0672-T-Minus-20251223
[MUSIC PLAYING] Today is December 23, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-minus. 22nd to LLS T-dred. Open aboard. [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] Five. Vantor images a damaged Starlink satellite from orbit. Four. Tori Bruno departs ULA as CEO. Three. A spate of recent global launches show uneven outcomes. Two. FAA documents detail aviation risks from SpaceX's Starship Test Flight number seven. One. CACI to acquire ARCA Group, expanding space-based sensing and intelligence. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] And today's guest is Greg Gildinger from Integrity ISR with our monthly Space Intelligence Chat about recent Russian space activities. Stay tuned for that in the second half of the show. [MUSIC PLAYING] Happy Tuesday, everybody. Thank you for joining me and happy Festivus. Let's dive in, shall we? US-based national security company CACI International has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire ARCA Group, a space and defense technology company focused on space-based sensing, mission software, and actionable intelligence. CACI says that the acquisition will be an all-cash transaction of $2.6 billion. In its announcement, CACI says the acquisition expands its technology portfolio in support of national security missions, particularly in areas such as missile warning, space situational awareness, space control, and resilient communications. According to CACI, ARCA brings deep expertise across space and ground-based systems in real-time sensing and decision advantage for US government customers. It also adds that ARCA's work aligns closely with priorities across the space force, the intelligence community, and missile defense agencies. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals, of course, but CACI does expect the deal will close in the third quarter of fiscal year 2026. Company leadership described the deal as a strategic expansion of CACI's technology portfolio, positioning the firm to compete more directly in large-scale space sensing and intelligence programs as space becomes increasingly contested as an operational domain. According to newly reviewed FAA documents obtained by the Wall Street Journal, the seventh test flight of SpaceX's Starship in January 2025, which ended in an explosion and large debris field over the Caribbean, posed a greater risk to commercial air traffic than was publicly known. Three aircraft, a jet blue flight, an Iberia flight, and a private jet all entered or came close to a temporary debris-no-fly zone, with two of those aircraft declaring fuel emergencies while carrying a combined total of roughly 450 people. The Wall Street Journal reports that air traffic controllers scrambled to reroute planes as debris rained down across parts of the Caribbean for nearly 50 minutes. The FAA documents indicate that SpaceX did not immediately notify the FAA through its required failure reporting hotline. SpaceX did not make the notification to the FAA until 15 minutes after the Starship vehicle disintegrated, delaying awareness of the debris field. Before that point, news of the explosion first made its way to air traffic controllers in Miami only due to pilots who actually saw it firsthand. For its part, SpaceX says this story from the Wall Street Journal was misleading and had incomplete information, and the company did decline to comment on the story. Earlier this year, it should be noted that federal officials halted an internal FAA safety review examining rocket debris risks, even as launch activity is expected to continue to rise significantly in the coming years. In an email obtained by the Wall Street Journal, an FAA official wrote that the FAA would deal with debris risk at a different policymaking level and added that "the FAA will not hesitate to act if additional safety measures are required." And we, of course, have the link to the full exclusive story from the Wall Street Journal for you to read in depth. Now from the Starship flight test earlier this year to a whole slew of launch attempts this week around the world, let's take a look. First up in China, the first launch of the Chinese state-owned Long March 12A reusable rocket did successfully reach orbit on December 22, an impressive milestone on the country's first attempt at reusing a launch vehicle. That said, the booster's landing attempt did fail. Earlier this year, Chinese commercial space company Landspace also attempted a landing burn of the booster of its reusable rocket, the Jiu-Chui-3, so we should expect to see much more progress on this front in China in 2026. Also on Monday, Japan conducted another launch with its H3 small launch rocket to carry the Michibiki Geolocation System satellite to its target orbit. However, a premature second stage cutoff resulted in mission failure with the satellite not reaching its target orbit. This was the seventh launch of the H3 rocket, with the previous five launches all being successful. And lastly, in Brazil at Alcantara Space Center last night, Korea's InnoSpace had its first commercial launch attempt with the Hanbit Nano space vehicle. However, that launch ended in failure when its rocket crashed about 30 seconds after liftoff, and that crash unfortunately sent the company's shares down by about 29% the next morning in trading. Space is hard. Moving on now, yesterday United Launch Alliance announced that its CEO, Tori Bruno, is stepping down after 12 years of leading the company to pursue another opportunity. John Elbon is now the interim CEO of ULA. On social media, Bruno posted this message, "It has been a great privilege to lead ULA through its transformation and to bring Vulkan into service. My work here is now complete and I will be cheering ULA on." And we do wish Tori the very best and look forward to hearing what he is moving on to next. And lastly, the news about a failing SpaceX Starlink satellite is not new. The satellite in question suffered an anomaly last week, as you might remember, and is tumbling towards its deorbit future apace. The neat update about this, though, was that a Vantor worldview 3 satellite at SpaceX's request managed to photograph the damaged Starlink satellite from orbit itself. Vantor, which was previously known as Maxar Intelligence, posted this update. "Within hours we used our worldview space capability to collect a 12 centimeter non-Earth image that provided visual intelligence about the condition of the spacecraft. WorldView 3 was 241 kilometers away from the Starlink when it collected this image, which shows that the satellite is largely intact." Vantor went on to add this, "By leveraging our non-Earth imaging capabilities and expanded collection capacity, we were able to move quickly and provide confirmation that the satellite was mostly intact, enabling SpaceX to assess potential damage." In the image of a satellite, Framme satellite is always quite a technical feat, and this picture is certainly worth a thousand words. And in this case, it was taken very quickly too, so nicely done to the Vantor team. And that is it for this Tuesday Intelligence Briefing, and it is our last Intel Briefing of 2025. We here at N2K do take the holidays off. I should note that we have a year in review special episode that is dropping in your podcast feed tomorrow, and I know I'm a bit biased, but it is a great episode. Definitely do not miss it, because it's got reflections not just from me, but from the entire T-minus production team in conversation. And we will be running on-core presentations of great chats from past episodes of T-minus throughout the end of the year. Our daily Intel Briefings will be fresh and ready for you starting up again on January 5th, 2026. In the meantime, on behalf of the entire T-minus team, I wish you a wonderful restorative holiday season and all the best in the new year. [Music] Today's chat is my monthly Space Intelligence catch up with Greg Gillinger from Integrity ISR. This chat was a good one. We have actually split it into two parts for you. We will air the second half about Chinese space activity after the new year. So, in the meantime, here is part one of our chat. [Music] For our talk today, I'll actually start with Russia. Not heavy on the launch side so much, but some interesting on-orbit activity from a couple of their satellites. So, you might recall, a couple of months ago, I think it was, we talked about a little widget they had up in the -- we called it Super Synchronous Orbit, or Super Geo Orbit, which is actually technically incorrect. It's a geosynchronous orbit that's also highly elliptical. Okay, yes, I do remember this. I remember this one, so -- I do. I remember I put a pin in that one, and I said, "I think we might be going back to that at some point." So, we're going back to it. And that's going to be a common theme for today. So, we have Cosmos 2589. That's the satellite that, when Russia launched it in June of this year, it went into a geosynchronous -- so, at an orbital period of about 24 hours. But unlike a typical geosynchronous satellite, which has an average altitude above the surface of the Earth of about 35,786 kilometers, this thing had an apogee, so its furthest point away was over 51,000 kilometers, about 51,150 kilometers above the surface of the Earth. And its perigee, its lowest point, was just over 20,000 kilometers from the Earth. So, it has a 24-hour period. It travels from east to west, west to east, remaining over the Russian mainland. And the interesting thing with 2589 is it was built by some companies that were also instrumental in what we've seen in low Earth orbit with some of their what we call Nivellir satellites, which are these inspector satellites. So, the one satellite goes up and it has a subsatellite that comes off and it does basically an observer satellite that will inspect its parent, or could inspect another satellite if it wanted to. And then in the low Earth orbit cases, we've seen that subsatellite actually release projectiles at high velocity. US Space Command has kind of deemed that as a weapons test. So, same folks that made those Nivellir satellites, which are all in low Earth orbit, were partially responsible for developing and building this Cosmos 2589. So, when it went up, a lot of folks noticed hey, this is unusual. So, it went into this unusual orbit and it was built by this team of folks that has some experience in developing at least inspection satellites. We'll call them that for now. Right. And I remember when we talked about this some months ago it was keep an eye on it because it might do something like Russian nesting doll style in addition to its unusual orbit. So, what have we seen? So, it did. It did do something. It actually hatched sorry, the astro guys will get off me through saying that. It released a subsatellite, which we called a number of different things until we finally settled on Cosmos 2590. So, 2589 is the mother ship, if you will. Cosmos 2590 is kind of the the baby. The daughter. So, 2590 was released from 2589 just a couple weeks after so, after 2589 was on orbit. So, 26th of June 2590 is noticed. Right. And over the next couple of months we see 2589 really doesn't do much maneuvering. It stays in this geosynchronous elliptical orbit, just kind of doing its thing. But we see a lot of maneuvering out of the offspring satellite. I'll just call it that. So, 2590 is doing a lot of RPO activity. The rendezvous proximity operations with, against 2589. So, we expect, well, we assume that that's doing some sort of inspection missions. Very similar to what we've seen them do test in low Earth orbit. We did not see any of those high velocity third object projectiles released from any of these satellites. So, that's a key difference. But we obviously know that 2590 is a highly maneuverable object. And they, again, it looks like they conducted several tests. And then from the, so that was in June when 2590 was released. So, we have a number of different RPO events between then and 14 November. And from the second to the 14th of November this year, so just last month, they got closer than what we'd seen in the past. And there's some margin of error in all of the figures that I'm throwing out because these are very far away from the Earth. So, accuracy can be a concern. So, between the mother and the daughter or the parent and the offspring, whatever you want. Between the second to the 14th of November, it really looks like they were doing a final operations test because they kept those two things very close together. I say close, I'm talking, it looks like less than two kilometers apart. Which, yeah, close in satellite terms. Yes, exactly. And so, we hadn't seen that before. And then after the 14th, we saw 2589 make its first maneuver in quite some time. And it started to separate. So, two week period of this kind of intense RPO activity, followed by 2589 making a maneuver that over time it became a repetitive pattern. Where we see it begin to lower its apogee and increases perigee. So, what it's doing now is it looks like it's slowly creeping back to geosynchronous orbit. So, without this crazy elliptical piece to it. So, as perigee and apogee get closer to one another, your eccentricity goes down, you get closer to that perfect circle. So, an eccentricity of zero would be a perfect circle. Right now, they're around just north of 2593. So, before I mentioned they were about two kilometers apart for a couple of weeks now, at the end of the month they were over 3,000 kilometers apart. So, they're separating fairly quickly. We're not seeing the same eccentricity decrease from 2590 at all. So, you know, they're continuing to test it. We have seen some maneuvers, so it's still live. But it's no longer interacting with 2589. Russia has launched other satellites into similar orbits to these two in the past, those were communication satellites. It's taken about three to six months for those satellites to actually get to their operational orbits, which were more traditional, your more traditional geosynchronous orbit. So, we're expecting this to be about the same. 2589 has a rather large bus and the thrusters that we think are on there aren't necessarily all that powerful. So, we're expecting it to be closer to the six month, maybe even a little bit longer than six months before it finally settles into geosynchronous orbit. And maybe I shouldn't use some terms settle. I don't know what it's going to do once it gets into that geosynchronous orbit. How Russia intends to use it. Is there another daughter on board? Is there more than one of these subsatellites similar to 2590 on board? How does Russian tend to operate? Is it going to kind of traverse the geobelt like some of the other inspector satellites that we track? Or is it going to be more like the Russian Luch Olymp satellite, which tends to go to one target satellite, we'll call it target satellite, hang out for several months and then move on to another satellite. Oh, so it's not, its job might not be done. It's not, hey, I've done the inspection and we just don't know really. Yeah, probably not. I mean, I'm thinking that they did some testing in this geosynchronous highly elliptical orbit for a lot of reasons that remained over Russia. It also makes it really tough if you're operating all the geo-inspector satellites that we know of are in geosynchronous orbit. So if you're operating at 51,000 kilometers, you're 20,000 kilometers above the typical geobelt. So the ability to do any sort of imaging or characterization of the Russian activities with these two satellites is challenged by those distances, right? Now that they're moving back towards, once they join the geosynchronous belt, then inspector satellites have a much better opportunity to take a look and see what this thing actually may be capable of. But we don't know if Russia plans to, what their plans are or how they plan on using it, but it's likely something we'll be able to observe. So I think we have a reasonable chance of seeing what they're up to with this. But I think for now it's going to be kind of in this pattern of every 12 hours it does what we call "intrack burns," right? So it changes its velocity, it increases its velocity at apogee in order to raise perigee, and then it decreases velocity at perigee to reduce apogee. And it's just going to keep going out the next several months. Yeah, so they're kind of in this jellybean-looking orbit right now, and that jellybean's getting narrower and narrower. So far the apogees dropped just over 3200 kilometers, and the perigee's increased about that same number since November 14th. All right, Greg, we're going to have to leave it there for this month, but happy holidays to you, happy new year, and thank you so much for all this information that you've been sharing with our audience this year. I have learned so much from you. I've learned a lot about orbital mechanics through YouTube, so I really appreciate all the education, and I can't wait to learn more from you next year too. Happy holidays to the entire T-minus crew. It's been great working with you these last few months, and if anybody wants to get more in-depth information, they can always go to Integrity Flash, just Google it, and then they can subscribe for free there and see what this stuff looks like in print with graphics. [Music] [Music] [Music] We will be right back. [Music] Welcome back. And I mentioned it a bit earlier today, but we here at N2K are taking an end-of-the-year break with our Daily Intel Briefings after today's show, and we're not the only ones who take the time off. I'm sure many of you listening might be doing the same, and if you're not and you wish you were, I am sorry, I don't mean to rub it in. Well, the NASA scientists who work with the Curiosity rover on Mars will also be taking a break, and it just happens to be with good timing for the holiday season, but in this case, Curiosity is not taking time off for festivities. It is actually conjunction time, meaning Earth and Mars cannot see each other as the sun gets between us. This happens every two years or so, and it just so happens that the upcoming conjunction for Earth and Mars goes from December 27th to January 20th. Nice timing. Communications between our two planets gets really garbled by the sun's obstruction, if not completely obstructed, so it is best to take a break during that time and not plan on sending any commands to these very precious rovers of ours. As a result, Curiosity has been safely parked by the NASA team for its conjunction break when comms go dark, and in essence Curiosity will disappear behind the sun. While Curiosity is parked, background observations will continue, but nope, there will be no roving. Until then, to the NASA science team, we wish you all the best and hope you enjoy your well-deserved break, and I can't help but wonder what the rover will daydream of while it is idle. Maybe I'll mull it over on my own holiday break. And Curiosity, we will see you again soon on Sol 4787. And that is 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 are 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 are mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Tre Hester, with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpe is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thank you for listening. Thank you for being here in all of 2025. I wish you a happy holidays and a very happy new year. See you in 2026. ♪ T-minus. ♪ [MUSIC]
