← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
DiskSat for edge computing in space.
00:26:08
Satlyt to use DiskSat for edge computing in space. SKY Perfect JSAT and constellr have formed a partnership. Blue Moon Mk1 is at JSC for testing. And more.
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You're listening to the Cyberwire Network, powered by N2K.
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Today is February 4th, 2026. I'm Maria Varmazes and this is T minus.
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T minus 20 seconds to Los T drifting from a satellite 5 Blue.
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Origin's blue moon mark 1 lunar lander has arrived at Johnson Space center to undergo testing. 4 ISAR arrow space is expanding testing operations with SSC space at S Range Space center in Sweden. Airbus plans to deploy the Superbird 9 broadcast and broadband satellite for SkyPerfect JSAT in 2027. Japan's SkyPerfect JSAT and Europe's Constellar are collaborating on the launch of commercial sales of high resolution thermal infrared satellite data for the Japanese market. Satellite has entered into a commercial agreement with the Aerospace Corporation for the use of its Disk SAT technology. And today we have the very first of our chats from Commercial Space Week in Orlando, Florida. In this one I will be speaking to William Cook, who is the Senior Vice President of Space Operations at Psyonic Navigation. We're going to be discussing their precision navigation offering, so make sure to stay with us after today's headlines to find out more about that. It is Wednesday, everybody. Happy Hump Day. Let's dive into today's intel briefing, shall we? First up, Satellite. And that one's spelled S A T L Y T. Yeah, Satellite L has entered into a commercial license agreement with the Aerospace Corporation for the use of its Disk SAT technology. Disk SAT was developed by the Aerospace Corporation as a lightweight compact disc shaped satellite that's designed to optimize future rideshare launches. The Aerospace Corporation says that the unconventional shape enables new possibilities for cost effective and rapid constellation deployment, improving packing efficiency and balanced mass distribution. Following a successful launch last month, four Disk sats are now in orbit, beginning mission demonstrations that showcase the potential of this innovative satellite form factor. Under the new license, satlite will integrate its onboard computing framework using Disk sats architecture to explore applications in autonomous operations in orbit, data processing and distributed satellite coordination. The agreement establishes satellite as one of the first commercial companies to work with disksat technology. Both teams will continue exploring opportunities for testing and technology validation throughout 2026. Japan's Skyperfect JSAT and Europe's Constellar are collaborating on the launch of commercial sales of high resolution thermal infrared satellite data for the Japanese market. The partnership marks the first time a private company in Japan will commercially deliver data from constellar. The company's collaboration introduces a new Earth observation capability for government and industrial users, complementing optical and synthetic aperture radar systems with object level activity information. As it begins handling this new data, SkyPerfect JSAT will further enhance its data provision capabilities as a space solutions provider and strive to deliver more advanced solutions that address customers challenges and Staying with skyperfect jsat for our next story, Airbus says it plans to finally deploy the Superbird 9 broadcast and broadband satellite for the Japanese company next year. There have been multiple delays to the deployment of the spacecraft, with the original target set back in 2024, but Airbus was selected to develop the Superbird 9 and it was based on Airbus OneSat satellite design back in 2021. Better late than never. Over to Europe now and Isar Aerospace, which has still yet to release a date for its delayed launch from January, is expanding their testing operations with SSC space at S Range Space center in Sweden. Isar plans to open a second test site to support the development and production of its Spectrum rocket. The new facility will enable testing of more than 30 engines a month along with expanded integrated stage testing capabilities, increasing testing capacity and enabling further development. And we do hope to see them launching at some point in the early part of this year. And Houston we have a Lunar lander Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark one lunar lander has arrived at Johnson Space center to undergo testing. Very exciting. The testing will be conducted at the Thermal vacuum chamber A, which is a 90 foot tall chamber designed to create a vacuum and simulate conditions in space. Blue is working towards a goal of providing a lunar landing system by the Artemis 5 mission. NASA currently has a contract with SpaceX for similar systems for the Artemis 3 and 4 missions. The Blue Origin Blue Moon Mark 1 lunar lander is scheduled to launch on its inaugural Uncrewed Pathfinder mission at some point later this year. And that wraps up today's top stories. Head to the show Notes for links to further reading on all of the stories mentioned in today's intelligence briefing. And hey T minus crew. You know a lot of people are listening to podcasts through YouTube and if that's the way you prefer to listen to this show, well, good news. Hellos everyone. P Space Daily is indeed on YouTube. You might be listening to me that way right now in fact, and if you are, hi. We do post our episodes there on YouTube, along with video clips from interviews and events that we do throughout the year, like Commercial Space Week that we just did last week. So if you are dual screening at work and you keep the YouTube player going all day while your head's down, you know, listen, I get it. I'm not judging a lot of us to it at N2K Cyber is our company's YouTube channel and you will find the T minus Space Daily playlist there along with all of the other shows that we make here at N2K. Spoiler alert. A lot of them are about cybersecurity, hence the channel name at N2K Cyber. Again, that's N2K Cyber on YouTube. And you will also find a dedicated playlist of all of our conversations from Commercial Space Week on there. So do go and check them out.
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Today we're featuring the very first of our guests from Commercial Space Week in Orlando, Florida. William Cook is the Senior Vice President of Space Operations at Psyonic Navigation.
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I'm the vice president of Psionic Navigation, which I'll go into a little detail about what we do. Steve Sanford, he was the director of engineering at NASA and he and his team saw a need for advanced navigation. There's a gap in the technology. So with Artemis and going to the moon, lunar surfaces, Mars, planetary, they spent over $40 million of research while he was still there. So he and several people at the company that are there now were the inventors and the developers. So when the time came, he acquired the license and the patents for all that. And so we have the rights to commercialize this technology. So it's called Coherent lidar.
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Coherent lidar.
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Coherent lidar. And it's a LIDAR system that performs navigation for landing. Rpo, situational awareness. And it's based on the principles and uses the principles of Doppler. Okay, so can I ask you, before.
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You go into detail, just if you could explain maybe a bit. I think most of us are familiar with what LIDAR is, but Coherent is a very interesting descriptor. So what does that mean?
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So think of FM radio and AM radio and do people listen to AM radio anymore? I mean, but again, anyway, there's AM radio amplitude modulation and frequency modulation. Think of. So there are other LIDAR systems out there. Coherent LiDAR in the LiDAR system that we have developed is. It's very complex, but it's very precise and accurate. So imagine if you're in Cislunar or on the moon, there's no GPS there and there's probably not going to be there for a while. Right? But here on anything that moves, GPS can be jammed. This cannot be jammed. So a coherent LIDAR sends an exact frequency out and that frequency it will see only the frequency that it sends out. So it can't be jammed, it can't be spoofed. The system can look directly into the sun and will not get confused by the solar radiance or anything like that. So that becomes a very important feature for some of our clients who are situational awareness, where if they're trying to see if some other spacecraft is approaching them, naturally you want to approach with the sun behind you, because any system's going to look, they're not going to see it. We provide the benefit of being able to look directly into the sun from a navigational and a sensor awareness. We still meet spec and performance. Now, thermal heating, that's another thing.
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Before we get into that, you had mentioned that there was a gap. Is that specifically part of the gap right there about the the directionality, or can you, can we tell me a bit more about that gap?
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So the difference between the other LIDAR systems that many people are familiar with are time of flight, flash lidar. Those have some, you know, rf. I mean, you know, Apollo landed on the moon with RF laser, you know, technology, and it works fine. But this is another level of accuracy. Our velocity we can measure below 2 cm per second squared. Wow. And our ranges, we start getting, collecting data at well past 20km. And then as we get closer to our landing, the data fidelity and data modeling becomes even more clear. So our sweet spot is about 15km out, but we start getting good data. In some of our demonstrations, we've flown on F18s, we've flown on landers on the ground, on Earth. We've been in two missions in orbit and we've got some excellent performance data on landing actually on the moon.
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Yeah.
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So we're now working with clients. Astrobotics is going to be. We're on the Astrobotics Griffin mission. Wow.
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Yeah.
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That's fantastic.
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That's coming up soon, isn't it?
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It is and we're really excited. I mean, we're going to be. They're going to be landing. The mission is to go to the south pole, Shackleton's crater.
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Yep.
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Very harsh environment. So you have regolith, you have dust, you have on one side, it's very light and then you get into the crater, it's completely dark. So the environment is very tough.
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Yeah.
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And this LIDAR system that we've developed, that has been developed, we're now producing it. We've moved from R and D so the last couple years. We have revenue generating programs now, but it's perfect for that, that environment.
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Wow. So a lot of talk of lunar application beyond that also. Any, any your sights are on Mars maybe, perhaps.
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Yeah. So we're really, like I said, you know, when NASA was developing this technology, it was with the understanding that we have to have accurate, very precise landing. And we're seeing a lot of that. You know, there's been some failures out there. It's not easy to land on the moon. It's particularly not easy to do it like some of the eclipse missions. NASA is promoting doing this at, you know, a certain budget that just increases the challenges. So landing on the moon, we also have RPO systems which are scanning systems. It's a little different technology and a little different and depending on whether it's cooperative or non cooperative. So how you design the system at its core is the same. The electronics are the same. Now we have a beam pointing unit on it and whether you're putting static telescopes on it or scanning telescopes, that makes a difference in the kind of application that you're going to be using. Interesting.
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Okay, I always feel bad asking this question because you all are working at the cutting edge. But what's next? What else are you working on, you know?
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Well, that's a great question. So we're building the machine to build a machine. Right. So like I said, we've taught so much. You know, I started out at Orbital, very innovative, but it was a very entrepreneurial culture that we were mentored. We're trying to recreate or build that entrepreneurial culture where you know, your engineering teams, you know, they're thinking outside the box. All the same cliches that you're hearing everyone's trying to do. But the thing we're doing right now is photonic integrated chips. So that technology is going to reduce the swap your mass. So right now we're at four and a half kilograms which is phenomenal for this type of technology. We expect within the next six to seven months with our photonic integrated chips that we're going to be going through a qual program. We're actually working with jpl. We have contracts with JPL on the Mars sample return missions. So we're already anticipating what kind of qualification human rated type technology is needed to be out there. And for us it's going to be reducing the size.
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Yeah, yeah.
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Additionally in our technology roadmap we're also going to be, we want to deliver to our customers a total navigation system so processing, you know, our nav filter. We're already integrating imus on our ground systems. We've got that developed. We've also got the pic, which photonic integrated chip that's integrated all on our ground systems already. So our next step is to make it so space qualified but we want to deliver a complete package to the customer so they don't need to go and spend extra money or getting processing. You know, we don't want to be the company just gives them data and then they have to number crunch all that.
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Right, right.
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You know, so well, Bill, I don't.
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Always ask my guests this question, but you have a really fascinating story and you've got a lot of experience in this industry. So I figure given your perspective, what are you really excited about? Not just at what you all are working on, but just more in general about what's going on in space space industry right now. What's got you?
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Well I will tell you in my career there comes a point where you're, you're giving back and I am that I'm doing that a lot because I was mentored by some of the best in the, in the industry. But I do see the exploration Europa.
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Yeah.
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You know, there's minerals they're mining. We're actually working with some of our clients right now that are going to be doing studies to find water on the lunar surface. And we know there's about 5 to 6% but that's a small surface area that you have to find to find this.
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They're not going to make it easy for us to get it, they being the moon.
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So you know, it's the, the moon is going to be a port and it's going to be, you know, and then you can't take everything so you have to be able to build that space mobility. You're going to need to get and travel around.
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Yeah.
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This Mars, you know, getting to Mars is going to take, you know, this side and it's going to, it's not going to be one or two technologies. It's going to be, that's the beauty of space right now is. Well it's always been integrating multiple different systems into one.
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Yeah.
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And we believe that our product and Psionic has the, the right product out there to make that, that transition.
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We'll be right back.
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Most security conferences talk about Zero Trust. Zero Trust World puts you inside. This is a hands on cybersecurity event designed for practitioners who want real skills, not just theory. You'll take part in live hacking labs where you'll attack real environments, see how modern threats actually work and learn how to stop them before they turn into incidents. But Zero Trust World is more than labs. You'll also experience expert LED sessions, practical case studies and technical deep dives focused on real world implementation. Whether your blue team, red team or responsible for securing an entire organization, the content is built to be immediately useful. You'll earn CPE credits, connect with peers across the industry and leave with strategies you can put into action right away. Join us March 4th through the 6th in Orlando, Florida. Register now@ZTW.com and take your Zero Trust strategy from theory to execution.
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Welcome back. It's been interesting seeing how various space agencies around the world are choosing their lanes, so to speak, for areas that they are starting to really specialize in. To me, when I think about the many things that ESA is working on, I think of how they are really focusing on responsible sustainable spacecraft reentry and disposal. Learning how to do it in ways that are better for our planet, and prioritizing good reentry practices for active and ending missions, that kind of thing. I do hope other agencies will also follow their example. And along those lines, ESA is going to be doing an interesting research project involving two satellites and a plane later this year. Two ESA Cluster satellites. And Cluster is a four satellite constellation that finished its mission back in 2024 and are near the end of their life. Previously two satellites from Cluster already demised. But there are two remaining Cluster satellites and they are due to reenter this year in late August and early September. And ESA not only was able to tweak these remaining satellites trajectory, but it will also have a science team on a plane nearby the satellite's reentry points, so those scientists can observe the reentry itself in real time. Or at least they will try to. It's not a simple task when reentries do happen very quickly and oh, you know, a mere 80km up in the atmosphere, very, very high up there. And I should note, ESA did an experiment like this with the first two cluster satellites that demised in 2024. And yeah, it was crazy hard to get a plane anywhere near the reentry and gather any useful data. And ESA's not mincing words, it's gonna be crazy hard to do it again. But hey, the more data the better. Because whatever we can glean on how these satellites break up in the atmosphere, what survives and what doesn't will allow for smarter satellite design in what ESA calls design for demise. Ooh, it's kind of gothy. ESA will be doing a dedicated mission just to this effect actually, with something called Draco, which is all about learning about what happens during atmospheric reentry from the inside. So even more good data to come from that. And with Draco and Cluster, we'll have even better re entries and better safer satellite disposal. That's a win, win, win. And that's T minus. Brought to you by N2K CyberWire we would love to know what you think of our podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like our show, and I certainly hope you do, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. If you don't mind, please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space2k.com we are proud that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector. From the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies, N2K helps 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 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 Ibin. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thank you for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.
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T minus.
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