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Today is June 6th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. T-minus. Twenty seconds to alloy. T-minus. Open aboard. Five. Canada's maritime launch services has obtained approval from the province of Nova Scotia for approximately $1.5 million under the Capital Investment Tax Credit. Four. Dawn Aerospace receives authorization to conduct rocket-powered flight testing and commercial operation of the Mark II Aurora Spaceplane at Talaki National Aerospace Center in New Zealand. Three. GERVA Space has announced a strategic partnership with France-based Soudern Arian Group. Two. U.S. President Trump threatens to cancel subsidies in contracts with Elon Musk's companies and Musk threatens to decommission the Dragon capsule in retaliation. One. Icebase lost communication with its resilience lunar lander and was forced to conclude its mission. [Music] Join us in the second part of today's show for the Weekly Space Traffic Report from our partners at nasaspaceflight.com. They will be rounding up the Weekly Space Launch News from the last seven days and taking a look at what's on the schedule for the next week. [Music] Happy Friday, everybody. We are kicking off with an update to Icebase's Mission 2 SMBCX Hakuto R Venture Moon. At the time of publishing yesterday, you may remember, we were none the wiser about the status of the resilience lander. We were glued to the screen watching the landing attempt yesterday when, shortly before touchdown, Icebase's Mission Control Center or MCC lost contact with the lunar probe. The Japanese company was forced to end the livestream, promising an update when they had news of its progress. And that news came some hours later and it wasn't what the team wanted to hear. Icebase shared, "As of 8 a.m. in Japan on June 6, 2025, Mission Controllers have determined that it is unlikely that communication with the lander will be restored and therefore completing success 9 is not achievable. It has been decided to conclude the mission. And honestly, our hearts broke for them." Takeshi Hakumada, founder and CEO of Icebase, shared this statement, "Given that there is currently no prospect of a successful lunar landing, our top priority is to swiftly analyze the telemetry data that we have obtained thus far and work diligently to identify the cause. We will strive to restore trust by providing a report of the findings to our shareholders, payload customers, haakuto our partners, government officials, and all supporters of Icebase. And we here at T-minus wish them all the very best of luck." And while Icebase was dealing with all of that, social media was blowing up with the back and forth social media posts between the U.S. president and SpaceX's founder. It was like watching a game of tennis with insults batting back and forth over the internet. And this is not the type of story we would normally cover on T-minus, but I promise you there's a good reason for it today. The rift between Donald Trump and Elon Musk over the proposed U.S. budget played out on Truth and X, with Donald Trump threatening to cancel subsidies and contracts with Elon Musk's companies, which include, of course, SpaceX and Starlink, and Elon Musk threatening to decommission the Dragon capsule in response. The decommissioning of the Dragon, by the way, could pose a serious threat to the United States' ability to bring astronauts and cargo back and forth between the International Space Station and Earth. Thankfully, it seems that Musk has backtracked on his threat, but we will see how this plays out in the coming weeks. Over to India now, and Druva Space has announced a strategic partnership with France-based Sodarin Arian Group. Sodarin is a global leader in optical and inertial instrumentation for space and defense sectors, and under Druva Space's flagship, launching expeditions for aspiring payloads initiative, also known as LEAP. Sodarin will deploy its next-generation Horus Star Tracker on a Druva Space-hosted payload mission. The Horus payload will be integrated onto Druva Space's P-30 nanosatellite platform, scheduled for launch in 2026. Dawn Aerospace has shared on social media that it now has its updated Part 102 license from the Civil Aviation Authority of New Zealand. The CAA is now authorizing rocket-powered flight testing and commercial operation of the Mark II Aurora Spaceplane at Tawake National Aerospace Center. Dawn recently started sales of its Aurora suborbital spacecraft, and the company says that getting airborne is as much about the hardware as the paperwork. Working hand-in-hand with regulators to develop frameworks that allow cutting-edge aerospace innovation to thrive safely, legally, and at pace. And we're sure we'll be seeing more of the Aurora in action in the near future. And we're finishing up with the top five stories today with an update from Canada. Maritime Launch Services has obtained approval from the province of Nova Scotia for approximately ten and a half million dollars under the Capital Investment Tax Credit, or CITC. They say that the approval will fund specialized commercial space infrastructure and enhance Canada's sovereign space capabilities. The approval builds upon prior support from the province under the CITC program. And approximately 30.7 million dollars in CITC funding has been authorized for qualified infrastructure projects at Spaceport Nova Scotia to date. Congratulations to them. [Music] And that concludes today's Intel Briefing. NTK's senior producer Alice Carruth joins us now to share some of the other stories that we are keeping an eye on. Alice? Hi Maria, we've added two additional links today in the selected reading section of our show notes. One is an update on my NERICS laser communication products and the other is on an RTX and Northwick Grumman rocket motor testing. And where else can we find those links? Links to all the original sources of all the stories we mentioned throughout the show should be available on your podcast platform and on our website, space.ntuk.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. Tomorrow we have Dr. Lucy Lowe talking about the science experiments joining the Axiom VOR crew that's headed to the International Space Station next week. Check it out while you are traveling to Midland, Texas for the 2025 International Rocket Engineering Competition like Alice would be along with thousands of other rocket engineering students from around the globe. She'll be joining the live stream of that event from next Wednesday and will be bringing us regular updates on this show next week. You don't want to miss it. We're handing over to our partners at nasaspaceflight.com right now who have the latest space traffic report for us. I'm Alessia Siegel for NSF and this is your weekly space traffic report for T-minus space. Kicking off the week, we had the 32nd launch of Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket and this one, just like the previous, had six passengers on board. This one took place on May 31st at 1339 UTC from launch site one at Blue's own spaceport in West Texas. On board were Paul Jaris, Jesse Williams, Amy Medina Jorge, Dr. Gretchen Green, Jaime Alamon and Mark Rocket. And yes, his last name is actually Rocket, that's not a joke. For this flight, Blue was flying the older New Shepard capsule, RSS First Step, which made its 13th flight. The New Shepard booster was Tail 4, which flew its 14th flight and both capsule and booster made it back safely to Earth. From Texas, we now go to California where a Falcon 9 took off on May 31st at 2010 UTC carrying a batch of Starlink V2 mini satellites into orbit. The first stage for this mission was B-1071, flying for the 25th time, becoming the third booster to fly that many times. It successfully returned to Earth, landing on SpaceX's drone ship of course I still love you. And that was the 28th and last orbital launch of the month of May. As usual, SpaceX continues to be the most active launch provider, putting the United States at the top of the list of most launches worldwide. The company launched 16 Falcon 9 missions in May, matching the record for the most Falcon 9 launches in a calendar month, and that's on top of the Starship launch that took place in May as well. And starting off the month of June, we had the launch of Rocket Lab's Electron rocket from New Zealand, carrying out the full stream ahead mission. The mission started on June 2nd at 2357 UTC and carried the second Black Sky third generation satellite into low Earth orbit. These satellites are commercial Earth observation satellites built by Black Sky. The third generation of satellites have a higher resolution imaging capability and are able to image in greater wavelengths than the previous generation. Not long after Electron, we had another Starlink launch, but this time from Florida. That launch took place on June 3rd at 443 UTC, carrying a mixed batch of Starlink V2 Mini and Starlink Direct to Cell satellites into orbit. The first stage for this mission was a veteran one, flying for its 21st time and it successfully landed on SpaceX's droneship just read the instructions. And in another quick turnaround of assets at Vandenberg, SpaceX launched another Falcon 9 rocket, carrying another batch of Starlink V2 Mini satellites. Lift off took place on June 4th at 2340 UTC and in case you forgot, June 4th was Falcon 9's birthday. It was on June 4th 2010 that Falcon 9 first took off to the skies and here we are still going strong 15 years later. Now, depending on how you count launches, either this Starlink launch from Vandenberg or the previous one from Florida also represented the 500th launch of the Falcon family of rockets, including Falcon 1, Falcon 9, and Falcon Heavy. The discrepancy is in Falcon 9's one suborbital launch, the Crew Dragon in-flight abort test back in 2020. So if you're only counting orbital launches, then the Vandenberg Starlink was the 500th launch, but if you count the suborbital one, then it was the previous one. Everyone loves numbers, am I right? Of those 500 launches, 484 were Falcon 9 launches, so in a few weeks we will likely have the 500th launch of Falcon 9, which is also really impressive to think about. And if you like even more stats, the booster flown on this Starlink mission was B1063 and it flew for its 26th time, making it only the second booster to reach that milestone. It also made it back to the deck of "Of course I still love you" and we may say it fly again really soon. Wait, what, you want even more numbers? Right, well, with the Starlink launches of this week, SpaceX has now launched a total of 8,851 Starlink satellites since the first Starlink launch, of which 1,158 have now re-entered and 6,715 have moved into their operational orbit. For the past six months, we've been following the second Hakudo armission from Japanese company iSpace on its journey to the moon. And while we finally saw the culmination of that story this week, it unfortunately did not end the way that we hoped. At this point, it seems very likely that the lander added another crater to the moon's surface. So what happened? Well, let's start from the beginning. The Hakudo R lander was launched towards the moon on January 15th, together with Firefly's Blue Ghost lander. Blue Ghost touched down on the lunar surface in early March, but Hakudo R went the long way round on a much longer but more fuel efficient route, trading propellant for time. Now, this wasn't iSpace's first attempt at landing on the moon. The first Hakudo R mission crashed into the lunar surface in April of 2023. It was later revealed that the lander's computer misinterpreted its sensor data and it tried to touch down 5 kilometers above the lunar surface. It hovered until it ran out of propellant and then plummeted to its demise. With this second mission, iSpace hoped to correct the mistakes and even named the new lander Resilience. Unfortunately, it just wasn't meant to be. After a successful launch and journey towards the moon, Resilience prepared to touch down in Marae Fragoris on June 5th and initially all seemed to go well, but just 90 seconds before expected touchdown, telemetry was lost. Now, based on what we saw in the seconds before, it appeared to be descending much faster than it should have been, and the faces of the people in mission control gave away more than any piece of telemetry ever could. For everyone at iSpace, we feel you. Landing on the moon is no easy feat, but Resilience still managed to take off 8 out of its 10 milestones, which is great. Hopefully, the next attempt will touch down a bit softer. iSpace later confirmed in a press briefing that Resilience did not successfully touch down on the lunar surface, at least not softly, and that the lander sent its last bit of telemetry at 192 meters above the surface. The company is now investigating the root cause, but they believe it's a different issue than what caused the failure of the first mission. They found that the altitude measurements from the laser rangefinder were delayed and that the lander did not decelerate enough as a result. The company wants to incorporate learnings from this mission into their next vehicles. And to wrap up the week, we had the launch of a Changjiang 6A from China on June 5th at 2045 UTC. The rocket was carrying a batch of Guowang Internet satellites into low Earth orbit. These satellites are part of China's own Starlink-like satellite Internet constellation, created and developed by CASIC, the China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation. This is now the fourth operational launch for the constellation and brings the total number of these satellites launched to over 30. Going into next week, we'll see a lot more action in space with a number of Falcon 9 launches scheduled. Some of them will be Starlink launches, but two of them will be carrying customer payloads. One is planned to launch the SXM-10 satellite into geosynchronous transfer orbit for Sirius XM, while the other is slated to launch Axiom's fourth human spaceflight to the International Space Station. That launch, currently planned for June 10th at 1222 UTC, will feature the fifth and final crew-dragon capsule to be manufactured by SpaceX. From now on, if they still launch Dragon after all of the drama on social media, SpaceX will just be reusing the already existing capsules until the spacecraft is retired. Next week, Rocket Lab is also planning another electron launch, and China may pop into the schedule as well. United Launch Alliance is also working towards another potential launch of Atlas V with Kuiper satellites on board at the end of next week. I'm Alicia Siegel for NSF, and that's your weekly Space Traffic Report. Now back to T-Minus Space. We'll be right back. [WIND] Welcome back! There's a lot of positive space news coming out of India this week. They are ramping up for Group Captain Shubhan Shushukla of the Indian Air Force's launch to the ISS. He's among a four-person AX4 crew traveling no earlier than Tuesday. Shukla will be only the second Indian ever to travel to space and the first to visit the International Space Station. Also in the news is Amity University Shatisgarh in Raipur, which has become the first academic institution in the state to partner with NASA to establish a NASA Aeronet Atmospheric Monitoring Station on its campus. The Aeronet, which stands for Aerosol Robotic Network, is part of over 600 stations across more than 80 countries. This also makes Amity University Shatisgarh the second Amity campus in India after Amity University Hariana in Gurugram to join this international network. And finally, four teams from India were accepted to compete in the International Rocket Engineering Competition in Midland, Texas next week. Those teams should be arriving this weekend in preparation for Registration Day on Monday, Conference Day on Tuesday, and then launch days Wednesday through Saturday in West Texas. And a little reminder, we will be catching up with them and all the other teams competing in the competition next week. So go and check out more about that competition at soundingrocket.org. And I'm sure that those that are marking Eid al-Adha have a lot to celebrate this week. And that's it for T-Minus for June 6th, 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. 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 Kilpie is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you next time. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
