C (9:51)

China actually had a couple of launch failures at the beginning of the year. One with very significant one with the SJ32 on board. I believe a very rare failure of a long March 3rd bravo from a Chinese standpoint. They've got some things to figure out as to what may have gone wrong with that particular launch. But before that. So on December 30, they did launch a long March 7 Alpha with a couple of interesting satellites on there. So they call them the Xijiang or SJ29 Alpha and Bravo. And China doesn't release a heck of a lot of information on these. Well, they don't really have a lot of information on anything, but particularly Spartan in terms of what they release regarding these SJ or satellites. Right. So in the launch notification for the SJ 29 Alpha Bravo, they, they use some interesting language saying that this was, these satellites were for I believe was target. They used the word target in there. We, I don't think we've seen that ever before. So it's obviously for some sort of space domain awareness capability, testing out new technologies. But they, they dropped the term target in there. So they got, they got a lot of folks attention of okay, maybe this is some sort of target identification system, or does it have other capabilities on there? Who knows. So it went up into geosynchronous orbit. So it's over 73 degrees east longitude and has about a 3 degree inclination. So it's geosynchronous, not geostationary.

A (11:32)

Huh.

C (11:32)

And so a lot of attention being paid to it. Some ground based observers were quick to notice that after a couple of days you could actually make out two different objects. So confirming what China had stated, that there were actually two spacecraft on board. But they did notice that one spacecraft was significantly brighter than the other. So what that means we don't know anything about the size or shape, but that does is a good indicator that they are not identical. Right. So one of the things when I first seen the launch go up, it reminded me back in 2021, China used the Long March 7 to launch the Xiyan 12 satellites. So there's 1201 and 1202 and those are the kind of the, they're geostationary wanderers. Right. So they're, they're there primarily for going back and forth across the geo belts and observing other satellites as they go. So I thought maybe that was kind of the next step for that program, but turns out that's not the case. These satellites apparently are not identical, unlike the Xi' an pair that was launched in 2021. So we don't know exactly what's going on here. We've seen some maneuvers from the SJ 29 Bravo satellite. So the one that's on the dimmer side or not as bright and it looks like it's maintaining a position about 30 kilometers away from the SJ 29 Alpha satellite. So they're in some sort of rendezvous proximity operation. Currently not incredibly close, but, you know, 30 kilometers at GEO is relatively close, right?

A (13:20)

Seems pretty close. Yeah. And the visual magnitude, I mean, I. I would imagine you don't want to infer necessarily too much from that because it could be a lot of different variables that contribute to why something has less magnitude. It could be the way it's angled. It's not necessarily a distance thing.

C (13:36)

Right, right. It's not. It's more likely a size or vehicle composition or probably both. Right. So you could also get some glinting. But if you look at things over time, those things should even out. So what we do know is that both spacecraft are stable and operating and now maneuvering. And that one is. And they're not the same shapes or sizes, I think is probably a safe bet.

A (13:57)

Okay. All right, so what else is on your radar?

C (14:00)

Well, so this is something that's still playing out. I did find it interesting that. So the United States operates, I think it's up to 4 geosynchronous space situation Awareness Program satellites. So these are the GSAT vehicles to kind of keep tabs on what everybody's doing up in geo. They conduct the characterization mission. So really taking images at safe distances of interesting objects. Right. So what some folks noticed right away was that as SJ29 Alpha and Bravo got into position, that USA 325, which is a GSAP satellite, also showed up in that area. Right. So they're not coplanar. USA 325 has a different inclination, different rank, but it is certainly in the vicinity now. And it looks like if you go and look at publicly available data on USA 325 location, the last time it was updated was in late December. And that placed the satellite way over towards Indonesia in that area there. It looks like in early January, it made some pretty significant maneuvers to get into place to be the welcome Wagon for SJ 29 and kind of check things out. So now as you've got these SJ29 pair of satellites kind of doing their thing, you've got USA 325 in the area as well to occasionally keep tabs of what's going on. So that'll be an interesting to watch here as things unfold over the next, who knows, couple weeks, three weeks from, maybe longer. We saw with the SJ21 and SJ25 refueling effort, that these things can go on for Months at a time, so we'll see.

A (15:51)

Okay, is there anything else that we want to add about the Chinese satellites or are there any other Chinese satellites you've been keeping an eye on lately?

C (15:58)

There are a couple other satellites we can talk about as well. I just kind of mentioned SJ21 and SJ25, so folks might recall that those are the two satellites that have been engaged in a refueling operation, the first of its kind in GEO since going back to this summer. They looked to dock on 2 July of 2025 and remain docked for several months. And then we saw them begin to separate in the fall of this year. I think it was in October, November time frame. Right. And since that time. So we did see them separate, but we didn't see any large maneuvers where, you know, SJ25 went to go refuel another satellite or SJ21 went off to go do perhaps more of its mission. They kind of remained in the same area and that continued really through the first couple weeks of January of 2026, where we saw, depending on the data sources you look at the SJ21 and SJ25 on a couple of occasions got within close enough range so that that range may be less than 5km, maybe it's less than 1km, depending on what data you look at. There were some conjecture that perhaps they had re docked at one point, but there were several instances where we were unable to resolve the two different satellites from ground based telescopes. Right. So we're not exactly sure what was going on there. It's difficult to tell one satellite from another once they do get within those closer ranges. So depending on who you look, what data you're using, from the 1st through the 15th of January, the two satellites seem to get within 5km of one another four times, eight times. I've seen some, some reporting of that nature. We're not really sure, but it looks like they were, they were actually practicing these operations, these rendezvous proximity operations in geo. So they had a couple of test vehicles. It looks like they're comfortable with them. And we saw a lot of activity similar to that leading up to the January time frame. So a lot of practice going on with those two satellites for Chinese space operators as they assume. I seek to get more comfortable with running these kinds of operations.

A (18:22)

Interesting.

C (18:24)

Yeah. And then in the middle of January, you saw a couple of small maneuvers from both satellites. And as I'm talking to you today, it looks like they're about 600km apart and drifting further apart. So maybe they moved on to another phase of their mission. It's worth noting that they are still plane matched. So if they wanted to come back together and do more RPO for whatever reason, they could do so with fairly minor maneuvers in terms of the amount of fuel it would take. So we'll see how that plays out over the coming weeks.

A (18:59)

That should be interesting to see what happens. Got anything else in the tank or.

C (19:03)

Yeah, So I guess really quickly a little closer to the Earth, we had a Yaogan 50 attack 01 launch from, from China. And the interesting thing. So, yeah, again, satellites, we believe are used for national defense, for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance for. For the Chinese Defense Forces. And the interesting thing about Yagon 50 is it went into a retrograde orbit, which. A retrograde orbit in and of itself is not unusual. Most of your imagery satellites are in slight retrograde, that is like 97 degrees or greater than. So a retrograde orbit is any orbit greater with an inclination greater than 90 degrees. So your imagery satellites typically are in sun synchronous orbit, which is 97 to 98 degrees somewhere in that, depending on their altitude. Yeah. And 50 inclination is 142, which is really in retrograde. So there's some. So that means it's going counter to the Earth's rotation. Right. And the effect of that is for yellow grand 50, it'll go. That inclination will take it as north far north as 38 degrees north latitude and 38 degrees south latitude. But orbiting against the rotation or counter to the rotation of the Earth actually increases its relative speed or relative velocity to the Earth's surface. And that relative velocity is an important component for radar imaging satellites. Right. So the greater your relative velocity with your target than the actual, the better potential you have for greater resolution. So based off of that orbit, which we had not seen before for Yao Gan satellites, we surmised that this thing is actually a synthetic aperture radar imaging system. And we'll wait to see how many more of those actually go up. The name seems to indicate that there will be more than one in the not too distant future.

A (21:01)

And up next, we have the space traffic report from our partners@nasaspaceflight.com.

D (21:09)

I'm Alicia Siegel for NSF, and this is your weekly space traffic report for T minus Space. Starting off the week. On February 7, China launched a space plane lifting off from the Zhouchuan Satellite launch center at 358 UTC. A Changzhong 2F carried the Changfu Sheyang Xiang Hangtian Qi, or CSSHQ into space. It's a reusable experimental spacecraft akin to Boeing's X37B, which has been flying missions for the US Air Force and later the Space Force since 2010 and is currently on its eighth flight across two vehicles. The Chinese space plane flew for the first time in 2020 and is now on its fourth mission, although we don't know whether it's been the same vehicle every time or not. Like the X37B, CSSHQ's missions are very secretive, so we don't know what it plans to do on its flight. It'll likely conduct experiments or release some satellites like it did on all three of missions. We'll just have to wait and see. Later that day, SpaceX launched a Starlink mission from California, marking Falcon 9's return to flight after the failed deorbit on the Starlink Group 1732 mission five days earlier. The rocket took to the skies above the Vandenberg Space force base at 20:58 Universal Time on February 7, carrying 25 Starlink V2 mini satellites into a Sun synchronous orbit. SpaceX used booster B1088 for this mission, which flew for the 13th time and touched down on the deck of Of Course I Still Love youe. Capping off another successful flight later in the week, Falcon 9 launched another batch of Starlinks from Vandenberg. Liftoff occurred on February 11th at 17:11 UTC. The mission's first stage, B1 100, successfully touched down on Of Course I Still Love youe, completing its third flight with 24 more Starlink V2 Minis delivered to sun synchronous orbit. SpaceX has now launched 11,162 satellites for the constellation. Of these, 1,492 have returned to Earth, and 8,377 are now in their operational orbits. Thursday was a busy day in spaceflight, with no fewer than four flights lifting off from all around our planet, starting with another launch from China at 06:37 Universal Time. On February 12, a Zhelong 3 rocket lifted off from the Dongfang Hong Tiangong launch platform stationed in the South China Sea. The rocket carried an Earth observation satellite for Pakistan, which is equipped with optical sensors to aid in land mapping, environmental monitoring and natural disaster management, among other things. On its way up to sun synchronous orbit. The satellite was accompanied by six rideshare payloads, one of which was for the Chinese University of Hong Kong. Next, we had the first launch of Russia's Proton rocket in almost three years, lifting off from Baikonur at 8:52 UTC that same day, the rocket carried Russia's fifth Electro L weather satellite into a geostationary orbit. Proton also carried an additional payload that we don't know much about, but its name suggests that its purpose is likely to occupy some communications frequencies as a placeholder so that Russia won't lose its use them. Half an hour later, The United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket lifted off from Space Launch Complex 41 in Florida, carrying two satellites for the US Space Force's Geosynchronous Space Situational Awareness program. Numbered 7 and 8, these are the latest in a series designed to track satellite activity near geosynchronous orbit. To protect space based national security assets, Vulcan released a third satellite called Espa Ring into geosynchronous orbit, which the Space Force plans to use for research, development and training purposes. On the way up, Vulcan experienced an anomaly, or an observation, as ULA calls it. With one of its four solid rocket boosters, it appeared to have burned through its nozzle, which later threw some debris into the rocket's exhaust plume. Regardless, the rocket seems to have been able to deliver its satellites into their destination orbits, which the Space Force later confirmed. The issue bears resemblance to a similar anomaly that occurred on Vulcan's second flight. The impact on the rocket's upcoming launches remains unclear at this time. Later that day, a rocket lifted off from Europe's spaceport in French Guiana, lofting a batch of Internet satellites for Amazon's LEO Constellation. The mission marked several firsts as it was the first to fly on Ariane 6's 4 booster variant, which lifted off from Kourou at 1645 UTC on February 12th. The 32 LEO satellites were encapsulated in Ariane 6's 20 meter long fairing, which also flew for the first time on this mission. The five previous Ariane 6 missions all used the 14 meter version and for the final two first on this mission. It was the first AR to launch for a commercial customer and the first of 18 missions on a contract to deliver Amazon LEO satellites to low Earth orbit. Wrapping up the week, SpaceX launched its Crew 12 mission to the International Space Station on Friday. The crew of four consists of Commander Jessica Meir and pilot Jack Hathaway, both NASA astronauts, accompanied by mission specialist ESA astronaut Sophie Adeno and Roscosmos cosmonaut Andrei Fedyaev. After the crew boarded Dragon Freedom, Falcon 9 was loaded with propellants and lifted off at 10:15 Universal Time on February13. The capsule and its passengers are set to arrive at the orbital outpost on February 14, with docking scheduled for 2015 UTC this marked the fifth flight for Freedom and the second for Falcon 9 booster B1101, which touched down successfully on the brand new landing zone LZ40. SpaceX constructed this pad at the SLC 40 complex to replace LZ1, which was decommissioned last year after the company's lease of The Launch Complex 13 site expired. Going into next week, SpaceX plans to launch four Starlink missions, two from California and two from Florida. Last week, Firefly announced that the launch window for the seventh flight of its Alpha rocket opens on February 18th or early February 19th. If you set your clocks to UTC. The mission will be the return to flight after the failure on Alpha's sixth flight in late April of last year. During that mission, the first stage disintegrated after stage separation and the resulting explosion damaged the upper stage engine, preventing it from reaching orbit. Firefly plans to use this next flight, called Stairway to 7, to test technology for Alpha's Block 2 configuration, which will fly from Flight 8 onward. Hopefully the unfortunate lessons learned paid off and this one will perform without any issues. As always, some other launches may pop up in the schedule after we publish this episode, so we recommend that you check out nextspaceflight.com or download the app on your phone to stay up to date. And that's your weekly update of spaceflight news. I'm Alicia Segal for nsf and we'll see you all again next week. To recap this week in Spaceflight, I'm Alicia Segal for NSF and that's your weekly Space Traffic Report. Now back to T minus Space.

A (27:51)

We'll be right back.

B (27:56)

The world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data. Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365Copilot welcome back friends.

A (28:30)

It is Friday the 13th in February, which aside from the whole unlucky superstition thing that can only mean one thing. Tomorrow is a rare conjunction event. It'll be Valentine's Day on a Saturday. That is a 10 out of 10 difficulty level if you have cause to observe the occasion. I hope you planned ahead because a Saturday Valentine's Day is an all hands on deck situation, isn't it? Restaurant reservations are going to be booked solid. You know that one bouquet at the grocery store that's still left is looking real sad and picked over. And chocolates. You want some of those? Try two weeks ago, buddy. Wah wah. But if you need a message of love and affection and would rather not try to pen some poetry yourself, I understand. Worry not, my friends, because the Cyrano de Bergerac of space has got you covered. And that would be none other than. Drumroll please. The Space Systems Command. Oh yeah, baby. Nothing gets romance aflowin than words of love from your favorite military field command. And they even posted their sweet, Sweet Valentines on LinkedIn. Because you know, that is the very first place everyone goes for getting their ego fluffed. So what tantalizing sentiments from SSC await your beloved? Let me walk you through some of their selections. I'm tracking your trajectory and you're headed straight for my heart. Are you a satellite? Because I'm picking up a strong signal between us. You launch my heart into a whole new orbit. Now if you really, really, really think the apple of your eye will go for a Space Systems Command Valentine's Day e card on LinkedIn and it won't get you in trouble with HR jar, we've got the link for you. Happy Valentine's Day. Happy Valentine's Day. 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 in the show notes or send an email to spacen2k.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@n2k.com N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thank you for listening. Good luck on Valentine's Day and have a great weekend.

D (31:51)

T minus.

B (32:07)

If you only attend one cybersecurity conference this year. Make it RSAC 2026. It's happening March 23rd through the 26th in San Francisco, bringing together the global security community for four days of expert insights, hands on learning and real innovation. I'll say this plainly, I never miss this conference. The ideas and conversations stay with me all year. Join thousands of practitioners and leaders tackling today's toughest challenges and shaping what comes next. Register today@rsaconference.com cyberwire26. I'll see you in San Francisco.