← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
Scaling solar tech and securing space traffic.
00:24:33
OSC releases solicitations for CASS. CNES selects a new consortium to demo 5G D2D connectivity. Maxar and Anduril partner on a US Army C2 system. And more.
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Foreign you're listening to the N2K space network.
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Foreign Today is September 9, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazas and this is T -T -20 seconds to Los T Drift. China has launched a remote sensing satellite from the One Chang spacecraft launch. Messiem has secured 3.3 million pounds in seed funding in a round jointly led by the UK Innovation and Science Seed Fund Maxar to partner with Anduril to supply the foundational geospatial intelligence that will underpin a next generation mixed reality command and control system for the US Army. Capgemini Thales and Thales Alenia Space have been selected by CNES to lead an innovative demonstration of 5G directed device connectivity. NOAA's Office of Space Commerce has announced new solicitations for a commercial Conjunction Assessment Screening Services pilot program. Our guest today is Kevin Hell, President and CEO of Empower Technology. We're going to be discussing a new investment in M Power by Lockheed Martin Ventures. Stick around to find out more about solar panels in Foreign thank you for joining me. Let's dive into today's Intel Briefing and we are kicking off with an update on the U.S. traffic Coordination System for Space Program, better known as TRACKS. NOAA's Office of Space Commerce, also known as OSC, is developing the TRACKS program to provide basic space situational awareness data and services to civil and private space operators in support of spaceflight safety and as TRACKS approaches production release, OSC has announced new solicitations for a commercial Conjunction Assessment Screening Services pilot known as cas. These solicitations represent an important first step towards improving conjunction analysis quality, which is a core part of the mission that Space Policy Directive 3 assigned the Department of Commerce and is another example of TRACKS leveraging the commercial space situational awareness industries innovative capabilities and by evaluating commercial CAS outputs and independent data quality assessments, TRACKS will work to close capability gaps in today's approach to space traffic coordination, strengthening the safety of space operations worldwide. OSC is selecting up to 5 vendors to provide data from their CAS to support evaluation activities, and the CAS provider data will identify suitable services to explore further for integration into the TRACS operational system, and additionally, OSC will select one provider to manage the data flow required for this evaluation and perform an independent evaluation of the quality of the CAS provider's products. More details can be found about all of that by following the link in our show notes and we need to note that this new program is released on the heels of rumors that US President Donald Trump's administration has pulled back about 40% of the annual budget for OSC. Employees at the OSC reportedly received notification from the Office of Management and Budget reducing the annual budget from $65 million in fiscal year 2025 to $37 million, the money that the Office had already spent through July. That leaves a funding shortfall until the start of the new fiscal year in October, and we hope it does not impact the rollout of TRACs in the coming months. Let's move on over to Europe now. A consortium led by Capgemini Thales and Thales Alenia Space have been selected by the French space agency CNES to lead an innovative demonstration of 5G directed device connectivity. The demonstration is part of a government packed call for project under the France 2030 program. The project named you deserve 5G will demonstrate the feasibility of direct communications between satellites and mobile devices or fixed terminals. A demonstrator satellite will be placed in low earth orbit to test interoperability between terrestrial and non terrestrial 5G networks. The project will use a set of scenarios to evaluate how smoothly devices can switch between satellite and terrestrial 5G coverage. The demonstration is a crucial step towards truly global, seamless and uninterrupted connectivity. Capgemini will be responsible for radio access solutions and 4G 5G core networks. For its part, Thales will assess the feasibility of a 5G D2D terminal with a directional antenna operating in the future C band. Additional support will come from Orange, which will contribute its operator expertise and host the demonstration at its Bercinai facility in France. And SES is in charge of studying the implementation of D2T services, while Qualcomm will supply a 5G NTN compatible test mobile terminal and and loft. Orbital will be responsible for the platform assembly, integration, testing, launch reservation and satellite operations. For the demonstration phase, Maxar has announced a strategic partnership with Anduril to supply the foundational geospatial intelligence that will underpin a next generation mixed reality command and control system or C2 for the US Army. The C2 system will power the soldier borne Mission Command Architecture program which will provide US Warfighters with a mixed reality capability that overlays real time battlefield intelligence directly into a soldier's field of view. Kind of like a video game Heads up display sounds like advanced headsets will display digital information on top of their real world view during live combat missions and training. And by integrating Maxar's geospatial intelligence into Anduril's Lattice AI powered software, the system will give soldiers accurate real time awareness of terrain and threats. Maxar and Anduril say that they're turning data into actionable insight that strengthens survivability and accelerates decision making in contested environments. It is certainly a sci fi turned science reality system that blends space data, AI and soldier ready battlefield tech. Sky News is reporting that Messium, a British satellite imaging startup, has secured £3.3 million in seed funding in a round jointly led by the UK Innovation and Science Seed Fund. Messiem uses hyperspectral satellite imaging and AI analytics to improve the efficiency of farmers crop management by detecting how much nitrogen is present in each part of a field. The funding is also reportedly backed by the UK Space Agency. And congratulations to messiem and China launched a remote sensing satellite from the One Chang spacecraft launch site in the southern island province of Hainan earlier today. A modified Long March 7 rocket carrying the Yaogan 45 satellite blasted off at 10am local time and sent it into the preset orbit. Chinese media say that the satellite will mainly be used for scientific experiments, land resource surveys, crop yield estimates, and for disaster prevention and mitigation. Foreign that wraps up today's intel briefing for you. Stay with me to find out how much a Star wars fan spent on buying Darth Vader's lightsaber from the Empire Strikes Back and the Return of the Jedi. But before we get into that very important news and my chat with Kevin Hell from Empower, producer Alice Cruz joins me now with an update on the other stories that we are watching today. Alice, what do you have?
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Maria We've added one additional link in today's selected reading section of our show Notes. It covers the announcement that the Space Development agency has selected Dr. Garpa Tap Sandhu as the Acting Director of the SDA. You can read more about that and all the other stories mentioned in the show by following the links that are available on the podcast platform that you listen to us on or on our.
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Website, space.n2k.com it/crew if you are just joining us, welcome and be sure to follow T minus Space daily in your favorite podcast app. Also, if you could do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. 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 our show useful, please share it so other professionals like you can find T minus. Thank you so much everybody. It really means a lot to me.
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Today's guest is Kevin Hell, President and CEO of Empower Technology. Kevin started by telling me more about Empower.
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We are a leader in advanced solar technology for space. We have a product called Dragon Scales and essentially it's a very unique technology. It's silicon based. It's flexible, resilient, lightweight solution for solar power in space. And it really addresses a huge need in the industry right now, which is traditional solar solutions for space are both too expensive and and incredibly supply constrained based on gallium arsenide. You know, gallium is incredibly limited right now and 98% of it comes from China and is really at risk. One of the things that's been driving or has been historically driving gallium arsenide is the fact that it has very high efficiency relative to silicon. In fact, silicon was the initial technology used in space for solar arrays. And then gallium arsenide was developed to increase the efficiency. So you didn't need as long of an array of and that was particularly important when launch vehicle costs were very high and when the penalty for weight was extremely high.
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Yeah.
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However, launch costs have come down, the penalty for weight has come down. And even though silicon has lower efficiency given the amount of power requirements for these new missions, silicon has found its way back into back to the future, you know, it's now something that we consider for designs and works out quite well. And it's the only way that you're going to meet the requirements for many of these large scale missions. However, in addition to that, one of the great things about Dragon Scales is that we can take advancements in the silicon photovoltaic world that's primarily driven by the terrestrial market and take those increases in efficiency and essentially drag and drop them into our Dragon Scales architecture. So we're able to leverage a lot of very expensive investments that the terrestrial market makes to increase the efficiency for your rooftop or for any other solar application. So some of the new technologies that are coming down the pike are heterojunction cells, top gun cells, as well as perovskites on silicon. And what these new technologies do is really close the efficiency gap relative to gallium arsenide. One of the penalties of silicon is that again, you need a slightly longer array, that array can weigh a little bit more. But with these new technologies, that efficiency gap, we expect that to close. And in fact Perovska and silicon promise to get very, very close to the efficiency of gallium arseide. And when that happens, there really is no penalty at all for silicon. You got, you know, a cost that is, you know, 5 to 10x, you know, less and you have unlimited amounts of supply. And so really that's where we see it going over the long term through our roadmap.
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Yeah, I was going to say supply chain is you take that out of the equation also. So that's, I mean, it's never out of the equation, but it's less of a concern certainly. So, yeah, those are all very, very important considerations there, closing that gap.
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We're just glad that billions of dollars are being poured into the R and D associated with the increasing efficiency for your terrestrial rooftop applications, given their scale. And then that flows down to us and we can now use that for space and do, and do the things that we do to make it particularly suited for space.
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Honestly, what a great place to be, especially with such a great innovation. So very enviable, honestly. So, congratulations so on a recent announcement about a new investment in your company by Lockheed Martin Ventures. This was announced in late August. Would you mind telling me a bit about that?
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Yeah, sure, yeah. And it builds on two recent funding announcements we've had. The first was in May where we announced the series B funding, $21 million in series B led by Raiser's Edge and Shield Capital. And then more recently, we just announced an Additional investment from Lockheed Martin Ventures, which joins us as a strategic investor. And that brings the total Series B funding to over $24 million, which is really exciting. And this is really going to allow us to scale our high volume production of Dragon Scales and also expand our reach into national security missions as well, since obviously both Lockheed Martin Ventures as well as Razor's Edge and Shield Capital are focused on that area.
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Absolutely. I was going to ask about that partnership with Lockheed Martin Ventures, sort of what they bring, obviously financial support, but as a partner to you all, what kind of like the relationships and what they bring to you, maybe in the softer side of things, so to speak.
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You know, Lockheed Martin is one of the largest space and defense contractors in the world. And so their involvement brings mission expertise, defense sector reach and credibility. And it's really a very powerful signal. It validates Dragon Scales as the technology that's needed for this next generation of space missions that I was talking about. It also creates opportunities for Collaboration on Critical U.S. defense and national security missions that need resilient, rapidly deployable power solutions. As I mentioned, there's really a constraint in the market right now around solar power. And so we can come to the table on these kind of missions, particularly on the US Defense side, and help and provide solar power solutions. And it also, it helps accelerate our growth into areas like responsive launch and proliferated Leo Constellations, which is really a huge area right now.
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Huge. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. When you speak about scaling up, what does that look like for you all? Is that new facilities just being able to be producing more?
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Sure, yeah. No, it's a really exciting time for us. As I talked about last time, we have a manufacturing partner in upstate New York, Universal Instruments, and we have just started to produce off of our high production, high volume production line in New York. It has a 2 megawatt annual capacity, which is more, by the way, than the combined global output of the three main suppliers to space combined. So just give you an idea. And we are, we are producing flight modules out of that facility now on this new line. It's very exciting for us. And so this, this additional funding is going to help us continue to expand, you know, our production with, with Universal Instruments.
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That's fantastic. Anything else that you want to add about this announcement or just in general, what you all are sort of up to now and looking to do in the future?
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Well, you know, the space market continues to grow and we've got Leo Constellations for communications. You've got, as I've talked about, defense and intelligence missions you have space mobility, orbit raising services, space habitats, lunar and Mars missions, AI and in space computing. And then of course people are talking about space based power generation and beaming. All of these things require power and they require orders of magnitude more power than has ever been done in the past. And they need to be at a price point that is an order of magnitude or more or less than has ever been done in the past. And we are at that, we are looking to be that supplier to help enable all of these different missions and to make it actually work. And so we've had now over 15 years of heritage in orbit that we're really unique in the market in the sense that we're the only ones that have this combination of space heritage. 15 years already on orbit, we have a pipeline, over a half a billion dollars of active sales engagements. There's really little competition out there for what these new missions require. The legacy players are expensive and as I mentioned, very supply constrained. Other silicon suppliers are emerging as well, but they're years behind us and they don't really have yet scalable production that's working now like we do. And so we're really in a unique position and we're looking to basically be the major supplier for this, this next space 2.0 generation of Ms.
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We'll be right back.
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Welcome back. If you have a couple million bucks burning a hole in your pocket and an abiding love of Star wars, you might really relate to this headline. Because last Thursday somebody spent US$3.6 million at an auction to buy one of the actual lightsabers used by Darth Vader, both the actor and the stunt performer in both Star the Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. $3.6 million for an on screen prop. Now, I do not have that kind of spare change, but the devotion to a lifelong fandom, as you might have gathered from yesterday's show, yes, I do get that. If I did have that kind of money though, I'd probably be asking myself, what else is money for than to buy the actual red glowy lightsaber seen on screen that did strike down the mighty Obi Wan Kenobi and slice up the arm of Luke Skywalker. I mean, that's just respecting our geek history, after all. But yes, this light lightsaber is ultimately a screen prop. It doesn't actually do the cool glowy slicey thing. Sorry to disappoint, I know that part you do need to use your imagination for until someone figures out the tech and the screen prop itself is a fascinating bit of movie magic and prop making ingenuity. It was made from a 1950s camera flashbulb attachment and an I quote expertly modified by the production team into a lightsaber according to the prop store auction house description. And if you want an excruciatingly, almost worryingly detailed account about what went into this prop's build, rest assured that the contributors to the Star Wars Fandom Wiki have you more than covered with paragraphs of detail, and I will let you hunt that down yourself. In any case, congratulations to the lucky nerd who got their hands on this bit of film history. Best to stay anonymous with your winning though. I can think of quite a few people, fandom wiki contributors included, who are quite jealous. And that is T minus Brought to you by N2K CyberWire what do you think about T minus Space Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. The link is in the show notes for you and thank you for helping us continue to improve our show. We're 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 cyber security 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 Ivan. Peter Kilby is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thanks for listening. I'll see you tomorrow.
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T minus.