← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
Capturing things that go bump in the night.
00:30:27
The Vera C. Rubin observatory reveals stunning first images. Second batch of satellites launched for Amazon’s Project Kuiper. ESA and Dassault collaborate further, and Pulsar signs MOU with Thales Alenia. India officially transfers its SSLV program to private sector. And more.
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- [00:02]
Maria Varmazes
You're listening to the N2K space network.
- [00:13]
Dave
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- [00:53]
Maria Varmazes
Today is June 23rd, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazes and this is T minus T minus 20 seconds. The Vera C Rubin Observatory reveals its first stunning images. India's HAL officially enters the small satellite launch vehicle market. Hyperspace's tech demo Baguette1 to launch from Southern France. ESA and Dassault to collaborate further. And Pulsar signs an MOU with Talus Alenia, the second batch of satellites launch for Amazon's Project Kuiper. And in the second half of the welcome to the show. Today we have my chat with Greg Gillinger, SVP for Strategy and Development at Integrity isr, and he's talking with me about the dynamic nature of space operations and intelligence. Thanks for joining me on this lovely Monday. Hope you're having a good one. Let's dive into today's intel briefing, shall we? And we're starting with two launch updates now for the top of the show. Firstly, this morning a ULA Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying 27 more satellites for Amazon Project Kuiper to low Earth orbit. This is the second batch of Project Kuiper satellites for Amazon's new satellite broadband constellation. Amazon's goal is to get 3,200 Kuiper satellites to LEO. And the SpaceX Transporter 14 rideshare mission, which was originally planned for launch yesterday, was bumped due to weather concerns for a new launch time today with a launch window opening at 2:18 Pacific Time today. If successful, this smallsat rideshare mission will carry more than 70 payloads to low Earth orbit. Moving on now, it's a big space news day for France today. First up, Dassault Aviation and the European Space Agency have signed a letter of intent to to explore collaboration on next generation orbital transport systems, focusing particularly on reusable vehicles for low Earth orbit missions. At the center of this collaboration is Dassault's Vortex concept, which is a reusable lifting body spaceplane designed for crew, cargo and in orbit servicing missions. Vortex builds on Dassault's historic contributions to European spaceplane programs like hermes and the X38 and and incorporates new technologies for hypervelocity reentry, modular payload integration and next generation materials. Pulsar Fusion is scaling up with a strategic expansion into the US market by opening an office in Austin, Texas to engage American clients and investors. And in parallel, Pulsar UK has signed a Memorandum of understanding with Telus Alenia Space to collaborate on its 5 kilowatt Moon Ranger hall effect 3 thruster which is currently in live test. This partnership marks a significant step towards integrating Pulsar's electric propulsion technologies into Tier one space platforms. Now back in the uk, Pulsar is commissioning its first of two newly built space grade vacuum chambers, the largest in the country at its Bletchley facility. These chambers are critical for the qualification and endurance testing of both the Moon Ranger thruster and and their next generation Sunbird fusion propulsion platform. French startup Hyperspace has announced plans to launch its I cannot believe this is its name, but it really is Baguette one suborbital demonstrator from a mainland French military test site following an agreement with France's defense procurement agency, the DGA. Scheduled for 2026. The yes, that name again. Baguette 1 is a 7 meter single stage rocket using hybrid propulsion combining solid fuel with a liquid oxidizer for improved safety and cost efficiency. This launch will serve as a precursor to the company's planned orbital vehicle, the Orbital Baguette 1 or OB1. Yes, targeted for 2027 and capable of deploying 250 kilos to low earth orbit. The project is backed by France's 35 million euro France 2030 investment initiative, which reflects a national push to foster sovereign microlaunch capabilities. Operating from a government controlled defense site. Underlines the strategic potential of this platform for both civil and defense applications. And yes, they definitely named it Obi Wan. Yeah, they knew what they were doing. Okay, next up, India. India has officially transferred its small satellite launch vehicle program to the private sector, awarding Hindustan Aeronautics, or HAL and its partner L and T, a 5.11 billion rupee or $59 million contract to build, own and operate small satellite launch vehicle missions. Hal, which is traditionally a warplane manufacturer, now becomes the lead player in commercializing India's small launch capability. And this does mark the first time a complete launch vehicle system is privatized in India. And and it's part of a broader push to liberalize the country's space sector under Prime Minister modi's in Space Initiative and the Small Satellite Launch Vehicle, or sslv, designed by ISRO, is a cost effective quick response launcher that can deploy up to 500 kilos to low Earth orbit. And with the global smallsat market projected to triple by 2032, India is positioning itself to boost its current 2% market share significantly. HAL's offering is expected to undercut existing launch prices, thereby making it competitive globally and Today has been a hotly awaited day for many in the world of astronomy. We saw the very first images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory released to the public today, and they are overwhelmingly stunning. Stunningly overwhelming. The phrase that I'm seeing from the Rubin team is that it's all a cosmic treasure chest. And yeah, that feels about right. This observatory is some 30 years in the making and is located high in the mountains of Chile and was built and is actively supported by over 40 international organizations from around the world and is a joint venture of the U.S. national Science foundation and the U.S. department of Energy's Office of Science. The Rubin Observatory houses the world's most powerful digital camera, capturing petabytes, yes, petabytes of data from massive swathes of our night sky at an unprecedented scale, both in breadth and depth. So if there are planets or other large objects in our solar system that we've somehow missed, which is actually entirely possible, we can expect that Rubin will uncover them within its first year of operation. And for the next 10 years, Rubin will be continuously filming the southern night sky. So the possibilities for what this will mean for scientific understanding are truly fascinating. What will we learn about our galaxy's formation and what the universe is made of? I cannot wait to find out along with all of you. In the meantime, rubinobservatory.org is where you can find the images as they are released and just get utterly lost in their scale. You really haven't seen anything like this before, trust me. Where every single pixel is a galaxy and you can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in and zoom in. Have fun everybody.
- [08:55]
Greg Gillinger
Foreign.
- [09:03]
Maria Varmazes
And that is it for today's Intel Briefing. If you'd like more on all of the stories that I've mentioned today, be sure to check out our show notes both in your podcast app and on our website, which is space.n2k.com it/crew if you would like daily updates from us directly in your your LinkedIn feed, be sure to follow the official N2K T minus page over on LinkedIn. If you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do Here we are daily on Instagram. That is where we post videos and pictures from events, excursions and even some behind the scenes treats. The links are in the show notes everybody. Hope you will join us there.
- [10:05]
Dave
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- [11:21]
Maria Varmazes
My guest today is Greg Gillinger. He is the SVP for Strategy and Development at Integrity ISR and he's talking with me about the dynamic nature of space operations and intelligence. Greg, it's great to see you. It's great to have you on the show. And I wanted to also say welcome as part of you're coming on as a T minus segment host. So that's pretty exciting.
- [11:49]
Greg Gillinger
No, thank you, Maria. I've been listening to you guys for a couple years now. It's been a fantastic show. You guys do a wonderful service for a lot of folks. So I'm really proud to be part of it.
- [11:59]
Maria Varmazes
Oh, Greg, that's very kind of you. And I'm honestly really thrilled to be bringing you aboard because you bring a wealth of great experience and knowledge that I cannot wait for our audience to be able to benefit from. So why don't we start with I guess an introduction of who you are and what your area of expertise is in.
- [12:17]
Greg Gillinger
Sure, sure. So, Greg Dillinger. I was in the United States air force for 26 years. I retired in 2019. And when I retired I was the chief of the Intelligence Surveillance and Reconnaissance Division, or ISR division and the Combined Space Operations Center. And I was also the lead intelligence director for at the time it was 14th Air Force, which is a numbered Air Force, it's an organizational unit in the Air Force that no longer exists. It's now become part of the Delta structure in the Space Force. So I was doing intelligence work for decades and I was lucky enough to be put into some jobs early on that involved space intelligence, which at the time really wasn't considered a great career growth sort of a thing. But it turned out to be one of the best things for me. And so after my retirement in 2019, I started up with a company called Integrity ISR. Small company, great folks, doing a great mission. And we do a lot of space training and we also do some operations support. And so I've been lucky enough to work with, to continue to work with a team up at Vandenberg where we teach all of the enlisted Space Force personnel that are coming in to be, we say a 5cr or 5s. That's their career code, career specialty code. And then we also are training the 5i for the intelligence enlisted personnel that's out of Goodfellow Air Force Base. And then finally we have some instructors out in Keesler Air Force Base in Mississippi as well, training the, what we call the five Charlies or the space cyber personnel for the U.S. space Force. And then we have a, a number of other contracts that we're supporting. One of my favorite things that we do is something we call ISR University, where we travel all over the world and offer various training courses, many of them space related to different companies or different governments. Had the opportunity to go to Australia. After we get off our call here, I'm going to be talking to some students out of New Zealand. This one's going to be virtually, unfortunately, it's a fantastic opportunity. I'm just thrilled to be a little part of this, of the team that I, that I'm with. And one of the things that I do as part of that team is the Integrity Flash newsletter, which is, I think, how we kind of met. And in that every couple of weeks or so, if I can get my act together, I take a look at Russian and Chinese space operations. Right. So there's a lot. What I noticed after I retired was there's a lot of coverage on the unclassified side of, you know, things being launched because wallets, it's exciting and it's hard to hide and everybody likes watching rockets go. But the real mission occurs after the launch, obviously. And there's very little information about what occurs in space after a satellite gets into its orbit. I think five, 10 years ago. There's probably a reason for that. Because once things were in orbit, they kind of just stayed basically as Kepler was driving. Right. There was not a whole lot of maneuvering happening, that sort of thing. But in the last five years or so, maybe a little bit longer, we've started to. The domains become much more dynamic. So you know.
- [15:45]
Maria Varmazes
Yeah, maneuverability has changed the game, right?
- [15:48]
Greg Gillinger
Yeah, yeah, exactly. And what I'm seeing too is a lot of times satellites are being launched into constellations. So it's not just the satellite's relationship with the Earth that's important, but it's the satellites relationship with other satellites that may form a group of capabilities that may reinforce one another. So tracking where everything is in relationship to other satellites is another thing that not many folks were focused on and just started doing some research and found some great mentors out there to kind of coach me along on some of the orbital mechanics whenever I had a question. And there's also a lot of free tools available for us to use to do some of this analysis. There's much more capability out there than I had ever existed.
- [16:35]
Maria Varmazes
That's amazing. It's amazing what one can glean from open source public information and sort of connecting dots, which I know you do extraordinarily well. Lots of dots. Lots of dots and lots of tiny dots way up in different orbits even. Yeah. The thing that's really fascinating for me as a civilian, who's always been a civilian and has no military understanding whatsoever, and I'm fessing up to that, is how much when you introduced me to the idea of space intelligence, how much is also very relevant to the private sector where I think a lot of people might not have thought that this was something. I think many people might hear space intelligence and go, oh, that's military. That's not my concern. That's not my lane. And that's just not how it is anymore.
- [17:23]
Greg Gillinger
Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, you know, again, you can go back 10 years or so ago, there's not too many environmental monitoring or remote sensing companies out there. But we've seen a tremendous growth with companies like Maxar Planet. And I'm going to leave out a bunch of Hawkeye360 ISI, you know, many US based, many European based and others. Right. And it's really turned into kind of a growth industry now. I would say a lot of the commercial ventures are the largest customer tends to be the departments of defense out there. And that's kind of fueling a lot of this initial stages of growth here. But they're forming a very Important, fulfilling, very important role. I mean, we saw this prior to the invasion of Ukraine. I think it's pretty well documented that helping to get a lot of our European allies on board with, hey, we're really concerned that this is turning into a thing here was the ability to share pretty high quality imagery of different stages of Russian deployment in and around Ukraine territory.
- [18:33]
Maria Varmazes
Absolutely.
- [18:34]
Greg Gillinger
And being unclassified, that's vital. So you can put these back. Right. And so people can see it with their own eyes. So it makes things much more real. And as we're looking into, we're always partnering with other nations when it comes to defense and other areas as well. So the ability to share information quickly and easily has been real key. And that's one of the biggest benefits of commercial space capabilities that we have right now.
- [19:02]
Maria Varmazes
Yeah, absolutely. So you'll be joining us monthly for a segment where you're going to be giving us, and I'm putting this very broadly space intelligence. But what would be sort of your description of what our audience can expect to hear from you? Like, what kind of insights will they be able to glean from what you'll be sharing?
- [19:17]
Greg Gillinger
Yeah, so like I mentioned, I do a newsletter every couple of weeks. So what I'm thinking about is, and you all do a great job of, you know, covering all of the launches. So I'm going to give the post launch kind of a report as to. Okay, this spacecraft was launched by China, say three weeks ago. And it was at the time that you were reporting those probably in geostationary transfer or geosynchronous transfer orbit. But by the time I come on, maybe it's settled in and maybe that position is interesting for some reason or another. Right. So a good example of this, China just launched four of their TJs satellites. These go out to geostationary orbit and we believe they're either intelligence gathering or some sort of inspection satellite or maybe even the Solo satellite. So where China decides to place them in orbit is something that is, you know, not is non true. Right. So that all that is planned out, you know, way in advance and it's done for a purpose. So and sometimes there's things that we can look at just by the positioning of a satellite and the nature of its orbit that may tell us a little bit about either what it's there to do or what's there to check out, what it's there to support those sorts of things. Right. So in the example of the TGS satellites that China launched, a fairly rapid succession for them over the course of A couple of months. Where are they actually now? And there's a couple of interesting details there that we'll talk about as we have these discussions. I think I'll find it.
- [20:50]
Maria Varmazes
Yeah, you dropped some really interesting nuggets about orbital mechanics that I had. No, I will always fess up to things I'm ignorant of. Orbital mechanics is definitely one of those. I don't know nearly as much as I would like. And you had revealed some very interesting things about what certain things can mean. And I'm trying to be a little vague because I don't remember all the details. But I found that just really. Sorry, I just found that really fascinating. Yeah. That so much can be gleaned from changing inclination, I think was one of the things that you mentioned and just what that can say. And this is for me, I was just kind of hanging on your every word, like, wow, really? So I have a feeling I'll be doing that with your segment too. Like, wow, that's really cool that we can figure that out and that these things can mean certain things. So I am really looking forward to it. Greg, I'm very appreciative of you sharing your expertise with all of us.
- [21:45]
Greg Gillinger
No, of course, of course, yes. Certain maneuvers are more expensive than others. So if you're doing some sort of plane change maneuver that definitely signals some sort of intent. And then also launching into a particular inclination also signal some intent, I think. Since we've talked. Russia launched a satellite, Cosmos 2588 into a Coplana orbit with one of our high value US assets. USA338, I believe it is. So it's not the first time they've done that. There are currently three we believe are NAR satellites, inspection satellites that are coplanar with various high reconnaissance satellites.
- [22:29]
Maria Varmazes
So it's something to keep an eye on.
- [22:31]
Greg Gillinger
Yeah, for sure. We'll dive into kind of what that means to be coplaner and why that's important. And I've got several mentors out there that are fantastic and they will no doubt let me know if I. If I run astray at the laws of physics at any point.
- [23:02]
Maria Varmazes
We will be right back.
- [23:09]
Dave
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- [23:49]
Maria Varmazes
Welcome back. Tricky problems often require creative solutions. And one very notoriously tricky problem for astronomers, and this will include even the aforementioned Vera Rubin team, is dealing with the proliferation of satellites in low Earth orbit and the bright white streaks that these satellites can just rip through long duration images of the night sky, especially when they're taken around dusk or dawn. Just think about it. You put a shiny reflective metal thing up into orbit and it does what shiny reflective metal things do when they catch even the faintest amount of sunlight, they go ping. Which is not great for astronomy. So since we're not likely to have fewer satellites in LEO anytime soon, what exactly is to be done here? Well, what about making those shiny reflective metal things less shiny and reflective? What about painting as much of that satellite as possible, not just pitch black, but vantablack? Why not, right? Well, vantablack, if you're not familiar with it, is often called the darkest man made paint on Earth and it absorbs over 99% of all light. And Surrey Nanosystems, which is the creator of vantablack, and the University of Surrey in the uk, are partnering up to coat the hull of of a CubeSat with a new version of Vantablack and launch it in 2026 to see what kind of effect that Vantablack might have on making satellites less bright and intrusive to ground based astronomy. The cubesat will be called the Jovian One and it'll be part of the Jupiter mission. And yes, of course that's an acronym and it's for the Joint University's Program for In Orbit Training, Education and Research. Putting on my artist hat for a sec. One note about vantablack from that world is that it is considered kind of notoriously fragile as a paint coating. So it'll be very interesting to see this latest iteration of vantablack and how it holds up to the rigor of launch and being in leo. There's also lots of chatter about what coating a satellite in black paint will mean for heat retention too. It'll be very interesting to see, or I guess not see, the results from this one. Foreign that's it for T minus for June 23, 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 insight sites that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like our 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'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 Carouse. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. Go check out those Ruben images and have fun. See you tomorrow.
- [27:31]
Greg Gillinger
T minus.
- [27:45]
Dave
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