Today is June 20th, 2025. Happy summer solstice. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] NASA has made the decision to stand down the AXIEM-4 mission launch, which was rescheduled for June 22nd, and will now target a new launch date in the coming days. SpaceX's Starship experienced an anomaly on the test stand that caused a massive explosion. Redwire has completed the integration of a Hammerhead spacecraft platform for ESA's Altius mission. UTEL-SAT has announced a contemplated capital increase of 1.35 billion euros. Blue Origin to open a European headquarters in Luxembourg. [MUSIC] And later in the show, we will be joined by our partners at nasaspaceflight.com. They will be bringing us the Space Traffic Report, wrapping up the Space Launch News from the last seven days, and letting us know what's on the schedule in the coming week. [MUSIC] Thanks for joining me, everybody, and happy Friday. Let's dive into today's Intel briefing, shall we? Blue Origin has decided to make its move in Europe. The commercial space company has chosen Luxembourg for its European headquarters. Blue Origin's new HQ will be a base, from which to manage the operation of its European supply chain and support of continued growth. According to the company's press release, this new office will strengthen its presence in Europe and play a key role in the development of commercial space services, including lunar transport, space mobility, and harnessing in space resources. This collaboration is part of the SpaceResources.lu initiative, which promotes the peaceful exploration and sustainable use of space resources for the benefit of humanity. And in addition to its new location, Blue Origin has signed a memorandum of understanding with the European Space Agency and Tullis-Alenia to foster and facilitate commercial and industrial advancements in the area of space exploration in low-Earth orbit. And so, ESA, Blue Origin, and Tullis-Alenia will explore opportunities for European payloads and/or crew members to use on a non-exclusive basis, Blue's planned orbital reef space station. Through this MOU, ESA intends to develop a closer relationship with Blue Origin and Tullis-Alenia space for the development of orbital reef, which could provide services meeting Europe's long-term research and commercial needs in alignment with ESA's recently announced requirements. Staying in Europe, UTEL-SAT has announced plans to raise more funds by issuing new shares or other securities. The company announced a contemplated capital increase of 1.35 billion euros, which is anchored by key reference shareholders. UTEL-SAT says the funds will secure the execution of long-term strategic vision, which includes supporting its existing low-Earth orbit capabilities and the future IRIS-squared constellation. Such commitments are subject to shareholder approval and customary regulatory approvals, and as such, an extraordinary shareholders meeting is scheduled to be held around the end of the third quarter of calendar year 2025. Redwire has completed the integration of a Hammerhead spacecraft platform for the Altius mission. Altius, you know we love an acronym, stands for Atmospheric Limntracker for Investigation of the Upcoming Stratosphere, and it's an upcoming European Space Agency mission. Redwire is the prime contractor for Altius, and work for the spacecraft platform was performed at the company's facility in Belgium. The satellite will now undergo platform system testing and payload integration, which will mark the completion of the full satellite. ESA plans to use the Altius to deliver profiles of ozone and other trace gases in the upper atmosphere to support services such as weather forecasting and to monitor long-term trends. Late Wednesday night, Space X's Starship experienced an anomaly on the test stand, and that cause, as you may have seen online, a massive explosion. Space X says the vehicle was in the process of loading cryogenic propellant for a six-engine static fire when a sudden energetic event resulted in the complete loss of Starship, and damage to the immediate area surrounding the stand. The very good news is that nobody was hurt during this event. Space X says its engineering teams are actively investigating the incident, and will follow established procedures to determine the root cause. Initial analysis indicates the potential failure of a pressurized tank known as the COPV, or Composite Overwrapped Pressure Vessel, containing gaseous nitrogen in Starship's nose cone area, but the full data review is ongoing. It's not great news for Starship, which has already experienced several explosions during test flights this year. And speaking of not great news, NASA has made the decision to stand down on the Axiom-4 mission launch, which was rescheduled for Sunday, June 22nd, and will now target a new launch date in the coming days. The space agency says it needs additional time to continue evaluating the International Space Station's operations after recent repair work on the Orbital Lab's Zvezda service module. NASA says it wants to ensure that the station is ready for additional crew members and is taking the time necessary to review data. Their crew remains in quarantine in Florida and the astronauts stand ready to launch when the station is ready to receive them. And that concludes this Friday's Intel Briefing. N2K Senior Producer Ellis Carouse has more on the other stories that we are watching. What do you have for us today, Ellis? Lots of launches that are planned that will be covered in the Space Traffic Report. Rocket Lab scrubbed its launch attempt earlier today due to high winds. Keep an eye out for that to be rescheduled in the coming days. I know you're going to be covering some of the payloads on Transporter 14 later in the show. That's scheduled for lift off on Saturday, and I'm also hoping to catch the Blue Origin launch early Saturday morning in Van Horn, Texas. Go New Shepard! I promise I'll share pictures if I get to see that on our LinkedIn and Instagram pages. I cannot wait to see those pics, Ellis. Thank you and yay for launches. So where can we see details on all of those stories? As always, we include links to the original sources of all the stories we mentioned throughout the episode in the selected reading section of our show notes. You'll also find those links on our website. Simply visit space.intuk.com and 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 Ian Itz talking about Iridium's satellite IoT services. Check it out while you're enjoying the longest day of the year if you're in the Northern Hemisphere or the shortest day of the year if you are in the Southern Hemisphere. Either way, happy solstice. You don't want to miss it. [Music] Our friends at nasaspaceflight.com have the Space Traffic Report for you now. I'm Alicia Siegel for NSF, and this is your weekly Space Traffic Report for T-Minus Space. Starting off the week, we had the launch of a Falcon 9 from Vandenberg on June 17th at 336 UTC. The rocket was carrying 26 Starlink V2 mini satellites into low Earth orbit. The first stage for this mission, B1093, was flying for only its third time, and it successfully landed on SpaceX's drone ship, of course I still love you. Another Starlink launch took place the day after that on June 18th at 555 UTC from Florida, carrying 28 Starlink V2 mini satellites into low Earth orbit. The first stage for this mission, B1090, was flying for a fifth time, and it successfully landed on SpaceX's drone ship, just read the instructions. With the two Starlink launches this week, SpaceX has now launched a total of 9,003 Starlink satellites, of which 1,178 have re-entered, and 6,928 have moved into their operational orbit. Also this week, we had the first operational launch of the Angara rocket in its most powerful configuration. Lift-off took place on June 19th at 3 o'clock UTC from site 351 at the Plesets Cosmodrome in Russia. The rocket was carrying a classified payload for the Russian Ministry of Defense into a geosynchronous transfer orbit. Unfortunately, since it's classified, very little is known about it. Going into next week, in addition to the usual set of Starlink launches, we'll have some pretty major missions on the calendar. One of them will be the 33rd launch of Blue Origin's new Shepard rocket, carrying six passengers up to the edge of space. It's interesting because Blue just did a new Shepard launch with people on board barely a month ago, so it seems the company's slowly building up a launch cadence with new Shepard. Next week, we're also expecting the launch of a Falcon 9 with SpaceX's transporter 14 mission, the 14th mission to Sun Synchronous Orbit under the company's small sat ride share program. By the way, this is the one that includes Vardas Winnebago 4 spacecraft, and the capsule for the exploration company's mission possible test. Now you might have noticed that we didn't cover two launches in particular this week, and that's because they didn't happen. If you watched last week's Space Traffic Report, we talked about how the Axiom 4 mission on SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket might have had a chance to launch this week after having suffered delays from two different sources, issues with the rocket itself and with the International Space Station. Well, over the past week, it seems like teams decided to take just a little bit more time to understand the situation on the station and the existence of those air leaks on the Zvezda service module. The launch had been rescheduled at one point for June 19th, and then later moved to June 22nd, but those two dates are pretty much out of the question now. It's currently still unknown whether the mission will be able to proceed in the next week or so. The other launch that didn't happen was the launch of the second batch of operational Kuiper satellites on ULA's Atlas V rocket. The rocket was rolled out to the pad, the countdown was started, and the propellant load was well underway when the company decided to scrub the launch. According to ULA CEO Tori Bruno, the culprit of the scrub was an issue with a gaseous nitrogen purge line that couldn't be resolved during the short 30-minute window for this launch. Since then, Atlas V has been rolled back to the vertical assembly facility for vehicle checks and to fix the issue. The company is now tentatively aiming for a launch on June 23rd at 10.54 UTC. I'm Alicia Siegel for NSF, and that's your weekly Space Traffic Report. Now back to T-Minus Space. (upbeat music) We'll be right back. Welcome back. Exploding rockets, oh my. It's a kind of sneaky kind of cheeky thing that SpaceX's Transporter 14 ride share mission is getting ready right now to lift off this weekend. It's an easy bit of news to miss, what with all the things happening this week. But let us hope for no such similar fate for this mission, however. Transporter 14 being a ride share mission means there are a lot of payloads aboard from companies all over the world. And as is tradition, it seems with ride shares, there are scant announcements about who exactly is on board Transporter 14. It seems it's almost forbidden for some companies to announce what they're up to until their spacecraft is launched on orbit and commissioned. Almost as if one breathes in the direction of the mission, you'll attract bad luck. Okay, that is some podcaster whining there and I'll stop complaining because thankfully for Transporter 14, we do know ahead of time actually a few of the missions. One of them is UK-based MagDrive, which will be testing plasma thrusters in space with the fuel of the aforementioned thrusters being made of superheated solid metal. If successful, the propulsive and ISAM possibilities from this demo really abound. So all the best to the MagDrive team. And speaking of a UK-based mission, we have to note another mission on Transporter 14 that features our friends at Spaceforge. Their mission called The Forge Awakens is the first UK-licensed in-space manufacturing mission and their Forge Star 1 satellite is fully integrated on Transporter 14 and ready to go. The goal of the Forge Star 1 is to prove that high-performance semiconductor materials can be manufactured in space and then safely returned to Earth. May the Forge be with them, wishing them the absolute best on this groundbreaking mission. (upbeat music) That's it for T-Minus for June 20th, 2025, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. We always love to hear what you think of our 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 a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey and the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com. For privilege 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 reeminent 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. Have a lovely solstice. We'll see you next time. T-minus. (thunder rumbling) (water splashing) [BLANK_AUDIO]
