Is it a bird, is it a plane? No, it’s Kosmos 482.

0519-T-Minus-20250512

Today is May 12th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. The U.S. administration is reportedly about to revive the National Space Council. MySpace has signed an agreement with Takasago Thermal Engineering to plan for and study the feasibility of thermal mining technology for water extraction on the moon's surface. Biasat's GX10A and GX10B satellite payloads are now available to deliver services for government customers. Redwire Corporation reports their Q1 financial results. The failed Soviet, Venuslander Cosmos 482 crashed safely into the sea after 53 years on orbit. Today, I'll be catching up with Patrick O'Neill from the U.S. ISS National Laboratory. Patrick will be bringing us the monthly update on what's going up on the International Space Station, so stick around for more on that later in the show. Happy Monday, everybody! I hope you had a great weekend. Let's dive into today's Intel briefing, shall we? For weeks, certainly on this show, we've been speculating about the re-entry of Russia or I guess I should say the USSR's Cosmos 482 satellite, the spacecraft which was originally destined for Venus 53 years ago, was expected to crash back to Earth after being stuck in Earth's orbit. On Saturday morning, it finally came back down, though its final destination is still a bit of a mystery. The failed Soviet, Venuslander reportedly re-entered over the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia a little after 2.30 a.m. Eastern time on Saturday. According to Russia's space agency Roscosmos, Cosmos 482 appears to have fallen harmlessly into the sea. Other space agencies and tracking companies predicted different landing areas, and it is unclear when or even if we'll get a definitive answer to where Cosmos 482 came crashing down. What we do know is that nobody has been reported as being hurt by the space junk, which was expected to crash at a speed of around 150 miles an hour, at least according to one Dutch tracker. So, glad we can all take a collective sigh of relief. Redwire Corporation presented their first quarter financial results this morning to their investors. The company's revenues for the first quarter of 2025 decreased 30.1% to $61.4 million as compared to $87.8 million for the first quarter of 2024. However, net losses were down by $5.1 million to $2.9 million as compared to $8.1 million for the first quarter of 2024. Jonathan Baleff, the chief financial officer of Redwire, added to the press release that, despite facing very dynamic macroeconomic conditions, Redwire enters the second quarter ready to close on our acquisition of EDGE autonomy and to capitalize on market trends in space and defense technology. ViyaSat has confirmed that its GX10A and GX10B satellite payloads are now available to deliver services for government customers. The satellite communications company completed in-orbit testing of the payloads late last year, and government services are now available with commercial maritime and aviation services anticipated to follow throughout fiscal year 2026. The payloads are housed on Space Norway's Arctic Satellite Broadband Mission Spacecraft (ASBM-1 and ASBM-2). The GX10A and GX10B payloads will provide broadband satellite coverage over the Arctic region for government and commercial customers. Over to Japan now, and Icebase has signed an agreement with Takasago Thermal Engineering to plan for and study the feasibility of thermal mining technology for water extraction on the Moon's surface. The MOU aims to conduct a feasibility study for joint technology development with the goal of demonstrating the extraction of water on the Moon. The culmination of the effort will be to install Takasago's thermal mining technology, which is currently in a research and development phase on a future ice-based lunar rover to conduct the exploration. And speculation is growing that the U.S. administration is about to revive the National Space Council (yes, the Council, which Trump also revived in 2017 after it had been dormant for 24 years) is chaired according to law by the vice president. A White House official confirmed to Politico that the administration was staffing the council despite opposition by SpaceX's CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk. Well, that's very interesting, isn't it? And that concludes today's Intel Briefing. You'll find the original sources and links to further reading in the selected reading section of our show notes and on our website at space.ntuk.com. Hi T-minus crew, if you would like daily updates from us directly in your LinkedIn feed, be sure to follow the official N2K T-minus page over on LinkedIn. If you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do here, we are @t-minusdaily on Instagram. That's where we post videos and pictures from events, excursions, and even sometimes some behind-the-scenes streets for you. Links are in the show notes. Hope you'll join us there. [Music] Our guest today is Patrick O'Neill from the ISS National Lab. You spoke to the Internet's hero, Johnny Kim. I did. You did. I feel weird being like, "What was that like?" Tell me about an interview, but genuinely, what was that like? So it was cool for a variety of reasons. One, obviously you're talking with someone who has such a decorated background at such an early age. I mean, he's accomplished so much, but he's truly a very, very humble individual. And one of the things that the NASA team was talking with me about was, let's not focus on the meme of Johnny Kim. Let's maybe focus a little bit, because everyone wants to go out there and tell them, "Oh my gosh, your background." And if anything, let's maybe talk about how your background is one where the things that you've learned, the training that you've had along the way, how that can make you a more effective crew member on station for this. So that was awesome in and of itself. One of the questions that I asked is, because life imitates art type scenario where there's a lot of movies or things that sometimes inspire you as a younger person. I knew that there was going to be some of the traditional movies like "The Martian" or "Interstellar," but one of the ones that he brought up that I wasn't expecting was "Gateca." Really? I love that movie. It is one of the most fantastically made movies I've ever seen. Yeah, it's a great film. And it's so funny too, because if you look at the way that the world is moving now as far as R&D is concerned, and even the notion of personalized medicine, who's to say the one day down the road, we can't get to a state where you can genetically dispose your child for what it is that you're looking for. And then... He has a brother who ends up being the "Gateca" version, and then he was supposed to be the lesser version, but then he worked his fanny off because he had something that he wanted to do. He wanted to be an astronaut. I think that in what Johnny was saying though was that it's not really a space movie, but it's more a movie where space is the end goal for the lead character, but it's more about human adversity, overcoming obstacles in order to achieve your goal. That's amazing. Well, I mean, a science film inspiring someone like him who has really touched on so many different facets of the cutting edge of the sciences. I completely appreciate that he probably is really sick of the internet meme. When you spoke to Johnny, how many weeks in was he on the ISA? I mean, how many days? He wasn't even in a full week. Yeah, so he was in less than a week at that point. I think he got up there on a Tuesday. We did the interview on the following Monday. And part of the conversation was, how have you adjusted? I mean, obviously space is a very harsh environment. And you know, it's especially if you are a first time space flyer, if you're a first time astronaut on station, I can imagine it takes a little bit more time for your body to figure out its space legs, so to speak. And so he was pretty candid about that where it did take a couple of days for him to get his wits back about him. And but he was also marveled by just the adaptive nature of the human body, being able to go to such a novel extreme environment and be able to assimilate and to do it in a matter of days. So he was again, I think that that's kind of the medical side of him where it kind of kicks in where you're like, well, that's that's really cool. I mean, space is hard, space is stressful, but by golly, we can still find a way to make it work. Humans are pretty darn neat. As a doctor, as an official. We're pretty cool when we don't get in our own way, right? That isn't that a fact. So it sounds like he's doing all right. And I would hope so, certainly. And he and the rest of the crew hopefully are acclimating well. I mean, they've been up there now for a little bit now. I'm so curious what you've been hearing about what they're working on. Well, we had SpaceX's 32nd Commercial Reciplized Services mission to the space station a couple of weeks ago. And on that was a variety of projects that the crew is going to be focused on. Most of them are biomedical and nature or plant biology. So, you know, those are kind of the main activities for them. They're also working on a few other more like the astronaut ones themselves where there's like bio monitors and things of that nature. So they're busy and they're also going to be prepping to have some, some new astronauts come to the space station in a couple of weeks. So we'll be having the AX4, that's the Axiom Space, fourth private astronaut missions. So there'll be four new crew members that are going to be coming up. We're talking about some of the science that's flying on that because we, a national lab is sponsoring a lot of it. So we're excited to collaborate with the Axiom team. I had a chance to actually go out to Houston and met with a research team that is from Axiom that's going to be sending a glucose monitor to station. Where it's going to be, it's going to be on one of the astronauts. And hopefully they can validate the technology and that might be able to set the foundation for having astronauts that traditionally would have been, you know, "disqualified" from being able to live and work in space for extended periods of time. So through the, you know, the validation of these types of technology demonstrations, again, maybe some of the best and brightest as far as minds were concerned that again, previously wouldn't have had the chance to go and support research in space. Now they might have the ability to do that. And I think that that, you want research like that to happen. That truly does open up access for other people and winds the aperture. And if more people, they can do great things on the ground, have the ability to do great things in space, then we're all going to be better for it as humans. I mean, I know there's a lot of research and progress happening on the diabetes front and always more work to do, but it's so fascinating, always fascinating in this job to hear how things in space are interfacing with medical research on the ground. I just, it's the coolest thing. So what it is funny when I met with the crew 10 astronauts before they flew, so it was Anne McClain and Nicole Ayres. And we did an interview and Anne was wearing a bio monitor. And you know, it's got all like the bells and whistles and obviously it's done to go out there and really monitor all avenues of her body as an astronaut to make sure that she's assimilating to space appropriately. But one of the other projects that's going to be flying on this AXIA mission is they're going to be sending an Aura ring to the space station. What are the astronauts aware of that? And this would be, I think the third time that they've flown this, but you know, if you can have a ring or something like that, that is a much less invasive way of being able to evaluate your body effectively in space. And you know, again, we need sometimes like the bigger, the larger ones, but if you can have something like that, that again, doesn't distract or doesn't get in the way of your ability to perform your functions as an astronaut, that's pretty awesome too. So I mean, I'm excited about some of those projects that are flying. And you know, I think that the AXIA team was really excited about it because they have more projects than any other private astronaut mission that they've done to date. So there's more than 60 investigations that'll happen. And on top of that, they're excited because there's more than 30 countries that are equally represented along the way. So just, it kind of brings in that notion of it is the international space station and they're doing a lot of great work. So we're excited to see that mission and being able to support it. Patrick, every time I speak with you, I always not only learn a lot, but also it feels like a present I receive from you every time. But the incredible things that are happening on the ISS and just like ready to blow your mind. Here you go. If I can, if I can do another shameless plug. So we were talking about the Johnny Kim conversation. We dropped our latest episode. It's now episode number three for our podcast. We're trying to catch up. And so this one features CNN's Jackie Waddles and Rafael Rutkin from E2MC, which is more of a- I know him. Yes, indeed. Yeah. And so they were both talking about the business of space. And Rafael was talking a bit about the Orbital Edge accelerator program that the ISS National Lab is in collaboration with alongside three investment teams. And Rafael's team is one of the ones that is putting in $1 million each. They will then go towards six different cohorts. And so we were talking just about the space economy and general how it's evolved, but then also where we're going and then how opportunities like this could set the pathway for additional startups to do create things in space. So I encourage everyone to go and take a look at between a rocket and a hard space. If you do get a chance, you do have to listen to me talk for about 40 minutes. So there's that. But you also get to listen to other people talk to. It sounds like a pleasure. So I'll make sure that we have that linked in the show notes so everybody can take a listen. Patrick, a joy as always. Thank you so much for coming on the show and speaking with me. I appreciate it. Absolutely. Thank you for having me. . We'll be right back. Welcome back. If you've ever been lucky enough to see the Northern Lights, then boy, am I jealous. But it seems that the auroras on earth are nothing compared to the light display that Jupiter receives. And thanks to NASA's James Webb Space Telescope, we've captured these dazzling displays in unprecedented detail. On earth, auroras occur when charged particles from the sun interact with our magnetic field and atmosphere. On the other hand, Jupiter's auroras are similar, but they are supercharged. Not only does the solar wind play a role, but Jupiter's own volcanic moon Io spews particles into space, which fuels the luminous spectacles on Jupiter. So using its near infrared camera, Webb observed that emissions from the trihydrogen cat ion are far more variable than previously thought. These rapid fluctuations suggest a dynamic and complex interaction between Jupiter's magnetic field and its atmosphere. But there's a twist. Of course, there's a twist. Some of the brightest emissions detected by Webb don't actually match up with ultraviolet observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. So this discrepancy hints at unknown processes at play that could possibly involve low-energy particles that are still a mystery to science. Well, isn't that lovely? These findings not only deepen our understanding of Jupiter, but they also pave the way for future missions like the European Space Agency's Jupiter Ice Moons Explorer, aka Juice, which aims to explore Jupiter's environment and its intriguing moons. And it is en route, by the way. We look forward to hearing more about these cosmic light displays in the years to come. That's it for T-Minus for May 12, 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 the 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. 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 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 am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]