Ariane 6 back in action.

Today is March 6, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. >> T-minus. >> Twenty seconds to alloy. >> Open aboard. >> Five. >> Firefly Aerospace to launch its Alpha rocket for a dedicated Lockheed Martin mission, no earlier than March 15th. >> Four. >> Black Sky reports Q4 and full year 2024 financial results. >> Three. >> Red Hat and Axiom to collaborate on an on orbit data center. >> Two. >> AST SpaceMobile Kayhan Space and Leo Labs collaborate to reduce US Space Force tracking times. >> One. >> Arian 6 lifts off from French Guiana carrying a French spy satellite to Sun synchronous orbit. >> >> Our guest today is Tom Roder, Senior Data Analyst at the Space Foundation. And Tom spoke to N2K Senior Producer Alice Carouse about the NSF Annual Report on Launch and shared his insights on trends in space later in the show. [Music] >> And before we dive into today's headlines, we wanted to note that at the time of this recording, Intuitive Machines' IM2 mission carrying the Athena Lunar Lander is due to touchdown on the moon. Our whole team plans to stop what we're doing and watch the second lunar landing attempt of this week. What a dang time to be alive, y'all. We will bring you more on that story and however it goes on tomorrow's show. >> Onto today's intelligence briefing. Speaking of missions happening as we're working, this morning we watched Arian's Space's Arian 6 lift off from French Guiana. The rocket launched from Europe's spaceport in Kourou at 11.24 a.m. Eastern. It was originally planned for launch earlier this week, but that attempt was scrubbed due to further operations needed on a ground, which left many in our team skeptical that the launch was going to happen at all this morning. It's actually nice to be wrong for a change. Arian 6 carried an optical spy satellite called CS03 for the French military. CS03 is the third in a constellation of three military Earth observation satellites for the French military's MUSEUS program, which stands for Multinational Space Based Imaging System. The CS03 deployed into a sun-synchronous orbit about 500 miles above the Earth. AST Space Mobile, K-Hand Space, and Leo Labs have collaborated to demonstrate a collective capacity to help the Space Force quickly detect and track satellites launched simultaneously into low Earth orbit. The companies worked together to provide space situational awareness data for the five AST Bluebird Block 1 mission satellites to help the 18th Space Defense Squadron. The goal of the collaborative effort was to show that commercial data can help close the time lag between when a satellite is released into orbit from a rocket to when the Space Force can reliably track it and put the trajectory coordinates into the military's catalog of space objects. AST K-Hand and Leo Labs were looking to resolve the issue of the COLA GAP, or Collision Avoidance GAP. They told Breaking Defense that they were able to reduce the time it takes to identify and track objects, specifically in the case of ride shares or multiple deployments, from an average of about two months down to a week. Wow. Axiom Space and Red Hat are collaborating on Axiom Space's data center Unit 1, also known as AXDCU-1. The unit is targeted to launch in spring of this year to the International Space Station. The data processing prototype will conduct tests on the space station and demonstrate initial orbital data center capabilities. The unit will aim to test applications in cloud computing, artificial intelligence and machine learning, data fusion and space cybersecurity. Axiom Space says the AXDCU-1 launch will mark another milestone in the company's journey to bring industries to space that otherwise would not have considered space an option. Space Space Intelligence Company Black Sky reported two four financials and full year 2024 performance results. The company reported $102.1 million in revenue for 2024, which is up 8% from the prior year. Their net loss for the same time period was $57 million. The company reiterated recent successes including the launch of their first Gen 3 satellite, which began delivering imagery that exceeded customer expectations for initial image quality. And you can read their full report by following the link in our show notes. Firefly Aerospace held a successful hot fire of its Alpha rocket and set the date for its launch no earlier than March 15. The Alpha Flight 6 mission, called Message in a Booster, is scheduled to launch Lockheed Martin's LM-400 spacecraft during a 52-minute launch window that will open at 6.25 am PST. Alpha Flight 6 is the second mission that Firefly is launching for Lockheed Martin and the first of Firefly's multi-launch agreement with the company that includes up to 25 missions over the next five years. The launch is planned to take off from Firefly Space's Launch Complex 2 at Vandenberg Space Force Base. And before we jump into Alice's interview with Tom Roder, she has some extra stories for us today. Always Maria, it's increasingly hard to keep the intel briefing to just five, so we always add other stories to the selected reading section of our show notes. Today's a big day for launch and landing as Maria's already covered. Starship is due to try again for Flight 8 today at 6.30 pm in Texas. We've included a link to watch that live. We've also included the launch update for Crew 10's launch, an announcement from Satyx Fire Securing funding from UKSA, an update from Talysa Lanier, Erickson and Quile-Com on Space Base's connectivity, and a story from Voyager Space working with Bio-Farma company Lintek. Okay, that is a lot. So where are those stories again? We include links to further reading on all the stories mentioned throughout the episode in our show notes and at space.intuk.com. Just click on this show title. Hey T-Minus Crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership or recruit talent, T-Minus can help. We'd love to hear from you. Just send us an email at space@intuk.com, or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. [Music] Our guest today is Tom Roder, Senior Data Analyst at the Space Foundation. Tom spoke to N2K Senior Producer Alice Karruth about what he does for the Space Foundation and all about their latest space report. I'm a Senior Data Analyst. That means that I look at data from space, but also look at the people, the companies, the policies and all that goes into that data. And try to mesh it into something understandable for our audience. The Space Foundation is pretty famous for coming up with a global economy number every year. We do the same thing for launch, the same thing for payload. We do nation by nation reviews. It's all published at our website, thespacereport.org. I've always really enjoyed the reports and what insights that come out of them. Can you tell us a little bit about what you guys found in the 2024 report? Just another string of broken records. It's starting in 2020 and going forward to spend a launch record every year. And we are down where, rather than looking at weeks between launches as we did 10 years ago, we're now looking at hours. So 2024 hits that mark with a launch every 34 hours. And it's interesting what that number does not contain. That doesn't include your new shepherd's based tourism launches. It doesn't include four flights of Starship. And the other thing that we've seen is this massive shift. You know, a decade ago, the majority of launches were for civil government and military purposes. Now that market is being dominated 70% plus with commercial launch with much of that coming, of course, from SpaceX. You know, 259 launches last year, 132 of them were aboard a single launch vehicle type, the Falcon 9. Yeah, I don't think that statistic was surprised anybody in the industry who had been paying attention that the Falcon 9 is definitely the workhorse of the industry. But I do think there's a little bit of a cautionary tale coming up with the Falcon 9. We've become so expectant of it being this workhorse that's constantly doing great things. But last year we saw one of the boosters fail on landing. Most recently, we saw a failure with the second stage and debris falling in Poland. Are you seeing any kind of trends of concern when it comes to the Falcon 9 rocket and its reusability? Every rocket launch is hard. And every rocket comes with degrees of concern. I don't think what we've seen with Falcon 9 is at all abnormal when you look at the rate of launch of these machines. And especially the reuse that we've just, we have no experience with this level of reuse in space launch. We're learning new things, but overall the trend of failures is down over the past decade just, you know, across the industry. And we're seeing that demand for reliability. That's what Falcon 9 has really done is when you look at companies like Rocket Lab and United Launch Alliance and Mitsubishi, they have to be perfect on the first flight. And it's that drive that has really changed the industry. I think a lot of people have forgotten the early history of Falcon 9. And the fact that it was kind of like when my dad worked on the Minuteman missile here in America. It was initially called the Inter-County Ballistic Missile because they couldn't get it off Vandenberg. I like that. Yeah, I mean, it's true. We have become a little bit complacent really, haven't we, about just how much cadence we're seeing and how much growth we're seeing. We're starting to think, you know, these things when there are little failures that there are anomalies, but actually this is just part of parcel of space. I'm also interested in hearing about the payloads. Now, I understand that as much as we're seeing launch cadence go up, was there a drop in the amount of spacecraft that were taken to orbit last year? We saw a small drop in the number of spacecraft taken to orbit last year. But largely that's because we didn't have a couple of these massive right-share flights that are setting up your CubeSats and throwing them up like glitter. That just didn't happen as often in 2024. I expect both the launch number and the payload number to accelerate in 2025. You know, just here we got notice that down in Brisbane, Australia, Gilmore Space is preparing to launch ARIS, making it Australia's first native launch vehicle. We're going to see a lot of that when you look at Rocket Factory Augsburg going to launch RFA-1. Just several examples across the industry. As many as two dozen new rockets could hit orbit in 2025. And several of these, especially from China, are designed as direct competitors to Falcon 9. Yeah, it's an exciting time really, but also very interesting to see how this changes where people launch from as well. So you mentioned Australia, you mentioned RFA, which is going to be launching hopefully from Scotland. What else are you thinking there's going to be coming up in this next year? One of the ones that I'm really excited to see, it's the geek in me, is seeing Sierra Spaces, reusable spacecraft go up and come back from the International Space Station. What really interests me about that is here in America, especially, we have a whole lot of space ports that are horizontal reentry. And so we could see the potential as we grow Space Commerce of seeing something like Dream Chaser coming to an airport near you to deliver products built in space. That's going to be really interesting. We've seen a new year now in 2025. We've seen a new administration coming. There's a little bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to NASA at the moment, when it comes to workforce. Blue Origin have just seen a reduction in workforce as well. Do you think that's a trend we're going to be continuing to see this year? You know, time will tell on policy. We really haven't seen what policy is going to look like. We've heard a lot of things around policy, but we haven't seen anything hard and fast. We'll get to that point at some point, but Congress has to weigh in on these changes as well. And so we still haven't seen, for instance, a fiscal year 2025 budget for the United States government. If and when we get that, then we'll have an idea of what last year was supposed to look like, which will give us a better idea going forward. In terms of industrial changes like we saw at Blue Origin, that's not uncommon. When you look at companies that transition from development to manufacturing, you need a different kind of workforce. When you're inventing and doing new things, that's a very specialized application. And what I noticed was after Blue Origin announced that they were going to trim their workforce, I looked at my feed on LinkedIn and the number of recruiters on there who were saying, "Please come to us." was truly impressive. Overall, when we look at job openings on the website, space-talent.org, since 2022, we're in a growing trend. About this time in 2022, there were about 15,000 job openings on that website for space-specific workers. Now there are about 19,500 on that website. And that actually runs in verse to wider industrial trends in America, where we have seen a lower demand signal for some manufacturing workers and for some engineers. Yeah, and hopefully we're going to start to see more of a trend when it comes to investment in space as well. As you mentioned, we're very much in this era of commercial space. And that commercial space has to have funding. And I've seen some rumors online about VCs kind of getting a little bit more weary. What are you seeing when it comes to investment in space, not just here in the U.S., but globally as well? Globally, we are seeing a lot of these startups beginning to get in the fellops by larger companies. In the U.S., you'd say Raytheon, overseas, you could say Airbus or BAE. But we are seeing these startups in that matured to the point where they are of value to these larger firms. And I think we're going to see more of that merger and acquisition activity. It was up through the last two quarters of 2024, and I don't expect that to change. We're also hearing magical words again that we haven't heard since 2021, like SPAC is back, possibly. So, you know, let's see. With policy changes we're seeing around the globe, there is a real encouragement toward commercial space. And we are seeing new countries enter that marketplace and new customers enter that marketplace. And if you watch the American Super Bowl, one of the biggest ads was the fact that you can now send texts over Starlink. So, unlike commercial space, which is kind of a fuzzy commodity just a decade ago, we now have a business model that is making money and has millions of subscribers. So, this is that inflection point that I think we've all seen coming, but we never expected to happen so quickly. Yeah, I feel like that whole old saying of every company is going to eventually be a space company is starting to come to fruition. Are you seeing some trends about the non-traditional space market looking to space more to be able to enhance their business opportunities? I'm hearing a lot from the data sector. And this can be anything from Earth observation to companies that just need a really fast secure pipeline to transmit their data internally. But space is a great place, of course, for Earth observation. We're seeing companies like Tomorrow I/O come in with very specific weather solutions. They're useful. They're big agriculture and everything. Actually, some of their customers include major retail firms so they can determine staffing based on weather, which is that's really incredible stuff. We're seeing from space. But in terms of the data pipeline, that grows and grows and grows. It's calculated that you can create a global laser network that's the equivalent of fiber optic with just 600 satellites in mid-Earth orbit. When you look at that cost comparison to putting fiber optic cable to surround the globe, it's a no brainer. And so I think we're going to see a major telecom transition. And as telecom goes, so do data centers. So do a lot of these things. And so that's the real big commercial trend I think we're going to see is there's industry for especially low Earth orbit where you can see things like data centers winding up there because it's cold. And solar energy is much more efficient up there and it's, you know, well it ain't free. It's a lot cheaper than paying utility bill. We'll be right back. Welcome back. The twin Voyager probes launched in 1977 and have far, far exceeded expectations of how long they'd be on mission. 47 years is a long time to be doing science in deep space, especially when your mission was technically only supposed to last for five years. Those two, they keep on trucking. But nothing lasts forever, my friends, not even the stars. And our voyagers are getting up in years and they're running low on power. So NASA is making some hard calls on how to best proceed with the voyagers. Either keep them going with the power that they're running on now and run out of juice entirely in just a few more months or do as they have been doing lately and continue shutting down the onboard instrumentation to allow the voyagers to keep on going just a little while longer. NASA's choosing the latter, of course, saying that the latest shutdown of Voyager 1's Cosmic Ray subsystem experiment and Voyager 2's low energy charged particle instrument will give each probe at least another year of power. With these instruments shutting down, each Voyager will only have three of its original 10 scientific instruments on board still running. Barring any unforeseen issues, NASA expects that they can keep the voyagers running into the 2030s, hopefully making it to their 50th year on mission. Wouldn't that be amazing? So, friends, I think we all know and understand that one day we'll be getting some very sad news indeed about these intrepid explorers, but at least today it is not that day. [Music] That's it for T-minus from March 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're privileged that N2K and podcasts like T-minus are part of the daily routine of many of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. From the Fortune 500, many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. N2K 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 Kilpie is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]