Mons Muton. The spacecraft is expected to attempt its landing on March 6th and remain active on the surface for two days. The moon will then be able to land on the surface of the moon, which will then be the base of the moon. The moon will then be able to land on the surface of the moon, which will then be the base of the moon. The spacecraft is expected to attempt its landing on March 6th and remain active on the surface for 10 days. The three ride chairs flying on this mission are NASA's Lunar Trailblazer, Astrophorges Odin spacecraft, and Epic Aerospace's Chimera Orbital Tug. Lunar Trailblazer will insert itself into lunar orbit and start a multi-year mission mapping the distribution of water on our celestial neighbor. Astrophorges Odin spacecraft is planned to fly by the moon and then use its own propulsion to fly by Astroid 2022 OB-5. The company aims to eventually carry out asteroid mining missions, and this will be the first of many, aiming to prove many of the systems that will eventually be used for those future missions. That said, as of recording, Astrophorges has been having troubles communicating with the spacecraft, so here's hoping that that's just temporary and that everything can continue as planned. While that last launch had quite a lot going on, let's move on to a more familiar one, a good old Starlink mission. Lift off of Starlink Group 1213 took place on February 27th at 334 UTC from Space Launch Complex 40. The mission was carrying eight Starlink V2 Mini and 13 Starlink Direct-to-Sell satellites into low Earth orbit. But this wasn't your ordinary Starlink launch as it flew using a brand new booster. While not yet confirmed, we believe that this booster has serial number B1092, and despite it being new, it certainly knew the instructions when it landed successfully on SpaceX's drone ship, just read the instructions. With the two Starlink launches this week, SpaceX has now launched a total of 8039 Starlink satellites, of which 956 have re-entered and 6,340 have moved into their operational orbit. The third launch of the day came from Jochuan in China with a Changjiang-2C taking off on February 27th at 708 UTC. The rocket was carrying the second pair of Superview Neo1 satellites into sun-synchronous orbit. Superview Neo1 satellites are Chinese commercial Earth observation satellites with about a half-ton mass at launch and imaging capability of 50 centimeters per pixel. This week, we also had the return to Earth of VARDAS Space Industries Winnebago-2 spacecraft. The spacecraft, built by Rocket Lab and based on its pioneer bus, was launched as part of the Transporter-12 mission in January, and it's been in orbit until just this past week. It consists of a propulsion module and a re-entry capsule, the latter of which hosts a number of payloads involving the manufacturing of pharmaceutical products in microgravity. The capsule also included a payload from the Air Force Research Laboratory to study dynamic plasma during re-entry using the capsule as a hypersonic testbed. The propulsion module conducted a de-orbit burn on February 27th at 1352 UTC that initiated the spacecraft's return to Earth. According to the company, capsule separation should have happened at 1422 UTC, followed 17 minutes later by parachute deployment ahead of a soft touchdown at the Kuniba test range in South Australia. And the final launch of the week took place from Kazakhstan with a Soyuz 2.1A rocket launching the latest Progress resupply vehicle to the International Space Station. Lift-off happened on February 27th at 2124 UTC from Site-316 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The Progress MS-30 spacecraft is carrying about three tons of food, fuel, and supplies to the orbiting outpost. Prior to the launch of the spacecraft, the Progress MS-28 spacecraft departed the station on February 25th at 2017 UTC. This was done to make way for this latest Progress, which is scheduled to dock to the AFT docking port on the Zvezda module on March 1st at 2303 UTC. The spacecraft will then remain attached to the ISS for about six months, adding extra cargo space for the station and providing regular reboosts of its orbit. And barring any surprises, that was the 20th and final launch of February. The world wraps up the second month of the year with a total of 41 launches, 25 of them performed by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. Coming in second is China, as usual, with a total of nine launches so far in 2025, and this month we saw the first launches by Japan and Russia who had yet to launch anything this year. Going into next week, we'll have a lot more activity, starting off with the launch of a Kwaija 1A rocket from China. The roughly 45-minute launch window for this mission is set to open on March 1st at 951 UTC. Next week in deep space, NASA's Europa Clipper will be flying by Mars as part of its long trek to Jupiter and its moons. Europa Clipper should be coming as close as 884 kilometers from the surface of the Red Planet, with that closest approach set to happen on March 1st at 1757 UTC. Down here on Earth, there are a number of Falcon 9 launches scheduled for next week, beginning with a Starlink mission out from Florida. That launch has a planned four-hour launch window set to open on March 2nd at 157 UTC. From China, we'll also have a Series 1 rocket taking off from Jochuan no earlier than March 2nd at 810 UTC. Right around that time, Firefly's Blue Ghost lander should be starting its descent to the lunar surface. That landing should be taking place on March 2nd at 834 UTC at the Marais-Crisium region of the moon. Next week, there will also be a Soyuz 2.1B launch from Plesetsk carrying the GLONASS K2 #14L satellite into a medium Earth orbit. The launch is currently scheduled for an instantaneous launch window on March 2nd at 2222 UTC. Back in the US, a Falcon 9 will lift off from California on March 3rd at 309 UTC. The main passenger on this flight is NASA's Spectrophotometer for the History of the Universe, Epic of Reionization and ICES Explorer, or Sphere X telescope, that will explore the origins of the Universe. Sphere X will be joined by four small satellites for NASA's punch mission, which will study solar wind. All five satellites on this flight will be deployed into sun-synchronous orbits, and the booster will return to its launch site and land at landing zone 4. Next, we'll have the second flight of Arian-6, this time carrying a French reconnaissance satellite into orbit. Lift-off is scheduled for March 3rd at 1624 UTC from the Guyana Space Center. Also next week, we'll have the eighth launch of SpaceX's Starship rocket. The company had originally targeted February 26th for this launch, which was then moved to February 28th, and more recently was rescheduled to March 3rd. The launch window for that mission will last for roughly one hour and open at 5.30pm CTC or 23.30 UTC. SpaceX moved the super-heavy booster for this launch, booster 15, out to the launch site for flight, but has yet to transport the second stage, ship 34, as of recording. The company aims to carry out what it planned to do on flight 7, but was never able to accomplish due to ship 33's breakup during flight. Additionally, just recently, SpaceX received a modified launch license from the FAA, including, for the first time, wording that will allow orbital flights of Starship in the future. As always, we'll be live for launch coverage and also for pre-flight updates through our countdown to launch streams. Another Falcon 9 will be launching next week from Florida, carrying more Starlink satellites. The four-hour launch window is set to open on March 4th at 6.28 UTC. Over on the west coast, SpaceX is also gearing up to launch its next transporter mission as part of the company's small sat ride-share program. The launch is currently scheduled for March 6th at 6.39 UTC, so get your coffee ready for that one. As mentioned earlier, next week we'll also have the landing of Intuitive Machines Athena Lander. The landing is currently scheduled for March 6th, with the exact landing time still undisclosed. And at the end of the week, we'll have yet another Starlink mission from Florida, with a four-hour launch window set to open on March 7th at 14.09 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. As mentioned throughout this show, especially this week, NASA is due to launch its Sphere X Space Telescope this weekend, and we thought we should take a little dive into what we can expect from this two-year mission. The spectrophotometer for the history of the universe, epoch of re-ionization and ice's explorer, better known more concisely as Sphere X, plans to survey the sky in optical as well as near-infrared light, which, though not visible to the human eye, serves as a powerful tool for answering cosmic questions. Astronomers will use the mission to gather data on more than 450 million galaxies, as well as more than 100 million stars in our own Milky Way. Talk about an overachiever. Sphere X plans to map the entire sky four times over, over two years, offering scientists a chance to study how galaxies form and devolve, providing a window into how the universe came to be. The mission will create a map of the entire sky in 102 different color bands, far exceeding the color resolution of all previous all-sky maps. It'll also identify targets for more detailed study by future missions, such as by NASA's James Webb Space Telescope and the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope. For those of us a little guilty of getting lost in images captured by Hubble and the Webb Space Telescope, we could not be more excited if we tried about this latest space telescope. I know I'll be watching for the launch this weekend and looking forward to that first map, which should be delivered in fingers crossed after about six months. [Music] And that's it for T-minus for February 28th, 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 our podcast. Your feedback ensures that we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in this rapidly changing space industry. If you like the show, please share our rating and review in your favorite podcast app. Also, 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, your people. We make you smarter about your teams while making your team smarter. Learn how at N2K.com. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Tre Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpe is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. Have a fantastic weekend. [Music]  [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]