Liz Stokes (6:52)

Always Maria it's increasingly hard to keep the intel briefing to just five, so we always add other stories to the selected reading section of our show. Notes Today's a big day for launch and landing, as Maria's already covered. Starship is due to try again for Flight 8 today at 6:30pm in Texas. We've included a link to watch that live. We've also included the launch update for Crew 10's launch, an announcement from Satex Fire securing funding from UKSA, an update from Thales, Alanier, Ericsson and Qualcomm on space based connectivity, and a story from Voyager Space working with biopharma company Lintech.

Maria Varmazas (7:27)

Okay, that is a lot. So where are those stories?

Liz Stokes (7:29)

Again we include links to further reading on all the stories mentioned throughout the episode in our show notes and@space.m2k.com just click on the show title.

Maria Varmazas (7:39)

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'd love to hear from you. Just send us an email@space2k.com or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals.

Alice Carruth (8:15)

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Maria Varmazas (8:59)

Our guest today is Tom Roeder, Senior Data Analyst at the Space foundation, and Tom spoke to N2K senior producer Alice Carruth about what he does for the Space foundation and all about their latest Space report.

Tom Roeder (9:14)

I'm a senior Data analyst. That means that I look at data from space, but also look at the people, the companies, the policies and all that goes into that data and try to mesh it into something understandable for our audience. The Space foundation is pretty famous for coming up with a Global economy number every Year we do the same thing for launch, the same thing for payload. We do nation by nation reviews. It's all published at our website, thespacereport.org.

Liz Stokes (9:46)

I've always really enjoyed the reports and what insights that come out of them. Can you tell us a little bit about what you guys found in the 2024 report?

Tom Roeder (9:55)

Just another string of broken records starting in 2020 and going forward. It's been a launch record every year. And we are down where rather than looking at weeks between launches as we did 10 years ago, we're now looking at hours. So 2024 hit that mark with a launch every 34 hours. And it's interesting what that number does not contain. That doesn't include your New Shepard space tourism launches. It doesn't include four flights of star. And the other thing that we've seen is this massive shift. A decade ago, the majority of launches were for civil, government and military purposes. Now that market is being dominated 70% plus with commercial launch, with much of that coming, of course, from SpaceX. With 259 launches last year, 132 of them were aboard a single launch vehicle type the Falcon 9.

Liz Stokes (10:58)

Yeah, I don't think that statistic would surprise anybody in the industry. If you've been paying attention, that the Falcon 9 is definitely the workhorse of the industry. But I do think there's a little bit of a cautionary tale coming up with the Falcon 9. We've become so expectant of it being this workhorse that's constantly doing great things. But last year we saw one of the boosters fail on landing. Most recently we saw a failure with the second stage and debris falling in Poland. Are you seeing any kind of trends of concern when it comes to the Falcon 9 rocket and its reusability?

Tom Roeder (11:29)

Every rocket launch is hard and every rocket comes with degrees of concern. I don't think what we've seen with Falcon 9 is at all abnormal when you look at the rate of launch of these machines and especially the reuse that we've just. We have no experience with this level of reuse in space launch. We're learning new things. But overall the trend of failures is down over the past decade, just across the industry. And we're seeing that demand for reliability. That's what Falcon 9 has really done is when you look at companies like Rocket Lab and United Launch alliance and Mitsubishi, they have to be perfect on the first flight. And it's that drive that has really changed the industry. I think a lot of people have forgotten the early history of Falcon 9 and the fact that it was kind of like when my dad worked on a Minuteman missile here in America. It was initially called the intercounty ballistic missile because they couldn't get it off Vandenberg.

Liz Stokes (12:43)

I like that. Yeah, I mean, it's true. We have become a little bit complacent really, haven't we, about just how much cadence we're seeing and how much growth we're seeing. We're starting to think these things when there are little failures, that there are anomalies. But actually this is just part of parcel of space. I'm also interested in hearing about the payloads now. I understand that as much as we're seeing launch cadence go up. Was there a drop in the amount of spacecraft that were taken to orbit last year?

Tom Roeder (13:11)

We saw a small drop in the number of spacecraft taken to orbit last year, but largely that's because we didn't have a couple of these massive rideshare flights that are setting up your cubesats and throwing them up like glitter. That just didn't happen as often in 2024. I expect both the launch number and the payload number to accelerate in 2025. You know, just, just here we got notice that down in Brisbane, Australia, Gilmour Space is preparing to launch eris, making it Australia's first native launch vehicle. And we're going to see a lot of that. When you look at rocket factory Augsburg going to launch RFA1 just several examples across the industry. As many as two dozen new rockets could hit orbit in 2025. And several of these, especially from China, are designed as direct competitors to Falcon 9.

Liz Stokes (14:16)

Yeah, it's an exciting time really, but also very interesting to see how this changes where people launch from as well. So you mentioned Australia, you mentioned rfa, which is going to be launching hopefully from Scotland. What else are you thinking there's going to be coming up in this next year?

Tom Roeder (14:31)

One of the ones that I'm really excited to see, it's the geek in me is seeing Sierra Space's reusable spacecraft go up and come back from the International Space Station. What really interests me about that is here in America especially, we have a whole lot of spaceports that are horizontal reentry. And so we could see the potential as we grow space commerce of seeing something like Dream Chaser coming to an airport near you to deliver products built in space. That's gonna be really interesting.

Liz Stokes (15:10)

We're obviously in a new year now in 2025. We've seen a new administration come in. There's a little Bit of a cautionary tale when it comes to NASA at the moment. When it comes to workforce, Blue Origin have just seen a reduction in workforce as well. Do you think that's a trend we're gonna be continuing to see this year?

Tom Roeder (15:27)

You know, time will tell on policy. We really haven't seen what policy is going to look like. We've heard a lot policy, but we haven't seen anything. Hard and fast, we'll get to that point at some point. But Congress has to weigh in on these changes as well. And so we still haven't seen, for instance, a fiscal year 2025 budget for the United States government. If and when we get that, then we'll have an idea of what last year was supposed to look like, which will give us a better idea going forward. In terms of industrial changes like we saw at Blue Origin, that's not uncommon. When you look at companies that transition from development to manufacturing, you need a different kind of workforce. When you're inventing and doing new things, that's very specialized application. And what I noticed was after Blue Origin announced that they were going to trim their workforce, I looked at my feed on LinkedIn and the number of recruiters on there who were saying please come to us was truly impressive. Overall, when we look at job openings on the website spacetalent.org since 2022, we're in a growing trend. About this time in 2022, there were about 15,000 job openings on that website for space specific workers. Now there are about 19,500 on that website. And that actually runs inverse to wider industrial trends in America, where we have seen a lower demand signal for some manufacturing workers and for some engineers.

Liz Stokes (17:07)

Yeah, and hopefully we're going to start to see more of a trend when it comes to investment in space as well. As you mentioned, we're very much in this era of commercial space and that commercial space has to have funding. And I've seen some rumors online about VCs kind of getting a little bit more wary. What are you seeing when it comes to investment in space? Not just here in the US but globally as well.

Tom Roeder (17:27)

Globally, we are seeing a lot of these startups beginning to get enveloped by larger companies. In the US you'd say Raytheon. Overseas, you could say Airbus or bae. But we are seeing these startups and that mature to the point where they are of value to these larger firms. And I think we're going to see more of that merger and acquisition activity. It was up through the last two quarters of 2024, and I don't expect that to change. We're also hearing magical words again that we haven't heard since 2021. Like SPAC is back. Possibly. So, you know, let's see. With policy changes we're seeing around the globe, there is a real encouragement toward commercial space. And we are seeing new countries enter that marketplace and new customers enter that marketplace. And if you watch the American super bowl, one of the biggest ads was the fact that you can now send texts over Starlink. So unlike commercial space, which is kind of a fuzzy commodity just a decade ago, we now have a business model that is making money and has millions of subscribers. So this is that inflection point that I think we've all seen coming but we never expected to happen so quickly.

Liz Stokes (18:57)

Yeah, I feel like that whole old saying of every company is going to eventually be a space company is starting to come to fruition. Are you seeing some trends about the non traditional space market looking to space more to be able to enhance their business opportunities?

Tom Roeder (19:13)

I'm hearing a lot from the data sector and this can be anything from Earth observation to companies that just need a really fast secure pipeline to transmit their data internally. But space is a great place, of course, for Earth observation. We're seeing companies like Tomorrow IO coming with very specific weather solutions that are useful to big agriculture and everything. Actually, some of their customers include major retail firms so they can determine staffing based on weather, which is that's really incredible stuff we're seeing from space. But in terms of the data pipeline that grows and grows and grows, it's calculated that you can create a global laser network that's the equivalent of fiber optic with just 600 satellites in mid earth orbit. When you look at that cost comparison to putting fiber optic cable just around the globe, it's a no brainer. And so I think you were going to see a major telecom transition. And as telecom goes, so do data centers. So do a lot of these things. And so that's the real big commercial trend I think we're going to see is there's industry for especially low Earth orbit where you can see things like data centers winding up there because it's cold. And solar energy is much more efficient up there. And it's, you know, while it ain't free, it's a lot cheaper than paying your utility bill. Foreign.

Maria Varmazas (21:06)

We'll be right back.

Alice Carruth (21:12)

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Maria Varmazas (22:07)

Welcome back. The twin Voyager probes launched in 1977 and have far, far exceeded expectations of how long they'd be on mission. 47 years is a long time to be doing science in deep space, especially when your mission was technically only supposed to last for five years. But those two, they keep on trucking. But nothing lasts forever, my friends. Not even the stars. And our Voyagers are getting up in years, and they're running low on power. So NASA is making some hard calls on how to best proceed with the Voyagers. Either keep them going with the power that they're running on now and run out of juice entirely in just a few more months, or do as they have been doing lately and continue shutting down the onboard instrumentation to allow the Voyagers to keep on going just a little While longer. Longer. NASA's choosing the latter, of course, saying that the latest shutdown of Voyager 1's cosmic ray subsystem experiment and Voyager 2's low energy charged particle instrument will give each probe at least another year of power. With these instruments shutting down, each Voyager will only have three of its original 10 scientific instruments on board still running. Barring any unforeseen issues, NASA expects that they can keep the Voyagers running into the2030s, hopefully making it to their 50th year on mission. Wouldn't that be amazing? So, friends, I think we all know and understand that one day we'll be getting some very sad news indeed about these intrepid explorers. But at least today, it is not that day. That's it for T minus for March 6, 2025, brought to you by N2K CyberWire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@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 Senior Producer is Alice Carrus Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Peter Kilpe is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.

Alice Carruth (24:49)

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