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- [00:02]
Maria Varmazes
You're listening to the Cyberwire Network powered by N2K.
- [00:12]
N2K CyberWire Team Member
Heading to this year's Black Hat USA. The N2K CyberWire team will be on site recording from our podcast studio in the Spectre Ops Kennel Club. If you're interested in joining us for a conversation or learning more about what we're recording throughout the week, visit sponsor.thecyberwire.com for more information. And make sure you stop by the studio and meet the N2K CyberWire team. We'll see you there. This episode is supported by Black Hat usa. If you follow the research, you know, a lot of it breaks on. Black Hat stages hundreds of peer reviewed briefings, more than 100 hands on trainings, and the largest business hall in Black Hat's history. Six days to learn the skills you'll need. Tomorrow, August 1st through the 6th, use code CYBERWIRE for $200 off your briefings pass@BlackHat.com we'll see you in Vegas.
- [01:23]
Damian DePipa
You can't protect everything all the time. That, that's just an impossibility. And cyber in space is similar to cyber, you know, here on our networks on Earth. As soon as you build a better mousetrap, along comes a better mouse. And, and it's got to keep evolving. Okay, we know we're not gonna be able to protect, we know a better mouse is going to come along at some point in time. So how do we quickly recover when something does occur? And so those are all the challenges you've got to build in up front in order to have these, you know, resilient systems that are to last, you know, so that people's GPS systems work.
- [02:02]
Maria Varmazes
Welcome, I'm Maria Varmazes and you're listening to T minus Space Cyber Briefing. In this show we examine the evolution of cybersecurity in the global and orbital infrastructure that powers, protects and connects our lives.
- [02:19]
Damian DePipa
3, 2, 1, 0.
- [02:33]
Maria Varmazes
Hello and happy 250th Independence Day weekend to our listeners in the United States and wherever you are. I hope you're having a good one. On today's show, I'm chatting with Aurea Space CEO Damian DePipa and we're taking a look at how space systems have evolved over the decades. From government run, siloed vendor locked exquisite programs to a commercial driven ecosystem enabled by lower launch costs, where commercial applications now largely outweigh national security uses. That means we're looking at an increasingly fragmented ecosystem needing interoperability and yep, lots of cybersecurity implications there. Let's dive in.
- [03:15]
Damian DePipa
I'm Damian Dipipa. I'm the CEO of Auria. You know, I personally have over 35 years experience in in space systems C5ISR National Security Space started you know, as a, as an aerospace engineer back at the end of the Reagan administration and what they called the Star wars days. So I was one of those young engineers sitting around a table kind of looking at each other going can we really make two things hit each other 3km per second in the endo and exo atmosphere. And, and so I was solving those problems, then moved into, you know, space systems C5ISR systems. I was a chief satellite architect for communication satellites for the U.S. intelligence national security satellites and then led large space and intelligence organizations for companies, you know, like Northrop Grumman, Mantech, Perspecta. I was part of the management team that sold the company perspective to Paraton. And then I was the president in Peraton. And then since then I've been working with private equity firms putting I'll say mid sized companies together really to be agile and attack some of the more innovative problems here in the marketplace. And now I'm excited to working with Enlightenment Capital for the past few years where we've assembled a number of companies together into a mid sized company really to attack the command and control and communications continuum for space and advanced missile systems and operations. So that's really at ORI what we do, we are innovators and integrators of solutions across the command and control and communications continuum for advanced space and missile operations. And we're developing software and hardware from orbit all the way to the tactical edge.
- [04:56]
Maria Varmazes
That's awesome. Damian, thank you so much for joining me and thank you for that fantastic intro. It is wonderful speaking to someone who has really seen the industry change. I cannot even begin to imagine what you have seen over the course of your career and how things have just changed from those Reagan days to now in the space industry, just let alone in the last 10 years. But again, even further back than that. I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind indulging me a little bit and telling me a bit about that evolution that you've seen, I imagine both in hardware and in the software world, what kind of changes you've seen and where we've arrived.
- [05:31]
Damian DePipa
Yes, you know, it's actually amazing when you look back over the last 30 some years, particularly with space systems satellite systems, how they've evolved. Back in the early years when I was started, this was all government run. You wanted to work in the space industry. You were either as Part of the government or you were a contractor supporting one of the major government program, you know, whether with the Department of Defense, with satellite or NASA working satellite or space systems. And that's where you were kind of entrenched. And those systems were very siloed. I know you wanted to talk about this a little bit. But they were usually exquisite. They were usually built end to end by single providers or teams. Very much vendor locked from that perspective. And to see it evolve over the years now, particularly as launch costs have really gone down in order to get things to orbit, it has really opened up the commercial space ecosystem in a sense. And that has brought in a lot of providers able to build and launch space systems for use to where quite frankly the commercial applications for space today outweigh the national security and military applications for space. And that has really advanced technology in a way that, that we could not imagine 30 some years ago, where various technologies that apply to systems here on Earth are also applicable to space. And you've got those companies now building a corporate marketplace for space systems. And that has really broken down a lot of these previous silos, these vendor locked solution, those solutions that lacked an ability to connect with each other. And that's really where we come in from Aurea and we fit the market and we fill a gap where there are numerous fragmented systems that can't interoperate with each other, can't communicate with each other, they can't be updated. And that all goes to the siloing. And we come in and what we bring is that non vendor lock open architecture ability, applying commercial applications to this space ecosystem.
- [07:42]
Maria Varmazes
I'd love for you to tell me more about breaking down those silos because you said it so well about, you know, the classic thinking of, you know, these, these space systems being exquisite, custom built, beginning to end. And of course many of these systems are still in existence and there's a long, there's a long life for a lot of these, these missions. But the, with the advent of, and the, the mushrooming truly of, of the commercial sector, you know, that's changing. But still of course these systems have to be interoperable. And I cannot even begin to imagine that the fascinating technical and also process challenge that, that this all presents to, to be able to interoperate with all these different systems, some of which maybe are on the old paradigm, some of which are new. I mean, how on earth do you tackle such an incredible set of challenges with, you know, legacy systems and new systems that are operating on these different paradigms?
- [08:34]
Damian DePipa
Yeah, we still have a need for some of the legacy exquisite systems that are in medium or high elliptical Earth orbit doing, you know, specific missions, you know, classified or highly sen. And so that requirement will always, will always exist. Truly what we're really seeing is the proliferation of, you know, the low Earth orbit, medium earth orbit systems where commercial providers are able to enter the market space. And, you know, we're seeing things like, you know, you know, Amazon coming in with their new system, you know, Starlink, other providers, you know, mapping the Earth every day with numerous satellites out there. And that's really the biggest change, I think that we seen is really how the commercial market space has driven the use of space for application in the commercial areas that now the US Government wants to leverage. Right. And so now as we're working more and more with, you know, the US Military, the intelligence community, they are really asking us more. How can we leverage these advances in commercial technologies to our benefit? Because they're outpacing what is being done within the government in some cases. And with that, we come along to really break down that communication, command and control fragmentation and tie these pieces together, even with things like cloud technologies. I mean, we are working one program right now where U.S. space Force wants to be able to have access to commercial antennas, to be able to do the command, control and telemetry of their satellite systems through a secure cloud environment with their own mission operation centers. And we are providing kind of that connectivity for them to be able to do that. So that because their own resources for commanding and controlling the satellites are really at capacity and they need to expand outward and that's really where we come into play on these things.
- [10:32]
Maria Varmazes
Yeah, that's a great example. And I'm wondering if you can dive a bit more also into the challenges and opportunities here. I'm thinking of the incredible complexity of the different systems that we're talking about. And I'm just wondering if you can just tell me a little bit more about this.
- [10:47]
Damian DePipa
Sure. Some of the challenges deal with being able to design a system thinking forward, knowing that technologies are going to change. How do you design a system that, like for us example, where we develop the software and the APIs, knowing that in the future we're going to have to modify that as the technology moves forward and evolves as well. And so we do want to design those systems with open architectures, for example, like we are doing for the Joint Antenna Marketplace for the US Government, where we're reaching out to commercial antenna providers, knowing that the technologies for the antenna systems are going to change but not only that, knowing that the government may want to access multiple cloud providers. So whether it be a Oracle or a Microsoft or a AWS as the cloud provider, to be able to have that architecture open, knowing that you're going to have to be able to swap in and out different components in the future as they evolve, that's probably one of the challenges, you know, we work with mostly in designing these systems and planning these going forward. The other one, like everybody else deals with, is the cyber side. You know, we at Aria, we, we really work hard to bake the cyber solution in from the beginning into what we're doing and not try and bolt it on afterwards. Recognizing too that you can't protect everything all the time. That's just an impossibility. And cyber in space is similar to cyber here on our networks on Earth. As soon as you build a better mousetrap, along comes a better mouse. And you've got to keep evolving in order to solve that. But more importantly too, you've got to design your systems to be kind of three ways a ubiquitous so that you have fallbacks in your solution. If something happens, you got other satellites, other systems to be able to take that lo if something gets attacked, you've got to be resilient, hardened, where you realize the most important aspects of your system are knowing that you can't protect everything. Well, what must I protect more than everything else to be sure we're able to do that. And third, to be able to recover, okay, we know we're not going to be able to protect, we know a better mouse is going to come along at some point in time. So how do we quickly recover when something does occur? And so those are all the challenges you've got to build in up front in order to have these resilient systems that are going last the test of time that you continue to build on, you know, so that, you know, people's GPS systems work, you know, John Deere Trakter is able to get their weather, weather data in order to, you know, do what they need to do for the farming industry and you know, every other aspect of our lives from, you know, you know, communication to travel to just basic logistics that is so codependent on the space industry today can still operate.
- [13:45]
Maria Varmazes
Let's take a quick break now. When we get back, reflections on the rapidly changing space market from ARIA Space CEO Damian Dipipa after this. This episode is brought to you by Accenture. When your advertising operations fall out of sync, everything else follows. Spotify and Accenture are working together to reinvent the rhythm of ad sales, using automation, analytics and smarter workflows to simplify campaign delivery and access better data across the business. The result? Less time spent on operations, more time connecting brands with the moments and fandoms that matter most. Learn more@accenture.com Spotify are all batteries the same?
- [14:40]
Damian DePipa
That's like asking if all soccer players are the same. Take Messi, the most decorated player ever. Is there any other player who has achieved that? No, just him. Now take Duracell. Is there any other battery with powerboost ingredients inside? No, just Duracell. Remember, goats only trust goats because they're built different. And Messi only trusts Duracell.
- [15:09]
Maria Varmazes
Welcome back. Here's more of my conversation with Aurea Space CEO Damian Depipa. Something that you mentioned earlier that I wanted to go back to was about the concept of agility. And that's something that I wanted to ask you about as well. Given the incredible market pressures right now, and certainly many signals from the US Government about the need for more space solutions, not just more resilience in the face of adversarial action, but more quickly developed and responding to, you know, potential threats. I mean, stereotypically, one does not often think of, you know, the space industry as being necessarily agile, but that is changing. Can you speak a bit to how, you know, you all are able to respond to to those changing market pressures at speed?
- [15:55]
Damian DePipa
Yeah, absolutely. Look, they are definitely changing and we embrace this. We at ori, we actually love this because we are agile and we are innovators. But for example, some of the latest competitions we've been involved with and are currently involved with are very different at how the government is acquiring what they're looking for versus how they might have asked for it 20 years ago. Now they're asking for kind of proof. They want us to come in with our tech team and provide an orals presentation to actually demonstrate we know what we're talking about. And then they'll typically down select two or three providers to actually build a prototype over a short period of time so that you're actually demonstrating your ability to be agile and innovative in solving their solution. And they're asking for commercial application to be involved in what you're doing. And so that's a definite change with maybe how we've done business, particularly with the U.S. government and in the the past. And so, you know, from that perspective, you know, we love that because we are agile in that sense. Now we also have the added advantage that we develop products commercially, so we have Some large space systems providers that are actually, you know, licensing our products, utilizing our maintenance agreements, maybe purchasing a little non recurring engineering from us to help integrate those systems together. And as a commercial provider of these product lines, we're constantly evolving them ourselves. We're, we're constantly updating with, you know, for the new operating systems, the new technologies. And so from that standpoint, you know, we, we kind of maintain the leading edge of agility and innovation that our other government customers then benefit from because we're already doing it in the commercial marketplace. And so we're really kind of ourselves excited about this because it does break down the old barriers of the very large classical, you know, systems integrators having a lock in the market because they're the only ones that could do it because the government required a complete end to end system. But now the government's willing to buy things in parts and piece them together because they want these open architectures. And we've carved out this whole C3 portion, the command, control and communication side of it where we're experts on, and also because we actually have real space operators that have worked in that environment and understand how it works as well.
- [18:19]
Maria Varmazes
Damien, I'm very curious. I always love asking CEOs you all are thinking about the market and the larger, you know, the macro so much more. And I'm very curious. If you had a crystal ball for the next 5, 10 years for the space industry as you see it, what do you see happening in terms of opportunities?
- [18:39]
Damian DePipa
Yeah, there's going to continue to be commercial opportunity in space, particularly on the communication side. We're continuing to see that. We're seeing more constellations go in that deal with various types of communication. I honestly think, you know, if I'm looking at my crystal ball, everybody's got their iPhones today based on cellular networks. I think cellular networks are going to be a thing of the past at some point. Everybody's going to have direct to satellite with their own phones from that standpoint. And then you'll have worldwide connectivity no matter where you are in that sense. And then I see as we are actively making progress towards interplanetary type activities, hey, okay, we've just circumnavigated the moon again and we got the whole Artemis mission and now we're talking about moon bases. And then, you know, Elon Musk wants to go to Mars and there's plans for Mars. So the communication side of that is always, always going to be a major thing that has to be worked on the command, the control the communication, the use of satellite systems, how they connect, how they operate. And so I think that market's going to be around for a very long time, both on the military and the government side as well as commercially. And we're excited about that because we play on both those market areas.
- [19:55]
Maria Varmazes
That's fantastic. Well, Damien, I'm recognizing that we're coming up on time, but I always want to give my guests the last word. If there's anything that you want to leave our audience with, anything that I missed that you wanted to talk about, this is sort of the bingo free square in the middle. Anything at all, I will hand the floor to you.
- [20:11]
Damian DePipa
Yeah, great. Look, like I said, we're innovators. I also like to tout maybe a little bit of what we're doing in modeling and simulation as well as training for some, you know, because like I said, we have the technologists that understand how to do command, control and communications from a technology standpoint. We also have operators that actually work real world mission operations centers, commanding satellites and doing the communication side of this. And one of the innovative things that we've done is we've paired up our operators with modern day software developers, modern day game developers, UI UX developers, and we've created training systems for the next generation of space operators as well as space warfighters. So for example, we got tools being utilized at what's called the National Space Defense center as well as at the U.S. air Force Academy that is teaching the next generation of space war fighters and space operators how to operate in a space environment, how to command your satellite systems, how to do the orbitology, how to manage the payloads, and then even how to do space warfare, force on force, space warfare. And we do it in a very modern day gaming type environment that this generation of space operators used to seeing who grew up in a gaming world where you didn't need thick manuals to learn how to use a system. It came on intuitive. So that's kind of another area we've branched out into with our command and control communications talent along with our innovative software development and systems development. And it's really gaining a lot of traction as well. And we're excited about it. We demo it often at various symposiums we go to.
- [21:47]
Maria Varmazes
Oh, that's awesome. Well, Damian, thank you so much for telling me about that and also for sharing your expertise with me and the audience today. This, I learned a lot from you and that's the best part of my job. I get to learn from my guests. So thank you so much. For joining me today. I appreciate it.
- [22:01]
Damian DePipa
You bet. Take care.
- [22:10]
Maria Varmazes
And that's T minus Space Cyber Briefing brought to you by N2K CyberWire. If you like what you heard today, you will also enjoy our newsletter, Signals and Space. You'll get research and notes pulled together by our producer Ethan Cook and me, along with this week's top Space Cyber news stories. Subscribe by visiting TheCyberWire.com newsletters 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 cybersecurity landscape. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space2k.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 cybersecurity professionals grow, learn and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people people, the technology and the ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how@n2k.com thank you for listening to T Minus. I am your host Maria Varmazas. The show is produced by Ethan Cook and Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ivan with content strategy by Mayan Plout. Peter Kielpe is our publisher. See you next week.
- [23:45]
Damian DePipa
T minus.
- [23:57]
Maria Varmazes
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