Plus: Moody's downgrades SES due to debt and a launch doubleheader
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| | | A SpaceNews daily newsletter | | 02/19/2025 | | | | | Satellite operator SES moved to reassure investors after receiving a downgrade from a major ratings agency. Moody's downgraded the Luxembourg-based satellite operator's outlook from stable to negative but kept its Baa3 long-term issuer rating, one notch above non-investment grade. Company leaders pointed to the expected rise in net debt at SES to finance its acquisition of Intelsat as a factor weakening SES's financial profile. In response, SES issued a financial update ahead of its earnings announcement next week, stating that revenue will be at the upper end of its forecast of 1.94-2 billion euros ($2-2.1 billion). Adjusted EBITDA, or earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization, is also set to surpass forecasts of 950 million to 1 billion euros. [SpaceNews]
Large-scale layoffs at NASA did not take place Tuesday as expected, but the reprieve may only be temporary. NASA was expected to fire 1,000 or more "probationary" civil servants, part of broader job cuts across the federal government instigated by the Trump administration. However, by the end of the day no major layoffs were reported throughout the agency. It was not immediately clear why the layoffs did not take place as similar firings continued at other agencies, like the National Science Foundation. The firings, along with those leaving through a buyout program, would have cut the agency's civil servant workforce by 10%, the largest single cut since the end of the Apollo program. Sources said the layoffs could still take place to some degree later this month, and NASA, along with other federal agencies, has been instructed to prepare for larger-scale layoffs. [SpaceNews]
Rocket Lab and SpaceX conducted launches minutes apart Tuesday. A Rocket Lab Electron lifted off from the company's New Zealand launch site at 6:17 p.m. Eastern and placed into orbit the first Gen-3 imaging satellite for BlackSky. The satellite is capable of 35-centimeter imagery, among other improvements. BlackSky signed a contract with Rocket Lab in 2023 for five Electron launches. At 6:21 p.m. Eastern, a SpaceX Falcon 9 lifted off from Cape Canaveral, placing 23 Starlink satellites into orbit. The first stage of the rocket landed on a droneship in The Bahamas, the first time the company conducted a landing there. SpaceX said droneship landings in The Bahamas allow for new trajectory options, including for the upcoming Fram2 private astronaut mission that will fly to polar orbit. [SpaceNews]
Rubicon Space Systems won a NASA contract to develop a thruster that uses green propellant. The company said it won the contract, of unstated value, for a 110-newton thruster that uses ASCENT, a nontoxic propellant touted as a green alternative to hydrazine. The company believes this would be the most powerful thruster yet powered by ASCENT. [SpaceNews]
| | | | | Northrop Grumman and ULA tested a solid rocket motor as part of the investigation into an anomaly on a Vulcan launch. The GEM 63XL booster was fired at a Northrop facility in Utah last week to support the investigation of the Cert-2 launch in October, when the nozzle of one of the two boosters fell off a little more than 30 seconds after liftoff. The launch was still successful but the study of the incident has delayed certification of Vulcan for national security launches. ULA said the booster was "modified" for the static-fire test but didn't state what had changed. [NASASpaceFlight.com]
The former head of Russia's space agency has a new space-related position. The Kremlin announced Tuesday that President Vladimir Putin had named Yuri Borisov as "special presidential representative for international space cooperation." That position was previously held by former cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev. Borisov was removed as the head of Roscosmos earlier in the month, although the Kremlin did not disclose its reasons for doing so. Dmitry Bakanov, the country's deputy transportation minister, was named as the new head of the space agency. [Reuters]
Blue Origin has named who will fly on its next New Shepard mission. The NS-30 flight will include one returning customer, investor Lane Bess, who flew on NS-19 in December 2021. The others include a Spanish TV host, an entrepreneur, a doctor and an investor. Blue Origin did not disclose the identity of one of the six people. The company said the NS-30 launch date will be announced soon. [Blue Origin]
Another search for signs of alien civilizations has come up empty. The Commensal Open-source Multi-mode Interferometric Cluster (COSMIC) piggybacked on other observations by the Very Large Array (VLA) radio telescope in New Mexico, analyzing the signals for anything that appeared to be artificial in nature. COSMIC collected data from nearly one million individual pointings of the VLA and detected thousands of candidate signals, but none of them survived more rigorous analysis. [Space.com]
| | | | | | | | | "If you follow the science news over the last couple of years, what you probably heard is that perhaps James Webb's first glimpses of early galaxies could break cosmology. The answer is no, it doesn't."
โ Juliรกn Muรฑoz, an astronomer at the University of Texas, discussing observations of the early universe by the James Webb Space Telescope at the AAAS annual meeting Saturday.
| | | | What's New With SpaceNews? |  | | Check out the latest episode of Commercial Space Transformers, our new video series featuring conversations between SpaceNews Senior Staff Writer Jason Rainbow and the people driving the space industry's commercial transformation. This week, Sunil Nagaraj, Founder and Managing Partner of Ubiquity Ventures, Nagaraj discusses his early involvement in space startups, including investments in Rocket Lab and Spire Global, and how he assessed risk in the early days of commercial space ventures.
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