Redwire, Firefly, and China’s Expanding Space Playbook.

[MUSIC PLAYING] Today is August 28, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-Minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-Minus, 22nd to LOS, T-Dress. Open aboard. [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] Five. NASA's sounding rocket mission Tomex Plus finally took off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia last night. ESA and Avio have secured three missions to fly on the Vega C rocket as auxiliary passengers from the European spaceport in French Guiana. FAA headquarters staff will be moved into the US Transportation Department headquarters in Washington, DC. Firefly Aerospace has received FAA clearance to resume Alpha rocket launches following the Flight 6 mishap. Redwire has been awarded a NASA single award contract to support operations on the International Space Station. [MUSIC PLAYING] Today, I'll be speaking to Greg Gillinger from Integrity ISR to get an update on what China is up to on orbit. Want to know the latest on the Chinese refueling mission or why there's an increased launch cadence for its Gwong Pee Leo constellation? Well, stick around after today's Intel briefing to find out more. [MUSIC PLAYING] Happy Thursday, everybody. Thank you for joining me today. Let's dive into today's headlines. Redwire has been awarded a NASA single award to support operations on the International Space Station. The indefinite delivery indefinite quantity contract has a $25 million ceiling for a five-year period to fulfill future task orders for biotechnology facilities, on-orbit operations support, mission integration, and related services for the agency on the ISS. Redwire's capabilities are intended to support the diverse set of life and materials sciences research investigations that NASA processes every year. The company will provide turnkey services to manage, integrate, and facilitate experiments and support on-orbit operations for NASA-funded research investigations aboard the ISS. And through this contract, Redwire was recently issued a $2.5 million task order from NASA's in-space production applications program to support additional drug development investigations on the ISS using Redwire's Pillbox technology. And John Valinger, president of Redwire in space industries, said in the press release, "As the sole recipient for this IDIQ contract, Redwire is grateful for NASA's continued trust in our proven biotechnology capabilities and experience. And we are committed to enabling new discoveries for NASA and the ISS science community." Firefly Aerospace has received Federal Aviation Administration clearance to resume Alpha rocket launches following the Flight 6 mishap on April 29, 2025. The company conducted a thorough investigation with the FAA and, in parallel, assembled an independent review board of multiple government agencies, customers, and industry experts. The findings confirmed Firefly's flight safety program performed nominally throughout all phases of flight. Both Alpha stages landed safely in the Pacific Ocean, and the launch posed no risk to public safety. Corrective actions have been implemented to prevent another mishap, including increasing thermal protection systems' thickness on stage 1 and reducing the angle of attack during key phases of the flight. With FAA approval to return to flight and corrective actions implemented, Firefly is now working to determine the next available launch window for Alpha Flight 7. And speaking of the FAA, Reuters says that they are moving offices. According to a memo from the US Transportation Department, the Federal Aviation Administration Headquarters staff in Washington, DC, will move out of the current building and consolidate agency IT and other systems. So where are they going? Well, the answer is to be closer to the DOT, of course. The FAA Headquarters staff will be moved into the building that houses the US Transportation Department headquarters in Washington. And the memo obtained by Reuters also says that it will begin sun-setting legacy systems and embracing advanced technologies as it works to quote, "streamline our processes, consolidate administrative functions, and modernize our infrastructure to better serve the American public." All of this is really not a surprising move given the reorg that we are seeing at the moment, and we are sure that it will be made public in the coming weeks. We have an update now on the European Space Agency's recently acquired missions. In addition to the ISAR contract, which we mentioned on yesterday's show, by the way, ESA and Avio have secured three missions to fly on the Vega-C rocket as auxiliary passengers from the European spaceport in French Guiana. The missions are part of the Flight Ticket Initiative, which is a collaboration between the European Space Agency and the European Commission for European Companies and Institutions to test and prove new products and applications in space. It encourages the use of new European launchers. The missions with Avio will allow Spanish company Perse to operate its ET-packed mission to demonstrate a solution to de-orbit satellites using a kilometer-long aluminum tape that will be extended from the satellite. And German Aerospace Center, known as DLR, will fly its Pluto+ CubeSat to demonstrate a high-performance, yet compact avionics system. And finally, French company Grasp is developing an Earth observation constellation. Under the contract signed, their second satellite in the constellation called GapMap1 will launch on one of the Vega-C flights. Are you on the US East Coast, specifically around the mid-coast, and saw some confusing trails in the sky last night like some of our colleagues did? Well, those vapor trails were caused by NASA's sounding rocket mission, the Tomex+. It finally took off from NASA's Wallops Flight Facility on Wallops Island, Virginia last night. The Turbulent Oxygen Mixing Experiment+ or Tomex+ is a NASA sounding rocket mission to investigate one of the Earth's most turbulent atmospheric regions called the mesopause. Not to be confused with menopause, also very turbulent. The mesopause is a region of the upper atmosphere stretching from about 53 to 65 miles in altitude at the boundary between Earth's mesosphere and Earth's thermosphere. This sodium layer forms from the constant influx of dust grain-sized meteors that burn up in the sky. A specialized laser aboard the Tomex+ rocket tuned to a wavelength that excites sodium atoms caused the sodium layer to fluoresce. This glowing band then becomes a natural tracer for atmospheric motions, allowing scientists to track its bends, ripples, and swirls as energy moves through the upper atmosphere. And honestly, TLDR, it created some really beautiful patterns in the night sky. (upbeat music) And that wraps up today's Thursday Intel Briefing for you friends, but there's more intelligence sharing to come in my chat with Greg Gillinger. But before we get to that though, N2K Senior Producer Alice Carruth joins me now with a roundup of the additional stories that we think you should know about. Alice? - Thanks, Maria. - The United Launch Alliance has started preparations for their next launch on behalf of Amazon's project hyperbrawl band satellite constellation. No launch date has been announced so far, but watch the space. And Ars Technica is reporting that the chief of Russia's main spacecraft manufacturer issued a dire warning this week, saying that its corporation has reached a critical condition and cannot continue in his present state. You can read more about both stories, along with all the original sources of all the other stories mentioned throughout the show by following the links in our selected reading section, or by heading to space.n2k.com and clicking on today's episode title. - Hey, T-minus crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership or recruit talent, T-minus can help. We would love to hear from you. Just send us an email at space@n2k.com, or send us a note through our website, and we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. (upbeat music) Now let's check in with what's going on in orbit with China this month with integrity ISR's Greg Gillinger. (upbeat music) Last month's segment was fascinating. There's a lot going on, there always is, and you've got some fascinating insights to share. So let's just dive in and start with an update on China refueling, and I'm super curious about what that means. So. - Right. There's a couple of Chinese satellites in geosanctics. China has stated that they intend to conduct some sort of refueling demonstration with the Xi Jinping 25 satellite, and it has been paired with Xi Jian 21 now, since the 2nd of July. Now all of our information is based off of ground-based telescopes, and radar telescopes as well, and also passive RF listening devices, right? But from the ground, these two satellites are so close together that we can't tell one from the other. So they've been like that for going on a month and a half now. So after the 2nd of July, they've kind of grappled together, we assume, and apparently are conducting some sort of refueling, right? So for listeners out there, they may be familiar with the North and Brown and Mission Extension Vehicle. That's where a satellite actually clamped onto another satellite in geo, and then drag it and serve it as its kind of surrogate propulsion system. We don't believe that's what's happening here. This is kind of a first that we would see in geo, and that they're actually passing propellant from SGA-25 into the SGA-21 vehicle. - Passing propellant? - Yes, so that at the end of the day, just like a rental car, you drop it off full, right? So SGA-25 is going to, at some point, we believe, release SGA-21, and they can both go their separate ways. Unlike with the North and Roman vehicle, right? If that detaches from its other satellite, the other satellite can't maneuver. In this case, they're passing propellant, so you'll have two satellites that are then capable of independently maneuvering from one another. All right, so we've been launching this since January with the launch of SGA-25, but really focused in after the 2nd of July when they became kind of one, what dot in the sky. And recently, actually the week of 8 through 15 August, we saw massive maneuvers from both, right? They're joined together, so one moves, the other one moves as well. And we saw something that was pretty unusual, very unusual, I would say, for geostationary satellites, and actually any satellites in that they connected a significant plane change maneuver. Now, for some of your listeners who might be wondering what a plane change maneuver is, that's a change in the orbit's inclination, right? And also the right ascension of the ascending node. But you're changing your orbital plane, and why that's so unusual is it takes a lot of energy. And when we talk about energy and space, that means fuel, right? And for spacecraft, we measure fuel in terms of, it's kind of like aircraft measures fuel and pounds, because that's how they kind of think. In space, they measure fuel in terms of meters per second. So a typical maneuver in geo is just some sort of station keeping maneuver. And it's usually certainly less than five meters per second, oftentimes less than one. And they're just kind of maintaining their spot. Now, what SGA 25 and 21 did, they went from an inclination of 10.4 degrees. So it's in its orbit, it's gonna be 10.4 degrees north of the equator, one point, and another point to be 10.4 degrees south. And they changed it all the way down to 4.4 degrees, which is, you could submit some quick math, that's a six degree change. And we estimate the fuel, this isn't completely accurate. We don't know hardly anything about the mass of the satellite. So there's other things, but rule of thumb wise, is basic physics, the calculations we came up with, this maneuver would have required about 332 meters per second. So orders of magnitude larger than what you would normally see from a station keeping perspective. So very unusual. So they are currently now, looks like they have all stabilized at that 4.4 degree inclination. I should mention this is all occurring over the equator, roughly speaking, like south, southeast of the Philippines, at 127 degrees east, longitude. So that's, I have to, the Chinese coast, so it's something that's very visible for them and for all of their command and control sorts of assets in mainland China should have no problem communicating with these satellites. - I'm fascinated by, this is not an impromptu mission. This had to have been planned out quite far in advance. So one wonders about the nature of what they're doing here. It's just kind of interesting that this must have been sort of in the pipeline for quite some time, but it's all conjectured. - Both these satellites, we believe, are made by the same, not necessarily the same team, but the same state-owned enterprise in China. It's hard to be certain of anything, but there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that would say that this has been planned for quite some time. And China, when they launched SJ25, they announced, okay, this is going to be a orbit refueling demonstration. So we had that going course. And they launched into this very unusual orbit that just happened to match up exactly with the orbital plane of SJ21. And just as a refresher, SJ21, when they launched it in 2021, they announced, okay, this is a debris removal demonstration. And then that's when it went in lasso to a dead Chinese satellite and hauled it out to super synchronous orbit. And used a lot of fuel in that process, right? So it makes a lot of sense that that would be that would be the object for this refueling attempt. And it certainly was planned well in advance, right? So China does not really release any information. So we may see some additional manoeuvres have been coupled or docked, I should say. And SJ25 was launched with this mission in mind. So I suspect that it has probably a lot more fuel capacity than the SJ21. So I would anticipate SJ25 is doing most of the maneuvering for the pair of them right now. Just the SJ21 is kind of like the rental car that you need to return full, right? So prop it up to the orbit that they want it to be as precise as they can for whatever the next object is, if there is a next object, drop it off. And then what does the SJ25 is able to do its thing? What do you do with, is that it for SJ25? Or does it have more fuel in the tank, so to speak? And literally to refuel other objects. So things I'm looking at are other interesting Chinese spacecraft that are kind of near that plane. SJ25 is currently at 4.4. But you've got three satellites at 2.9 degrees, one of which is the SJ23, which we've seen, you know, maneuvering frequently and observing other satellites. And then there are two Xi'an-12 satellites as well that have similar missions. We believe they're for kind of inspection missions as well. And they've been crisscrossing the geobelts for the last, that they launched in 2021 or so. So those are some potential candidates. We don't know, this could have been it. We'll keep watching from afar. And see what we can determine and see what China's got as flight. - Something fascinating to watch. And I will stay tuned for your insights, certainly. So yeah, but that's not all today that we're talking about, right? There's also China's increased launch cadence for its Gouang-Pi-Leo constellation, which we cover now on that on T-minus when there's updates on that one. So that is a familiar name to me as well. I'm very curious to hear what insights you have on this. - Yeah, it's pretty clear to me that they've kind of reached a point where they're comfortable with whatever spacecraft that they have manufactured and now they're just getting into orbit. So what we're seeing just top level view is in the last three weeks, we've seen five launches, variety of different types of space launch vehicles. They've launched two, long March six alphas, five satellites each. They've launched a long March eight A, lost a long March 12. And the largest rocket that the largest space launch vehicle they have, it's just the long March five Bravo with kind of 10 of these satellites. They're going to a variety of different orbits, all to about the Gouang-Pi-Leo constellation itself, what they've announced is that there's really going to be two major shells, if you will. So the outer shell is operating at around 1200 kilometers. And it looks like they're building out two separate inclinations. So satellites inclined at 50 degrees and then quite a few more at this point inclined at 86.5 degrees almost polar orbit. And then they're going to have an air shell, which they haven't even started building yet. They've got four test satellites in that right now. And it's at about 400 to 500 kilometers up. So in the last three weeks, they more than double the size of the constellation. They're up to 72 operational satellites all over right now. They've got about 14 test satellites as well. I neglected to mention that they had a failed launch for some additional test satellites. I believe there's rumors out there that the Zucay two Charlie, I believe it was, that had a second stage problem was also carrying four tests satellites for the Guo'ang constellation. I don't think that's gonna confirm, but that's kind of what's out there on the internet these days. So pretty clear that they're looking to build this out as rapidly as possible. A recent briefing, one of their leaders, the Guo'ang, China sat at is kind of the company heading this up. One of their leaders was saying that they hoped to have 400 satellites on orbit by the end of 2026. So we're seeing evidence that they were ready to do so. There are also some concern on China that it's kind of a real estate grab, right? That a lot of the good orbits are already being occupied by other proliferated Leo constellations, notably star-like, star-shield type. So I think China is very motivated right now. Satellites ready or not, they're going to start populating so they can make a claim to those orbital slots. For those of us that follow this stuff closely and try to report on it, it's going to be a very busy couple of years. An orbital land grab? I think that was the first time I've heard that described that way, but that is a really... I keep saying fascinating 'cause it is, it's just, I never would have thought that, but it makes sense as you say it and goodness, okay? That's just the work we're doing. I think launching there, the architecture seems to be coming a little bit more clear, right? So for their 86 and a half degree inclined satellites, it looks like they're separating them by 30 degrees of range. So to fill out the entire constellation, they're looking at six orbital planes, each separated by 30 degrees. They have done five out of the six thus far. And then they also have two orbital planes inclined at 50 degrees. So as they continue with their launches, we'll start to see what this constellation is actually going to look like. At this point, it looks like they're intending to put up 10 satellites in those 86 and a half degree planes and nine satellites in the 50 degree planes. This could all change, right? Once they have established their position in those orbits, they may populate them with far more than nine or 10 satellites. And they just recently launched a Long March six alpha, again to that 86 and a half degree plane. And the plane that they chose matched up with the previous Long March six alpha launch, each carried five satellites, brings it to 10. Whenever they launch a Long March five, it's carrying 10 satellites, typically to that 86 and a half degree inclination. So that seems to be what they're planning is at this point. Now, how they use it is another way that we'll figure, it's another thing for us to consider. Like the Long March five is the largest rock, capable of carrying up to 25,000 kilograms. But that suggests that these satellites are significant size, significantly larger than anything we've seen for Starlink or Kuiper, one web, which measure in the couple hundred kilograms per satellite. So it kind of makes you wonder, what are the capabilities are on board there, right? They're advertised as being this broadband internet service capability. But given that additional mass, what else is possible that we don't know, but it's just something to gain a lot of it. - We will be right back. Welcome back. I don't think I'll be smashing anyone's dream by saying this, but yes, sadly, the window of opportunity for being part of the Artemis II flight crew is most definitely closed. That said, if you want to play a part in the Artemis II mission, there is a way. Because NASA is inviting volunteers to help track the Artemis II mission, when the Orion capsule carries the crew around the moon and back in April next year, fingers crossed. And no, this has nothing to do with budget cuts. The agency still has the near space and deep space networks to handle primary communications. But NASA is curious, and who can blame them, about how well commercial and non-government systems can follow the spacecraft too. After all, during Artemis I and 2022, 10 outside groups, including space agencies, universities, companies, and even private citizens, successfully picked up Orion's signals and tracked and measured changes from Orion's radio wave transmissions, which was pretty cool. So, can we do it again and more? Well, NASA certainly wants us all to give it a try. So if you are part of an organization with ground tracking capabilities, NASA has an RFI for you. The voluntary mission, if you choose to accept it, will be to attempt to receive and measure Orion's transmissions as the crewed spacecraft makes its 10-day lunar loop. It's definitely got a bit of a cool factor for sure, but it's also very useful. That collected data will help inform how the US transitions towards a commercial-first approach in deep space communications, which, after all, will be infrastructure critical for future moon and hopefully Mars missions. There is a link in the show notes for you if you want to take a look at the RFI. (upbeat music) And that's T-minus brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know 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 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 stand formed. 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 Eiben. Peter Kilty is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. T-minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] [BLANK_AUDIO]