Today is June 24th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-minus. 22nd to LLF T-dress. Open aboard. [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] Five. ESA's biomass satellite releases its first images. Four. Five UK public service projects to receive funding for satellite imagery data from UKSA. NATO unveils its commercial space policy. Ice Space Japan says a faulty laser range finder is to blame for mission two's hard lunar landing. SpaceX transporter 14 rideshare launches with 70 payloads on board. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] And in the second half of the show, we have my chat with Stefan Powell, who is the CEO and CTO at Don Aero Space. We discuss their exponential growth and talk about Oklahoma's purchase of their space plane. [MUSIC PLAYING] Thanks for joining me on this Tuesday. It was a big day for so many space companies around the world yesterday with the launch of the SpaceX transporter 14 rideshare at 2.25 PM Pacific time yesterday. It had 70 payloads aboard. And while we could not possibly cover all of what was aboard, we'd be here a while and we're not that kind of podcast. We wanted to check in with a few of the missions that we have been highlighting. It's a good start when you hear separation confirmed. That means your payload is deployed in space and is on its way to its spot on orbit where it can soon begin its work. Two missions that we've been keeping a close eye on both hit the separation confirmed milestone yesterday and they would be Spaceforge's Forge Star 1, which is the UK's first in-space manufacturing satellite and Starfish Space's Otterpup 2, whose mission is to dock with another satellite in low-Earth orbit. We will keep an eye on these and other groundbreaking missions as they go on their way, hopefully to a full mission success. And though the Transporter 14 launch was just yesterday, some of the missions have already come to a conclusion. The exploration company of Germany, which had a re-entry capsule for its test flight aboard Transporter 14, said their mission was a "partial success, parentheses, partial failure. Their parentheses not mine." According to the company, the mission "possible capsule" was launched successfully, powered the payloads nominally in orbit, stabilized itself after separation with the launcher, re-entered and re-established communication after blackout, but it encountered an issue afterwards based on their current best knowledge and they lost communication a few minutes before splashdown. And they say they are still investigating the root causes and will share more information soon. And we wish them all the best. Moving on now, Icebase Japan has concluded their post-mortem for their Hakuto R Resilience Mission 2 lunar lander and released their root cause analysis of their hard landing on the moon. They found an anomaly in the laser rangefinder and having reviewed their assembly manufacturing and testing data and found no issues there, it seems the laser rangefinder problem was most likely due to deterioration of performance that was lower than expected. To remediate this issue, Icebase says it is launching an external review task force including third party experts and working more closely in the future with JAXA to further improve their technical capabilities. The company says that they do not anticipate that these findings will impact their upcoming lunar missions three or four, which are planned for 2027. It's been in the works for a little while and today NATO unveiled their official commercial space strategy at its annual summit in The Hague, the Netherlands. According to the document, the NATO commercial space strategy "aims to strengthen the alliance's relationship with commercial space partners and improve its ability to leverage the growing array of commercial space services to meet and inform NATO operational and defense planning requirements in times of peace, crisis, and conflict. The strategy will support the implementation of NATO's overarching space policy by setting out clear priorities to enable improvements in cooperation with the commercial space sector in order to create increased complementary capabilities, capacities, and resiliency for the alliance." And those priorities include leveraging the use of commercial solutions, ensuring continuous access to space and space services, and enhancing coherence, specifically as it pertains to commercial providers working with NATO, as well as NATO allies obtaining space capabilities that are standardized and interoperable. It's a three-page document, so not too much, and it's pretty high-level, so it is definitely worth a look. Check out the whole thing in our show notes, which is over at space.ntuk.com. There are five new UK-based projects that are backed by two and a half million pounds in UK space agency funding via ISAs in Cubed 2, and they all aimed to harness satellite data to enhance public services. And here's a brief rundown of each of them. There is Core of Nawningham, which is an AI-driven radar monitoring to detect micro-movements in infrastructure. There is Thicket of Glasgow, and in this case, AAC Clyde Space is providing satellite-enabled biodiversity mapping to optimize land management and ensure that farmers leverage government sustainability schemes. GHG-SAT UK of London will be monitoring real-time methane and GHG to enable precise emissions tracing to industrial sources, bolstering regulatory oversight and climate defense capabilities. And then there's Phantom of Guildford, where Earth Eye is delivering environmental analytics to the rural payments agency to enhance land use monitoring and policy enforcement. There's the EO for Biodiversity of Oxfordshire, where HR Wallingford is using Earth observation to track habitat changes over time, supporting biodiversity safeguards and regulatory compliance. And all of these initiatives demonstrate how satellite-backed AI systems are integrating into cybersecurity-aware public infrastructure, enabling data integrity, environmental safeguarding, emissions accountability, and most importantly proactive risk management at scale. A mere two months post-launch, ESA's biomass mission has released its first radar images, which are nothing short of spectacular, revealing forests, deserts, glaciers, and volcanic terrain with vivid, false-color detail, all revealed at the Living Planet Symposium. Now, the biomass mission employs a pioneering P-band synthetic aperture radar and a 12-meter deployable mesh reflector to penetrate dense forest canopies and directly map woody biomass, offering 3D volumetric insights that exceed current optical or L-band radar methods. Commissioning of biomass continues, but early data already demonstrates the satellite's potential to transform forest carbon stock assessments and enhance climate monitoring. And we will have a link in our show notes for you to check those gorgeous images out. [Music] And that is it for today's Intel Briefing. As always, we have a lot of reading for you in our show notes, which are in your podcast app or over on our website, which you can find at space.ntuk.com. Hey, T-minus crew, if you are just joining us, be sure to follow T-minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. And also do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and co-workers. A growing audience is the most important thing for us, and we would love your help as part of the T-minus crew. So if you find T-minus useful, please share so other professionals like you can find the show. Thank you so much for all your support. It means a lot to me and all of us here at T-minus. [Music] Next up, I speak with Stefan Powell, CEO and CTO at Don Aero Space about their exponential growth and Oklahoma's purchase of their space plane. [Music] There's really strong leadership and there's a really solid understanding of the value of space. You know, Jim Bridenstine, he's a former NASA administrator, of course. You know, he's represented Oklahoma at the national level and the House of Representatives. So clearly there's a very good understanding at the top and senior positions of just how valuable space is for everyone. There is a lot of aerospace going on, just no actual space access. So, you know, the Oklahoma University has a lot going on with that, the Newsteric Science expertise and drones. There's, you know, lots going on in semiconductor industry, especially in Texas and northern Texas. That's quite close to Oklahoma. You know, they are interested in microgravity experimentation. There's a robust aerospace industry since just about forever in Kansas. So there is like demand and expertise in this area. And that combined with a piece of infrastructure that's actually left over from the space shuttle days. The spaceport at Burns-Platt was one of the emergency landing areas for the space shuttle. So there's like this fantastic capability. There's this big need. An actual, you know, a vehicle actually flying to space is kind of the last link in the chain to really extract value out of this and make it happen. I'm very stoked that Dorn Aerospace can be the one to, you know, be that last link in the chain if you like. You mentioned a bit about sort of the industries that would be very interested in accessing, you know, Leo with your services. Tell me a bit about, you know, the customers that you are working with. Yeah. So the customers that we're working with are interested in suborbital microgravity primarily. So semiconductor industry is one that I mentioned. The whole semiconductor industry, you know, like essentially growing a big silicon crystal, cutting it up and then itching a chip onto that and that chip ending up in your iPhone or whatever. That whole process, like the yield of that process, the efficiency of that process is entirely dependent on the quality of the input material, the quality of that silicon wafer and the crystal quality of that wafer. So we actually know from a bunch of sciences being done on ISS that crystals grow much better in microgravity because there's less convection currents and less things disturbing that crystal growth. So you get a much more pure crystal. So that's really important because that basically means that the chips you get are going to be higher quality. They're going to be higher yield. If you look at like, you know, Intel chips, how you can buy like an i3 or an i5 or an i7 or an i9 and they're all like, you know, the price difference between an i9 is huge compared to an i3. You know, they're actually the identical chip. The only difference is that an i9 had fewer errors in it. There's more of the chip that's active because it's less broken. So if you just start the entire chip manufacturing process for an Intel chip with a perfect silicon wafer, the chance that you get i9 chip, like all of your chips, i9s, is much, much higher. So, you know, it's incredibly valuable for them if they have a higher quality crystal going in the start of the process. So, yeah, so semiconductor industry in general is extremely interested in how microgravity can result in better crystals, this thing of being a better crystal and therefore higher yields coming out the end. It makes a lot of sense. The thing that we're really excited about is that potentially you don't even have to go to orbit to grow these crystals. You can actually just grow what's called a seed crystal, but you only need a few minutes of microgravity to just grow the start of the crystal perfectly. And then with that perfect seed crystal, you can now grow a perfect crystal off that terrestrially on Earth. That is a fascinating prospect. And I feel like that also dovetails a little bit into something that I, talking to Team Oklahoma about you all working together was the cadence of launch that you all offer. And that sounds like a massive differentiator. I remember vaguely two years ago when we last spoke that that was also something you had mentioned. Can you speak a bit to the cadence because it is quite amazing. Yeah, so we can even go back to that exact example. Let's say I'm a semiconductor. I'm trying to figure out how microgravity is going to improve my semiconductor processes. I want to run experiments in microgravity. If I want to get something onto the station on the ISS and to figure out, you know, does these do these changes improve the process or not? That cycle of getting something up there, running the test, getting it back, analyzing, did it improve it or not? That's years currently, like two to three if you're doing well. With flying suborbitaly, you can potentially do that in like days. You know, you can fly, you can get the thing back, you can analyze it. The analysis takes a couple of days. Talking to industry, it looks like you're going to shrink that design test evaluate cycle from literal years down to days. I mean, like it's a thousand times increase in the velocity of science. Like that's just, I mean, it's obviously just a complete game changer for them. I was going to say we don't often get leaps like that. So that one sort of speaks for itself or how huge that is. So yeah, not a small deal. We should recognize that like orbital microgravity is going to be much higher quality, much longer duration. You can do much more with it. So I'm not trying to say suborbital microgravity is going to completely replace orbital, but it's very complimentary in the sense of like, we don't actually know exactly how to use orbital microgravity effectively yet, but we can probably understand like at least the first 40, maybe 80% of the problem in suborbital microgravity. We can narrow the design space from like a thousand parameters down to like the five that we just kind of evaluate properly in suborbital microgravity because we don't have enough time. And you know, that massively reduces the problem of understanding how to use orbital microgravity properly. And there's probably some processes that actually just don't need to go to orbit. So in some sort of cases, we may be able to actually get the value of space without going to orbit altogether. Can you tell me a little bit about some of the other partnerships that you've been working on? Yes, yeah. I mean, one of the advantages of actually not being a U.S. company is that it is actually easier to serve the rest of the world. So yes, we're forging partnerships. In Japan as well, we have agreements with ANATC, which was the company that brought, sorted out all the agreements for getting virtual orbit to launch out of Japan. That launch never actually happened, unfortunately, for obvious reasons. But yeah, they understand the Japanese market really, really well. We're forging other relationships elsewhere in the world. We've recently opened up a French office as well, key market there for us too. I mean, Europe remains a stronghold for our space propulsion business. We continue to sell pretty well into Southeast Asia in general. So yeah, certainly a thriving global business. Fantastic. I think the real significance of what we're doing here is kind of in something that we've only really just recently figured out. We've always known and always talked about the Aurora being special for three reasons. Like there's the technology reason, the vehicle obviously. You want highly scalable operations. You want to be able to fly multiple times a day, thousands of times per aircraft. And that means that you need a reusable aircraft. Because you want a highly reusable aircraft, you need to have a highly reliable aircraft. And so that really necessitates like a ton of early decision making that makes the vehicle like literally hundreds of times more reliable than our traditional rocket. Like that's what's really pushed us towards this, an aircraft essentially. It's an aircraft with a performance of a rocket, not a rocket with wings. And then at the infrastructure side, which is like yes, like with Oklahoma, it's a fully licensed spaceport. A lot of the interest that we're fielding right now are actually people that or organizations that don't actually have a spaceport yet. It's really an airport, which is just in a somewhat rural area. But because this vehicle is so much more accessible, it's so much safer. It's certified as an aircraft in lots of cases. It's really bringing space capability to people that wouldn't have traditionally even been able to consider this. So it's really, you know, it's opening this up a lot. And for us, it's really like we don't want to be building launch pads. Everyone talks about how hard it is to build a launch pad. You know, the launch pad is like more expensive than the rocket. So like this is so key to scalability that we can access these not just dozen spaceports across the U.S., but like literally hundreds if not thousands of airports that could support our vehicle. And then the third but being regulation. You know, in New Zealand, we can, we fly as an aircraft. We integrate with other airspace users. We really want to be able to bring this model as much as we can to the states as well, because, you know, the, just the amount of congestion in the airspace, you know, this is an increasing topic, especially around spaceports. You know, there's as many airline flights in about 65 minutes as there are space flights had ever been. So, you know, clearly they're the much more scalable model here of many, many airspace users working together. If we really want to be doing a lot more space flight, we should be doing it as an, according to the airline model, so that we can all play together. That's really important. Now, the fourth but that we've really realized is that we actually need to change the business model of space. Like right now, if you go to market, you want to get to space. Like you can really only buy a service. The people who have the capability will only sell you the service. They won't sell you the factory to build the rocket, the whatever, you know, they won't give you that capability themselves. That really limits how the ecosystem can grow, because, you know, a SpaceX or a ULA or a Rocket Lab are probably only going to operate from like a select few places. In the airline model, you know, Boeing will sell a plane to, you know, not quite everyone, but just about everyone, which means, you know, Thai airways can buy a plane and service their Thai market. They understand Thailand, the local government, the local people, the local needs way better than Boeing ever could. So, we want to do the same, right? You know, we want to provide the vehicle, within reason, to other operators who understand their local governments and their local needs, and they can build their own space ecosystem. And that means we'll serve into an ever-growing ecosystem that's way bigger than we ever could have served, you know, by ourselves. [music] We'll be right back. [music] Welcome back. Now, yesterday was the big reveal of the first images from the Vera Rubin Observatory, and I did spend a bit of time talking about its fantastic eye on the Southern night sky, and I urged you to check out the images. So, did you? If you didn't, that's okay. I'm not mad. I'm just a bit disappointed. And I'm here to drop a URL for you. Here it is, skyviewer.app. It features images from the Rubin Observatory in high, high, high definition, and you can pan around and zoom in and in and in to your heart's content. You can poke around the image on your own or take a guided tour, which I highly recommend. They did a really nice job with it. It'll show off spiral galaxies, edge-on views, galaxy clusters, and even in one case, three galaxies merging into one. It is a cosmic treasure chest indeed. And remember that just about every color dot you see is not a star, but a galaxy. And many of the objects observed don't even have any labels of any kind yet because they haven't yet been studied. There is so much out there to learn. And really, Rubin is just getting started. So, yeah, here's that URL again, skyviewer.app. Definitely check it out. [Music] That's it for T-Minus for June 24th, 2025, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. We're privileged that N2K and podcasts like T-Minus are part of the daily routine of many 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's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are 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] T-Minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
