Transcript
Maria Varmazas (0:01)
You're listening to the N2K space network.
Dave (0:10)
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Maria Varmazas (0:54)
Today is February 27th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazes and this is T min.
Colleen MacLeod Gardner (1:02)
T minus 20 seconds.
Maria Varmazas (1:13)
WeatherStream has been awarded a $2 million phase two Siber contract from the Office of Naval Research to further develop its multimodal platform for environmental remote sensing. Lumen Orbit has renamed itself as Star Cloud and has raised $10 million in new funding for its space based data. Astroscale Japan has been awarded a 7.27 billion yen contract by Japan's Ministry of Defense to develop a responsive space system demonstration satellite prototype. Vardo's W2 spacecraft lands in the Australian outback after completing its second mission. Intuitive machines Lunar Lander Athena is heading to the mo and our guest today is Colleen MacLeod Gardner, a commercial strategist and brand developer. And Colleen and I spoke about the crossover opportunities for the space industry and the need for good marketing. You can hear that chat after today's headlines. Happy Thursday everybody. It's getting busy on the highway to our nearest natural satellite as IM2 becomes the third commercial mission heading to the moon this year. At 7:17pm Eastern last night, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launched from the Kennedy Space center, putting the Athena lunar lander on its planned trajectory towards the moon. The Athena lander is expected to descend to touchdown on a flat mesa like structure known as mons Mouton on March 6, just 100 miles from the Moon's south pole. If they achieve the planned touchdown, it'll put the lunar probe closer to the south pole and than any other spacecraft has yet attempted. And as I mentioned, it is the third lunar lander heading to the moon right now. Times we live in, huh? Firefly's Blue Ghost is also expected to touch down on the lunar surface in the coming days. Both probes are part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services program and both are carrying commercial and federal payloads. The third mission is ICE based Japan's Resilience Lander which isn't expected to touch down until May. Athena's mission is the first to search for suspected ice from the moon's surface. On board, it has a hopper named Grace after software pioneer Admiral Grace Hopper, well known in the cybersecurity community and the mobile autonomous prospecting platform rover built by a company called Lunar Outpost. They will communicate with the Athena lander via cellular networking equipment provided by Nokia and a first of its kind demonstration. Additionally, a tiny micro rover known as Yaoki provided by Tokyo based Diamond Corporation will be dropped to the surface from the Athena lander. It'll provide close up images of the lunar soil or regolith and then beam them back to Earth through Athena. Athena is also carrying payloads for Lone Star Data Holdings, Columbia Sportswear and the German Aerospace center, or dlr. Athena, by the way, was not the only payload on the Falcon 9 rocket that launched it. Astroforge's Odin asteroid prospector was released four minutes after Athena. NASA's Lunar Trailblazer satellite was then deployed about 20 seconds after that, followed a few seconds later by Epic Aerospace's Chimera Geo 1 space tug. And we wish them all the best of luck on their missions. Calling all Spaceballs fans, the Winnebago is back on Earth. Varda's W2 space capsule, which was launched on January 14, has returned from its second mission in Leo. The capsule is carrying payloads for customers, including a spectrometer from the Air Force Research Laboratory in addition to Varda's expanded pharmaceutical reactor. According to a post shared on social media at 5:52am Pacific Time today, the W2 spacecraft successfully executed its final re entry burn and prepared to deorbit. 24 minutes later the capsule separated from the vehicle and after another 17 minutes the parachute's deployed and the capsule landed safely in the Australian outback. Varda says it'll be recovered by their team tomorrow during daylight hours. A huge congratulations to all involved. Astroscale Japan has been awarded a 7.27 billion yen contract by Japan's Ministry of Defense to develop a responsive space system demonstration satellite prototype. The project includes the development and testing of a proto flight model for a small geostationary demonstration satellite. The development and testing phase will run from March 2025 to March 2028. In the launch and operations phases, which will be managed under a separate contract, the satellite will demonstrate technologies to advance space domain awareness, space surveillance, intelligence gathering and space operations capabilities. Lumen Orbit has renamed itself as Star Cloud, great name by the way, and has raised $10 million in a seed funding round for its space based data centers, and the funding comes after December's announcement that the startup brought in $11 million from early investors. StarCloud is aiming to place a network of megawatt scale computer servers in Earth orbit, powered by grids of solar panels that could stretch as much as 2 1/2 miles in width. StarCloud's 132 pound demonstrator satellite is due to be launched into low Earth orbit by this summer by what else but a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket as part of the Bandwagon 4 rideshare mission. And Weatherstream has been awarded a $2 million phase two supercontract from the Office of Naval Research to further develop its multimodal platform for environmental remote sensing. The company's platform spectrum enables rapid development of environmental algorithms from remote sensing data, supporting a wide range of applications including weather forecasting, atmospheric monitoring, and severe storm and hydro meteor detection. The Office of Naval Research is hoping that the satellite company's platform can be used for cutting edge meteorological use cases while reducing costs and N2K senior producer Alice Carrus has details on additional stories that didn't make it in today's Top five.