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Today is April 25th, 2025. I'm Alice Carruth and this is T-minus. Firefly Aerospace is scheduled to launch Alpha FLTA 006 for Lockheed Martin as early as April 27th. Aurora Tech has opened a new US headquarters in Denver, Colorado. Maya Space has selected the Łukasiewicz Research Networks Institute of Aviation to develop the engine that will power its kick stage. Planet Labs has signed a multi-year contract with EMDYN. JAXA has released Space 2 of its one trillion-dollar Japanese yen 10-year strategic space fund. Our partners at NSF have the weekly space traffic report for you later in the show, rounding up the space launch news from the last seven days and taking a look ahead at what's to come this week. Happy Friday everybody! Let's dive into today's Intel briefing kicking off with news out of Japan. The Japanese Space Agency JAXA has released Phase 2 of its one trillion Japanese yen 10-year strategic space fund. For those wanting to keep up with the currency exchange, one trillion Japanese yen is approximately US$6.5 billion. The fund is aimed at bolstering Japan's space capabilities and will focus on advancing key technologies and supporting projects that will enhance the country's position in space exploration and innovation. The number of funded projects will increase to a total of around 140, expanding the fund's reach to include not only already established sectors but also new and emerging space services. The initiative is part of Japan's broader effort to strengthen its space sector and establish long-term technological leadership in the industry. According to JAXA, Phase 2 will build on earlier groundwork with a particular emphasis on technology advancements that drive Japan's strategic objectives in space. The lab has signed a multi-year contract with European Geospatial Intelligence Platform, EMDYN. Through this relationship, EMDYN will use Planet's global satellite imagery SkySat satellites to monitor activity across large geographical regions. The satellites will be used to monitor border movements, infrastructure development or maritime patterns and capture high-resolution images of events as they unfold. By combining planet's Earth observation capabilities with MDIN's analytics and mission-tailored intelligence platform, MDIN plans to deliver a solution for organisations that operate in high-stakes environments where informed decisions must be made with speed, clarity and confidence. French launch company Maya Space has selected the Lucasavage Research Networks Institute of Aviation to develop the engine that will power its Calibri kick stage. Maya Space is a subsidiary of Ariane Group and is developing a two-stage rocket called Maya. Maya Space expects to conduct its first Maya rocket launch in 2026 from the former Soyuz site at the Guyana Space Center. Aurora Tech has opened a new US headquarters in Denver, Colorado. The German wildfire monitoring company says its expansion to the US marks an important milestone in its mission to support wildfire resilience in America. The Denver office will serve as a central hub connecting US wildfire emergency services, utility providers and government agencies with Aurora Tech's technology. The company has a network of over 40 satellites that operate in low-Earth and geostationary orbits. The constellation can detect heat anomalies and emerging fires as they erupt, mapping their location, severity and speed of spread. The expansion to the US is already generating positive momentum, with Lamia County, Colorado signing on as one of Aurora Tech USA's first customers in its wildfire solution co-op program. Firefly Aerospace is scheduled to launch the Alpha FLTA 006 mission for Lockheed Martin as early as April 27. The mission is the first of Firefly's multi-launch agreement with Lockheed Martin that includes up to 25 missions over the next five years. This dedicated launch is for Lockheed Martin's LM400 tech demo to prove out the risk reduction and power finding efforts the company has done for its multi-mission satellite bus. FLTA 006 will further validate Alpha's ability to take customers directly to their preferred orbits as the only operational one metric ton rocket. That concludes today's Intel briefing, but fear not, N2K producer Liz Stokes has more on the stories that didn't make today's headlines. Liz? Thanks Alice. Check out the links to two additional articles on Booz Allen and Meta's AI Vision Language Model Demonstration, and South China Morning Post's piece on Shanghai's ambition in the commercial space sector. Interesting Liz, can you please remind us all where those links are found? Links to further reading on all of the stories mentioned throughout the show can be found in the selected reading section of our show notes and on our website space.n2k.com. Thanks for that. Hey Team Miners crew, tuning tomorrow for Team Miners Deep Space, our show for extended interviews, special editions and deep dives with some of the most influential professionals in the space industry. Tomorrow we have former NASA astronaut Christopher Ferguson and his mentee Victus Patel talking about the Astronaut Scholarship Foundation's mentorship program. Check it out while you're working off all that Easter candy that you've consumed in the last seven days, or continue to consume Easter candy. It can't be just me, right? You don't want to miss it. . It's Friday, so that can only mean one thing. Our partners at nasaspaceflight.com have the Weekly Space Traffic Report. I'm Alicia Siegel for NSF and this is your Weekly Space Traffic Report for Team Miners Space. Starting off the week on April 18th, a Cheonjung 6A launched from China. Lifting off from a foggy Taiwan satellite launch center at 2251 UTC, the rocket carried six satellites into a sun synchronous orbit. According to official sources, the purpose of these satellites is to monitor the space environment and to perform related testing. And that's pretty much all we know about the payloads. Next up, a spaceship departed from the International Space Station. On April 19th at 2157 UTC, the Soyuz MS-26 spacecraft undocked from the Ross Viet module on the Russian side of the space station. On board were Russian cosmonauts Alexei Ovchinin and Yvonne Wagner alongside NASA astronaut Don Pettit. Ovchinin was the commander on this flight and has also served as station commander since early March. He handed over the post to Japanese astronaut Takuya Onishi the day before he left the station. Nearly three and a half hours after undocking, the Soyuz capsule descended under its parachute and touched down on the steps of Kazakhstan. By that time, it was April 20th, which also happened to be Don Pettit's 70th birthday. But unfortunately, it seemed like he wasn't feeling so well as the cameras avoided him after he was taken out of the capsule. He saw this coming and explained it during an interview a few days earlier. "The very first thing I'm going to do when I get to Earth will probably be empty the contents of my stomach. This is a physiological thing that affects different people different ways. Some people can land and go out to eat pizza and dance and when I land, it takes me about 24 hours to feel like I'm a human being again." Now that isn't selling the best way to celebrate your 70th birthday, but he's a pro at this and he knows best. Hopefully, he felt much better soon thereafter and at least enjoyed a slice of cake. With this flight, the trio added 220 days in space to their careers. Pettit completed his fourth space flight, logging a total of 590 days in orbit. And if you count the aborted Soyuz MS-10 mission in 2018, this was also the fourth flight of Uvchinan, who has now spent 595 days in space. Meanwhile, Wagner completed his second flight, fulfilling 416 days in orbit. India's SpadeX satellite successfully docked in space again. To clarify, the satellites docked successfully in January, completing India's very first docking in orbit, but this week they did it again. The two satellites of the Space Docking Experiment, or SpadeX, were launched at the end of last year to test the technology needed for rendezvous and docking. The mission completed its first successful docking a few weeks later, checking off a very important milestone for India's Gagan Yon human spaceflight program and the upcoming Chandrayaan-4 lunar sample return mission. Both programs require these capabilities. But docking was just the first part of the mission. On March 13, the two satellites undocked and went their own separate ways. Now, this might seem trivial, but ISRO thoroughly simulated and tested everything on the ground to make sure that they would end up with two healthy spacecraft afterwards. Then, on April 20, the spacecraft docked again. This time, they did it fully automated without the manual hold point at 3 meters that was used during the first docking back in January. The next day, the satellites performed a power transfer experiment while docked. They were supposed to test power transfer during the first docking, but that didn't happen as ISRO suspected a small misalignment of the power transfer ports. On this second attempt, ISRO got to implement a few lessons learned during the first attempt. And it worked! Electricity was transferred between the satellites for four minutes, and with that, ISRO managed to complete an important milestone in the SPADE-X mission. Now, it's likely that the two spacecraft will separate again, as ISRO plans for the satellites to operate their payloads for up to two years after the docking experiment is completed. The first Falcon 9 of the week lifted off from California on April 20 at 1229 UTC. The payload on this mission was the tenth batch of SPY satellites for the U.S. National Reconnaissance Office's proliferated architecture, also known as "Star Shield." This was also the first mission under the National Security Space Launch Phase 3, Lane 1 contract awarded in October of last year. The mission was flown by booster B-1082 on its 12th flight. It successfully landed on the deck of SPACE-X's drone ship Of Course I Still Love You, ready to be prepared for its next mission. Later that day, NASA's Lucy spacecraft flew by asteroid Donald Johansson. The spacecraft is currently on its way to study the Trojan asteroids that lead in trail Jupiter in its orbit around the Sun. The mission was named after the famous fossilized remains of an early pre-human ancestor found in Ethiopia in 1974. While this 3.2 million-year-old skeleton taught us a lot about our own evolution, NASA hopes the Lucy mission will reveal more about the origins of the planets in our solar system. Before it reaches Jupiter's orbit, the spacecraft has to fly through the asteroid belt. There, it whizzed past a 150 million-year-old asteroid named after Donald Johansson, the paleontologist who discovered the Lucy fossil over 50 years ago. Its closest approach was on April 20 at 1751 UTC, when the spacecraft flew by it at a distance of 960 kilometers. Just prior to that, the spacecraft pointed its Lucy Long Range Reconnaissance Imager, or Lallori camera, at the asteroid and sent back highly detailed images as it approached. Teams noticed the asteroid varied in brightness in earlier observations, which indicated an elongated shape. That's exactly what Lucy found, but it seems that the asteroid is slightly larger than expected. It's roughly 8 kilometers long and 3.5 kilometers across at its widest point. The asteroid shape is known as a contact binary. The result of two smaller asteroids that collided and merged together to form a single body. But the geology of the neck where the two lobes join is somewhat puzzling. It looked something like two stacked ice cream cones. The Lallori images are only the beginning. Lucy collected much more data that astronomers can use to study Donald Johansson as well as some color images and even some in infrared. NASA estimates that it will take up to a week to download all of this data. The spacecraft will now continue on its journey to the Trojans, where it's expected to arrive at its first target in August of 2027. Lucy will travel through the rest of the asteroid belt for much of this year, but it's not expected to encounter another asteroid there. As it turns out, the asteroid belt is mostly empty space and much sparser than you might imagine. Back on Earth, a Falcon 9 took to the skies from the Kennedy Space Center on April 21st to send the CRS-32 resupply mission to the International Space Station. The rocket lifted off at 8.15 UTC to send the Dragon capsule on its way to the ISS. SpaceX used booster B-1092 for this mission, which ended its third flight by successfully touching down on landing zone 1. The Dragon flying this mission is C-209, which is visiting the station for its fifth time. On this mission, it's outfitted with a set of upgraded drug parachutes that feature stronger joints and ribbons. According to SpaceX, there's nothing wrong with the previous design, but the company saw an opportunity to improve the parachutes, so it did. Dragon arrived at the ISS the next day, docking at the Zenith, or space-facing, port of the Harmony module, and as usual, the delivery included new science payloads as well as food and supplies for the crew -- more than 3,000 kilograms of it, in fact. But NASA had to adjust the cargo load for this mission, following the cancellation of the NG-22 cargo mission. If you remember from a few weeks ago, this mission was scrapped after the Cygnus spacecraft for this mission was damaged in shipping. With the station's food supplies already strained from schedule changes after Starliner's failure last year, the Cygnus issue came at a bad time for NASA. To compensate, the agency had to offload some science payloads and prioritize shelf-stable food, meaning the astronauts didn't get as much fresh fruit and vegetables as they normally would on a normal resupply mission. Instead, NASA sent up 1,262 tortillas, a staple in an astronaut's diet. The new supplies should last until the end of summer. One of the science payloads that made it onto this mission is an atomic clock for the European Space Agency that will study Einstein's theory of general relativity. The payloads that didn't make it will get a chance to fly on the next cargo flight, or maybe even onboard crew 11 in July. Next, we had the launch of SpaceX's Bandwagon 3 mission. Falcon 9 lifted off at 48 minutes past midnight UTC on April 22 for a space launch complex 40 in Florida. The rocket carried three payloads into low Earth orbit for the third mission of SpaceX's Bandwagon rideshare program. This differs from the company's transporter rideshare program, which focuses specifically on sun-synchronous orbits. The payloads on this mission were a couple of South Korean radar reconnaissance satellites, a weather satellite built by Tomorrow.io, and an experimental reentry capsule called Phoenix for the German company Atmos. Phoenix features an inflatable heat shield, and it seems like it worked. Unfortunately, last minute changes to the mission's trajectory meant that Atmos wasn't able to track Phoenix through the final stages of descent and recover the capsule after sposh-down, but they declared the mission a success based on the data that they did get. Bandwagon 3 was launched by booster B-1090, which flew for a third time. It landed successfully on landing zone 2, right beside the booster from CRS 32, which had touched down on LZ-1 just hours before. It's not often that we get to see back-to-back landings at the Cape. We also had a crew launch from China this week. On April 24, the Shenzhou-20 mission lifted off from the Zhou Chuan satellite launch center, carrying a crew of three up to China's Tianjiang space station. The commander of this mission is Chen Dong, a former Chinese Air Force pilot born in 1978. Dong is flying for the third time, previously flying on Shenzhou-11 and 14, and becoming the third Chinese astronaut to log this number of flights. He's joined by two first-time flyers, Chen Zhongwei, who was born in 1984 and is also a former Air Force pilot, and Wang Jie, an engineer at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, who was born in 1989. The three are expected to stay on the station for about half a year. They replaced the Shenzhou-19 crew, who are scheduled to come back to Earth next week, with the landing scheduled for 604 UTC on April 29. And wrapping up the week, we had a Starlink mission on April 25. Falcon 9 lifted off from the Cape, carrying 28 Starlink V2 mini-satellites into low Earth orbit. The booster for this mission was B-1069, which flew for the 23rd time. It landed successfully on the deck of a shortfall of gravitas. With this mission, SpaceX has now launched a total of 8,344 Starlink satellites. Of these, 1,089 have returned back to Earth, and 6,576 are now in their operational orbits. Next week promises to be a busy one, with launches around the world and a spacewalk. We're expecting five Starlink launches from SpaceX, three from Florida and two from Vandenberg, and it also seems like ULA might try to launch the first operational flight for Amazon's Project Kuiper again. This mission scrubbed a few weeks ago and has been rescheduled a few times since. Hopefully the weather cooperates this time and Atlas V can take to the skies. Another mission that's been rescheduled a few times is the Message in a Booster mission on Firefly's Alpha rocket. It's back on the schedule for next week, with lift off from Vandenberg scheduled no earlier than Sunday. We may also get more missions from China, including one on the country's heavy-lift Chongjiang 5B rocket on Monday. On Tuesday, ESA plans to launch its biomass satellite at Top of Vegas Sea from French Guiana. On May 1, NASA astronauts Anne McClain and Nicole Ayers are set to step outside of the ISS for their spacewalk. Their goal is to relocate an antenna and prepare the station for the installation of a new set of solar arrays. If you want the latest information on all of these events, check out NSF's next spaceflight app and website. We've recently added a feature in partnership with Flight Club to simulate the flight path of rockets. The app is free to download, so why not give it a try and tell us what you think? I'm Alessia Segal for NSF and that's your weekly Space Traffic Report. Now back to T-Minus Space. . We'll be right back. Welcome back. It's been a while since we had an update from iSpace on their latest lunar land mission, so we were excited to receive the news late yesterday that resilience has successfully completed all deep space orbital manoeuvres. The mission launched back in January and had a long list of pre-landing milestones that iSpace wanted to reach. iSpace says that the completion of the deep space manoeuvres marks the sixth milestone of Mission 2, also known as SMBC times Hakuto R. Venture Moon. iSpace engineers performed the final orbital manoeuvre from the Mission Control Centre in Tokyo, Japan. In total, the resilience lunar lander has completed eight orbital control manoeuvres. Resilience is now maintaining a stable attitude in its planned orbit and mission operations specialists are now preparing for the Mission 2 milestone success seven, entering lunar orbit. The resilience lander is expected to enter lunar orbit on May 7th. Let's go touchdown. Is that a saying in American football or did I just make it up? I'm actually more of an actual touchdown as in try gal myself. Only the brave play rugby. That's it for T-minus for April 25th, 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 that 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 also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com. We privileged that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine of many 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. 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'm N2K's senior producer Alice Carruth. Thanks for listening this week. We hope you have a great weekend and I hope you'll join us next week when Maria Varmazis is back on the mic. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] T minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]
