← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
Rocket Lab’s hyper for US and UK defense space.
00:27:00
Rocket Lab on-ramped for US and UK defense contracts. Redwire to provide IBDM’s for ESA’s Lunar I-Hab. Space ISAC launches a UK Global Hub. And more.
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- [00:02]
Maria Varmazes
You're listening to the N2K space network.
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Alice Carruth
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Maria Varmazes
Today is April 15th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazes and this is T minus T Min 20 seconds to Los.
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Elizabeth Crist
T Dris.
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Maria Varmazes
Outpost Technologies has been awarded a $1.8 million contract from the US Space Force SpaceWorks Cibber Program 4 Space ISAC has launched a UK global hub. Lunasa has been awarded a contract by ESA for Deep Neural Network for robust satellite model matching. Redwire has been selected by Thalesalinia Space to provide four docking mechanisms for ESA's Lunar IHAB. Rocket Lab has been on ramped for US and UK defense contracts to expand hypersonic technology development with haste and our guest for this, our 500th episode, by the way, is Elizabeth Crist, the new CEO of Ispace us. I caught up with Elizabeth at the Space Symposium just last week in Colorado Springs to find out about how she's settling into her new position and to discuss some of the exciting partnerships and projects that are coming up for Ispace us. Stick around for more on that later in the show. Happy Tuesday everybody. Let's dive into today's intelligence briefing. Rocket Lab has been on ramp for U.S. and UK defense contracts to expand hypersonic technology development with haste. The rocket launch company was selected by the US Air Force to participate within its Enterprise Wide Agile Acquisition Contract, which is a $46 billion indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract designed for the rapid acquisition of innovative technologies, engineering services and technical solutions that develop the Air Force's new capabilities. The program has a contracting period through 2031 and is designed to be broad in scope, flexible in funding, and agile for maximum use to enable the Air Force to quickly procure services and technologies across various domains. So that means Rocket Lab isn't likely to receive the full $46 billion, just to be clear. Still. Additionally, Rocket Lab has also been selected by the UK's Ministry of Defence for its Hypersonic Technologies and Capability Development Framework, which is an approximately $1.3 billion framework to rapidly develop advanced hypersonic capabilities for the UK. As a newly selected supplier to the framework, Rocket Lab is now eligible to bid to provide services, technologies and testing capabilities that support the UK's development of sovereign hypersonic technology. Rocket Lab says that it intends to bid for contracts and task orders served by its Hypersonic Accelerator, Suborbital Test Electron or HASTE launch vehicle, as well as other engineering, design and launch services for both the United States and the United Kingdom. Redwire has been awarded a contract from prime contractor Telesolinia Space to provide four docking mechanisms for the European Space Agency's habitation module for the Lunar Gateway. More specifically, Redwire's Belgian subsidiary Redwire Space NV has been awarded the contract to deliver the international berthing and docking mechanism for the Lunar IHAB and the Lunar IHAB is built under Telus Alenia's Space Prime Contractorship and is ESA's Habitation Module, which will provide living quarters, lab space and mission support infrastructure for astronauts conducting long duration missions in deep space. The Gateway Space Station is an international lunar orbiting outpost designed to support crewed missions to the moon while developing key technologies and experience for a future human mission to Mars. Redwire's contract includes one active international berthing and docking mechanism that will couple Lunar Ihab to the rest of the Gateway and three passive systems which will be used as a docking port for other modules or visiting vehicles staying in Europe for this next one. LUNASA has been awarded a contract by the European Space Agency for Deep Neural Network for robust satellite model matching and the project focuses on enhancing the safety and reliability of autonomous space missions through advanced artificial intelligence. Lunasa will develop a deep learning based system for relative pose estimation during autonomous rendezvous and proximity operations with a strong emphasis on robustness against challenging space backgrounds such as star fields, planets and other celestial bodies. Amin Chabi, founder and CEO at lunasa, said, we are thrilled to collaborate with ESA on this forward looking initiative. Robust pose estimation is a key enabler for the future of autonomous operations in space and this activity will push the frontier of what's possible with AI in orbit. The Space Information Sharing and Analysis center, better known as the Space isac, has launched a UK Global Hub. According to the press release, the expansion enhances Space ISAC's growing capabilities by strengthening real time monitoring of cyber and physical threats that are impacting space systems. Additionally, it also provides global response times to emerging space security threats through a more strategic incident response coordination. Space ISAC Executive Director Aaron Miller says the launch of our UK Global Hub represents a pivotal advancement in international collaboration for space security. This expansion reinforces our commitment to protecting space assets worldwide and ensures that our members benefit from real time information sharing no matter where they operate space ISAC says it is focused on further expanding its international footprint, strengthening partnerships and inching closer to a complete Follow the Sun model. Outpost Technologies has been awarded a $1.8 million contract from the US Space Force SpaceWorks Small Business Innovation Research, or CIBBER program. The award is through the innovative Cargo Exoatmospheric Delivery Technology topic or Brace yourself for this one Iced Tea and funds Outposts Shielding Technology for Exoatmospheric Experiments and Payloads program known as steep. Get it? Steep T. Steep T, yeah. The STEEP program will focus on developing the deployable heat shield system designed to enhance the performance and survivability of payloads re entering Earth's atmosphere. Over the contract period, Outpost will conduct a comprehensive evaluation of advanced thermal protection solutions, culminating in the design, analysis and testing of a subscale prototype of the system. And that concludes our intel briefing for this, the 500th episode of T Minus Space Daily. And we've got more on that and our two year anniversary coming up this week, so stay tuned. But until then, Senior producer Alice Carruth has more on the stories that we should be keeping an eye on. Alice Maria, where did that time go, eh? Yes, we've included two additional stories in the selected Reading section of our show Notes. One is on an MOU sign between Space Apps and Blue Abyss and the other is an op ed by Moriba Jar on yesterday's all female spaceflight. Yes indeed. It is definitely stirring up some mixed opinions out there on the interwebs. And where else can we find all of those links?
- [09:12]
Alice Carruth
As always, they can be found on.
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Maria Varmazes
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.
- [10:04]
Alice Carruth
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- [10:46]
Maria Varmazes
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.
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Elizabeth Crist
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.
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Maria Varmazes
Wow.
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Elizabeth Crist
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.
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Maria Varmazes
Were you into space before that? Was that even on your radar?
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Elizabeth Crist
It's not.
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Maria Varmazes
I love it. I love it when that happens.
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Elizabeth Crist
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.
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Maria Varmazes
Yeah.
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Elizabeth Crist
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.
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Maria Varmazes
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.
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Elizabeth Crist
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.
- [15:40]
Maria Varmazes
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?
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Elizabeth Crist
That's the one. Apex is.
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Maria Varmazes
Tell me how that's going.
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Elizabeth Crist
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.
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Maria Varmazes
It's the far side of the moon, right?
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Elizabeth Crist
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.
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Maria Varmazes
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?
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Elizabeth Crist
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.
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Maria Varmazes
That's so cool.
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Elizabeth Crist
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.
- [18:00]
Maria Varmazes
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?
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Elizabeth Crist
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.
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Maria Varmazes
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.
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Elizabeth Crist
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.
- [20:29]
Maria Varmazes
We'll be right back.
- [20:36]
Alice Carruth
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- [21:36]
Maria Varmazes
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.
- [24:07]
Alice Carruth
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