← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
Ax-4 splashes down in Grace.
00:26:57
Axiom-4 splashes down to Earth. Mitsubishi selects Sierra Space for a docking mechanism. NASA awards Astrobotic a SBIR Phase II for a solar array. And more.
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- [00:02]
Maria Varmazes
You're listening to the N2K space network.
- [00:11]
Dave
Hey everybody, Dave here. I've talked about Deleteme before and I'm still using it because it still works. It's been a few months now and I'm just as impressed today as I was when I signed up. Deleteme keeps finding and removing my personal information from data broker sites and they keep me updated with detailed reports so I know exactly what's been taken down. I'm genuinely relieved. Knowing my privacy isn't something I have to worry about every day. The Delete Me team handles everything. It's the set it and forget it peace of mind. And it's not just for individuals. Delete Me also offers solutions for businesses helping companies protect their employees personal information and reduce exposure to social engineering and phishing threats. And right now our listeners get a special 20% off your delete me plan. Just go to JoinDeleteMe.com N2K and use promo code N2K at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com N2k code N2K today is July 15th, 2025.
- [01:29]
Maria Varmazes
I'm Maria Varmazes and this is T minus.
- [01:35]
Muzaffar Mangi
T minus 20 seconds.
- [01:46]
Maria Varmazes
The NASA Science Mission Directorate is seeking proposals for research opportunities in space and and earth sciences. 4 Spire Global has been awarded a $1.2 million extension modification from NASA to continue participation in its commercial satellite data acquisition program. NASA has awarded astrobotic a SBIR Phase 2 contract to advance development of its extra large vertical solar array technology. Sierra Space has been awarded a contract by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to deliver key components for spacecraft docking on the ISS. The Axio 4 crew splashed down off the coast of California in a SpaceX Dragon capsule and our guest today is Mustafar Mangi, co founder and global Business Lead at Farmdar. Mustafar spoke to T minus producer Alice Carruth about how his company monitors agricultural production from space. Stick around to find out more about that and their partnership with Planet Labs later in the show. Thanks for joining me on this Tuesday. Let's get into it. If you were an early riser or maybe were up late last night and happened to be somewhere near the coast of San Diego, California, you may have caught a glimpse of the Dragon Capsule Grace's reentry this morning. That SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule was carrying the four member AX4 team as it parachuted into calm seas off of the Southern California coast at around 2:30am local time. The Axiom 4 crew was led by retired NASA astronaut Peggy Whitson. Whitson has now logged 695 days in space, which is a US record by the way. And all of that was done during her previous three NASA missions, a fourth flight to orbit as commander of the Axiom 2 crew in 2023 and her fifth mission to the ISS commanding Axiom 4. Whitson radioed to Mission Control that the crew was happy to be back moments after their return. A recovery ship was immediately dispatched to secure the capsule and hoist it from the ocean to the deck of the vessel. Completing the AX4 crew were Shubanshu Shukla of India, Swabosz Uznanski, Wisniewski of Poland and Tibor Kapu of Hungary. The crew returned with a cargo of science capsules from more than 60 microgravity experiments conducted during their 18 day visit to the International Space Station. Welcome back to terra firma AX4. And speaking of the International Space Station, Sierra Space has been awarded a contract by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to deliver key components for spacecraft docking on the orbiting lab. This includes a passive common berthing mechanism connection hatch lighting system and pressure sensor technology to enable spacecraft to dock at the iss. The components will ultimately be used by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency for space station missions to the iss. No details were shared about the contract's value or the deadline date for the component's delivery. NASA has awarded Astrobotic a Small Business Innovation Research Phase two contract to advance development of its extra large vertical solar array technology known as VSAT xl and the award follows the successful VSAT XL engineering study for NASA. And with this new award, Astrobotic will manufacture a prototype to test the solar array deployment system. Astrobotics says the VSAT XL is a solar powered system that is deployable, self leveling and capable of sun tracking for optimal energy capture and is ideal for placement at the lunar South Pole where the sun circles the horizon at a low angle all year round. The VSAT XL's larger solar panel is designed to mount on top of Astrobotic's Griffin Lander and will be a component of Astrobotic's Luna Grid system and Luna Grid is designed to supply sustained lunar surface power for a range of missions and the new CBER award will allow Astrobotic to mature VSATXL's design and build and test a functional prototype. Spire Global has been awarded a $1.2 million two month task order extension modification from NASA to continue participation in its Commercial Satellite Data acquisition program or CSDA. The award is an extension to a $6.7 million 12 month task order awarded in August of 2024. Under the new order, SPIRE will continue to deliver Earth observation data, including gnss radio occultation, GNSS reflectometry and space weather measurements. SPIRE has awarded Earth observation data to NASA's CSDA program since 2018. Spire's data will support U.S. government funded research with the objective of enhancing global weather forecasting, atmospheric profiling and climate research. And from our Better Late than Never desk, it's only five months late, but the much awaited NASA Roses 2025 is out okay, so here is what that means. The NASA Science Mission Directorate is seeking proposals for its annual NASA research announcement, or NRA the Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences, or ROSES 2025. The ROSES 2025 NRA is NASA's annual omnibus solicitation which invites proposals for various basic and applied research projects in space and earth science sciences. It has multiple individual program elements with specific topics and proposal due dates. This year's roses provides around 35 proposal opportunities with a total estimated fund of 125 to 150 million. A data point for contrast, Roses 2024 had around 100 proposal opportunities with an estimated total award of over 600 million. And nonetheless, going back to the 2025 announcement, around 300 awards are expected for the omnibus Notice of funding opportunity. Funding for each AW vary depending on the project, and most awards are expected to have at least a three year performance period. And you can read more about that solicitation by following the link in our show notes. And speaking of those notes, N2K senior producer Alice Carruth has the other stories that we have included for you today. Alice, what have you got for us?
- [08:11]
Alice Carruth
Hi Maria, we have added three additional stories along with the original sources of everything we mentioned throughout the episode. In today's show Notes, they cover the announcement that SpaceX has been welcomed as the 10th beta user. For tracks details about what China has sent to Tiangong in the launch of their latest Medium Launch Vehicle, which we covered in yesterday's show, and the announcement from space force that 823 guardians have been promoted. Congratulations to them indeed.
- [08:36]
Maria Varmazes
And a reminder that those links can also be found on the episode page on our website space.n2k.com hey t/ Crew, if you are just joining us, be sure to follow T minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. Also do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday, please show three friends or coworkers this podcast. A growing audience is the most important thing for us and we would love your help as part of the T Minus crew. So if you find T Minus useful, please share so other professionals like you can find us. Thank you so much everybody. It means a lot to me and all of us here at T Minus.
- [09:25]
Dave
You hear from us here at T Minus every single day now. We'd love to hear from you. Your voice helps shape the future of N2K networks. Tell us what matters most to you by completing our annual audience survey. Your insights help us grow to better meet your needs. There's a link to the survey in our show Notes. We're collecting your comments through August 31st. Thanks. Did you know Active Directory is targeted in 9 out of 10 cyber attacks? Once attackers get in, they can take control of your entire network. That's why Semperis created Purple Knight, the free security assessment tool that scans your Active directory for hundreds of vulnerabilities and shows you how to fix them. Join thousands of IT pros using Purple Knight to stay ahead of threats. Download it now at sempras.com purple-knight that's sempris.com purpleknight.
- [10:32]
Maria Varmazes
Our guest today is Muzaffar Mangi, co founder and global business lead at pharmdar. Muzaffar spoke to T Minus producer Alice Carruth and started by telling her about the origins of pharmdar.
- [10:47]
Muzaffar Mangi
I'd like to kind of touch on the origins of pharmdar. So there's three co founders, there's myself, there's my friend Mohammed and his younger brother Ibrahim. And he's a fourth generation large scale farmer on about 2,500 acres. And so this began as a way of optimizing his family business. So basically our product innovation is driven out of farming. If it's not going to make an impact, well, it's nice to have unless the technology has a money trail before or after it really will the technology get adopted? That's how we view it because everything we build has to kind of work on his farm first and at a reasonable scale. We don't have ambitions of going direct to farmers simply because a startup would need, I'd say about 15 years and about $40 million to burn before you'd make a serious dent in going direct to farmers, which we do not have that time, or those kind of funds. So we thought that who would be motivated and has the infrastructure and the money to take this to the farmers and that is your big agri companies. So let's take an example of a sugar factory. Now they've got a team in place. They are very motivated to ensure that the farmers they buy from are doing exceptionally well because essentially that sugarcane is going to run their factory. And that was a concept which we wanted to try. And very soon into our journey we realized that's the model in terms of what pharmdar does. You could put our products in two buckets. There's the macro and there's the micro. Now the macro is called crop scan. And with that choose a specific type of satellite imagery. And we have these AI models that consume that satellite imagery. So that's our raw material, you could say. And those AI models from anywhere from 80% to 96.7% depending on the satellite imagery, you get a different type of accuracy. We identify at scale what crop is on the ground. So a customer like Corteva might come to us and say, hey, you know, we'd like a snapshot of everything that's growing in Pakistan, or we'd like to know how much rice there is in Cambodia at this exact point in time. And once we know that, there's a bunch of other things we can tell about the sugarcane or rice or whatever. So say a sugar factory comes to us and says, tell me how much sugarcane there is in Thailand in terms of hectares or acres or rye. But then they would want to know what kind of tonnage they should expect per hectare. So the yield of the sugarcane, they might want to know how old is the sugarcane in terms of how many years it is or what the sowing date was, thereby determin the peak maturity. So that's when the sugarcane should be harvested. There's a cut to crush window, otherwise the sugarcane starts going stale. Or determining how much sugarcane remains at a specific date during the harvest season. And this information is used at scale, scale meaning anywhere from say, you know, half a million hectares to up to 90, 100 million hectares in a single go. And this is used to plant supply chain sales, forecast, crop forecasts, commodity prices. So Thailand may want to know does Indonesia have a surplus or shortage of sugarcane, thereby determining will they be able to export there and if so, for how much. Pricing decisions, sales team decisions, warehousing distributors, what kind of money the distributor should be making, and so forth.
- [14:14]
Alice Carruth
Yeah, that must revolutionize the way that farming is now approached. Not just from like you say, that kind of n scale of being able, that overview, but surely for the farmers as well, if they're able to access that information, they must be able to completely revolutionize the way that they are able to approach their work.
- [14:31]
Muzaffar Mangi
So for the farming bit, right? I mean, contrary to popular belief, farmers are not falling over themselves to embrace technology. But there is clearly an understanding that technology is at play. But understand that for a farmer, this is not a new iPhone that you tinker around with for half an hour in an Apple Store and decide whether you like it or not to actually see if this makes any impact or not. Number one, there's a bit of an acumen involved. Who's going to teach them at scale? And number two, it takes an entire crop cycle before they can even determine whether this was successful or not. So a trial is an entire year and they're dying. So adoption takes time. But when they, you know, when we went to farmers and we've spoken to, you know, a significant number of them, they said, if this technology is so fantastic, why aren't the big companies using it? So that's how the adoption is happening. For farmers specifically, knowing how much sugarcane there is in all of Thailand is not perhaps relevant. But for them, there's the micro products, which we call Gene Pro, and that is crop monitoring. So a farmer may want to know his crop health, his crop stress, where to irrigate, when to irrigate, where to apply nitrogen. Historically, what are the high, medium and low productivity areas? Or a soil organic matter comparison. This is relevant to Afon, so hence our micro range approach products. But again, we are not the ones giving this to the farmer. So taking the example of the sugar factory, again, it's in their best interest to make sure the farmer flourishes. So they take this information, we equip their agronomy and farming teams with the knowledge on what to do with this or what interventions are required, and then they take it to the farmer.
- [16:07]
Alice Carruth
What kind of area are you able to cover with farmdar? I'm assuming this is at quite a large scale of where you're covering.
- [16:14]
Muzaffar Mangi
It is, it is. So we kind of refrain from releasing the actual number of hectares that we've scanned because it sounds a bit ridiculous, but it's in the hundreds of millions, simply because if we need to scan 100 million acres for sugarcane and then scan it again eight times during the season for harvest, that's eight entire scans that we have to go through. So it's a massive number. But I think better question would be, what is the customer demand? And customer demands are usually state, province or countrywide. That is really where the data has significant meaning, because knowing what's happening in the entire country is where the highest state decisions can be made.
- [17:01]
Alice Carruth
Absolutely. That brings us to why we invited you to come on today. And that's Your new relationship with Planet. Can you tell us a little bit about that?
- [17:09]
Muzaffar Mangi
Absolutely. So when we started off just like any ad tech, we thought, oh cool, drones, you know, and we sank a bunch of cash and some drones and we realized, no, that's not how it's going to work. You know, do other stuff, but scaling them is just not possible. So about four years ago is when we approached plan and we were like, hey, we've heard you guys have planned satellite imagery. And you know, our relationship with them has been fantastic. I mean, we've just announced a nice shiny contract with them, but we've been working with them since day one. And you know, to tell you the truth, the sheer volume of support they've extended us in terms of educating us on the usage of satellite imagery, you know, that's been there for, at least here in Pakistan, we've been their largest buyer of 3 meter imagery for a couple of years. So it was a no brainer to get into a contract like this. So in technology, I feel that kind of knowledge sharing comes from a relationship. If that foundation of the relationship is solid, then it flows quite easily. It's shared wisdom. And we're very happy to share whatever information we have on what we're doing with Planet Imagery, whatever new use cases we're finding, and they work very closely with kind of customizing what our requirements are.
- [18:23]
Alice Carruth
That sounds like a really symbiotic relationship and what a great way of doing things. What's the next thing for Farmdale? Because I feel like you're scaling up in quite a vast way. You've gone from your friend's farm to all of a sudden covering entire nations. What do you think is in the future for farmdoc?
- [18:39]
Muzaffar Mangi
There could be two answers to that. Right? Like from a startup perspective, it's easy to get very excited about scaling. So we need to remain focused and we need to say no to a lot of things just because it's the next shiny thing. Walking away from it is tremendously difficult. And I'm the commercial guy, so it's usually with a heavy heart. So really going to the markets where we are. So for example, Thailand and Vietnam or the US or some parts of Brazil. Right. Doing justice to what we were trying to do over there. I mean, it's imperative that we hit a home run, not just once, but every time. So that's really where we are right now. We've had good success. We've got some fantastic names who've trusted us. Our products work, they've come back for more we need to scale those relationships and really drive value. That's our marketing. In terms of the technology itself, we've got this fantastic deal with planet. They allow us to really drive value on micro level, acre level imagery. We're quite excited with the use cases and the different things we can do with that. So we've had a traditional set of plant health, stress, nitrogen and a couple of basic things. But some of our more discerning customers now want far deeper analytics. And the kind of packages that PLANET allows us to have and even experiment with allows us to create new technology which can be used on a micro level. So that's super exciting for us. And then on a macro level, the holy grail is sucrals detection. You know, we've cracked yield prediction fairly well. You know, it's competitive. But I'd like to say that we're doing okay. You know, we've had, we've had some good moments, some great moments and some, you know, perhaps, you know, I'd rather not mention type moments. But in terms of sucrose detection, that's the holy grail. Nobody's managed to do that satisfactorily and, and that's where, you know, satellite imagery really comes into play.
- [20:55]
Maria Varmazes
We'll be right back.
- [21:01]
Dave
Krogle is AI built for the enterprise soc. Fully private schema free and capable of running sensitive air gapped environments. Krogle autonomously investigates thousands of alerts weekly, correlating insights across your tools without data leaving your perimeter. Designed for high availability across geographies, it delivers context aware, auditable decisions aligned to your workflows. Krogle empowers analysts to act faster and focus on critical threats, replacing repetitive triage with intelligent automation to help your SOC operate at scale with precision and control. Learn more@krogel.com that's C R O gl.com.
- [21:51]
Maria Varmazes
Welcome back. As if partnering with Prada wasn't enough, Axiom Space is adding eyewear maker Oakley to its list of brands that it's collabing with for the Axiom spacesuit. And its full name is the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit, or axemu. And Oakley, which makes those ever popular wraparound sunglasses, will be working with Axiom on the visor system. Unveiled during Oakley's 50th anniversary, this partnership brings the company's five decades of optical innovation into one of the most extreme environments yet, which would be the lunar South Pole. The visor will feature Oakley's high definition optics, gold coatings to reflect harsh sunlight and multi layer scratch and dust resistant surfaces. All those things are essential for astronauts working in deep shadows and brutal sun glare. No protective atmosphere to help take the edge off the sun's powerful light on the moon after all. So they are not kidding when they say that the solar glare can really hurt. Axiom says astronauts are elite athletes in a visual environment like no other. And Oakley's tech is built to help them see farther, clearer and sharper than ever before. So when Artemis 3 astronauts step onto the moon, they will do it with Oakley Optics helping lead the way. So yeah, just visualize a gorgeous modern spacesuit with a gleaming gold coated visor. It'd be an impressive sight. If anyone lived on the Moon to see it in person, they would undoubtedly be impressed.
- [23:22]
Muzaffar Mangi
Foreign.
- [23:27]
Maria Varmazes
And that's it for T minus Brought to you by N2K CyberWire we'd love to know what you think of this podcast. We're conducting our annual audience survey to learn more about our listeners. We're collecting your insights until August 31, 2025. There's a link in the show notes. Hope you'll help us out. We're proud that N2K CyberWire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private 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 Peltier and Tre Hester with original music by Elliot Piltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ivan. Ear Kilby is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening everybody. We'll see you tomorrow.
- [24:35]
Muzaffar Mangi
T minus.
- [24:49]
Dave
Hey everybody, Dave here. I've talked about Delete Me before and I'm still using it because it still works. It's been a few months now and I'm just as impressed today as I was when I signed up. Delete Me keeps finding and removing my personal information from data broker sites and they keep me updated with detailed reports so I know exactly what's been taken down. I'm genuinely relieved. Knowing my privacy isn't something I have to worry about every day. The Delete Me team handles everything. It's the set it and forget it piece of mind. And it's not just for individuals Deleteme also offers solutions for businesses, helping companies protect their employees, personal information and reduce exposure to social engineering and phishing threats. And right now, our listeners get a special deal, 20% off your delete me plan. Just go to JoinDeleteMe.com N2K and use promo code N2K at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com N2k code N2K.