[MUSIC] Today is February 6th, 2026. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] >> T-minus. >> 20 seconds to LLS, T-dress. >> Open aboard. >> Right side. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Five. >> China has successfully conducted an operational application experiment of space ground laser communication at a rate exceeding 100 gigabits per second. >> Four. >> A new laboratory that will help UK companies develop and test the engines powering the next generation of satellites has opened at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire. >> Three. >> TrustPoint has been awarded a contract to adapt and upgrade the company's commercial, D-band positioning navigation and timing payload. Voyager Technologies and Max Space have announced a strategic partnership to advance expandable space exploration technology. Tomorrow.io has raised $175 million to accelerate the deployment of a deep sky AI native weather satellite constellation. [MUSIC] And happy Friday everybody. It is the end of the working week for many of us. And that means it's the perfect time to catch up on the space traffic report with NSF. They'll be bringing us the launch news from the last seven days and taking a look at what's on schedule for the next week. Or not, maybe with the Falcon 9 currently grounded, but in any case, find out more after today's Intel briefing. [MUSIC] >> Happy Friday everybody. Let's dive in to today's headlines. First up. Tomorrow.io has raised $175 million in equity financing led by Stone Court Capital and Harper Vest. The company plans to use the capital to accelerate the deployment of deep sky, which is what Tomorrow.io calls the world's first AI native weather satellite constellation. The funding is intended to support the rapid expansion of the company's space infrastructure and intelligence platform, which is enabling global atmospheric sensing and decision making capabilities. Tomorrow.io's first constellation already delivers real-time atmospheric intelligence to more than 250 organizations around the world. The applications range from supply chain optimization and infrastructure resilience to early warning systems and climate adaptation. The company says that the same data that enables enterprises to optimize operations also strengthens public sector preparedness, disaster response, and long-term risk planning, underscoring the dual commercial and societal impact of AI native weather intelligence. Tomorrow.io says the planned deep sky constellation will dramatically increase revisit rates, expand coverage in data sparse regions, and enable faster refresh cycles for global and regional forecast models. Congratulations to them on the raise. Voyager Technologies and MaxSpace have announced a strategic partnership to advance expandable space exploration technology. The collab brings together Voyager's experience delivering mission critical space systems and infrastructure with MaxSpace's high-volume, low-mass expandable structure technology. The companies are aiming to create a scalable approach to human operations on the lunar surface and are critical to humanity's expansion to Mars and beyond. The effort supports a growing national and commercial emphasis towards a sustained human presence and operational continuity beyond low-Earth orbit. The phase development path includes ground validation and in-space demonstrations later this decade with the goal of enabling operational lunar and Mars capabilities that are aligned with NASA's exploration timelines. TrustPoint has been awarded a 1.9 million AF works SIVR Direct Phase II contract that is focused on adapting and upgrading the company's commercial C-band, positioning, navigation, and timing payload. The payload will be adapted to integrate with the Department of Defense's architectures and meet advanced government requirements. TrustPoint's payload is designed to address the US Space Force's growing need for tactically responsive and resilient space capabilities. The upgraded payload will bolster resistance to GPS jamming and spoofing and expand the operational resilience of PNT in contested environments. The effort will culminate in laboratory testing and collaboration with the Air Force Research Laboratory, setting the stage for potential Phase III deployment opportunities. A new laboratory that will help UK companies develop and test the engines that are powering the next generation of satellites has opened at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire. The disruptive experimental Electric Propulsion Lab, known as "Deep Lab", was built by space technology company MagDrive, and it aims to give British businesses access to specialist testing facilities for electric propulsion systems, which are used for satellite maneuver, maintain their orbits, and travel further into space using less fuel than traditional chemical rockets. The 3.8 million pound facility has been established with 1.8 million pounds from the UK Space Agency's Space Clusters Infrastructure Fund and 2 million pounds of company investment. While MagDrive will be its largest user, the 10,000 square foot lab is open to startups, established aerospace firms, and academic researchers across the UK space sector. And China has successfully conducted an operational application experiment of space ground laser communication at a rate exceeding 100 Gbps. The experiment achieved a communication speed of 120 Gbps, and high-quality remote sensing images were successfully processed from the transmitted data, according to the Aerospace Information Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. This accomplishment sets a new domestic record for space ground laser communication transmission speed. Test results confirmed a stable communication link with high-quality downlink data transmission. And this achievement represents yet another milestone for this research team following their previous breakthroughs of 10 Gbps in 2026 and 60 Gbps in 2025. Congratulations to them! And that wraps up today's Intel Briefing, my friends. Heads of the selected reading section for more information on all of the stories mentioned in today's show. We have even added one additional story for you on the Pentagon's directive to investigate SpaceX or potential Chinese ownership. Tomorrow, be sure to check your podcast feed for T-minus Deep Space. It is our special Saturday show where we share an in-depth interview and dive a bit deeper into fascinating topics with brilliant guests. And on T-minus Deep Space tomorrow, we have returning orbit fab CEO Daniel Faber joining me to catch up on orbit fab's latest work with ESA and the US Space Force, just to name a few, and lots, lots more in-depth all about the future of in-space refueling missions. This was an in-person chat from Commercial Space Week in Florida, by the way. I think you will really enjoy it. It's a good one. And that is on T-minus Deep Space tomorrow. Don't miss it! I'll hand you over now to the team at nasaspaceflight.com. I'm Alacia Segal for NSF, and this is your weekly Space Traffic Report for T-minus Space. This was a rather quiet week in space traffic with just three launches. The first one occurred on January 31 at 401UTC with a Changjiang-2C lifting off from Jochuan in China. The launch was carrying the ALSAT-3B Earth Observation Satellite for the Algerian Space Agency into a Sun-synchronous orbit. That launch from China was the 24th and last of January, which was the most active January ever when it comes to the number of orbital launch attempts. Of those 24 launches, 13 were by SpaceX, which was again the most active launch provider in the world, with China coming second with eight launches. January also had three failures, which is quite a rarity considering that two of those came from such established rockets as the PSLV and the Changjiang-3BE. The last time January had any launch failures at all was three years ago, with the debut launch of ABL's RS-1 rocket and the failed flight of Virgin Orbit's Launcher-1 from the UK. February didn't start completely failure-less either. On February 2 at 1547UTC, a Falcon 9 lifted off from Vandenberg in California carrying another batch of Starlink V2 mini-satellites into orbit. While the primary mission of launching those satellites and deploying them was a success, the second stage failed to de-orbit after satellite deployment. According to SpaceX, the second stage experienced with the company calls an "off-nominal condition" while it was preparing for that de-orbit burn. The second stage then re-entered a few orbits later due to its low perigee. In its release, SpaceX also mentioned that teams were reviewing data and determining root cause and corrective actions before returning to flight. The FAA also issued its own statement, requiring SpaceX to conduct a mishap investigation as a result of this incident. That means that upcoming Falcon 9 launches licensed by the FAA may be affected until the agency clears the rocket to return to flight. The third and final launch of the week happened this Thursday, February 5 at 1859UTC with a Soyuz 2.1B rocket lifting off from the Plesets Cosmodrome in Russia. The rocket was carrying a set of classified payloads for the Russian Ministry of Defense with no official information about their nature. Next week could be much more active with launches planned from multiple sites around the world. While SpaceX is still working on Falcon 9's return to flight, it's planning up to three launches next week if they're able to fly on time. Two of them will be Starlink missions, but the third will be Crew 12, the next Crew rotation mission to the International Space Station. That launch will also feature the first booster return at the newly built Landing Zone 40, so that means both launch and landing will take place within the same complex. And SpaceX won't be alone when it comes to potential launches from the United States next week. United Launch Alliance is also preparing for the next launch of its Vulcan rocket, which will carry the USSF-87 mission for the US Space Force. That same day, there's also a launch planned for the first batch of Amazon satellites on board the European Ariane 6 rocket. That mission will also be the first launch of the Ariane 6 rocket in its four-solid rocket booster configuration, the most powerful and most capable yet for the family. Russia is also planning to launch a proton rocket next week, carrying the Electro-L number 5 satellite into geosynchronous transfer orbit. This launch had originally been planned for late December, but a software glitch on the second stage forced the rollback of the rocket and a delay of more than one month. This will also be the first launch of a proton rocket in almost three years. So as you can see, these are becoming a rarity. And from China, we'll have two orbital launches next week. The first one should be this weekend and could be carrying the secretive Chinese experimental space plane that the country has flown on at least three prior occasions. A Jialong 3 is also planned to launch next week from a barge off the coast of the city of Haiyang. But all eyes will be on a sub-orbital launch that could happen next week from the Wenchang Space Launch Site. Preparations have been underway at the spaceport's launch complex 301 for the in-flight abort test of the Mengzhou spacecraft. Mengzhou is China's next-generation crew spacecraft, which will replace the current Shenzhou spacecraft in low-Earth orbit and will be used for its lunar program. Thus, the success of this test will determine whether China's future human spaceflight programs will continue to progress on time or not, which is something pretty important these days if you think about it. Now, these are the launches that we know may happen in the coming week as of recording. But sometimes a few new ones pop up in the schedule or some could also delay between now and our next space traffic report. So we always recommend that you go to nextspaceflight.com or download the app on your phone so you can stay up to date with all of the space traffic. I'm Alicia Siegel for NSF and that's your weekly space traffic report. Now back to T-Minus Space. We'll be right back. Welcome back. There are a million flavors of jokes that I know I've overheard from my veteran friends about military grade, meaning made by the lowest, better. And I think similarly there have got to be some jokes out there about what space age technology really means. In the common usage, people say it to mean the latest and greatest. But truly, maybe it should mean equipment that's often more than a decade behind where we are at in the consumer world, right? So color us all a little bit genuinely pleasantly surprised when we heard the latest from NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. It's official, my friends, NASA astronauts are getting a very 21st century upgrade in their latest missions. Smartphones cleared for spaceflight. Yes, this is for the very first time if you can believe it. Starting with Crew 12 and Artemis 2, crews will use modern phones to capture life in orbit and beyond for Artemis 2, of course. In the meantime, it's noteworthy that in the background, NASA will be speeding up how it qualifies hardware for flight. That has been a longstanding complaint, hasn't it? Space age no longer will need to mean flying vintage consumer tech. What? Yeah, right? Granted, in the grand scheme of things, this is absolutely a small change. But that Isaacman took to social media to share this update is indeed an important signal that he is looking to shift NASA towards faster, more sleek operations if you will, shorter development cycles and sustained missions around the moon. Now, I will shelve my comments about the heritage of the SLS flight hardware, but truly, sometimes progress isn't a flashy new rocket. Sometimes it's simply proving that spaceflight can finally keep up with the technology that's already in our pockets. Space age indeed. And that's T-minus, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd 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 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. 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 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. We'll see you next time. T-minus. [sound of wind] [BLANK_AUDIO]
