Alice Carruth (9:12)

As always, they can be found on.

Maria Varmazes (9:13)

Our website space.n2k.com just click on this episode title. Hey T Minus Crew. If you are just joining us, be sure to follow T minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. Also, please do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday, please show three friends or coworkers this podcast. A growing audience is the most important thing for us and we would love your help as part of the T Minus crew. If you find T Minus useful, please share so other professionals like you can find the show. Thank you. It means a lot to me and all of us here at T Minus. Foreign.

Alice Carruth (10:03)

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Maria Varmazes (10:45)

Today's guest is Elizabeth Cristian, the new CEO of ispace US. Here's some of our conversation from the 40th Space Symposium just last week in Colorado Springs.

Elizabeth Crist (10:58)

I'm Elizabeth Crist. I'm the CEO of ISPACE us. So I actually started my career. My background is actually in chemistry. And so I started my career working for a technology company that's was developing materials for different electronics equipment. And so as I was, I was doing that, I was a research scientist, and that wasn't quite satisfying for me. So I ended up stepping into a program management position, which is really kind of dividing between the business side and the technical side. I had some excellent mentors at that time, early career that really helped shape me and grow me as a leader. So I was fortunate at a company early in my career to lead a global program management team. I think I was 27 at the time.

Maria Varmazes (11:51)

Wow.

Elizabeth Crist (11:52)

And it was a tremendous amount of responsibility, but I really appreciated that. And that really kind of propelled me into the next phase of my career. I spent time working on various aspects of product development, all sorts of technical things. I love to get in the weeds and understand what's going on with different technologies. And so I got into the space industry. I was recruited into a position. The company was struggling to meet schedules, meet customer demands. They needed to build out a program management organization. And so this company, Worldview, was my first aerospace position.

Maria Varmazes (12:35)

Were you into space before that? Was that even on your radar?

Elizabeth Crist (12:37)

It's not.

Maria Varmazes (12:38)

I love it. I love it when that happens.

Elizabeth Crist (12:40)

Yeah. So it wasn't. Yeah. So that was interesting. I got a call from someone that I had worked with previously and said, hey, I think you might be interested in this.

Maria Varmazes (12:47)

Yeah.

Elizabeth Crist (12:47)

And so it was a fascinating industry. I fell in love with it and just the challenge of it, like, there is nothing harder than working in space. And so I started in a director role, eventually started to prove myself, and moved into an executive vice president. And then a couple years ago, I got a call from our former CEO Ron Garand, that he was looking to scale a company in the US which was Ispace us, and brought me in, in an executive role to really do what I had done previously, which is, you know, lead program management, develop business rhythms for the organization, and help kind of align the team so that we could achieve our mission. And so Fast forward to today. A lot has happened in the 22 months that I've been at the company. And so we've scaled from about 40 employees to over 110. We have this really exciting mission that we're working on with Draper as part of our CP12 contract. And so I've just been fortunate to have the trust in our global leadership team to appoint me into the US CEO position. Congratulations. Yeah, I'm excited and thrilled to support the team and take the business to the next level.

Maria Varmazes (14:06)

You all have had a lot of news lately as a company, so I want to get into that. The MOU you just signed with Redwire here at symposium. That is so exciting. Please tell me a bit about that.

Elizabeth Crist (14:16)

Absolutely. So we've been working under the radar, I'll say, with Redwire for a bit now. And so our teams and our capabilities are very complimentary. So Ispace, what ispace brings to the table, Obviously, we're developing lunar landers. We're working on kind of next generation capabilities. And where we really saw a really nice strategic partnership with Redwire is all of their capabilities that they have that we don't have and their heritage. And so Red Wire has assembly, integration and test facilities conveniently co located in the greater Denver, Colorado area. They have a tremendous reputation with NASA and other customers. They have other capabilities. And so there's a cultural alignment. Our teams are constantly at each other's facilities. And we are going to be bidding together as partners on the next commercial Lunar Payload Services upcoming proposal. So CS6. So we're working on that. And then we're working on some other exciting things too. So we want to really build this relationship, build this partnership. So we're in discussions of sample return missions from the lunar surface. Right. So highly complicated technology development, but we're starting to think through those things.

Maria Varmazes (15:40)

One of the many things I really admire about Ispace as a company and I space us especially you all, don't shy away from difficult problems, and you're working on some just fascinating things. Lunar problems. Apex, right?

Elizabeth Crist (15:52)

That's the one. Apex is.

Maria Varmazes (15:53)

Tell me how that's going.

Elizabeth Crist (15:54)

Yeah, we're currently in development, so we're starting to actually get flight hardware in. So we're in between our critical design review and our systems, what they called it, sir, Milestone. So basically it's where we're coming together to assemble all the flight hardware. So now is an absolutely exciting time to be in our facility. So we're starting to do all the testing that's necessary to verify and validate our systems. So we're focused heavily on that, and things are going well. Obviously, we're going to a really challenging part of the moon with this mission. And so we're spending a lot of time, you know, making sure that we've. We've done the right research, we've done the right testing.

Maria Varmazes (16:40)

It's the far side of the moon, right?

Elizabeth Crist (16:41)

Exactly. Right. Yeah. Yeah. And so in order to actually support NASA's payload operations, we're not only are we developing a new lander, we also have two communication relay satellites that will be orbiting the moon to provide communications to the payloads because of the location that they're on the moon. So we've got all of that going on in our facility in Denver right now.

Maria Varmazes (17:04)

Exciting. And one thing I've often wondered about is, as you all are working on this, I'm wondering, are you looking ahead to June to the Hakato arm landing?

Elizabeth Crist (17:13)

Oh, my gosh, yes. I think everyone in the company is absolutely ecstatic for that landing. So we actually have teammates from our US Office that are on console in Mission Control in Tokyo right now.

Maria Varmazes (17:28)

That's so cool.

Elizabeth Crist (17:28)

Yeah. So they're learning, you know, how to operate that lander, and they'll take that information back and support. But yeah, we're having multiple watch parties. So we'll have one in Denver, obviously, Tokyo, we're going to have a DC event, and then our Luxembourg office, so we have. Our European rover will be on that mission. So we're also going to have a landing event there as well. So there's going to be a lot of fun media going on on June 5th for that landing.

Maria Varmazes (17:59)

I love to hear from CEOs like yourself about sort of when you pitch your company about your differentiator. I mean, what makes Ispace Us so unique?

Elizabeth Crist (18:08)

What makes Ispace Us so unique, I think, in comparison to our competitors, is honestly our global heritage. So Ispace Us, it benefits from being a US Company, of course. However, we have been able to leverage significant heritage from our counterparts in Tokyo. We have, you know, we have a site in Luxembourg, we have a site in Tokyo, we have a site in Denver. And so it allows us to really have. For being a small company like ourselves, we have such a huge network of customers that we can be potentially looking at as well as, like, exchanging information. And so I think for Ispace Us, what. What makes us extremely unique is that that previous heritage that we're bringing to. To the table for. For the US Business moving forward.

Maria Varmazes (19:01)

Awesome. And I can never pass up an opportunity to ask A CEO about your vision for where you're taking the company next. So I would love to hear your, your roadmap a little bit.

Elizabeth Crist (19:09)

Yeah, of course. So I think for these lunar missions, what's really important right now what we're focused on is the transportation piece. So as you've probably seen in the news, it's really hard to land, as it turns out. So we're focused heavily on making sure that we have very reliable systems, tools and planning capabilities so that we are able to land successfully and operate all customer payloads. So that's number one, number one priority is making sure we can land. Then as we kind of move on from that, then it's sustained operations. How can we survive the lunar night? How can we meet the extremely harsh conditions on the lunar surface so that we can have sustained operations? And then really the long term vision is we want to have a CIS lunar ecosystem. We want to be the ones that are providing that transportation service, enabling that infrastructure. It's eventually a people on the moon where they're able to be there and you know, conducting experiments and there's all sorts of new exciting applications that, that can be in place there.

Maria Varmazes (20:29)

We'll be right back.

Alice Carruth (20:36)

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Maria Varmazes (21:35)

Welcome back. Over the weekend in the Netherlands, the teams at the European Space Research and Technology center and its surrounding partners celebrated ESA's 50th year in the Netherlands in a way that really only the Dutch could. They set it with flowers in the largest spring festival in the Netherlands, the Bloemenkorso Ballenstrek. The parade floats are completely covered in flowers from local flower fields and they travel a 42 kilometer route. Part of it this year was a flower festooned Aryan 6 pulled by a tractor of course. And the rocket really is something to behold. If you are a fellow floral nerd, then you will love the choices that they made here. Alliums, camellias, Siberian irises, Gerbera daisies, foxgloves, protea, and of course, tulips. It is in Holland, after all, all those flowers used to dazzling effect in a fabulous spray of color and shape to bring the rocket and its blaring engines to an explosion of botanical life. And if those words mean absolutely nothing to you, pretty flowers make nice rocket for parade. Trust me on this. You should really check out the photos. That's it for T minus for April 15, 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 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 Ibin. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. And thank you for listening for 500 episodes. We'll see you tomorrow. T Minus.

Alice Carruth (24:07)

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