← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
GeoXO constellation reduced in scope.
00:25:46
NOAA’s GeoXO receives cuts to the constellation. NASA calls for input on the SLI mission. JAXA selects Mitsubishi Electric to develop solar tech. And more.
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Foreign you're listening to the N2K space network.
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Today is August 21st, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T T minus 20 seconds to Los T Drift and Roll. NASA has released a request for information for the Sustainable Land Imaging mission. The Solar System Internet, which is a part of a delay tolerant network, has been successfully tested in cislunar space. Japan's space agency has selected Mitsubishi Electric to develop solar technology for satellites. NASA has released an RFI to look for alternatives to the Sustainable Land Imaging mission. The Trump administration seeks to cut air quality and ocean monitoring instruments from the GEOXO satellite constellation and reduce the overall number of satellites in the Our guest today is Dr. Emma Loudon, the newly appointed president of SLU, and we're going to be discussing the outreach efforts that she is leading at slu. So stick around to find out more about that after today's headlines. Thanks for joining me on this Thursday and we're kicking off this intel briefing today with news of another climate monitoring mission about to hit the chopping block. It's no secret that the current US Administration is making bold moves away from climate related projects. Not the best timing as we come into hurricane season here in the United States. Anyone on the east coast like me will know a lot about that at the moment, thanks to Erin. Well, anyway, back to the story. It seems that the Trump administration is seeking to not only slash climate pollution rules, but also reduce the information collected about the pollution in the first place. Two planned instruments, one that would measure air quality, including pollution and wildfire smoke, and another that would observe ocean conditions in unprecedented detail are about to be dropped from NOAA's planned Geostationary Extended Observations, also known as GEOXO. GEOXO is a planned satellite constellation that will replace and expand upon the GOES R series, which currently provides Earth observation data from geostationary orbit. The instruments in question were already contracted to BAE Systems, which could now charge cancellation fees if they are indeed dropped from geoxo, and the reason given for the planned cut is a reduction in cost. The planned satellites for the GEOXO constellation had a maximum cost of $500 million per year, for a total of $12 billion. In addition, NOAA is now only building four satellites as part of the constellation rather than the six it originally awarded. The first set of satellites are due to launch in 2032 as the GOES R series nears the end of its operational lifetime. And that is not the only Earth observation legacy system in jeopardy right now. NASA has released a request for information to support the future of the Sustainable Land Imaging, or sli, mission, and the US Space Agency is looking for alternatives to the mission, which is under threat with the current fiscal year 2026 budget. Landsat satellites have continuously acquired multispectral images of the global land surface since the launch of Landsat 1 in 1972. The Landsat data archive constitutes the largest continuous moderate resolution record of the global land surface as viewed from space. The SLI mission objective is to continue the ability to detect and quantitatively characterize changes on the global land surface, and the aim of the ensuing Landsat project is to continue this legacy. More details about the RFI can be found by following the SAM.gov link in our show Notes. Let's head on over to another country now and Japan's space agency JAXA has selected Mitsubishi Electric to develop solar technology as part of the first phase of the Space Strategy Fund. The project aims to strengthen the domestic satellite supply chain by reducing the cost of solar arrays and their components and strengthen supply capabilities. Mitsubishi Electric will develop low cost mass producible solar cells in collaboration with domestic suppliers who have expertise in the solar cell field. In addition, the company will verify the applicability of glass used for ground based products to the space environment and work towards the mass production of low cost cover glass. As part of the contract, Mitsubishi Electric will also develop new solar arrays that incorporate the new solar cells and cover glass. The Solar System Internet, or ssi, which is part of a delay tolerant network, has been successfully tested in Cislunar Space and the system is a collaboration effort between Lone Star Data holdings, the Interplanetary chapter of the Internet Society, and Unified Medical Records for Space Exploration. The demo simulated hypothetical real time medical data collection and transmission from cislunar space and lunar orbit back to Earth, providing invaluable insights into the capabilities of space grade network communications. The system leveraged the edge processing capabilities aboard Lone Star Data holdings data Center Mission en route to the Moon, which launched to the lunar surface on Intuitive machines second mission to the Moon on their lunar lander Athena. The SSI project aims to support the future of human and robotic space exploration. Astrobotics says that its planned lunar power demonstration, called the Luna Grid Light, has reached another major development milestone and is nearing flight readiness. The Luna Grid light will deploy 500 meters of ultralight cable across the lunar landscape and transmit 1 kilowatt of power for the first time on the moon using an Astrobotic Cube rover. The project has now successfully passed critical design review and has proceeded to flight component fabrication and assembly. And that concludes today's Thursday Intel Briefing. But it is yet another busy day in the space industry and N2K senior producer Alice Gruth joins us now to let us know what else we should be keeping up with. Alice, what do you have for us today?
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Maria we have six additional links in today's selected reading section. I know it's a lot so I'll run through them quickly. Wired has an article on a new AI chatbot that's on the Tiangon Space Station. Allspace and Telesat have signed an MOU. We're all going to be watching the X37B mission, which is scheduled for liftoff this evening from Florida. The Washington Post has an opinion piece on why nuclear powered rockets will win the new space race, Bloomberg has a piece on SpaceX's costly Starship failures, and the Tomex plus launch has been postponed again until no earlier than Saturday.
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Woo. That is a lot.
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So where can we learn more about.
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All of these stories?
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We include original sources to all the stories mentioned in the show notes and they're available on the platform you listen to us on and they're also included on our website space.m2k.com just click on today's episode title it -crew.
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If your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership, or recruit talent, you 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 and Then we'll connect about building a program to meet your goals.
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You hear from us here at T minus every single day now. We'd love to hear from you. Your voice helps shape the future of N2K networks. Tell us what matters most to you by completing our annual audience survey. Your insights help us grow to better meet your needs. There's a link to the survey in our show Notes. We're collecting your comments through August 31st. Thanks. 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 Ark helps modern enterprises secure their machine future. Visit cyberark.com machines to see how.
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Today'S.
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Guest is Dr. Emma Loudon. And Emma was recently appointed as the President of slu and I asked her how she ended up in her new role.
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As I was wrapping up my PhD research on exoplanet dynamics and exoplanet formation and evolution, all that fun stuff, I was also continuing that work with Ascend and with other organizations like the Brook Owens Fellowship and Summer Science Program. Thinking about workforce, thinking about how do we open the doors for the next generation in space industry. Anybody who's in it talks so excitedly about what's on the horizon and I just love getting to share that mission and that vision with other people who may not encounter in their lives. So that's kind of what led me to slu. It's been about a year long process thinking about whether it was the right fit and how to make this work and what the perfect opportunity was after graduation. And it turned out that SLU really was it. I am so excited to be joining this president and just honored to join this incredible team and with this amazing mission. I mean SLU is all about bringing the universe to everyone. And the idea that you don't have to live in a place with a dark sky, you don't have to have access to a telescope, you don't have to be able to go to the planetarium. We can bring the cosmos to every single person with an Internet connection. And that vision of connecting everybody to the universe and understanding their place in the universe, it gives me chills every time. I love it.
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Yeah, I just, I was like thrilled to hear the news that you were, you were joining and in a leadership role Especially, and I always love to.
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Ask leaders what your vision is for.
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You know, taking the company, because, again.
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They have a very, very cool mission.
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So I imagine you want to build on that and do something really neat.
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So I'd love to hear about that.
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Yeah. So, I mean, SLU is working from a foundation of about 15 years, building out a network of 10 observatories around the world ready to grow with more telescopes being prepared to go on sky. There's an amazing learning platform online already that has. We call them quests. They're learning activities for students of all ages, kindergarten through astronomy. And then we have a number of hobbyists, amateur astronomers, platform as well, who use it to do everything from track exoplanets to track small asteroids, which is amazing that they can use this network of telescopes to do that successfully. And so there's this incredible foundation of both education and infrastructure. And what I'm really excited to build on is to work with this new chapter of SLU where we're expanding into Earth science. So instead of only having students be able to look out at the universe with the telescopes, we're also giving them access to remote sensing data from the same satellite companies that we all know and talk about and talk with at industry conferences so they can learn to query databases, understand different bands on remote sensing, use that to get analytics out that are valuable for all the many different industries that use different levels of satellite data and be able to learn their Earth science objectives based on science standards with the satellite data. So that's the next chapter we're building.
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Oh, that's a really. That makes so much sense. And it also strikes me as we had talked about the importance of figuring out new ways to get people into the workforce, which is always that perennial discussion point.
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This is a really smart way of.
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Doing that because there are so many industries that are not strictly space industry companies or sectors that are going to be needing that access to that data and people who know how to query those databases and understand it. So that's a very.
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That's a really smart.
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That's a.
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That's some good strategy.
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It's like, that's a really good idea. That makes a lot of sense. We need people to do that.
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Well, I'm excited, too, as you said, to, like, pull on the workforce side of it. The other cool thing that very naturally flows out of it is the desire to do work with the career technical education. So not just unintentionally trained students to the Earth science, but actually certify them with badges and CTE level career readiness and career awareness programs that teach them about jobs in the space industry, that use the satellite data, that they're learning how to use their science. So it all kind of flows together and brings this pipeline of talented students who are interested in this data and know how to work with it to the space industry and helps just raise their awareness of what options are available for them.
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I could see that really breaking down.
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Barriers also for students who may not.
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Have, you know, that may have a lot of socioeconomic or just knowledge barriers or you name it, into getting into maybe the more traditionally accepted pipelines within the space industry about, you know, go, go to this top lane school and graduate after doing the thing.
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And not everybody can do that for a whole host of reasons. So I love that.
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I think it also really ties into to the conversations that have been happening in the industry for a while about space workforce and how we need to build the workforce. There's all the missions like Space Workforce for Tomorrow and the different fellowship program that are really trying to build those pipelines. And I see SLU as complimentary to that work as a way to really expand the reach because like I said, all you need is an Internet connection. It can be on a phone or a computer and you get access to the platform. So it really opens the door to build those pipelines in a big way.
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You're always doing cool stuff. So I'm kind of like, what else you got? What else you got going on?
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I mean, I've been doing a lot of fun things over the last couple years. I found that in graduate school, the best success came from having other projects to work on outside of it. So I published a children's book last year called Mia and the Martians with Dr. Tanya Harrison. We wrote about a little girl who goes to Mars and meets all the rovers and learns life lessons from them that help her both learn about science and like Mars for her science fair project, but also teach her perseverance and curiosity and opportunity and spirit.
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I mean, children's book authoring, not a small endeavor either. So what was that like?
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It was a whole learning process. I had to use the ability to just learn a lot online and also do a lot of informational interviews with other authors. It's amazing how much easier it is to publish than it used to be. The only real upfront costs for publishing are working with an illustrator and the rest of it. You can actually do self publishing in a really reasonable way, which is wonderful. And we were so grateful to find an incredible illustrator who Just brought Mia to life and then had an incredible supportive community on indiegogo who help cover those illustrator costs. And I was just so excited about the way the book turned out. I've always loved Mars. My first intro to space was the Mars rovers when I was super little Spirit and Opportunity and watching them bounce down in their little bubble wrap onto Mars. And personally, I'm obsessed with the anthropomorphication of rovers and just spacecraft in general and how people will cry over a hunk of metal losing power and how we can find such connection with these objects of exploration and these tools of exploration. And I think the accounts that they had for the different missions, which I think sadly are going away as part of the loss of NASA communications, they are such a powerful tool. I remember when Curiosity sang itself Happy Birthday and everybody was so excited. I just think that kind of connection to these objects of exploration is so fun.
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That sounds like a really fascinating, like, human anthropology research. If you feel like going for a second PhD, you're like, no, absolutely not. I'm good, thank you. But no. It is a fascinating idea, though.
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Yeah, I think about that sometimes because there's so many things to be curious about and so many things to learn about in the world. And then I'm like, no, I think I'll just go to the library and read a book about it.
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Is there anything else you wanted to.
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Mention before we wrap up today?
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I think I would just love to talk a little bit about the. You have other fun projects that I've been working on. One of the things I've really been interested in is how we can be thinking about space as a way to also help students get excited about the future. I think a lot about mental health and mental wellness when it comes to students and the high levels of anxiety and depression that we're seeing in young people. And aside from the technological benefits of astronomy and science education, I've been reflecting a lot as I go to schools and speak about how the idea of looking up and out and connecting to each other and the world around us actually serves as a way for students to develop a sense of practical hope where they can, at the end of a long day, look up and say, wow, I'm just this tiny little speck of dust, like, floating around. And that's so. I mean, it's the concept. We all in the space industry are familiar with that idea. The cosmic perspective, the pale blue dot, the idea of stopping and saying, wow, I'm so small. But also my actions matter so much because we're the only life that we know about. And then using that energy to get up the next morning and keep going and keep fighting to make the world a better place. That is the kind of purpose that I'm so excited about and so excited to continue to spread with the books with SLU just in general. And I hope that we as an industry can kind of lean into that side as well because I think it's really important and it also is what connects a lot of people to the night sky.
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Yes, I think those are very wise words. And finding that why that you can really connect with the cool factor is great. But it doesn't sustain interest in the long term. It will maybe get somebody in the.
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Door, but they'll turn right back out.
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If you, if like that's not enough, there has to be that why. And I think you've absolutely nailed it. Of what will give people that long term connection and that that feels to me much more sustainable and more authentic, especially to what's going on right now.
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For a lot of people.
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So, so thank you for that.
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That's wonderful.
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Thank you for the opportunity to share that. I think it's just a really important thing to be thinking about as we as the industry really struggle with how to communicate to other others outside of the industry and how do we exist in the world right now and also how do we support the next generation? We have to meet them where they're at. And where they're at is pretty anxious right now for good reason. So whatever we can do to support that.
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We'll be right back.
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Welcome back. Banff National Park, Green Gables, the CN Tower, Chateau Frontenac, Stanley park, the Bay of Fundy. None of those things are in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan. Now with all due respect to our listeners there, despite its natural beauty and resources, you gotta admit it is not the most well known of the Canadian provinces. Really sorry. Still it did get a name check on T minus and really the whole of space related news last May when a large chunk of a SpaceX Crew Dragon capsule left quite a mess and a couple of farm fields there. And now for a really odd connection to the province. I'm going to throw at you now. Pop star Chapel Roan, who is not Canadian and also even more oddly now has a space connection too. And that is why I'm even mentioning any of this on the show. Her latest single called the Subway super briefly, and I mean super briefly, name drops the province. And this is a family show, so I'll lightly modify the quote where she.
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Says, frack it, I'll move to Saskatchewan.
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Now combine that with the fact that the song hit number three on the Billboard charts on its late July debut and the province saw an expl of tourist interest. 1800% increase for social media follows for the province basically overnight. You cannot buy that kind of publicity. And right now, through the 24th of August, here's that space connection. Saskatchewan is host to the Summer Star Party in the Dark Sky Observatory and Campground at Cypress Hills, and the organizers there are hoping that this new interest in Saskatchewan, thanks to Chapel Roan, will also help boost attendee numbers in the Amateur Astronomy Star Party. Well, I guess we'll find out in a few days if it worked. Meanwhile, Chapelroan has yet to perform in the province, but says she plans on it in the future. I guess bringing her own kind of star party to Saskatchewan for a potential second time. And that is T brought to you by N2K Cyberwire we'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures that we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. We are conducting our annual audience survey right now to learn more about our listeners. That's you. We're collecting your insights until August 31, 2025. There is a link in the show notes for you. We're proud that N2K CyberWire is part of the daily routine of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and 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's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iban. Peter Kilby is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow.
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T minus.