Today is July 14th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-minus. 22nd to LOS, T-dress. Open aboard. [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] China has rolled out its new generation of medium-sized launch vehicles. [INAUDIBLE] SpaceX launched an Israeli government-funded communication satellite into orbit on Sunday. I launched Trailblazer, Optus, HEO, In-of-War Technologies, and the Defense Science and Technology Group to build, launch, and operate a sovereign Australian low-Earth orbit satellite. Firefly Aerospace to propose an initial public offering of shares of its common stock. The AX4 crew has undocked from the International Space Station and has started its return to Earth. [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] Our guest today is Patrick O'Neill, Public Affairs and Outreach Lead at the International Space Station US National Laboratory. And as always, Patrick will be bringing us the monthly update on what's going on on the ISS later in the show. So stick around to find out more. [MUSIC PLAYING] Happy Monday, everybody. Thanks for joining me. Let's get into today's Intel briefing. First up, SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft undocked at 7.15 AM Eastern time from the space-facing port of the International Space Station's Harmony module earlier today, carrying the AX4 crew. And the spacecraft is carrying private astronauts Peggy Whitson, Shubhan Shushukla, Swavoj Ujnaynski, Kavish Niewski, and Tibor Kapu. It's also returning with more than 580 pounds of cargo, including NASA hardware and data from over 60 experiments conducted during the mission. Dragon is slowly maneuvering away from the station into an orbital track that will return the crew and its cargo safely to Earth. It's targeting a splashdown off the coast of California tomorrow. That would be Tuesday, July 15. If you want to invest in the first commercial company to successfully land on the moon, your chance is coming up. Firefly Aerospace has announced its intention to go public. The company filed a registration statement on Form S1 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission related to a proposed initial public offering of its shares of its common stock. The number of shares to be offered and the price range for the proposed offering have not yet been determined. Firefly intends to list its common stock on the NASDAQ global market under the ticker symbol, quite simply, Fly. We're seeing a real push for nations to develop sovereign capabilities of late. The next three stories really cover that angle well. First up, we'll start in Australia, where iLaunch Trailblazer is partnering with Optus, HEO, In-of-War Technologies, and the Department of Defense's Defense, Science, and Technology Group, all to build, launch, and operate a sovereign, Australian, low-Earth orbit satellite. This satellite will carry two advanced payloads developed through the iLaunch Trailblazer University's program for space domain awareness and advanced connectivity. It will be manufactured by In-of-War Technologies at Lot 14 in Adelaide, South Australia and operated by Optus from its Bellrose Space Operations Center in Sydney. The spacecraft is set to launch in early 2028. Next up, SpaceX launched an Israeli government-funded communications satellite into orbit on Sunday. Israel's Innovation, Science, and Technology Ministry has invested around $200 million in the advanced satellite since 2018 in close collaboration between Israel Aerospace Industries and the Israeli Space Agency. The JOR-1 is set to operate in a geostationary orbit roughly 36,000 kilometers above Earth. And we've included a link in the selected reading section of our show notes to a Jerusalem Post article indicating that the JOR-1 is the start of Israel's push for sovereign capabilities in space. And China has rolled out its new generation of medium-sized launch vehicles. According to the China Manned Space Agency, a Tianzhou-9 cargo spacecraft and a Long March 7 Y-10 carrier rocket was transported vertically to the launch pad at the Wenchang spacecraft launch site in South China's Hainan Province on Saturday. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation says that the spacecraft has a low Earth orbit payload capacity of 14 tons, which matches the mass requirements for the Tianzhou cargo spacecraft to deliver supplies to the space station. The Tianzhou-9 is the fourth cargo spacecraft in the application and development phase of China's space station. It'll carry around six and a half tons of supply materials, including consumables, propellants, and application experimental equipment to support the in-orbit life and workings of the taikonauts on the Tiangong space station. [MUSIC PLAYING] And that concludes today's Intel Briefing. As a reminder, all of the original sources of the stories that I've covered throughout the show today can be found in the selected reading section of our show notes. Hello, hello, 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. And if you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do here, we are @t-minusdaily on Instagram. That is where we post videos and pictures from events, excursions, and even sometimes from behind the scenes treats. Links are in the show notes. Hope you will join us there. [MUSIC PLAYING] Last week, I caught up with Patrick O'Neill, who is the Public Affairs and Outreach Lead at the International Space Station US National Lab to find out what he's been up to and what's going on on the ISS. So earlier this week, I was out over at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Had the opportunity to meet with the crew 11 astronauts that are going to be going up in a couple of weeks. So mainly, it was Mike Fink and Zena Cardman. And it was interesting to get their perspectives, because Mike has been with the NASA astronaut program since the mid '90s. And then Zena, this is going to be her first flight. So you have this unique juxtaposition between the two. And I look at Mike, and I think myself, goodness gracious, he has been there through the totality of the ISS program. So he flew in 2004. He flew in 2008. And the mission that he was on in 2011 was when they deemed the space station complete. And he has not flown since. So now fast forward 14 years, he has the ability to go and live and work on a space station that he was instrumental in helping to build. And so now he gets to be up there for a very long duration mission, where they're going to be sporting a lot of different types of R&D. So again, it's really exciting to see someone who has been through the trials and tribulations of all aspects of the space station program, and now having the opportunity to see him go back up there after, again, a lot of the hard work that he's done to see it through to this point. Yeah, I was going to say, it's a bit of a, almost a victory lap. But also, what, I mean, just what a great story that is too. Not, I mean, a lot of crew worked on building the ISS. And not everyone gets that opportunity. So I'm really glad that he's getting that, because that's got to be so validating. And I can't wait to hear his reflections from Orbit about what it's like to be up there again, seeing how it's been since 2011. My goodness, a lot, well, it's going to be very lived in at this point. And that's some of the things that he and I were talking about, too, was when he was out there in 2011, they did a little bit of research, but it wasn't a ton of research, because the main job of a lot of the astronauts when they were going there was to assemble the space station, put everything together. And when they had a little bit of additional time, let's do some R&D off to the side. And so now his job is to go up there and support all this research that has now been built up over the years. And not just the research, but one of the questions I was asking him was about the excitement of all the new facilities that are up there. Since that timeframe, 14 years, now there's more than 30-plus commercially owned and operated facilities on the space station. And they now span such a myriad of scientific discipline. And now he gets the chance to go out there and partake in all that. And then now you have also Xena, who is going to be this is her first space flight mission. And she's someone who has prior to being an astronaut was had experience in living and working in also extreme environments like Antarctica. She did confirm, yes, it's cold out there. But you learn quite a bit. And so again, it's going to be great to go out there and see two very different types of astronauts, but still being able to go out there and support the mission and being able to support a lot of great research that's going to be flying over the next few months. Yeah, I cannot wait to hear their reflections and the different, comparing, contrasting those perspectives and how meaningful it must be to both of them in different ways. That's going to be just fascinating. So speaking of the science going up with them, is there can you give us a little preview of what's coming? Because I'm sure there's a lot, but any things that are notable that you want to highlight? I can certainly give you some insights. So typically with the crew missions, we don't have a lot of science that flies up. Normally, we send just the astronauts and some of the basic essentials, and then down the road we'll have commercial resupply services missions. And that's no different with this one. There's a couple of projects that are flying with them, like plant biology investigations, some yeast investigations. But then down the road in a couple of weeks, we'll be having SpaceX CRS-33. That one's going to be packed with a lot of fun goodies. And then we'll have NG-23, which will be flying about a month or so after that, also packed with a lot of research. And so some of the investigations that the team will be supporting during the mission, we'll definitely be looking at a lot of biomedical research, a lot of in-space production applications. There'll be some research from the National Science Foundation, which is focused, you know, working with the National Science Foundation is great because they fund a lot of fundamental research, which allows for us to then focus on more applied research. And so they'll be supporting investigations in both tissue engineering, as well as in transport phenomena and fluid dynamics. There'll be even student-led investigations that are looking at genetics. So again, it really is kind of across the board. Oh, one of the things I'm excited about, the crew is not really going to be working that much with it, but they still have to install it. But there's going to be a couple of different tech devs and demonstrations that are me flying that are looking at edge computing and AI components. And what's exciting to me about that is now just like trying to increase the bandwidth of, you know, what's being transported to and from, and how that can help us from a research perspective, how that can eventually help the astronauts themselves be more efficient when they are working on the space station. So that's one area where I think we've kind of had some challenges over, you know, the many years we've been up on station. But the more and more that we're looking at these types of technologies and edge computing, I think that that's going to be really exciting from an R&D perspective and the ramifications in a positive way that that will have for all of us. Yeah, what a force multiplier that could be. And I'm thinking, as you mentioned, you know, all the years it took to get the ISS assembled and then when it finally, finally came, all the pieces came together quite literally. And now the lab has been sort of exponentially growing and its capabilities. And I think about, you know, how many years it has left and at this sort of amazing port, it's got like all of its powers and now we're going to be giving it this incredible new capability with edge computing. And that will really just, how much juice we're going to get out of these last five years. Well, yeah, so that's the biggest thing is in the past, I mean, you could take a picture, you can sort of get a couple of videos, but it's not real time transmission type stuff. And so if we're able to get to that point, to your point, you know, how much more can we learn? How much more can we do while those investigations are on station before we bring them back down? And what's the impacts that's going to have for the scientific community across the board? I look forward to hearing about that. So speaking of you being super busy, you've got travel plans coming up for Ascend, which is coming up real soon. Tell me about that. We get to go hang out in America's playground in the middle of July, you know, I'll tell you what. Sometimes. It's going to be air conditioning will be my best friend as well as a sunblock because as a little ginger, you know, sometimes the sun, it kind of gets you pretty good, but we're excited to be there with our friends over at AIAA. This year we moved away from the ISS Research and Development Conference and now we're working with the AIAA team to put together a variety of sessions where we're highlighting some of the great things that are happening on the space station and in low Earth orbit. So I think that we're also planning to do a live downlink transmission from the International Space Station to help kickstart the party. But then on top of that, we'll have sessions that are focused on everything from space investment to, you know, how the space station is contributing to getting us from low Earth orbit to eventually the Artemis program and getting us back to the moon and then eventually beyond. So what are the technologies that we are advancing? So one of those would be focused on AI and edge computing. So our friends at Hewlett-Packard, I think we'll be joining that session to talk about how it is that they are contributing towards getting us that data throughput. But then we will also be having some emphasis on the annual Genes in Space Student Lead Program where these students had the opportunity to propose genetic experiments that will launch to the space station. So that's always been a really exciting collaboration we have with our friends over at Boeing and many PCR. But again, we're just grateful for the opportunity to work with the Ascend team this year in Las Vegas. And hopefully in the future, we can build on that and have more conversations about what's happening on the space station and why that matters for all of us. - Yeah, I was gonna say the news dropped pretty recently about the 2026 Ascend. Can you tell me a little bit about what's going on with that? It's far in the future, but still, I mean-- - It is far in the future, but I do like the fact that it is gonna be in Washington, DC in May. And again, I love me some Vegas, but July is a little bit hard, but May next year in DC, so what we're planning to do there is hopefully have a little bit more of sessions that are directly infused and focused on tracks that are either ISS or low Earth orbit. And again, we're really grateful for what it is that the Ascend and AIAA team has been able to do this year in lieu of ISS, RDC not taking place. But again, hopefully next year we can build on that and really have some truly identified tracks and bring everyone together in one big, robust, and exciting forum. - A lot of amazing updates. It's great as always to speak with you. Anything I missed that we should cover that you wanted to talk about? Or did we manage to get all this? - The only thing that I would flag for your viewers is be on the lookout for a lot of great insight that's gonna be coming not only from the National Lab, but also from our friends over at NASA. Later on this year, we have a big milestone for the International Space Station Program. 25 years of continuous human presence. So look for a lot of those updates and maybe some of the factoids and the cool things that have been happening on the space station along the way. We're excited to roll out a variety of campaigns around that. And so again, it's just, it's a testament to, you know, us collectively working together with our international partners to find ways to live and work in space and to do great things for humanity. (upbeat music) We'll be right back. Welcome back. The billionaire pilot and private astronaut, Jared Isaacman, best known for funding and commanding SpaceX's Inspiration 4 and Polaris Dawn missions, is investing in the next generation of space explorers with a new $15 million donation to Space Camp. The donation is helping build out the inspiration for skills training complex at the US Space and Rocket Center in Alabama. And that is the home of the original Space Camp and the visitor center for NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center. And this donation follows a previous $10 million gift that he gave in 2022 to kickstart this exact project. And the new combined funds will support everything from simulated missions to the moon and Mars, to activities for Space Camp robotics and US cyber camp students. A fourth dormitory for Space Camp attendees is also on the wish list though, more funding will be needed to make that happen. So if anyone listening happens to have deep pockets, maybe there's a Space Camp dorm building with your name on it in the future, who knows. In the meantime, Isaacman has his own connection to Space Camp as I didn't know this, but he attended the aviation challenge at age 12 and says that the experience helped inspire his path to the cockpit and then onwards to space. And now he's paying it forward to help launch the next wave of mission ready talent. In his own words, Space Camp is a national treasure. And the US Space and Rocket Center posted this update on July 11th about these latest developments. And they said this, "We were beyond honored to welcome our friend and aviation challenge alum, Jared Isaacman, for a first-hand look at the inspiration for our skills training complex taking shape. And we are beyond grateful for his $25 million commitment for this project. Jared's generosity is an investment in the future of space exploration and new generations of pioneers. The building will transform Space Camp as it transports trainees with new missions, night vision training, realistic simulated parachute landings and more. At Astra Future Astronauts, this is just the beginning." (upbeat music) (upbeat music) And that's T-minus brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We would 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 proud 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 helps space and cybersecurity professionals grow, learn and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, the technology and the ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. 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 Ivan. Peter Kielpe is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. (upbeat music) - T minus. (upbeat music) (water splashing) [BLANK_AUDIO]
