← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
Firefly FLY into their IPO.
00:24:51
We’ve got financial updates from Firefly Aerospace. MDA Space, BlackSky and Redwire. Intuitive Machines to acquire KinetX. NASA to study OTVs. And more.
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- [00:00]
Maria Varmazas
Foreign you're listening to the N2K space network.
- [00:09]
Frank Chimenti
CISOs and CIOs know machine identities now outnumber humans by more than 80 to 1 and without securing them trust, uptime, outages and compliance are at risk. Cyberark is leading the way with the only unified platform purpose built to secure every machine identity, certificates, secrets and workloads across all environments, all clouds and all AI agents. Designed for scale, automation and quantum readiness, Cyber ARC helps modern enterprises secure their machine future. Visit cyberark.com machines to see how.
- [00:58]
Alice Carruth
Today.
- [00:58]
Maria Varmazas
Is August 7th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazas and this is T minus. T minus 20 seconds to Los T drifts to go for deploy. Neospace Group has officially launched Saudi Arabia's first National Earth Observation Data Program. Four RAFT and SAIC have been awarded the U.S. air Force Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities Hope 2.0 contract. NASA has selected six companies to produce studies focused on lower cost ways to launch and deliver spacecraft of various sizes and forms to multiple, difficult to reach orbits. Intuitive Machines has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kinetics One. Firefly Aerospace announced the pricing of its upsized IPO, while MDA Space, BlackSky and Redwire reported their Q2 findings. Financial updates Our guest today is Frank Chimenti, Director of Mechanical Satellite Solutions at Beyond Gravity. Frank joins our producer Alice Carruth to talk about satellite manufacturing on the Space Coast. Stay with us for more on that after today's intel briefing. Foreign it is Thursday, everybody. Hope you're having a good one. Thanks for joining me. We've got a lot to unpack on today's show, so let's dive in, shall we? We're kicking off with a roundup of space financial updates. First up, Firefly Aerospace, which rang in the bell at the New York Stock Exchange this morning as the company announced the pricing of its upsized initial public offering. Firefly is offering 1,926,000 shares of its common stock at a price of $45 a share. In addition, Firefly has granted the underwriters a 30 day option to purchase an additional nearly 3 million shares of its common stock at the IPO price, less underwriting and discounts and commissions, of course. The shares began trading on NASDAQ global market today, August 7th under the ticker symbol FLY, and the offering is expected to close tomorrow August 8th, subject to customary closing conditions. And speaking of financials, three big names in space filed second quarter financial updates in the last 24 hours. MDA Space reported revenues of $373.3 million, which is up 54% year over year. Earth observation company Blacksky reported revenue for the quarter was down to $22.2 million, compared to 24.9 million in the second quarter of 2024. But it's not all bad news, as Blacksky says their imagery and software analytical services grew to $18 million, and Redwire, which completed the acquisition of Edge Autonomy this quarter, reported revenues of $61.8 million for Q2. And you can dive into all of the line items on the full reports by following the links in our show. Notes Staying with Acquisition News Lunarlander company Intuitive Machines has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Kinetics and Kinetics is an Arizona based aerospace company with more than 30 years of experience delivering flight, proven deep space navigation systems, engineering, ground software and constellation mission design for the US Government and international customers. Intuitive Machines says the acquisition strengthens the company's position as a vertically integrated provider of end systems for the Moon, Mars and beyond. The acquisition is expected to close prior to the end of 2025, subject to customary closing conditions. NASA has selected six companies to produce studies focused on lower cost waste to launch and deliver spacecraft of various sizes and forms to multiple, difficult to reach orbits. The firm fixed price awards comprise nine studies with a maximum total value of approximately $1.4 million. The awardees are Aeroscience and Technology, Blue Origin, Firefly Aerospace, Impulse Space Rocket Lab and United Launch Services. Each of the six companies will deliver studies exploring future application of orbital transfer vehicles for NASA missions. NASA will use the findings to inform mission design, planning and commercial launch acquisition strategies for risk tolerant payloads and the studies will be complete by mid December. Raft, in partnership with Science Applications International Corporation, better known as SAIC, has been awarded the US Air Force Tactical Exploitation of National Capabilities or 10 CAP Hope 2.0 Award and the award supports the Air Force's continued efforts to accelerate the operationalization of national space based assets. The 10 cap mission is designed to bridge the long standing gap between high level space and intelligence systems and frontline warfighter operations. By leveraging existing national capabilities including satellite derived Data and Title 50 resources, 10Cap seeks to enhance situational awareness, reduce decision latency and enable more agile responses to to dynamic threat environments. Under the 10 Cap Hope 2.0 award, Raft will deliver a suite of enabling technologies that enhance the Air Force's ability to operationalize national space based intelligence. NEO Space Group, known as nsg, has officially launched Saudi Arabia's first national Earth Observation data platform and the platform is operated by Up42, a geospatial company recently acquired from Airbus, the platform provides users with access to high resolution satellite imagery, geospatial analytics and advanced AI powered tools from more than 80 global providers. It serves as a centralized hub for strategic sectors including energy, agriculture, urban planning, mining and environmental management. NSG says it's built on secure local infrastructure and is aligned with Saudi data regulations. The platform supports the kingdom's Vision 2030 goals by accelerating digital transformation and enhancing national capabilities in space and geospatial technologies. And that concludes today's Top five headlines. And this is where I bring in producer Alice Carruth and ask hey Alice, what other stories are we watching today?
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David Moulton
Hey Maria. We've added four additional links in today's selected reading section. The first one is an update on the return of the SpaceX Crew 10. NASA and SpaceX are targeting no earlier than 6:05pm on Friday, August 8th for the undocking of the agency's SpaceX Crew 10 mission from the International Space Station. At the time of recording today we have a SpaceX launch of the KF02 mission. You can go back and watch that liftoff. Air and space forces say that there's a tweak to the Space Force uniform. And finally Pakistan and China are reportedly looking to build on their tech collaboration.
- [08:02]
Maria Varmazas
Which could include space lots to cover there. And as a reminder you can find those links in the show notes which are available on our website space.n2k.com hi T - 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 would love to hear from you. Just send us an email@space2k.com or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals.
- [08:49]
Univorty2
New adversary tactics and emerging tech to meet these threats is developing all the time on Threat Vector. We keep you a step ahead. We dig deep into the threats that matter and the strategies that work.
- [09:01]
Alice Carruth
How do they help that customer know that what they just created is safe?
- [09:04]
David Moulton
The future is now and our expectations are wrong.
- [09:09]
Univorty2
Join me David Moulton, Senior Director of thought leadership for Univorty2 at Palo Alto Networks and our guests who live this work every day.
- [09:17]
Maria Varmazas
We're not just talking about some encryption and paying multimillion dollar ransom. We're talking about fundamentally being unable to operate automated eradication and containment. So being able to very rapidly ID what's going on in an environment and contain that immediately is there hiding in plain sight.
- [09:40]
Univorty2
So if you're looking to sharpen your strategy and and stay ahead of what's next. Tune in and listen to threatvector, your frontline for security insights.
- [09:56]
Frank Chimenti
And now a word from our sponsor, ThreatLocker, the powerful Zero trust enterprise solution that stops ransomware in its tracks. Allowlisting is a deny by default software that makes application control simple and fast. Ring Fencing is an application containment strategy ensuring apps can only access the files, registry keys, network resources and other applications they truly need to function. Shut out cybercriminals with world class endpoint protection from Threat Locker.
- [10:34]
Maria Varmazas
Today's guest is Frank Chimenti, Director of Mechanical Satellite Solutions at Beyond Gravity. And Frank joins T minus producer Alice Carruth to talk about satellite manufacturing on the Space Coast.
- [10:49]
David Moulton
Could you tell us a little bit about Beyond Gravity, how long it's been around for and what it is you guys do?
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Alice Carruth
Yeah, well, Beyond Gravity does a lot of things in space. We have, there's two major divisions. There's launchers and satellites. We've been doing stuff for 50 years, different names. Ruag was the longest name and then it became Beyond Gravity. And we do stuff the really co stuff the, the fairings, the separation, the dispensers for, for the launching. On the launcher side, really impressive stuff. We have sites in Lichen, Ping, Sweden, Emin in Switzerland and in Decatur, Alabama in the US and then in the satellite side we do everything from the structures, which is what we do here, solar drive mechanisms, we do onboard computers, antennas, we do thermal blankets, we do mechanisms, so thruster mechanisms where it's kind of like the elbows of these arms, if you will, that kind of move the thrusters or the antennas around. We do a lot of different things and I think it surprises all the different groups like wow, you do this, you do that and you can almost build a satellite with everything that we do and almost the rocket, not the boosters, all that, the really big cool stuff, but all the other stuff we do. So it's an exciting place to work at.
- [12:08]
David Moulton
It really sounds it. And you guys are based in Space Coast Florida, very well known area in Titusville. And you mentioned that, you know, you are in a very specific division of what Beyond Gravity does. Could you tell us a little bit about what you cover in that area?
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Alice Carruth
So we have different business units within satellites. So we work within the Mechanical satellite solutions or mss. And our vice president is Alexandra, he's a great leader. A lot of sites and where she wants to take our business unit. And we two sides within Mechanical satellite solutions. We have the structure sides that build the plates or the structure of the satellite and then we have the, the mechanism side that do like the solar drive mechanisms, basically the elbow of the solar, solar array so it can move back and forth. Then in Titusville we, we do the structure side and the high cadence primarily. So I don't know, it's probably almost 10 years ago we, beyond gravity started looking into ways to improve the panel manufacturing to improve the time it takes to improve the repeatability, does the accuracy. And we came up with two different technologies. One was an insert, a special insert. We called it the gray dome. And we work with academia to come up with this part that can be used to automatically place it. And the other was, it's called an automatic potting machine. So it's able to not only machine the panel, but to pick up this insert, fill it with glue, flip it over and put in the panel. So before that beyond gravity and today all the rest of industry uses something called a Sherlock where they have to manually take an insert, they have to drill a hole, put the insert in, fill it with like a caulking gun, basically fill it up with glue, put in a jig. It takes like 30 minutes. Our technology takes about a minute and a half. So that gives us a huge advantage to be able to reduce cost and in lead time of being able to automate that. And you know, this is beyond. Garrity's goal is to get into that new space world where we have awesome engineers, we can design anything, build anything. But it's that repeatability to improve the operation, if you will, so that we can manufacture high cadence and get our products to our customers so they can get busy building their satellites and launching them up.
- [14:29]
David Moulton
Automated manufacturing always sounds very sci fi to me. It's amazing to hear that it's already happening and it's not science fiction anym, very much science reality. Now you mentioned you work with Airbus. I know you work with a lot of other customers. Is there any recent projects you guys have been involved in that you'd like to tell us about?
- [14:45]
Alice Carruth
Oh yeah. So we, we eventually we completed the, the OneWeb constellation, delivered everything and then transitioned to slightly more complex assemblies that are being used. Some of the primes for SDA for Tranche one and Tranche two, the transport layer and the tracking layer. So similar to the OneWeb, but different, much larger, a little more complex and very. It's been a good, good program so far.
- [15:15]
David Moulton
I feel like satellite communications is really like the thing right now in space. Everyone's trying to get in there. You mentioned OneWeb, obviously we've seen lots of Starlink coming on board and now Kuiper as well. Are you finding anything that you're coming across as you're at the forefront of this space part of the industry? That is perhaps an issue that needs to be overcome in that area.
- [15:37]
Alice Carruth
Time to market. I think that for, for us, beyond gravity, there are a couple of different product lines. We were probably the first in Titusville with our technology to improve the lead time of structure panels. But also within our, in our business unit we do the solari drive mechanisms and we came up with a very dedicated line that could quickly turn these around to get again to our customer. For the launcher side, we came up with a, we had, we're working with for a new customer and have this whole product line just for the dispensers, the fairings. And so they came up with a whole new way of, to make these things so we can get the, those products to the market faster. So there's a big focus. It's not just these one offs anymore, it's how do we make. We now we've perfected this thing, this product. It could be a, it can be a fairing or a structure panel. How do we mass produce it so we bring down the cost, bring down the schedule so that our customers can again get to the market quicker, get.
- [16:42]
David Moulton
To space quicker and produce tons and tons more satellites into orbit, hopefully. Because that's what we're all aiming for at the end of the day.
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Alice Carruth
Exactly, yeah.
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David Moulton
Looking forward, what is it you guys are working on coming up and then what's exciting you particularly in the satellite market right now?
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Alice Carruth
So I would say for me personally there's this new technology, this wireless energy where they're taking the satellites of collecting solar power and somehow I'll call it the black magic, right, and getting it down to earth. So I think that's, that's, that's very exciting from a technology point of view. I think again, I hate to repeat it, going back to how we manufacture things, I think the whole industry is being pushed to drive down costs and schedules are really important and really for this industry to thrive, to grow, we need to be able to meet these demands, meet the cost to get that product up there so that these, eventually these end customers can provide their services at a reasonable time frame. No longer can we take 10 years to launch a satellite. It has to be within a year, two years because we have to be quick. As technology is racing forward and there's a lot of competition out there and we have to stay in front.
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David Moulton
You're right. There is a lot of competition, which I suppose gets me to ask the question, you know, what is it? Beyond Gravity's pitch, What is it sets you apart from the other competition out there.
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Alice Carruth
I would say what sets us apart is our dedication to improving the process, improving the operation, so that we, you know, here, what does the customer need? How do we manufacture it in a time that meets the customer's demand and with a quality at the same time? So you can't just skip over quality just to rush it out the door. You have to still keep that same quality you've always given. And I think that that's something that we've shown, especially in our product line, that we've gone from, hey, we took this new technology, this new machine and new insert that no one's ever used before, proved that it could withstand the mechanical and thermal stresses of the environment, got it into production. Of course, like any new machine, it had its issues. But because Beyond Gravity has a great team of engineers, a great operations team, we're able to get over those issues quickly and turn it around. So we were producing panels at the rate that our customer needed.
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David Moulton
Amazing. If you want the listeners to hear one thing about Beyond Gravity, what is the one thing you want them to come away with?
- [19:09]
Alice Carruth
So I would say, and I find it the most. One of our more interesting sayings, I guess, in the company is we challenge the impossible, right? We want our people to be curious because we don't want the status quo. And I think that's how you get from that old space to that new space. Mentality is question, why? Why are we doing this? How can we do it better? You know, the passionate this guaranteed from. From every different site, from the operators on the floor to our. To our CEO, there's a dedication, there's a passion about being in space and doing this work, and that gives you that energy because when you have those hard times, you know, at space, we have hard times. How do you get through it? And it's that dedication and passion that we have. And it's again, and then being a team, be together, you know, how do we get through those hard times? Not only being passionate, but you need team members that are all pushing forward, finding new solutions to get through them. So I think that's what Beyond Gravity brings to the table.
- [20:16]
Maria Varmazas
We will be right back.
- [20:20]
Barry Wilmore
Abercrombie's viral denim sale is back and Spotify listeners get an extra 15% off with code Spotify AF. Abercrombie is known for their denim with 30 to 50% off all jeans. Find out how denim should fit. Shop the Viral Denim Sale in the Abercrombie app, online or in stores. Valid in stores and online through August 11, 2025 in US and Canada. Excludes clearance price reflects discount code. Valid in US and Canada through August 11, 2025. Exclusions apply. See details online.
- [20:53]
Maria Varmazas
Welcome back. And we're finishing off today's news with a celebration. After 25 years at NASA flying in four different spacecraft, accumulating 464 days in space, astronaut and test pilot Barry, better known as Butch Wilmore, has retired. And you will definitely know Butch's name from the many times I have said it in the headlines over the last 12 months or so following the Starliner flight and the so called Stuck in space saga. Now again, he was never stuck, but who would let that minor detail get in the way of a great headline? Wilmore is a decorated US Navy captain who has flown numerous tactical aircraft operationally while deploying aboard four aircraft carriers during peacetime and combat operations. He is a graduate of the U.S. naval Test Pilot School, where he went on to serve as a test pilot before NASA selected him to become an astronaut in 2000. And when asked on Fox News if he had always wanted to be an astronaut, he gave this answer, you know.
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Butch Wilmore
I guess like any kid I had the desire you see all the launches, you know, wow, that's really cool. Like any, you know, probably 99% of the kids out there, but it wasn't something I took steps towards to achieve but eventually joined the Navy, flew jets, got selected. A test pilot program kind of hit all those wickets that were required at the time to be selected as a space shuttle pilot. And I thought I'm going to give that a shot. And NASA said, thank you very much but we don't need you right now. So several applications later, I finally wore them down.
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Alice Carruth
Well done. I can see that side of the.
- [22:29]
Maria Varmazas
During his time at NASA, Wilmore completed three missions, launching aboard the space shuttle Atlantis, Roscosmos's Soyuz and Boeing's Starliner to the International Space Station and Wilmore returned to Earth aboard a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft. He conducted five spacewalks totaling 32 hours total outside of the orbital lab. We do wish Butch the very best of luck in his retirement and we are sure it's not the last we hear or see of him in the space industry. And that is T minus. Brought to you by N2K CyberWire we would 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 our rating and review and you your podcast app, please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space2k.com we're 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. Vere Kilby is our polisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. See you next time.
- [24:17]
Alice Carruth
T.