Today is May 7th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. The US Space Force says it's speaking to international partners about access to launch ranges. Space Systems Command has awarded $259 million to CITEC for the Forge OPIR contract. ClearSpace has successfully completed phase two of the clear mission for the UK's first active debris removal project. The German Federal Agency for Cartography in Geodesi has signed a seven-figure contract with Planet Labs. Texas approves Starbase's city status as the FAA green lights increased SpaceX's super heavy launches from Boca Chica. [Music] Happy Wednesday everybody! I hope you're having a great week. We've got a lot to get through this morning, starting with a flurry of news updates out of the city of Starbase, Texas. Yeah, you heard that right. SpaceX's South Texas Operations Center Starbase will be established as the newest city in Texas. Cameron County voted with broad support, paving the way for a newly incorporated city made up almost exclusively of SpaceX employees and people who are connected to the company. SpaceX shared on social media that "Becoming a city will help us continue building the best community possible for the men and women building the future of humanity's place in space." And the good news keeps rolling in for Elon Musk's space company. The Federal Aviation Administration has also released their decision regarding SpaceX's application for increased launches from the Boca Chica site, or perhaps we should say Starbase. SpaceX had requested a permit to increase launches from Starbase from a rate of five per year to twenty-five per year. The FAA statement says it found no significant impact for the SpaceX Starship Super Heavy Vehicles increased cadence at the SpaceX Boca Chica launch site in Cameron County, Texas. With that decision finalized, and once they have completed the investigations into the mishaps from the last two Starship launches, we could be seeing Starship test flights as frequent as every other week from Starbase. It's rumored that we could see the next Starship launch as early as May 19th if the mishap report is accepted by the FAA. The German Federal Agency for Cartography and Geodesi has signed an undisclosed seven-figure contract with Planet Labs. The new contract has a one-year term with an option to renew for two more years. The deal includes a fixed rate of all of Planet's data products over Germany. The data will be used to inform a variety of use cases, including monitoring water, forests, agriculture, socio-economics, and land use, and supporting federal monitoring campaigns and environmental assessments. Planet's partnership with Germany began in November 2021, and all federal institutions have direct access to their Planet Insights program. Planet has its European headquarters based in Berlin, and they say that this contract expansion continues Planet's growth across the public and private sectors in Germany, demonstrating the importance of space-based data in government and corporate decision-making. We're heading to the UK now, and ClearSpace has successfully completed phase two of the Clear mission. The company says this is a key milestone in the UK's first active debris removal mission. This phase has de-risked key technologies such as the spacecraft's robotic capture system. Tests prove that it can withstand the harsh launch loads, and in addition, ClearSpace developed image processing algorithms have been tested in a realistic environment, ensuring the system can accurately detect and track space debris. Some of the mission's close proximity phases have also been tested using a hardware-based spacecraft emulator, validating key operational sequences. ClearSpace has also completed detailed programmatic estimates, providing the UK Space Agency with key insights to inform mission planning. ClearSpace is collaborating with critical software, IndraDemos, PlexTech, and SpiritAero systems on the active debris removal mission for the UK Space Agency. The US Space Forces Space Systems Command has awarded the future operationally resilient ground evolution, also known as FORGE, the Enterprise Overhead Persistent Infrared Solution Contract, better known as OPIR, to CITEC. The $259 million award was made through a competitive, other Transaction Authority prototype agreement, leveraging the SSC Space Enterprise Consortium. SSC says FORGE provides the cornerstone of a resilient OPIR ground architecture, supporting legacy space-based infrared system and next-gen OPIR satellite payloads. The contract is a follow-on contract vehicle to continue the development and delivery of the FORGE framework, serving as the foundation for developing, managing, and hosting mission data processing applications. SSC says this cyber-resilient modular and scalable framework enables the ingestion of large volumes of data, efficient upgrades, and real-time wideband processing. And staying with the US Space Force, Brigadier General Kristin Pansenhagen said the Space Force is looking at increasing the ways that the United States can get assured access to space. Pansenhagen told the Mitchell Institute that initial discussions are being held with international partners about access to their ranges. Pansenhagen is the program executive officer at Space Systems Command for assured access to space, commander of Space Launch Delta 45, director of the Eastern Range, and director of launch and range operations. She says the current US launch program is meeting needs of the military branch, but the talks are being held to see what they may be able to do for enhancing each other's resiliency moving forward. That's it for today's Top 5 Stories, and 2K Senior Producer Alice Carruth has more on the other stories that we're watching today. Alice? We have two additional stories added into today's selected reading section of our show notes. The first is the announcement that Starcatcher Industries and SatLight are partnering to deliver integrated edge computing and orbital energy solutions. The second is on the Global Sentinel 2025 exercise held by the US Space Command. And a reminder, you can find links to further reading on all the stories mentioned throughout the show on our website, space.n2k.com. Just click on today's episode title. Hey T-Minus Crew, if you find this podcast useful, please do us a favor and share a 5-star rating and short review in your favorite podcast app. It'll help other space professionals like you to find the show and join the T-Minus Crew. Thank you, we really appreciate it. Stay with us for updates on the Ice Space Resilience Lunar Lander. Welcome back. We mentioned it in yesterday's show, but it is absolutely worth mentioning today. Ice Space says their resilience lunar lander has now successfully entered lunar orbit as of 5.41 a.m. Japan Standard Time today. For a lunar landing mission, being in lunar orbit, as you might imagine, is kind of a major milestone. Unless we all lose perspective here and become completely jaded space nerds, it is also just a huge accomplishment on its own. So, come on now, congratulations are absolutely in order to Ice Space. The resilience lander is on track for its June 5th landing attempt, and the countdown is on. And this will be Ice Space's second lunar landing attempt. Its first mission to the moon and landing attempt was back in 2023, and sadly was not successful. So we've all got our fingers and toes crossed for good luck on this one. And while we're all jazzed about another lunar landing attempt in the near future, two Canadian companies are teaming up to support lunar exploration on Earth for students across Canada. MDA Space and Mission Control have joined forces to sponsor the Rover Driving Academy, which has already served over 4,000 kids from grades 6 through 9 in Canada. With the support of these two companies, the program will now double its reach and also open up on-site Rover Driving opportunities at Mission Control's lunar analog test bed in Ottawa. That is super super cool. Love to see the industry supporting moon dreams of the future like this. That's it for T-Minus from May 7th, 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. You can email us at space@n2k.com or submit the survey in the show notes. Your feedback ensures we deliver the information that keeps you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. N2K's strategic workforce intelligence optimizes the value of your biggest investment, your people. We make you smarter about your team while making your team smarter. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Tre Hester with original music by Elliott 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. you you you [MUSIC]
