← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
Blue Origin’s all-female crew launches to space.
00:26:40
Blue Origin’s NS-31 all-female crew launches to space. The US proposes drastic budget cuts for NASA. Happy World Quantum Day! And more.
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- [00:02]
Maria Varmazes
You're listening to the N2K space network.
- [00:10]
Vanguard Representative
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Maria Varmazes
Today is April 14, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazes and this is T minus.
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Patrick O'Neill
T minus seconds to Los T.
- [01:13]
Maria Varmazes
India and the UAE strengthen ties across defense, trade, technology and space. 4Satelogic has been awarded a $30 million contract to provide analytics from its AI first constellation to a strategic defense and security customer. NASA calls for business models that propose new approaches to solving complex earth science problem using unconventional computing methods. A leaked copy of the US administration's 2026 budget request includes a 47% cut to NASA's science programs. Blue Origin carries the first all female crew to the Karman Line, and today we have our monthly update from the International Space Station national lab. Patrick O'Neill will be bringing us updates on the science currently underway on the orbiting lab. Stay with us for more on that later in the show. Foreign Happy Monday everybody. Let's dive into today's intel briefing, shall we? The first all female crew flight to space lifted off this morning from Van Horn, Texas. Blue Origin's NS31 flight carried a pop star, a civil rights leader, a tech founder, a journalist, a producer and an engineer to the Karman Line and back to Earth. The New Shepard rocket reached an apogee of 345,000ft, gave the spaceflight participants around four minutes of microgravity, and then returned them to the desert in West Texas. The run up to this launch has stirred a lot of mixed feelings about the importance and impact of the mission. Even amongst our team, there were differences of opinion on whether this morning's launch should have had as much coverage as it did. One thing is for sure, they did an amazing job with the livestream, and our friends at Teachers in Space had their payload on board, which included student design sensors to measure environmental factors from classrooms in New Mexico, Kansas and Maine. Perhaps any mission that attracts attention on human spaceflight and the importance of space science is a win. Hmm. We finished last week's show with some disappointing news leaked from the US administration. A copy of the 2026 budget has been shared online which includes a possible 47% cut to NASA's Science Mission Directorate. A draft of the White House's budget proposal was reportedly sent to NASA on April 10 by the Office of Management and Budget. It would cut around 20% from the agency's overall spending levels. The proposed cut to science would, quote, assume no other funding for telescopes aside from Webb and Hubble, meaning an end to the already completed Roman Space Telescope before its anticipated launch in two years. A cut of this size to the SMB would also put the future of NASA Goddard Space Flight center and its nearly 10,000 employees and contractors into question. Understandably, the news has not been well received by those working in space based science. And among those sharing the information of the many organizations advocating for change before the budget is made official is the Planetary Society. Calling these proposed cuts an extinction level event for the Earth and space science communities, they say that it will affect decades of work and tens of billions in taxpayers investment, to say nothing of ripple effects to facilities such as Goddard and Wallops. The Planetary Society are among the many groups calling on Congress to reject these cuts and restore proper funding to NASA science. Even Presidential Advisor and head of Doge Elon Musk said reports about the budget proposal were troubling. We will keep an eye on this story as it continues to unfold. Speaking of NASA, but different news this time. NASA is seeking business models that propose new approaches to solving complex Earth science problems using unconventional computing methods. The agency's beyond the Algorithm Challenge, which is sponsored by NASA's Earth Science Technology Office, is asking for proposals to more rapidly and accurately understand our home planet using transformative computing methods such as quantum computing, quantum machine learning, neuromorphic computing in memory computing or other approaches. Very apt on World Quantum Day. More on that later in the show. Anyway, participant submissions are due on July 25 and will be evaluated based on creativity, technical feasibility, kind of important impact, business model evaluation and presentation. Up to 10 finalists will be invited to present their ideas to a panel of judges at a live pitch event and winners will receive a monetary prize. More details can be found by following the link in our show. Notes Satelogic has been awarded a $30 million contract to provide analytics from its AI first constellation to a strategic defense and security customer. Under the terms of the agreement, Satelogic will deliver multiband optical imagery captured by the satellite Constellation. Satelogic says the Constellation is designed to run AI algorithms in real time, enabling advanced defense and security surveillance applications including rapid change monitoring, detection of defense targets, pattern of life assessment and monitoring of other sensitive defense sites. Leaders from India and the UAE met last week to strengthen ties across defense, trade, technology and space. Crown Prince Sheikh Hamdan bin Mohammed Al Maktoum, who is the Deputy Prime Minister and Defense Minister of the uae, visited India to discuss the India UAE Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. And India's Prime Minister Modi said of the visit that Dubai, one of the seven emirates of the uae, has played a, quote, key role in advancing the India UAE Comprehensive Strategic Partnership. And Sheikh Hamdan's quote, special visit reaffirms our deep rooted friendship and paves the way for even stronger collaboration in the future. And that concludes Today's intel briefing. N2K senior producer Alice Carruth has more on the stories that didn't make today's Top five.
- [07:39]
Alice Carruth
Alice thanks Maria. I'm still buzzing from this morning's launch as it included a payload from my local high school, Go Gadsden. A few other stories that we're keeping an eye on today include AE Industrial Partners, possible purchase of York City Space and Friend of the show Jonathan McDowell has been featured in the New York Times about his retirement and move back to the uk. Save his space data folks, and please.
- [08:01]
Maria Varmazes
Remind us all where we can find those stories.
- [08:03]
Alice Carruth
Links to further reading on all the stories mentioned throughout the show can be found in the Selected Reading section of our Show Notes and on our website space.n2k.com just click on this episode title.
- [08:14]
Maria Varmazes
Hey T Minus Crew. If you would like daily updates from us directly in your LinkedIn feed, be sure to follow the official N2K T minus page over on LinkedIn. And if you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do, here we are daily on Instagram and that's where we post videos and pictures from events like the Space, symposium, excursions and even some behind the scenes treats. Links are in the show notes for you. Hope you'll join us there. Foreign.
- [08:53]
Vanguard Representative
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- [09:36]
Maria Varmazes
Our guest Today is Patrick O'Neill from the ISS National Lab. It's been somehow a month since we last spoke, although gosh, I really thought it was more recently than that. But time does fly there have been a lot of updates in the last month. So I guess let's just run through them. There were some on the show we were talking about how the recent Cygnus mission has been indefinitely delayed. I was super curious about how a delay like that would affect the upcoming CRS 32. Like is it a Jenga situation where we can sort of like put more in the trunk? Like how does that affect, how does that kind of delay affect what's going on?
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Patrick O'Neill
Well, I wouldn't call it Jenga, but what I would call it is Tetris. So. Okay, yeah, so these are conversations that our team is actively having with the ISS program. In fact, they already have happened. So SpaceX CRS 32, it's going to be the next resupply mission to the orbiting laboratory. In later April timeframe when we had these missions, we're looking at sending both research as well as critical cargo for the crew. Given the fact that there will be a delay with the next Northrop Grumman resupply mission to station, that means we're going to be sending more cargo for the crew to ensure that they are able to live and work nominally on the space station. So safety is the biggest priority for us. So that's going to be a big consideration for CRS32. That being said, there is still going to be a lot of great science that's going up on that mission that will keep the astronauts very busy. So we're excited to talk about some of those investigations that are going to be forthcoming. Actually we will be having a webinar to talk about some of the science that will be happening on April 16th at 1:00pm Eastern Time. Unfortunately it will be hosted and moderated by myself, but nonetheless we will have a variety of researchers, NASA representatives and ISS National Lab peeps talking about the great things they're flying on that mission.
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Maria Varmazes
That's exciting. Can we get a little sample teaser of what's coming up? Is that something we can talk about?
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Patrick O'Neill
Yeah, we certainly can. So there's going to be two investigations that are sponsored by the National Lab that are going to be on that webinar. One of them is from a company called Escra Biotech and they are a spin out of University of Connecticut right in your neck of the woods.
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Maria Varmazes
Nice. Yep.
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Patrick O'Neill
You cop have a chance to go and me with those researchers. We're doing a video for the investigation they're sending. It's Janus based nanoparticles. So basically the Janus like the, you know, I guess it's a Greek mythology figure where the two headed.
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Maria Varmazes
The two face. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay, yeah.
- [11:59]
Patrick O'Neill
So they're doing research where they're looking to try to combat both osteoarthritis as well as things that can have like tumor or cancer implications. So it's like literally the two headed concept. So it really, it runs the full gamut of the type of biomedical research you can do on station. And so, you know, if it could have wide ranging implications for things like that, what else could it have implications towards? So this team has launched four investigations. I want to say already this will be their fifth one that is forthcoming on this mission. So really excited about it. It's a cool collaboration because it's also funded through NASA's In Space Productions program, but it's sponsored by the ISS National Lab. And then you again have this spinoff of an academia team that is now forging into the world of startups. So there's just a lot of really cool synergies around this.
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Maria Varmazes
Oh, that's fascinating. I love hearing that too. And also just when, when I hear about the biomedical experiments going to the iss, I'm often just like, how on earth did they think of, of trying this out, you know, if it affects one thing. But then, sorry, I'm just thinking recently about a story we did about how heart cardiac cells can potentially work in the same way as like a cancer cell, like, which are two totally different things. I never would have thought there would be any relation. And yet research aboard the ISS said that just wow.
- [13:17]
Patrick O'Neill
So when I was meeting with them, I was equally kind of having that same wow moment. And it reminded me of a conversation that we had with former astronaut Millie Hughes Fulford and she was talking about MRNA technology. And this was back in the time frame 10 years ago or so, where it was still very, very novel.
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Maria Varmazes
Yeah, nobody was talking about it. Yeah.
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Patrick O'Neill
But the way that she phrased it I thought was really, really fascinating was, you know, oftentimes we're treating diseases or issues. Think of a waterfall, we're treating it when the water's hitting the, you know, down at the bottom. But what we're trying to do is we're trying to catch it at the very top before it even goes over the side. And in some ways that resonated with me where it's like if you can catch these things early enough in the process, or you recognize that someone's, you know, physical makeup would be open or like they'd be more prone to getting something like this type of a cancer or an osteoarthritis situation, how can we try to prevent that up front? And I think that that's kind of what their team is talking about doing. Similarly, they are excited, as well as a lot of other biomedical investigators, of getting something to market faster, accelerating the idea, not only of having something work, but also maybe accelerating the idea of this isn't going to work. And instead of us allocating time, effort and energy towards something that's not, that's not going to work in the long run. Well, let's focus on things that we see advancements around. That's going to save us money, that's going to save us time.
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Maria Varmazes
Absolutely, yeah. I mean that's often the next question people ask when they hear, you know, the general public hears about all this cool research happening, is like, well, what are we going to do with that? So it feels like that sort of natural follow on to, for me to awkwardly segue into the Orbital Edge accelerator and use it I was just reading about recently. I would love for you to tell me more about this because it sounds super fascinating.
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Patrick O'Neill
Yeah. So I would preface up front by saying that the ISS National Lab has long since had a very strong push towards startup companies and making sure that they have the ability to access and leverage the space station. Over the years, startup companies have actually amassed more than $2.4 billion in post flight funding, which really demonstrates that they're learning a lot of things and they have the opportunity to then talk to investors and say we're doing cool things that really push the boundaries of innovation and then they get more capital based on that. But the Orbital Edge Startup Accelerator program is one in conjunction with a variety of partners, where we have three funding entities that will allocate their own dollars and we will select six cohorts, as we like to call them, or six startups. Each one of these startups will receive up to $500,000 investment from these, these, these funding entities. And we hope that it's going to be kind of across the board where it's not just biomedical research. But if it's, is IT companies that want to validate a technology on station or is it advanced materials, things like that? So the accelerator is now open and we were actually kind of traveling all over the United States meeting with a lot of different partners. I mean, we even have entities like AWS who are involved from a corporate sponsor perspective where they're trying to leverage their startup community, get them excited about, hey, have you ever thought about doing something on the space station? And on top of that, you have these funders that would be in a position to go out there and provide investment that would allow for you to continue to grow in your work on the space station. And who knows what that might lead to. So, again, startups have been a very, very important part of R and D on station to begin with. We hope that through accelerator programs that we're leading like this, the orbital accelerator, that it will only open the door for more startups to take advantage of this great platform.
- [16:52]
Maria Varmazes
That sounds fascinating. You mentioned a bit about sort of the kinds of efforts that you want to accelerate, not just biomedical, but other. Can you tell me a bit more about maybe other things you might be looking for, just so people can keep their antenna out?
- [17:06]
Vanguard Representative
Yeah.
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Patrick O'Neill
So, I mean, the biggest areas where we constantly are kind of focused on would be biomedical research, technology development, advanced materials, and then remote sensing. You know, I think that those are kind of the sweet spots. We talk about the notion of in space manufacturing, in space production. We just talked about that with like kind of this UConn team, where that's kind of their focuses as well. But those are kind of the areas, I would say that for these types of investigators, we're not necessarily looking probably for fundamental research, but rather more applied methods, things that can really help you in the here in the now and help us in the not too distant future. From a humanitarian perspective, that's fantastic.
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Maria Varmazes
I'm so looking forward to hearing who becomes a part of that and where that goes from there, because that's just, as I said, that is usually the next logical question in the chain. And I love knowing that you all are directly working on that.
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Patrick O'Neill
Well, I can, I can tell you where we expect to make some of those announcements as well as. So on top of that, we just announced that the ISS Research and Development Conference will be returning to Seattle, Washington. Our expectation is that the six selected cohorts or startups, they will be joining us at that conference. It's going to be July 28th through 31st. So encourage everyone to go to issconference.org to learn more about the conference, how to register, how to get involved. And there we'll talk about everything from startups to all the great things that have been happening on station last year, as well as what's going to be happening moving forward.
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Maria Varmazes
That's exciting. And ISS RDC was really great last year in Boston. Patrick, I'm looking at our ISS 25 years. What did we want to talk about that just aside from the anniversary or.
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Patrick O'Neill
I mean, yeah, so I mean the actual anniversary For. So this, this is a very important year for NASA and for its various partners, international partners, ISS national labs. Well, so this year will mark the 25th year of continuous human habitation on the space station. That date, actually, I want to say is November 2nd is the official anniversary.
- [19:03]
Maria Varmazes
Oh yeah, yeah, that's right, yeah.
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Patrick O'Neill
NASA and its partners, we're going to make a big deal at this for the next few months as well as the next few months after that November window. And we just want to make it very clear to the public the great things that have happened on station. The ability to do research, live and work in space, the, you know, the great things that it's brought to us across the board, as well as what we expect is going to happen in the future and how space station can contribute to that. So again, great anniversary. We love the opportunity to showcase Station in a way where hopefully it will resonate with the general public and they can understand again the value that space based R and D brings to us on a daily basis and just the general inspiration of what it's like for us to live and work collaboratively in a novel and extreme environment.
- [20:04]
Maria Varmazes
We will be right back.
- [20:11]
Vanguard Representative
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- [21:10]
Maria Varmazes
Welcome back. Today is World Quantum Day and it is also not World Quantum Day. It depends on how you look at it. April 14th is the designated World Quantum Day celebration in reference to Planck's constant, which is a key mathematical constant used in quantum Mechanics. Rounded to two decimal places to 4.14, which is how we would write April 14th in the United States. Notation. Sorry, rest of the world. It's hard to find a 14th month on most calendars. World Quantum Day is a decentralized worldwide celebration that invites us all to celebrate quantum technologies and future quantum developments in tech like quantum computing and cryptography, which we actually talk about now and then on T minus. But did you know that some medical imaging techniques such as MRIs and CAT scans are also based on quantum physics. Personally, I did not. So there you go. Now we're appreciating quantum science and technology all entangled together. So a happy World Quantum Day to all who observe it. That's it for T minus for April 14, 2025 brought to you by N2K CyberWire for additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@spare.n2k.com 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 space2k.com we're privileged 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 makes it easy for companies to optimize your biggest investment your people. We make you smarter about your teams while making your teams smarter. Learn how@n2k.com N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltier and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Peter Kilby is our publisher and I'm your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.
- [23:33]
Patrick O'Neill
T minus.
- [23:47]
Vanguard Representative
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