← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
Red horizon.
00:27:10
ESA’s Hera shares images of Mars and Deimos. Space Forge gets a UK license for its ISAM satellite. Norway taps Isar Aerospace for a launch contract. And more.
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- [00:02]
Maria Varmazes
You're listening to the N2K space network.
- [00:10]
Dave
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- [01:30]
Maria Varmazes
Today is March 13, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazes and this is T minus.
- [01:39]
Alvaro Alonso Ruiz
20 seconds.
- [01:49]
Maria Varmazes
NASA's SpaceX Crew 10 is targeting no earlier than 7:03pm Eastern Time on Friday, March 14th to launch to the ISS Telus Alenia Space and Telus Fazio to design and develop the space segment of the navigation system for ESA's Moonlight Lunar Communications and navigation services program. The Norwegian Space Agency has signed a contract with Isar Aerospace to launch its Arctic Ocean surveillance program satellites. Space Forge has been awarded the UK's first ever license for in space advanced manufacturing. ESA's Hera performs a close flyby of Mars and Dam. Our guest today is Alvaro Alonso Ruiz, co founder and COO at leanspace. Alvaro and I spoke about software in space and the need for drastic modernization. It's a great chat if I can say so myself. So join us after today's intel briefing. Happy Thursday everybody. I hope you're having a good one. We're kicking off with an update from the European Space Agency's HERA mission for planetary defense. The spacecraft, which launched in October of last year, made the first use of its payload for scientific purposes beyond the Earth and the Moon. It activated a trio of instruments and imaged the surface of the Red Planet as well as the face of Deimos, which is the smaller and more mysterious of Mars two moons. The images are quite stunning and we absolutely implore you to follow the link in our show notes to see them for yourself. HERA was able to image Deimos from as close as 1,000km away, it's practically next door surveying the opposite side of the tidally locked moon from the Red planet. Those images have now been used to create a video of the dust covered Deimos, which is believed to be a leftover of a giant impact on Mars or perhaps also a captured asteroid. Other instruments gathered a Black and White 1020 by 1020 pixel image captured by the asteroid framing camera and Hera's hyperscout H hyperspectral imager gathered a visual in a range of colors beyond the limits of the human eye to help characterize mineral makeup. Hera, on her carefully designed journey came as close as 5,000 km out from Mars. The planet's gravity shifted the spacecraft's trajectory towards its final destination. You might remember this name, Dimorphos and the larger Didymos asteroid that it orbits around. This maneuver shortened Hera's journey time by many months and saved a substantial amount of fuel. Its main mission is to gather close up data about the Dimorphos asteroid which was impacted by NASA's Revenge of the Dinosaurs dart spacecraft in 2022. It's hoped that data collected by Hera will help turn asteroid deflection into a well understood and potentially repeatable technique. Let's go over to the UK now and Space Forge has been awarded the UK's first ever license for in space advanced manufacturing. The UK Civil Aviation Authority has given approval for the launch of Forgestar 1, which is space Forge's in orbit manufacturing satellite. The company is aiming to demonstrate a scalable, returnable and relaunchable platform for manufacturing high performance semiconductor materials in space. The forgestar one is scheduled to launch later this year and the license marks a significant milestone as the spacecraft set to become the first UK ISAM satellite in orbit. A huge congratulations to the Space Forge team. The Norwegian Space Agency has signed a contract with Isar Aerospace to launch its Arctic Ocean Surveillance program satellites. Isar Aerospace's launch vehicle Spectrum plans to transport two vehicles to sun synchronous orbit from the company's dedicated launch complex at Andoya Spaceport launch site in Norway. The launch is not expected until 2028, with Isar Aerospace currently preparing for its first test flight from Norway. Thalassalania Space has signed a contract with Telespasio to design and develop the space segment of the navigation system and satellite navigation infrastructure for ESA's moonlight lunar communications and navigation services program. Telespasio is the lead contractor on ESA's moonlight program aiming to create a satellite constellation orbiting the moon and is designed to provide advanced communication and navigation services. Telesalinia Space will be responsible for the design, development and deployment of four lunar Elliptical orbit navigation satellites. Additionally, the company will develop key elements of the Earth Mission segment and oversee the complete testing and validation of the first satellite navigation system orbiting the moon. And we're sure that many of you tuned in last night to watch the launch of Crew 10 from Florida, only to find that the launch had been scrubbed 40 minutes before liftoff. Mission managers decided to wave off a launch attempt on Thursday, March 13, due to high winds and precipitation forecasted in the flight path of Dragon. NASA's SpaceX Crew 10 is now targeting no earlier than 7:03pm Eastern Time on Friday, March 14, to launch four crew members to the International Space Station. It'll be a happy PI day indeed. And that concludes our intelligence briefing for today. N2K senior producer Alice Karuz what extra stories do we have in the Selected Reading section of our show Notes?
- [07:58]
Dave
Maria Today we have four additional links for you to read at your leisure. A couple on partnerships between Telesat Orange and Space, Norway, SkyFi and Ursa Space, Airtel and SpaceX's Starlink and a financial announcement from Spire Global.
- [08:13]
Maria Varmazes
And a reminder that those links, in addition to being in our Show Notes, can also be found@spare.n2k.com just click on this episode title for more Hey T minus Crew. If your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership, or recruit talent, T minus can help. We'd like 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. Foreign.
- [09:00]
Dave
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- [10:14]
Maria Varmazes
Our guest today is Alvaro Alonso Ruiz, co founder and COO at leanspace. And I started by asking Alvaro what attracted him to the space industry and to start his company.
- [10:28]
Alvaro Alonso Ruiz
What I saw is that the space industry is amazing. Especially there's this new space movement, a lot of new companies spawning, doing amazing stuff. So on the one hand, I was very inspired by all the innovation going on. And on the other hand, I was appalled by the state of software in the industry. Especially because I had seen software in other verticals. And when I saw that space missions, they were state of the art in many technologies, but in software they were stuck decades in the past, I was amazed. I couldn't believe it. So that was kind of the driver for co founding Lean Space.
- [11:08]
Maria Varmazes
Tell me a little bit about what you've seen and maybe why are things the way they are?
- [11:13]
Alvaro Alonso Ruiz
Well, the space industry is inherently risky, so a lot of decisions are made to minimize risks, which makes sense, right? Especially because in the previous decades, space missions were done by engineers for engineers, if you know what I mean. All the missions were kind of R and D in a way. Every mission was a one off. They were reinventing the wheel over and over again. Everything was a custom implementation, there was massive redundancy being put in the spacecraft and also in the ground. And so they were trying to minimize risks all across. They were extremely expensive missions. They took forever. So, you know, like when finally you launched that satellite, nothing could fail. And it made sense in the past. Right now it doesn't make sense anymore. You see, for example, very successful companies like SpaceX, they operate in a completely different manner. They actually run their business as a software business. They launch a lot of satellites and some of them fail, but most of them succeed and they have very quick turnaround. They innovate constantly. It's like in software development, you work in sprints, you work with close feedback loops. You don't do waterfall approach, you do like agile approach. This is exactly the concept. And still in the space industry, while this kind of agile development methodologies have been around for like, I don't know, over 20 years, the space industry still operates waterfall. So you have missions that are defined at the outset. Every single detailed requirement is carved in stone, and only then you start development and then nothing can change. But of course things change because when you have A mission that lasts for years, requirements will change. So then things start to change and then it's chaos all across. Because introducing changes in a waterfall process is very complex. So what space companies have not realized is that they cannot keep on running hardware businesses because every company in the world is a software business. If you use software to deliver a service to your customers, if you use software to manage your paychecks, you use software to do your planning, to manage your emails, you are a software company, you just have assets that do things. But you run your business through software and you have to think as a software business. But in space, we are hardware focused and that's a limitation.
- [14:00]
Maria Varmazes
Yeah, that's the thing that I'm curious about. As I mentioned to you, before we started recording, I came from cybersecurity. So software is the world. That. And when I started doing this job, the differentiation I often heard was, well, that's bits, we're talking atoms. We're making physical things. We can't do that kind of thing here. Is that just a mental limitation? Is that just something. I mean, obviously they're different. I mean, I'm not saying they're not, but a lot of the pushback I've heard is, you know, we just can't do those things. It's just not possible in the physical space. Do you buy that? Is that, do you feel that that's not valid?
- [14:34]
Alvaro Alonso Ruiz
Yeah, of course not. Yeah, yeah, of course. No, of course not. Like all them, all the industries across the world, they're digitalizing. I mean, this concept of digital transformation is a thing. And even very aging industries like banking, for example, they are undergoing this digital transformation because they have realized the risks of staying anchored in the past are worse than the risks of actually implementing and introducing new technologies into their businesses. I think the problem in space is the mindset. Everyone says space is hard. It is. Or are we making it hard because something is? Yes, some things, no. For example, today I know of a constellation of earth observation satellites which is operated using Windows 95. Not kidding. Not kidding. So can you imagine, I mean, you have a background in cybersecurity. Can you imagine the risks these people are taking? It's insane. And when you talk to them and you say, hey, why don't you use, you can migrate your control center into a cloud, native cyber secure infrastructure, resilient. And they say, no, no, that's risky. And you're like, really? You're opening a system that is not maintained since 20 years. It's really frustrating. A few weeks ago I was Speaking at an event, I was on stage, and it was a panel on artificial intelligence of AI.
- [16:13]
Maria Varmazes
Of course, everyone talks about AI.
- [16:15]
Alvaro Alonso Ruiz
And it was the third time I was on stage talking about how can we leverage AI in the space industry? And it was extremely frustrating because it's like, how can we leverage AI if we are using technologies from the 70s when we're using disconnected systems that don't talk to each other, when operators are sending commands manually, literally typing the commands and sending them manually to spacecraft, you cannot use AI. We've missed a technological step. First, you need an infrastructure that connects everything together so you have all your data harmonized, standardized, usable, so that with this data you can actually train your AI models. Then after the outset of the AI algorithms, you need actionable insights that you can actually action. So you need a place where you bring it back, you bring back this output and you can do something with it. So you need this infrastructure that enables you to connect data in and out. And this doesn't exist in the space industry. Very, very few companies have something like this. They all have distinct systems, different technologies, incompatible. It doesn't work. So that was actually the trigger of me starting to be more vocal about the inherent limitations we see in the space industry. No one is doing anything about it. So I'm trying to step up and change things.
- [17:43]
Maria Varmazes
I think for folks who are outside of the space ecosystem, there is that general assumption that, well, space is either really, really behind or really, really advanced, one or the other, or both at the same time. But I don't know if there's that pipeline of talent going to the space industry from the software side. That's a whole other conversation. But I'm so curious about, as you said, that it's a mindset issue how we go about shifting that. I think there's so much to be explored there.
- [18:08]
Alvaro Alonso Ruiz
Let me answer first to a comment. You just made sure you have software talent entering the space industry. Because this is a question that was asked in this last AI panel. And the question is that this is part of the problem, because the space industry is plagued by aerospace engineers, not by software developers. So when a software developer joins the industry, and instead of working in APIs or microservices or AI, they have to maintain code written in Fortran in the 70s. I'm not kidding. This is the case.
- [18:47]
Maria Varmazes
I know. I believe it. It's a nightmare for a developer, though.
- [18:50]
Alvaro Alonso Ruiz
Yeah, we don't have good software talent entering the industry. All the companies we work with, the people writing the ground software, are typically aerospace Engineers, they don't know how to code and they are typically reusing libraries and things from way back because they're proven, they're validated open source. There's so many open source tools in the industry that people use. There's a huge risk. You open source libraries, some of them are right, some of them they're not because they might have a bug that someone introduced during the 90s and no one is maintaining this. No one knows and no one will know.
- [19:28]
Maria Varmazes
It's a huge technical debt. Yeah, technical debt is a huge problem. Yeah, I was going to say I'm imagining a software engineer looking for a really exciting job and the prospect of going, facing what you just mentioned, they have a lot of options. I'm not sure they'd want to take that on. I don't know how one fixes that. But anyway, I wanted to hear your thoughts. What do we do? It's not about me, it's about you.
- [19:51]
Alvaro Alonso Ruiz
The first thing we have to do is educate the market. And that's what I'm trying to do. Because I mean the problem is that it's a lack of knowledge. There's a lack of knowledge that actually modern software technologies reduce risk, they reduce costs, they reduce delays. There's a massive advantage that people need to understand. That's the first thing changing the minds. The second thing is that we need phased transitions because we cannot just like disconnect a control center, flying satellites and connect another one. It doesn't work. So we need a middleware layer that connects legacy systems with cloud based applications, kind of an integration platform. And that's what we're doing. At Lean Space, for example, we have an integration platform that can connect to all the hardware, all the different legacy software systems, and you can build applications with all this data that has been centralized. It also enables to break down monolithic architectures into microservices. And then the third thing I would say is like most of the systems in the space industry are based on premise because the cloud is like, oh, cloud sounds like dangerous or insecure or public. It's like security of my data. But actually a lot of times cloud providers have much better security than you have in your own basement. And some missions, of course, they need to be air gapped because of obvious reasons, but some don't need to do, don't need to be. So I think adopting hybrid cloud approaches and gradually migrate functionality as we are comfortable with or as the mission requires makes sense. So I think that's, that's how I would take it. And There are technologies out there that enable this transition, but the first step is actually willing to do so.
- [22:02]
Maria Varmazes
We'll be right back.
- [22:08]
Dave
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- [23:04]
Maria Varmazes
Welcome back. Hey, space cadets. The night sky has a rare, maybe kind of creepy treat for us tonight. A blood moon. A total lunar eclipse will occur and the moon will be cast in a deep coppery red hue. And the eclipse will be observable from the Earth's western hemisphere and will start in most places this evening, with totality expected in the early hours of tomorrow on PI day, no less. A total lunar eclipse is when the moon is completely in the Earth's shadow and it takes on a reddish hue as the only sunlight that reaches the moon has to first pass through the Earth's atmosphere. It's a phenomenon known as Rayleigh scattering coming into play there. Colors of sunlight that are associated with longer wavelengths scatter less and are able to make it around the Earth to reach the moon, while shorter wavelength colors scatter everywhere else and never make it to the Moon. So now you can explain it. When someone asks you why it's red during a total eclipse, we've included a link to see what time the eclipse occurs where you are. So send us your pictures if you're lucky enough to see it. That's it for T minus for March 13, 2025, brought to you by N2K CyberWire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@space.n2k.com we're privileged that N2K and podcasts like T Minus are part of the daily routine of many of the most influential leaders and operators in the public and private sector, from the Fortune 500 to many of the world's preeminent intelligence and law enforcement agencies. N2K's T 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 Kilby is our publisher and I'm your host, Maria Vermazes. Thanks for listening. We will see you tomorrow. T minus.