Today is May 2nd, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] >> T-minus, 20 seconds to L-O-N, team. >> Open aboard. [MUSIC] >> Dr. Marta Ewa-Vakowicz has been announced as the new president of the Polish Space Agency. >> Four. >> The Korea Aerospace Administration to fly a CubeSat on NASA's Artemis II mission. >> Three. >> Lockheed Martin has completed assembly and testing of NASA's Orion Artemis II spacecraft. >> Two. >> AFRL has awarded Ursa Major a $28.5 million contract for responsive space, hypersonic, and on-orbit propulsion. >> One. >> USSF has selected 12 vendors for $237 million spacecraft procurement through the Space Test Experiment Platform 2.0. It is Friday, but for our listeners in the United States, happy National Space Day. We hope you're celebrating and reaching out to your community to promote all things space. And our partners at nasaspaceflight.com will be bringing us the latest launch news later in the show, so stick around for the Space Traffic Report. Happy Friday everybody. We're kicking off today's Intel briefing with some large contract news out of the United States. The United States Space Force Space Systems Command's Department of Defense Space Test Program Office is paving the way to procure full life cycle solutions for science and technology experiments. Through a Space Test Experiments Platform 2.0 contract, the office has selected 12 vendors for spacecraft procurement. The company's program, the 2.0, establishes a 10-year multi-award indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract with a $237 million ceiling to bolster spacecraft procurement. And the 12 vendors selected for this award are Accient, Blue Canyon Technologies, General Atomics, Lockheed Martin, Loft Orbital Federal, Link Global, Orbit Systems, Spire Global Subsidiary, Specturion Space, Tyvek Nanosatellite Systems, Utah State University Space Dynamics Lab, and York Space Systems. The first step 2.0 delivery order is scheduled to begin in January 2026. The U.S. Air Force Research Lab has awarded Ursa Major a $28.5 million firm fixed price contract for responsive space, hypersonic, and on-orbit propulsion. This new contract will follow on work completed to mature advanced liquid rocket engines and will culminate in a flight demonstration. Under this contract, Ursa Major will serve as the lead integrator for a tactical flight demonstrator that aims to prove the ability to use a storable liquid rocket system for hypersonic applications. The company plans to use its Draper engine for the demonstration. Lockheed Martin has completed assembly and testing of NASA's Orion Artemis-2 spacecraft and has transferred possession to NASA's Exploration Ground Systems team. Lockheed Martin is the prime contractor to NASA for Orion and built the Crew Module, Crew Module Adapter, and Launch Abort System. NASA's Exploration Ground Systems team will now perform final preparations on the spacecraft, readying it for launch. Orion will soon be moved from the Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building at NASA's Kennedy Space Center to various processing facilities. This is where the team will load propellants and other consumables, such as water and oxygen, and install the Launch Abort System and its protective fairings. Upon completion, it will then be transported to the vehicle assembly building, lifted onto the Space Launch System rocket, and will undergo final preparations for launch. Artemis-2 is still tentatively scheduled for launch in April 2026. And speaking of Artemis-2, NASA and the Korea Aerospace Administration have signed an agreement for CASA to fly a CubeSat on next year's test flight. The KRAD Cube will use a dosimeter made of material designed to mimic human tissue to measure space radiation and assess biological effects at various altitudes across the Van Allen radiation belts, which is a critical area of research for human presence at the Moon and Mars. The CubeSat will ride to space inside a structural adapter that connects NASA's Orion spacecraft to the upper stage of the SLS rocket and will be deployed in higher orbit after the upper stage detaches from Orion and the spacecraft is safely flying free on its own, a safe distance away from the stage. And as we mentioned at the very top of the show, Dr. Marta Ewa-Vakovic has been announced as the new president of the Polish Space Agency. Dr. Vakovic's appointment comes after her predecessor was abruptly relieved of his duties. Poland's Ministry of Development and Technology claimed that PulsA had failed to adequately warn the government about the re-entry of a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage that broke apart over the country back in February. The agency also suffered a cybersecurity incident in March that forced it to disconnect its network from the Internet. On March 11, the Minister of Development and Technology officially announced the dismissal of then-PulsA President Jagos Wrocław. We wish Dr. Vakovic the best of luck in her new role. And that concludes today's Intelligence Briefing on this lovely Friday. And 2K Senior Producer Alice Kerruth has more on the stories that we're still keeping an eye on. Alice? Maria, it's increasingly difficult to keep it to just five stories every day, so we have three additional links in today's Selected Reading section for you to read up on. Aerospace Lab, in partnership with Mitsui Busan Aerospace, has been selected by the Japan Exploration Agency to supply the platform that will host JAXA's Samurai payload as part of a demonstration mission. A U.S. researcher says he won't receive NASA funding to study a Chinese lunar sample, and RAFT has been awarded another Space Force OTA for secure data transformations. Woo, that is a lot! And where can we find all those links? Links to all original sources to the stories we cover throughout the show can be found in the Selected Reading section of our show notes and on our website, space.intuk.com. Just click on today's episode title. 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. And tomorrow we have Daniel McCulloch's chat with Alice about NASA's Flight Opportunities Program. Check it out while you're enjoying springtime gardening, traveling back from RSA-C in San Francisco, or the state of the space industrial-based conference in New Mexico, or just generally recovering from yet another busy week. Either way, you don't want to miss it. It's Friday, so that can only mean one thing here on T-minus. Our partners at NSF have this space traffic report. I'm Ryan Kasey for NSF, and this is your weekly space traffic report for T-minus Space. Kicking off the week, we have the launch of a Cheong-Jung 3B from Shichang on April 27th at 1554 UTC. The mission was carrying the fifth Tianli-An-2 communications relay satellite into geosynchronous transfer orbit. These satellites are akin to NASA's T-Dress constellation, which allows ground teams to communicate with spacecraft and satellites even without direct line of sight with a ground station. This week we also had a myriad of launchers carrying internet satellites into space. The first started from Florida on April 28th at 0209 UTC. That was with a Falcon 9 rocket carrying a mixed batch of Starlink V2 Mini and direct to cell satellites into orbit. The first stage for this mission was a veteran, flying for a twentieth time, and it successfully landed on SpaceX's droneship just read the instructions. By the way, this mission marked the 250th dedicated flight for the Starlink constellation. Back in China, a Cheong-Jung 5B lifted off from Wenchang on April 28th at 2010 UTC, carrying 10 GWI Internet satellites into a polar low-earth orbit. This rocket is infamous for leaving its core stage in an uncontrollable orbit, but for this mission it carried 8 Yuan-Jung 2 kick stage, which meant no 20-ton core stages in orbit this time around. A sigh of relief from Spanish air-traffic control. Just minutes after that launch at 2042 UTC, another Falcon 9 took off from Vandenberg, carrying 27 V2 Mini satellites into low-earth orbit. This mission saw the oldest Falcon 9 booster in the fleet, B1063, launching and landing for a 25th time, becoming the second booster to reach 25 flights. Moving east to Florida, we then had an Atlas V lifting off from Space Launch Complex 41 the same day at 2301 UTC. After this mission, Atlas was carrying a batch of 27 Kuiper satellites for Amazon's Project Kuiper. After quite the delay to get them off the ground, Amazon finally has its first batch of operational Kuiper satellites in orbit. You may remember Atlas had already flown two prototype satellites back in 2023, but since then it's been radio-silenced from Amazon on when they would launch the operational batches. For that matter, we still haven't actually seen the satellites onboard the rocket, and the official ULA fleet ended just after the booster engine cut off. The company has a pretty busy schedule coming up if they want to keep their licensing rights with the Federal Communications Commission, as it needs to launch half of the over 3,000 satellite constellation by July 2026. Needless to say, they're probably going to need a push to the right on that deadline. And just a few hours later, from neighboring Launch Complex 39A, another Falcon 9 took off on April 29th at 02.34 UTC. Kuiper was carrying a mixed batch of Starlink director Cell and Starlink V2 mini-satellites into low Earth orbit. However, this wasn't your ordinary Starlink launch, as it was debuting a new booster with serial number B1094. Despite being new, it definitely had read the instructions, because it successfully landed on SpaceX's strength ship a shortfall of gravitas, and I'm sure we'll see it flying again very soon. If you were keeping track of all the times and launches, that was 110 satellites for three different internet satellite constellations launched within 25 hours. I'm sure a friend of the show and astronomer Jonathan McDowell will be very busy tracking all of them. The launch frenzy didn't end there, though, as we had a Vega C launching from the Guiana Space Center on April 29th at 09.15 UTC. The mission was carrying the biomass Earth observation satellite into a sun-synchronous orbit for the European Space Agency. Biomass is set to use a large deployable radar antenna to perform synthetic aperture radar observations of Earth's forests. This will give the scientists on Earth further insights into how much carbon they store and how it evolves over several seasons. ESA also intends to use this antenna to look at other places on Earth, like deserts and glaciers, and gather more data on how those also evolve over time. And to wrap up the launches in April, we unfortunately had the launch failure of Firefly's Alpha Rocket. Lift off of the rocket's sixth flight, nicknamed "Message in a Booster", took place on April 29th at 1337 UTC from Space Launch Complex 2 West in Vandenberg. The rocket was carrying a prototype satellite from Lockheed Martin using Lockheed's latest LM400 satellite bus. The ascent phase of flight for Alpha looked pretty much like all of the previous successful missions in the past. However, after main engine cut off, a large cloud could be seen from where the rocket was supposed to be, and a few seconds later, onboard footage showed chunks of hardware flying off. Furthermore, it looked like the nozzle extension of the lightning engine of Alpha's upper stage was completely missing. After a bit of a wobble from the visibly violent stage separation event, it looked as if everything was fine, but the big question was whether Alpha would have enough performance to reach orbit with this payload or not. As it turned out, Firefly announced after the mission that indeed it was not enough performance and the rocket and payload did not reach orbit and fell into the Pacific Ocean. With this failure, Alpha currently stands at only two fully successful flights out of its sixth total. However, the guidance and navigation showed that the second stage is pretty resilient, no matter what you can throw at it. That Alpha launch was also the 26th and last launch of April, bringing to a close the most active April in space history. In the ranking of space launches, the US remains at the top thanks to SpaceX, which as of the end of the month had launched 50 Falcon 9 rockets. Barring any surprises, it looks like we'll have more than 280 launches worldwide by the end of the year, and who knows, maybe we'll cross 300 launches for the first time. At the end of the month, we also have the return of the Shenzhou-19 crew from the Tiangong space station. Following last week's arrival of the crew of Shenzhou-20, the spacecraft undocked from the station's forward docking port on April 29th at 20-hundred UTC to start its journey back home. On board were Commander Hai Juche and Flight Engineers Song Lingdong and Wang Haotse. Following a one-day delay due to wind conditions at the original landing site, Shenzhou-19's descent capsule touched down on the desert plains of the eastern Inner Mongolia region on April 30th at 0508 UTC. During the crew's 182-day stay on the station, the trio performed dozens of science experiments and observations and conducted two spacewalks, one of them breaking the record for the longest spacewalk at over nine hours in duration. This was the second flight for Juche, logging a total of nearly 365 days in space across two missions. Lingdong and Haotse were flying for the first time, so they now have logged those 182 days in space from this mission. Up in space, NASA astronauts Anne McLean and Nicole Ayers performed the 275th spacewalk in support of the ISS project. The five-hour 44-minute excursion started off on May 1st at 1305 UTC, during which the pair relocated a communications antenna and installed a mounting bracket for a future ROGAC solar array. McLean and Ayers also installed a jumper cable to carry power from the P6 truss, located on the portmost side of the station, out to the Russian side of the station. The spacewalk was preceded the day before by an unplanned re-boost of the ISS by the Progress MS-30 spacecraft. This was performed due to a piece of debris from a Changjiang 6 rocket that launched in 2005 that could have come as close as 600 metres from the station had the manoeuvre not been performed. Thankfully, this didn't impact the spacewalk plans at all. And to wrap up the week, we had another Starlink launch from Florida. Yift off of Falcon 9, with 28 Starlink V2 mini-satellites on board, took place on May 2nd at 0151 UTC. The booster for this mission was flying for an 18th time, and it successfully landed on SpaceX's friendship just to read the instructions. With the many Starlink launches this week, SpaceX has now launched a total of 8,431 Starlink satellites, of which 1097 have re-entered, and 6,591 have moved into their operational orbit. Before too long, we're going to have kyberstats in here too. Going into next week, we have yet more into their Starlink launches, with potentially up to four Starlink launches from all three of Falcon 9's launch pads. China might also launch next week the second flight of the Changjiang-12 rocket, this time carrying a batch of Gwa-1 internet satellites. Since things in the spaceflight industry tend to be very fluid, the best way to keep up to date with all the latest launch updates is to visit nextspaceflight.com or download the next spaceflight app on your phone. I've been Ryan Caden for NSF and Natural Weekly Space Traffic Report. Now back to T-Minus Space. [Music] We'll be right back. [Music] Welcome back. Imagine a camera so powerful it can snap a pic of every galaxy in the universe. No pressure, right? Well, NASA's Sphere X telescope is doing just that. It is mapping the entire sky in 102 infrared colors, and it has just started its science mission. Sphere X, which stands for Spectrophotometer for the History of the Universe, epoch of Reionization and Isis Explorer, yes please try saying that three times fast, launched on March 11th, and every day it's snapping about 3,600 images, creating a cosmic map like no other. So why does all this matter? Well, by observing an infrared wavelength, which is light invisible to our eyes, Sphere X is peering into the universe's past, studying everything from the formation of galaxies to the search for life's building blocks in interstellar dust clouds. Over the next two years, Sphere X will complete more than 11,000 orbits around the Earth, circling Earth about 14 and a half times a day and mapping the sky in every direction. It's like taking a panoramic photo of the cosmos every six months. JPL has released a video marking the start of the science mission, and by the way, it is gorgeous. It shows Sphere X's field of view as it scans across one section of the sky inside the large Magellanic cloud, with rainbow colors representing the infrared wavelengths that the telescope's detectors see. The view from one detector array moves from purple to green, followed by the second array's view which changes from yellow to red, and it's got us excited to see what Sphere X will release in the coming months and years when it gets further into its mission. That's it for T-Minus for May 2nd, 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 we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like this show, please share our 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. You'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 teams 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'm your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. Have a wonderful weekend. [MUSIC] [BLANK_AUDIO]
