← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
Dawn Aerospace says “Oklahoma…OK!”
00:26:08
Dawn Aerospace of New Zealand signs an agreement with Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority. Sierra Space launches a new business unit. Muon Space completes Series B. And, more.
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- [00:02]
Maria Varmazas
You're listening to the N2K space network.
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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 Deleteme team handles everything. It's the set it and forget it peace 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 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 June 12th, 2025.
- [01:30]
Maria Varmazas
I'm Maria Varmazas and this is T minus.
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Ryan Melton
T minus 20 seconds.
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Maria Varmazas
Astrobotics Cube Rover 1 is flight ready for the moon Velo 3D and via space Partnering on additive manufacturing for space propulsion Muon Space completes its $146 million Series B and acquisition of Starlight engines. Sierra Space launches Sierra Space defense to support US national security needs 1 Dawn Aerospace to operate the Mark 2 Aurora in Oklahom and today's guest is Ryan Melton who is the CEO of OpenC3. He and I discussed his open source software for command and control in space as well as the upcoming Space Software Summit. Stick around for the second half of the show to hear that conversation. Thanks for joining me on this Thursday. Let's dive in. First up, Dawn Aerospace of New Zealand signed a $17 million agreement with the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority to base its Aurora Mark 2 spaceplane at the Oklahoma Air and Spaceport in Burns Flat. The deal includes one spaceplane, full ground support, systems, parts, maintenance and training for US Based operations. To get the Oklahoma Aurora up and running. A US Operational team will train in New Zealand this year and begin flights from Oklahoma by early 2027. The Aurora spaceplane offers suborbital flight capabilities with speeds up to Mach 3.5 and altitudes of 100 km with Runway launch and return. Designed for high frequency aircraft style operations, it is intended for for microgravity research, hypersonic testing and defense applications and this deal marks a major step for Dawn's expansion into the United States and highlights Oklahoma's growing role in the commercial space sector. And I should note that I recently spoke with both Dawn CEO Stefan Powell about the business case for dawn here and with the Oklahoma Space Industry Development Authority's Craig Smith about what this deal with dawn means for the growing space sector in Oklahoma and and we will have both of those interviews in the coming weeks on the show, so make sure to keep an ear out for it. Sierra Space launched a new business unit, Sierra Space Defense, alongside its Victory Works facility in Colorado. The 60,000 square foot site will support the production of Eclipse satellite buses, the Ghost Return system and its BlackOS AI platform. Sierra Space Defense has one and a half billion dollars in national security contracts already secured, including including a $740 million SDA deal. The new arm of the company focuses on missile detection, constellations, secure navigation technology and command systems. This move is a strong signal of Sierra's intent to become a key player in the United States space defense infrastructure. Muon Space has raised $146 million in an oversubscribed Series B round. The new funding will scale production of its Halo platform to 500 satellites annually, expand propulsion and ground operations, and support the integration of Starlight Engines thruster technology. And as part of the Series B round, Muon acquired Starlight Engines, which is a propulsion innovator known for developing high efficiency scalable satellite thrusters. The acquisition gives Muon full vertical control over key propulsion components as it ramps up its Constellation manufacturing. With this new infusion of capital, Muon plans to boost staffing and infrastructure for end to end satellite services. Next up, Velo3D and ViaSpace have signed a $4 million master services agreement for advanced propulsion manufacturing. Via will use Velo3D's additive manufacturing technology to produce hybrid rocket engine parts. The two year deal will accelerate the production of Via's expander cycle hybrid engines. Velo 3D will provide dedicated printing capacity, engineering support and training, aiming to cut lead times and improve scalability for future launches, which is a key move towards sovereign sustainable propulsion. Astrobotic has announced that its Cube Rover One is flight ready for deployment on its upcoming Griffin One Lunar Lander mission, which is scheduled for later this year. Weighing about 4kg and modular in design, Astrobotics says that its rover passed rigorous thermal vacuum and vibration testing to qualify for the lunar surface. Small but mighty Cube Rover's architecture mirrors CubeSats with payload flexibility and surface mobility that is suited for the moon's south pole region. It can carry 1 kilo of science payloads and operate over several kilometers with solar power and comms support. The milestone positions Astrobotic to deliver compact lunar mobility for science tech demos and exploration missions. And lastly, one little quick note for you while we wait on a new date for the Axiom 4 mission's launch. NASA says it actually might be a little while longer until we get any news there. And it's not SpaceX or Axiom's fault it ends up the good old Zvezda module on the International Space Station has, quote, a new pressure signature. In other words, it's sprung a new leak of some kind. So it may be a little bit longer until anyone is heading to the iss. Until that is patched up. Slap some flexi on it guys. Come on. And that is our intel briefing for you this Thursday. Links to every single story in today's roundup, plus a few extras for your reading pleasure are all in our show notes. Check them out in your podcast app or on our website, which is space M2K.com/YT/ crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership, or recruit talent, T minus can help. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email@spacen2k.com or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals.
- [08:48]
Dave
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- [09:21]
Alice Carruth
Foreign.
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Maria Varmazas
Melton, CEO of OpenC3.
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Ryan Melton
My name is Ryan Melton. I kind of come from an aerospace software engineering background. I was at Ball aerospace for over 20 years, worked on a whole bunch of NASA programs before I got into kind of the dark defense world. And then three years ago I broke off to start my own company, which is called OpenC3. What we do is a command and control software product called Cosmos. It's kind of unique for a couple different reasons. One is that we have an open source version, so most people kind of enter the Cosmos OpenC3 world by checking out our open source version of our product and it's A command and control product. And so I say that and a lot of people don't know what that means. Command control is an aerospace Y term. Our name, OpenC3 is actually C3 is Command Control and communications. And the way I like to describe these systems in the aerospace world is they're typically hardware control systems. So the command and control of pieces of hardware in my specific customer set is typically satellites. But I like to point out that it's, it doesn't have to be. So our product is super generic in that we can control anything that has a software interface in it. So during like the integration and test phase for a satellite, we're controlling the power supplies and we're controlling the solar array simulators and we're controlling the, you know, thruster simulator, whatever kind of stuff you have around the satellite and the satellite itself. And our software so kind of becomes this kind of hardware orchestration layer where you've got one common user interface that allows you to control a whole suite of hardware. And that's really where our product comes in. And that's where you can do with both our open source version and we have an enterprise paid version as well.
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Maria Varmazas
I always love to ask people this next question who work on open source projects. So why did you choose to have an open source version? And I assume this is where we also talk about why open source is so awesome. I'm very biased, but yeah.
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Ryan Melton
So I love open source. And this kind of goes back to the other question I usually get is how did Ball Aerospace let you open source this?
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Maria Varmazas
There you go. That's right.
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Ryan Melton
That's a big thing. We've been open source for just over 10 years. We hit 10 years of being an open source product in December and congrats. Part of that pitch was I found a VP within Baller space that was interested and I came up with seven reasons why we should open source the product. In that case, four Ball Aerospace. I don't remember all of them, but I know things like, you know, make money. We can, we can potentially sell a paid version or we can sell training and support. That was one of the features giving back to the community, which is something that I personally cared about, which I don't think the executives cared about, but I like. I mean, we use Cosmos is built on all kinds of open source software. It's built on Ruby, it's built on Rails, it's built on Vue js, it's built on Docker, it's built on the system giant. I mean, unfathomable 100 million lines, probably plus of open source code is underneath the part that we've written. Right. And so there's such this history and legacy and foundation of sharing and building products that are not proprietary that you can always dig in. One of the awesome features of having an open source product and even our paid product, it's not open source, but it's open code. There's a word for it. I'm blanking on, but you get the source code even with our paid version.
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Maria Varmazas
Oh, wow.
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Ryan Melton
Yeah, there's no magic. If something's going wrong, we obviously will fix it for you, but if for some reason we can't, you have all of the source code as well. And so there is all the way down to the kernel in the operating system of Linux you can access and fix something. So there is no magic, there is nothing I can't possibly fix. Any problem that you could possibly run into, the software could be fixed.
- [13:25]
Maria Varmazas
Hmm. I'm always fascinated by open source projects because especially in the context that you mentioned, and this is probably not strictly relevant to what we're here to talk about, but years ago I worked at a company similar idea where we had an open source version of the product that was hugely community supported and it was the original version and then we also had a paid version. And I think for a lot of people who worked on it and you know they were getting paid as you know, a corporate developer, being able to give back to the community was like the primary motivation. And I always thought that was just an amazing thing how community minded a lot of open source projects are and there's so much work that goes into them and it's such a labor of love. That's a complete tangent. I just think it's just they're amazing things.
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Ryan Melton
It's only sort of a tangent. I mean community is a big part of it. So we have a whole world. Like back when I was at ball airspace, there was no paid version, it was just the open source version. And we built an international audience of people that were using this software to control their satellites or control their little Arduino projects, or control their home or control their smoker in their backyard. The software got used all over the place. The Chomp Battlebot from the BattleBots TV show, are they all real testing? Yeah, they did all their testing with Cosmos with this product. Right. So it's.
- [14:41]
Maria Varmazas
Oh my God, that's so cool.
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Ryan Melton
That's been. For me, the funnest part is just putting something out there and seeing the world kind of pick it up and that's kind of going to be one of our main goals for kind of the second half of this year is to grow the community. So right now most people we interact with are our customers and they're submitting stuff on the open source or our paid version, both things. But coming up in probably it'll probably it'll either be Cosmos 6.5 or Cosmos 6.6. We're adding an app store and what that's going to do is allow other people in the community to publish their add ons, to plug it to Cosmos itself and people are able to find them. That's one of the biggest problems with anything is discovery. Like how do you even know something exists? Well, if you found Cosmos. Now I want to do something. I want to control a keysight power supply. Well, I go search in the app store and there's a plugin for a keysight power click install. Now I'm controlling the keysight power supply in seconds and I didn't have to write anything. So that's kind of the long term vision. I think that's going to make our community explode going forward.
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Maria Varmazas
That is such a great idea. I love that. So that's part of your future vision for having that app store version. Can you tell me a bit about maybe the aerospace customer community that you have, like who you've been working with, who's been using your stuff?
- [15:55]
Ryan Melton
Yeah, so we work with at this point, we're in pretty much every aerospace company you've heard of, either just with our open source version or with our paid version. Some of our customers are companies like Northrop and Boeing, Journal Atomics, General Dynamics. Those are kind of some of the bigger ones, down to startups like Turion and Atomos who just got bought, but kind of the full gamut of smaller startups to the kind of aerospace primes to big government frameworks. We're part of the forge C2 framework and we're also working with R2C2 on that framework as well.
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Maria Varmazas
So those frameworks are really interesting. I need to learn more about those. Can you tell me a bit about those? That's neat.
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Ryan Melton
So the government, they've got these big programs where they're big ground programs and they call them frameworks. Forge is the next generation missile defense ground system and R2C2 is from the space RCO and it is their kind of rapid deployment, rapid development type group. And so they're totally different missions but we're helping with both of those.
- [17:05]
Maria Varmazas
That's cool. Yeah, sorry. Both those acronyms were vaguely familiar and I just could not remember off the top of my head what they were for. But thank you, I appreciate that. And part of the reason that we reached out to you and we wanted to talk with you is also a software summit that you are a big part of coming up. And I think just the idea of a Space Software Summit in general just made my antenna go. Well, that's very interesting. Obviously, software has a big part to play in the aerospace world, which usually people think hardware first. In the last two and something years, I've been doing this job, I'm having more software discussions with people. And it's not just about like the homebrew stuff. It's about, you know, people figuring out, you know, what. What enterprise software will work with their COTS things. And it's. It's been very interesting hearing more of like the established software development practices also making their way into aerospace in a way that maybe I wouldn't have expected. I just. I've been very fascinated seeing this evolution. And I' hearing about a space Software Summit made me go, this feels really right. So tell me a bit about that, for sure.
- [18:07]
Ryan Melton
So we're hosting the Space Software Summit in Boulder, October 6th through 8th, coming up this year. It's basically the conference that I always wanted. So there's lots of aerospace conferences. We're actually going to be exhibiting at 10 this year, kind of all over the place, including one in Germany coming up in November. But there's very few that are software focused. JPL does put on a flight software conference every year. Aerospace puts on the ground software architecture workshop and there's a couple more little things. But those are the big things that are out there and they're both very focused. Ground software, flight software. But we all have to work together, right? So I said I want a conference where it's just software people. The exhibits are not going to be connectors and thrusters and stuff. It's going to be other software companies and a chance for us all to get together to do a more technical conference. So these talks are going to be technical. My requirement for all the speakers was you need to be able to put something out there where everyone can learn and take something home from your talk. So that is a key characteristic of the speakers for this conference and with kind of a few goals. One so we can kind of build partnerships and work together, but also so that our customers from people in the industry building satellites and building other aerospace products can discover the industry and the other software products that are out there. And a chance to see, hey, there's a lot of really innovative stuff going on in the commercial space industry that can save you a lot of time in your own business. Most of us are focused on a specific product like we're focused on command and control. But there's several companies coming who are focused on flight dynamics. There are several companies coming who are focused on mission planning. There's companies focused on flight software, there's companies focused on security. Right. So there's a whole breadth of this whole industry of the aerospace software group. And this is going to be a great opportunity to one, learn some stuff. But two, meet all these companies and get a chance to kind of see their latest products and what's going on and really kind of see the value add that we can add to the industry.
- [20:21]
Maria Varmazas
We'll be right back.
- [20:28]
Dave
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- [21:20]
Maria Varmazas
Welcome back. For our final story today we have an on the ground update from our senior producer Alice Carruth who is at the International Rocket Engineering Competition AKA the IREC over in Midland, Texas all this week.
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Alice Carruth
Hey from West Texas, this is Alice Carruth, N2K senior producer. I've been out here supporting the Interior International Rocket Engineering competition this year. 143 teams have turned up here in the US from over 20 countries and day one went off with a little bit of a hitch. A weather event suspended launches until after 11 o' clock on day one. But we managed to get nearly 30 launches off from all the university students that were welcome to come out here for the first day. We're expecting a lot more launches on day two and day three to get through those 143 teams. So do tune into the YouTube channel, the Experimental Sounding Rocket association on YouTube to see what's going on with the different teams from around the world. We're really excited to see all these students and the future workforce of the aerospace industry thrive.
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Maria Varmazas
That's it for T minus for June 12, 2025 brought to you by N2K CyberWire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@space.n2k.com we're privileged that N2K and podcasts like T Minus are part of the daily routine of many 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 Senior Producer is Alice Carruth. 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 Ivan. Peter Kilby is our publisher and I'm your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. T Minus still listing your home address on business documents With Stable, you get a permanent business address you can use for the irs, banks, vendors, everything, so you stay professional and keep your personal address private. Stable also digitizes all your mail, accessible from a secure online dashboard, so you can manage it from anywhere. Sign up@ustable.com pod and get 50% off your first three months of a grow or scale plan. That's ustable.com pod.