← T-Minus Space Daily
T-Minus Space Daily
From solstice to satellites.
00:26:38
Rocket Lab awarded an $816 million prime contract by the U.S. Space Force. The Space Development Agency made multiple awards to build 72 Tracking Layer satellites in all for Tranche 3. And, more.
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Foreign you're listening to the N2K space network.
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Today is December 22nd, 2025. Maria I'm Maria Varmazas and this is T minus.
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T minus 20 seconds. Los speed res go for deploy rock and roll.
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5 Safran to equip Telesat Lightspeed Leo Constellation 4 Exilaunch to deploy 22 satellites on SpaceX's upcoming Twilight rideshare mission. NATO suspects that Russia is a new ASAT weapon to disrupt Starlink. The SDA awards contracts for 72 tracking layer tranche 3 satellites. Rocket Lab was awarded $816 million in a prime contract for the SDA's missile defense satellite Const. Today's guest is Brandon Karp chatting with host of the Cyber Wire Daily, Dave Bittner on the space domain increasingly becoming a war fighting domain and what that means for space cybersecurity. Stay with us. Hi everyone. Happy Monday and I hope you had a lovely solstice yesterday. Thank you for joining me. Let's dive in, shall we? And while it has been a bit quiet today on the news front, there are still some big news items to cover. As first up, we have some huge news from Rocket Lab. They have been awarded an $816 million prime contract by the US Space Force to design and build 18 satellites for the Tracking Layer Tranche 3 program under the proliferated Warfighter Space Architecture, or PWSA. Under the contract, Rocket Lab will deliver satellites to provide infrared sensing to detect and track advanced missile threats. The company notes that this is Rocket Lab's largest ever award to date and this contract positions them as a major satellite prime for US national security missions. Rocket Lab says the program will leverage its vertically integrated capabilities including spacecraft manufacturing components and mission operations, all to support the Space Force's proliferated low Earth orbit architecture. And related to that story, Rocket Lab is not the only company that's part of the PWSA announcement. The Space Development Agency made multiple awards in fact to build 72 tracking layer satellites in all for Tranche 3 expanding its proliferated missile warning and tracking architecture in low Earth orbit. The satellites are designed to detect, track and provide fire control quality data on advanced missile threats, including hypersonic systems. In addition to Rocket Lab's aforementioned prime contract for 18 satellites, the other prime awardees include Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman and L3Harris Technologies. All four companies in all will be responsible for building 18 satellites each and the SDA says the tracking layer is a core element of its national missile defense approach, emphasizing its resiliency through distributed constellations. For our next story on NATO's suspicions about a new ASAT weapon from Russia, I'll hand you over now to Dave Buettner, my colleague and host of the Cyberwire Daily.
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2 NATO intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti satellite weapon designed to disrupt Elon Musk's Starlink network by releasing clouds of high density pellets into orbit. According to intelligence findings seen by the Associated Press, the so called Zone Effect weapon could disable many satellites at once, potentially undermining Western space advantages that have supported Ukraine. Analysts not briefed on the findings question whether such a system could be used without causing uncontrollable debris and widespread damage, including to Russia's own satellites. Some experts argue the concept may be experimental, exaggerated or intended as a deterrent rather than a deployable weapon. While Russia denies plans to weaponize space, officials have warned that commercial satellites aiding Ukraine could be legitimate targets, keeping concerns about escalation and orbital chaos alive. Our history repeats itself. Desk sent us a link to the Wikipedia page on project Westford, a US experiment from the 70s which involved putting needles in orbit. We'll have a link in the show notes.
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Thank you Dave and fun fact. Project Westford was named after my neighboring town of Westford, Massachusetts, which is which is home to the MIT Haystack Observatory, which that mission was done in support of back in the early 1960s. Highly recommend checking out that Wikipedia entry. It is a wild read. Okay, moving on. Next story. Xolaunch will deploy 22 customer satellites on SpaceX's upcoming Twilight rideshare mission launching on a Falcon 9 rocket no earlier than January 2026. Twilight is a new dawn dusk sun synchronous orbit mission that is designed to support a growing number of Earth observation, climate monitoring and technology demonstration satellites. Exalaunch has noted that it has deployed satellites on every SpaceX transporter and bandwagon mission to date and will now extend that experience to this new orbital profile of Twilights. It is also worth noting that ExoLaunch's deployment mission is remarkably international as well as as it includes customers from Bulgaria, Finland, Germany, Lithuania, Spain, Turkey and the United States and components manufacturer Safran Space of France has been selected by Canadian satellite operator Telesat to provide telemetry, tracking and control or TT and C systems for the Telesat Lightspeed Low Earth Orbit Constellation. Under the contract, Safran will deliver TT and C ground modems that support telecommand telemetry and simultaneous tracking of multiple satellites from launch and early orbit through full in orbit operations for Safran. They say that the agreement extends a long standing relationship with Telesat as the operator transitions from geostationary satellites to a large scale LEO network Foreign. And those are our top stories for you on this Monday. As always, if you would like to read more in depth about any and all of the headlines that I've mentioned for you today, the links are in our show notes. For your convenience, just check them out in your podcast app of choice or on our website space.n2k.com.
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Every month we check in with T minus founder, friend of the show and cybersecurity expert Brandon Karpf to chat about all things space cybersecurity. And this month it's my colleague and Cyberwire Daily host Dave Bittner who leads the conversation with Brandon. Here's their chat.
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It is always my pleasure to welcome back to the studio Brandon Karp. He is the leader of international public private partnerships at nc. Brandon, welcome back Dave.
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Always good to be here man.
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So keying off of an article from the folks over at Bank Info Security and it's titled as Space Becomes Warfare Domain. Cyber is on the Front lines, sure true.
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Of course I would argue that Cyber is the front Lines of almost any conflict these days.
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Yeah, let's dig into that. And why space specifically?
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Yeah, so this article in particular, and I think broadly speaking, the space cyber telecom community is recognizing how important and integral the space segment is to all of our national defense, national security, communications. You know, the three areas of space that are primarily supporting military and national security would be position navigation and timing, telecommunications and then earth observation. And these are just totally getting wrapped up into our national critical infrastructure. I'll give you one example. You know, recently IEEE released a set of standards and a proposal for how to make the space segment a fallback Internet backbone to the global information grid. Especially in the context of undersea cables, which are the, you know, 98% of traffic goes through undersea cables. As undersea cables become attacked, more and more as we're concerned about the resilience of those assets, creating a technical architecture that allows fallback to the space segment. And so as all those conversations are happening, just the vulnerability of the space segment and that infrastructure is just coming to the fore. It's becoming a hot topic for conversation.
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I should mention this article written by Sean Waterman and builds off an appearance by Jonathan Martin, who is the acting Deputy Director of the Office of the Chief Architect at the National Reconnaissance Office. He needs an extra wide business card. He was speaking at the Cybersat conference in Reston, Virginia. And one of the points made here is the vulnerability of the ground stations themselves. Does it fall into the general category of all the critical infrastructure we are concerned about?
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Yeah. So I mean, typically if someone says space and cyber in the same sentence, folks are going to immediately jump to hacking satellites. Right. When we think of space, we think about the satellites flying around in orbit, really falling around in orbit.
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Right.
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And that's actually been supported by a number of conferences recently where they've had hack the box, which is based on hacking satellites. And you know, that's really sexy, really cool. It's fun to see, it's interesting, but it's really not realistic. And what I love about the statements from this gentleman from the nro and obviously rehashed by Sean who writes on this stuff. Right. Anyone following this space knows that Sean Waterman writes on this, often points out a couple logical fallacies. First being anything affecting orbit is going to threatens the adversary's systems potentially as well because of something called the Kessler effect, which we could talk about. And then this article and the statements go into so what are the actual key vulnerabilities, what are the most likely threat vectors? And what they call the soft underbelly, which is totally true, is the ground stations is the ground segment. Right. This critical infrastructure on the ground where satellite terminals are hosted. And these physical locations are just that. They're physical, they're connected to the Internet. They have employee management systems, they have a much broader threat surface and a potential attack surface.
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Right.
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They have OT systems, IT systems, they're connected to the Internet, they're connected human resources systems. People can get to social media, you know, on their devices.
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You can walk up to them and touch them.
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You can exactly walk up to them and touch them. Right. And oftentimes they're even in sometimes remote locations, they're sometimes autonomous. And so there's just a. It's much more realistic to think that that is what would be attacked or manipulated as opposed to the actual space segment, which are the satellites in orbit.
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You mentioned the Kessler effect. Just quickly, what's that about?
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Yeah, Kessler is kind of that runaway chain reaction effect. If there's an attack, whether kinetic or non kinetic, whether it's a anti satellite missile or a cyber attack against a satellite, if that causes that satellite to break apart or crash into something else, you get hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of small pieces of debris in low earth orbit flying at like 17,000 miles per hour. Those pieces hit other satel, which also fragment, which also fragment. You know, you get this runaway chain reaction which essentially makes an entire orbital or set of orbitals unusable for anyone. And so, you know, people talking about the Kessler Syndrome or Kessler effect, really saying it's not quite rational for an adversary as a first strike to physically affect or cyber attack something in orbit when there you can have the same intended outcome by attacking the ground segment.
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I feel as though we're at the tail end of an era where much of this was covered by norms or tradition or I think longtime listeners of Cyberwire have heard me tell the story about a satellite engineer friend that I had who I asked him, what keeps you from when you're operating an uplink? From stepping on someone else's signal. And he looked at me and cocked his head sideways like a golden retriever and said, but David, we're gentlemen. Which I guess is quaint by today's standards, but that was the case for a long time, that we simply left each other's stuff alone. I guess that's cute by today's standards.
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Man, isn't that just like the history of all modern technologies? My research advisor in grad school is one of the founding fathers of the Internet. And he used to say, the Internet runs on beer. Everyone running these massive backbones know each other personally. We get beer together after conferences or hang out on the weekends. When we need to offload some netflow to Verizon from AT&T, we just call up our buddy, say, hey, can you guys handle a little bit more traffic in this area? Right. And that's exactly to your point. All of these systems were originally designed with trust, to implicitly trust each other because most of us knew each other personally. But now the technology is so proliferated, it's so easy to access, it's so inexpensive that you now have this. It's actually this mentioned in the article too, and the statements from the general, from nro. We have this supply chain dilemma where there are vulnerabilities in the supply chain. There's intentional manipulations of open source technologies, open source software, open source hardware, that even though these systems that we're using were designed to implicitly trust, just like the Internet routing algorithms are, are designed for routers to implicitly trust each other, we're in a world now where that trust just should not exist implicitly.
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Where do you suppose we're headed here? I mean, do you think the attention that this is getting is appropriate for the threat or to what degree are we getting in front of this versus playing catch up?
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You know, I think we are starting to get in front of it. You know, for a few years now, been a lot of calls for declaring space as national critical infrastructure, which it's now one of the critical infrastructure infrastructure sectors. You now see this at conferences, and not just cybersat. Gov, this conference which is totally focused on government uses of satellites and space and the cyber aspects of that, but also more mainstream conferences. All the ones that we go to in cybersecurity, all the big ones have space and satellite components to them, aerospace as well. And you see companies talking about this, the big space companies, planet being, Earth observation, talking about security, supply chain security, security segment. You see new companies coming along, providing solutions. So I think that we are getting ahead of it. The question is, are we actually getting real solutions? Which it's one thing to talk about it, it's another thing to actually see real solutions on the ground. Those solutions take massive amounts of investment. And I think that's where there's a gap.
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Yeah. And like so many of these things with critical infrastructure, you got literally decades of legacy hardware and software that's out there doing its thing.
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Totally. Yeah. And there's no way really around that, you know, this this article mentioned as an anecdote one company who was saying, we're not going to, we're not going to buy anything off the shelf. We're going to build because we just don't trust the supply chains. We're going to build everything. And maybe for a scaled problem set or for a bespoke, you know, unique capability and exquisite capability that the government just would pay anything for, okay, sure, you might be able to afford that in a scoped situation, but anyone who's trying to scale a business knows that when you're developing software, you're gonna use open source packages. And those open source packages, we just saw it this week and last week affected by supply chain attacks, right? Same thing with the hardware. It just financially doesn't make sense. And so there need to be other mechanisms and funding sources, whether it's government funding, whether it's the controls and regulations from say, the FCC around how we're validating the security of these systems and how we're actually controlling the security. Because without that, it's going to be a race to the bottom. And again, I think that is where the gap is right now. Everyone knows, everyone acknowledges, but we're doing a little bit of navel gazing that we know there's a problem. We know that as more Internet backbone maybe starts getting shifted to the satellite segment, it's going to become a bigger attack vector. And we need to consider the vulnerability of, to your point, these legacy systems that we just, whoever's running those systems, owning those systems, doesn't have the resources, I guarantee it. They do not have the budget allocated to update that.
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Brandon Karf is leader of International Public Private Partnerships with ntt. Brandon, thanks so much for taking the time.
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Thanks dav.
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We'll be right back. So good, so good, so good.
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Welcome back. NASA's SphereX space telescope is in the holiday spirit right now and it has an early present to share with all of us. And that present is its very first full sky map. And so fast too, because Spherex just launched over the summer and since then it has scanned the entire sky in 102 infrared wavelengths. Not bad. And so it has created a data set that'll help scientists study everything from the universe's earliest moments to where water and organic materials are distributed in the Milky Way. And honestly, it's beautiful too. And I don't necessarily understand what I am looking at, but my goodness, it is full of stars and gas and dust too. And it is gorgeous. So thank you NASA Spherex, for making a video of the sky map so we can all enjoy the stunning data. And the wideout view is by design for Spherex, as unlike telescopes like Webb that zoom in on small patches of sky, Spherex is all about scale. By mapping the whole sky in hundreds of millions of galaxies, it gives researchers a new way to study cosmic inflation, which is not an economic thing, my friends. It is the brief extreme expansion that shaped the large scale structure of the universe fractions of a second after the Big bang. The data SphereX gathers also allows astronomers to trace how galaxies evolved over nearly 14 billion years and identify regions that are rich in the chemical ingredients for life. Together with all of NASA's other great observatories, we all can enjoy the insights from both big picture cosmology and detailed follow up Science. There are three more all sky surveys that are already planned during SphereX's prime mission, by the way. And like the set that just dropped, all data from Spherex is publicly released to anyone and everyone who wants to take a look and dive in. How remarkable that so early into its mission, Spherex is already well, well on its way to becoming a foundational data set for astronomers worldwide. And that's T minus. Brought to you by N2K CyberWire. We'd 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, 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 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 a 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 are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Tre Hester. With original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ibin. Peter Kilfey is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thank you for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.