← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
SpaceX to buy more spectrum.
00:28:44
EchoStar offers to sell more spectrum licenses to SpaceX. Kratos to acquire Orbital Technologies for $356M. Reflex closes a $50M funding round. And more.
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Maria Varmazis
Foreign you're listening to the N2K space network.
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Thales Representative
At Thales they know cybersecurity can be tough and you can't protect everything. But with Thales you can secure what matters most. With Thales industry leading platforms, you can protect critical applications, data and identities anywhere and at scale with the highest roi. That's why the most trusted brands and largest banks, retailers and healthcare companies in the world rely on Thales to protect what matters most applications, data and identity. That's Talas T H A L E S learn more@talasgroup.com Cyber.
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Yani Barghouti
Foreign.
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Maria Varmazis
Today is November 6, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T -T -20 seconds. Portal Space Systems has introduced a new spacecraft which they plan to launch to orbit in 24. Starcatcher has set a new world record for wireless optical power transmission.
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Yani Barghouti
3.
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Maria Varmazis
Reflex Aerospace has closed a 50 million euro Series A funding round. Kratos Defense and Security Solutions has signed a definitive agreement to acquire 100% of the ordinary shares of Orbit Technologies for $356.3 million. EchoStar to sell a set of wireless spectrum light licenses to SpaceX for about $2.6 billion. Our guest today is Yani Barghouti, co founder and CEO of Cosmic Shielding Corporation. And I caught up with Yani to hear about how AI enabled chips in space can lead to space based data centers and significant cost savings for satellite operators. Definitely stick around to find out more about that after today's head. Thank you for joining me on this Thursday everyone. Let's dive into our intel briefing. So what do you call a company that keeps buying up all of the spectrum licenses? A conglomerate of course. No, no, it's not a weird joke. It is simply a fact and an accurate description of SpaceX with the news that they plan to purchase more licenses for from EchoStar. EchoStar said that it would sell a set of wireless Spectrum licenses to SpaceX for about $2.6 billion in exchange for stock in the space startup expanding on the $17 billion deal that the company struck back in September. So what Spectrum exactly is on offer in this deal? EchoStar says it'll sell the AWS three licenses which cover airwaves across the United States that can be used to support mobile and satellite communications. And we should add that SpaceX is not the largest buyer of spectrum from EchoStar to date as that accolade is owned by telecommunications giant AT&T who agreed to acquire 50 MHz of nationwide mid band and low band spectrum for $23 billion earlier this year anyway. Back to SpaceX EchoStar CEO Hamid Akivan said in a statement that by combining EchoStar's wireless air with SpaceX's rocket launch and satellite manufacturing capabilities, they can quickly create strong and affordable direct to cell services, and that is certainly a key objective of the latest generation of Starlink satellites. The sale to SpaceX will close after receiving regulatory approval. Kratos Defense and Security Solutions has signed a definitive agreement to acquire 100% of the ordinary shares of Orbit Technologies Limited for 356.3 million DOL. The acquisition is expected to be funded via cash on Kratos balance sheet and Orbit Technologies is a leading global provider of mission critical satellite based communication systems for mobile and unmanned aerial, seaborne, undersea and land systems, military vehicles and other systems. And once the acquisition is consummated, Orbit will report through Kratos Microwave Electronics Division which is headquartered in Jerusalem, Israel. German satellite manufacturer Reflex Aerospace has closed a 50 million euro Series A funding round and that funding round is actually the largest Series A in the European new space sector to date. Reflex says that the new capital will accelerate the development, production and deployment of sovereign satellite constellations providing optical synthetic aperture radar, space domain awareness and signal intelligence capabilities. Part of the financing will be used to expand existing manufacturing capacity in Bavaria to manufacture satellite constellations for intelligence and communications purposes. Reflex Aerospace aims to have all capabilities ready for deployment and demonstrated in orbit by 2027. Starcatcher has set a new world record for wireless optical power transmission. The space power company recently completed of optical power beaming tests at NASA's Kennedy Space center to validate core technologies for its orbital energy grid, the Starcatcher Network. Using an advanced suite of multi wavelength lasers, the team delivered more than 1.1 kilowatts of electrical power to commercial off the shelf solar panels at Space Florida's launch and landing facility. The most recent record high was 800 watts set by DARPA in May 2025, so records are being broken every day, doesn't it seem? Starcatcher delivered more than 10 megajoules of energy throughout the test campaign and the company says that the tests demonstrate readiness to power customer missions in orbit. Starcatcher will launch its first on orbit power beaming demonstration in 2026. And speaking of 2026, Portal Space Systems has introduced a new spacecraft which they plan to launch to orbit in 2026. Portal's Starburst is an ESPA class rapid maneuverability spacecraft. The Starburst one will be the company's first free flying mission with live payloads and it is expected to launch on SpaceX's Transporter 18 in Q4 2026. The mission aims to demonstrate rendezvous and proximity operations, rapid retasking and rapid orbital change for national security and commercial use cases. The company says that the spacecraft will be available for customer missions in 2027, and that concludes today's top five stories. But as always, there are so many more stories that could have made today's intel briefing, and N2K senior producer Alice Carruth joins us now with a look at those other stories that are making today's headlines.
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Alice Carruth
Alice thanks Maria. Firefly has completed their acquisition of SciTech. Laidos has been selected to lead StarLab's US space assembly, integration and testing activities for the commercial space station. European startup Ecosmic is having its flagship space domain awareness solution safe tested by the European Space Agency on a selection of ESA operated satellites. Raytheon UK has been awarded a contract to provide orbital analysts in support of the UK's Space Domain Awareness mission, and ispace has been selected by Japan's Space Strategy Fund for a project titled Establishing Surveying and Ground Investigation Technologies to Realize Lunar Base Construction. You can read more about these stories and all the others mentioned throughout the episode by following the links in the selected reading section of our show.
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Maria Varmazis
Notes hi T Minus Crew. A quick update and thank you from from yesterday's show where I asked you if you would be the 3500th follower of N2k T minus Space Daily on LinkedIn and I'm happy to report that indeed you all were very awesome and listened to that call and we are now over 3,500 followers on LinkedIn. Thank you very much. And you know a lot of people are also listening to podcasts through YouTube and if that is the way that you would prefer to listen to this show, well I have great news for you. T minus Space Daily is indeed on YouTube and and we post our episodes there along with video clips from interviews and events throughout the year. So if you like to dual screen at work and keep the YouTube player going all day while you are heads down, you are certainly Not Alone at N2K Cyber is our company's YouTube channel and when you are there you will find the T Minus Space Daily playlist along with all of the other shows that we make here at N2K like the cyber Wire and Hacking Humans. So again, if you want to listen to T Minus space daily on YouTube, find us at N2K Cyber on YouTube and thanks.
- [10:13]
Trevor Hilligoss
What happens when cybercrime becomes as easy as shopping online Spy Cloud's Trevor Hilligoss joined Dave Bittner on the Cyberwire Daily to explain how a wave of cybercrime enablement services are lowering the barrier to entry and making sophisticated attacks available to anyone.
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Dave Bittner
I think it's a pretty good general term that describes kind of an umbrella of tools and services that I would kind of tag as criminal or criminal adjacent. Instead of having sort of the smaller pool of high sophistication actors that are able to kind of carry out these really vast and costly cyber attacks, we see that being given to much lower sophistication, lower tech folks that are, you know, a much lower barrier to entry. To get into this field, the person that's buying access to this, they basically need a phone and a bitcoin wallet.
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Trevor Hilligoss
Make sure you hear this full conversation and learn how the underground economy is reshaping Cyber risk. Visit explore.thecyberwire.com spycloud that's explore.thecyberwire.Com spycloud.
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Yani Barghouti
Foreign.
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Maria Varmazis
Our guest today is Yani Barghouti, co founder and CEO of Cosmic Shielding Corporation. And Yani started our chat by telling me more about Cosmic Shielding Corporation.
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Yani Barghouti
So Cosmic Shielding, or CSC as we like to call it, has developed a nanocomposite shielding material that we use to build a variety of shielding structures for space and defense applications. And, you know, shielding has been an issue in the industry since the Apollo era. Right. Like I like to say that aside from getting to space, staying there is the next hardest thing. Right. So the idea with hard material is like, you could have the best shield in the world, but if it's hard to integrate, no one's going to use it. So we spent a lot of time optimizing what we call the secondary properties, so mechanical thermals and so forth. We worked out of the Institute for Solar Nanotechnology at MIT for some time until we got our own facility. And essentially what we've enabled is for customers to be able to take anything that you would use on Earth, whether it's a COTS device, like say an Nvidia gpu, solid state drive, or even a biological system, and use it in orbit safely and reliably. So essentially, in short, what we do is try and bring Moore's Law to space.
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Maria Varmazis
Fantastic. And I remember, I'm going back about a year when we last spoke. I think we were talking about the opportunities that shielding, like what you all provide, can open up specifically in the realm of AI. If I'm summarizing that conversation from a year ago correctly, and I know, there's been some announcements rather recently about some new awards that you all got. Could you tell me a bit about that?
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Yani Barghouti
Yeah. So last time we were on the podcast, we were discussing the Nvidia mission that we were doing with FRL and Ethereal, where essentially we were taking an Nvidia Jetson GPU and shielding it and showing that you can have essentially significantly reduced error rates without having to harden the chip using traditional radiation hardening techniques and so forth. So that was a success. Throughout the past year we've demonstrated not just with the on orbit mission, but many terrestrial examples of that same Nvidia system. Well, not the exact same one, of course. We had a very large sample size of systems to fry at the accelerator facilities. We didn't fry all of them, of course. So we tested shielded and unshielded and then aluminum shielded structures at High Mac, which is the Heavy Ion Medical Accelerator in Chiba, Triumph Major Accelerator in Vancouver, and then at NASA's Grace Radiation Labs. And at each case we were able to show a significant near order of magnitude reduction in single event effects as well as, what was more interesting to me, a reduction in the actual severity of events that do occur. So that's something that is difficult to predict. Right. So if you're trying to do a simulation, I'm trying to see that that's something a lot of people would have missed even up until now. And that takes us to the new award. So we get, we had support from Space Systems Command and FRL to essentially take what we did there in that mission with the Nvidia chips and take it a step further, generalize it to anything, essentially any new COP system, any modern ops hardware, and some traditional rad radiation tolerant and radiation hardened components. And not only showcase, you know, the efficacy because it's predictable for us, we know we can make it work. It's how do we predict exactly how well it's going to work? That's the next step. So we're taking all these other systems and we're screening them extensively through the same process as we did with the Nvidia boards and using that data to build essentially a model. So a semi empirical software tool to be able to quickly diagnose the shielding requirements for future hardware. So now that we know we can shield it, we need to see how much shielding it needs. Right. And instead of having to take chips to particle accelerators and spend, you know, hundreds of thousands of dollars on the low end just characterizing and de risking the system, imagine if you could just take those chips and do a simulation. So there's a huge gap in simulating the effects on the chips. We can simulate the environment. Right. That's very, very well understood physics and very comprehensively done, let's say in the industry taking that data and then applying it to the actual error rates. There's old. There are all tools people use, like one called Cream 96 for example. It's an old tool built by Vanderbilt doing during some time working with. Well, they worked with quite a few people. But NASA Shrag is an example, the Space Radiation Analysis Group, where they were trying to essentially say, okay, how can we take that radiation field data and guesstimate how a chip will react? The problem with that is that it was built, as the name suggests, in the 90s, right?
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Maria Varmazis
Yeah, yeah.
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Yani Barghouti
And anything below something like 90 nanometers, it just, it cannot give you an accurate representation. Right. So every single COT device for the most part these days is well under 90 nanometers. Right?
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Maria Varmazis
Yeah.
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Yani Barghouti
So essentially we're updating that, but also making it a little more sophisticated being able to incorporate advanced shielding into the simulation. So yeah, that's essentially what the TACFI is. We actually maxed out the commit from the Air Force side, $2 million there. And then we had another 2 million from a. Which is a little interesting and unique rather than from a VC match because tac fires are, you know, up public private matching program.
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Maria Varmazis
Yeah.
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Yani Barghouti
We actually have it exclusively from customers just because there has been a very high demand ever since the announcement of the Nvidia mission last year.
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Maria Varmazis
Well, congratulations. That's huge.
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Yani Barghouti
Yeah, no, it's exciting because essentially what for us, it knocks out knocks two birds with one stone. Right. Like how the phrase goes, it allows us to do what we need to do for Takfire and get the data we need to do from all these diverse range of systems while at the same time also de risking shielding designs.
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Maria Varmazis
For actual customers, Speeding things up significantly, Also updating these models that have been outdated for decades and being able to simulate at a scale and a level of sophistication that we just haven't had. I mean, that is a many decade advancement. That's huge.
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Yani Barghouti
Yeah, exactly. It's exciting for us and it's going to be quite the ordeal. Like don't get us wrong, but we've already started the project in terms of starting the initial beam test. So we have hundreds and hundreds of hours of accelerator time at NASA, Space Radiation Labs, himac, all the other cern. Actually that's one of the more exciting ones. And now the Work begins. And the exciting thing that I'm looking forward to is that you hear all this talk about data centers in space nowadays. Oh. Like we want to put, you know, it makes sense for the sake of saving power, lowering the environmental impact, put these data centers in orbit. But in order to keep up right there on air. But surfacing is going to have to be a core component there. Right. Like the hardware as it goes. But to update the hardware, you don't want to have to spend years de risking it in an accelerated facility. So that's the exact type of application or example user base that would benefit from this work. Another one that is less, I'd say less on the commercial side, more on the defense side is that there's a huge shortage of rad hard parts for defense applications. And as you know, we trend towards. I'd say, you know, there's some stability changes in the world. Of course there's some concerns over missile defense systems and so forth and so forth.
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Maria Varmazis
Yep.
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Yani Barghouti
The, the ability to essentially take COTS components and quickly de risk them to be used in these high risk applications that can be exposed to a high radiation environment or have just an extremely low tolerance for single event effect. So for example, if you have a missile defense system, there's one single event effect. Right. You're talking about a very short flight time. So a single error that causes a reboot on the system.
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Maria Varmazis
Totally, totally catastrophic.
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Yani Barghouti
That's actually an area we've been getting a ton of support from, from the government and we were actually recently awarded, which we'll go into details on this at a later date. But we're actually awarded a sole source contract to pursue some of that qualification alongside what we're doing with the TAC file. Wow. So I think it's a sign because, you know, even last year when we last spoke the, there was quite a bit of an increase on attention towards COTS and even shielding. Right?
- [20:16]
Maria Varmazis
Yeah.
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Yani Barghouti
And now it's almost becoming mainstream. The idea of like, okay, shielding might actually be the way to go with a lot of this hard. There was a gap where I think the industry had a little bit of a stasis with innovations in the field. Just mainly because there was a status quo. Right. You used RADHAR chips or you used COTS chips for like a cubesat mission that's only going to last a year or two.
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Maria Varmazis
Yes.
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Yani Barghouti
So now we're seeing all the fruits of all these new developments. Right. It's a really exciting time.
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Maria Varmazis
So we're making missions last a lot longer, more dependably and you know, that dollar goes further, so to speak, for all involved. So, yeah, I mean, I come at this as an ex computer science person and married to a computer science guy. Often when we think about edge computing in space, just the edge in space, so to speak, data centers in space, usually the first question that when we're talking about this over the dinner table is, well, what is radiation going to do all to these extremely sensitive, really tiny components? And it's just really cool knowing that like you all are working on something that is such an important component to this incredible infrastructure that is being built right now in space.
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Yani Barghouti
Absolutely. I appreciate that. And you know, there's a lot of changes going to happen over the next year as well because now that we've been in our hitting our stride essentially with our general operations of, you know, we're delivering materials at a weekly basis now to a variety of applications. And now our, our plan, in addition to what this TAC file allow. TAC file allow us to quickly diagnose. Right. The requirements for virtually any mission. The work product from that tac file, we are now developing essentially all in one. So rather than having engineers work to figure out how do I even integrate this material in these applications, we're developing ready to go coated variants of the material that have, whether gold, tantalum, aluminum, all sorts of different materials coating the outside of the layers, allowing you to essentially use it at any form factor beyond what we're currently doing. So essentially we focus on the actual chip level or inside the system. Right.
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Maria Varmazis
Yeah.
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Yani Barghouti
We're now going to be releasing structures for bus manufacturers. So full replacements of larger structures.
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Maria Varmazis
Wow.
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Yani Barghouti
Satellite elements like the bus elements used as essentially an all in one. So basically significantly improve the performance of the shielding itself. Just because we can design the actual enclosure rather than having to work around existing restrictions.
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Maria Varmazis
That makes sense.
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Yani Barghouti
Simultaneously giving significantly streamlined integration. So that's what we're working on in parallel with all this over the next few months. We're hoping to launch these early Q1 early next year. Outside.
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Maria Varmazis
We'll be right back. Welcome back. Credit where credit is due when it comes to clever headlines. Applause, applause, applause, please, for Popular Mechanics for this one. Scientists think this space object could be from a dead civilization. Now that headline is quite clever because if you think it's about the interstellar comet 3I Atlas that's been making a lot of headlines lately for its appearance, you would be wrong. No, this is not about that interstellar object at all. Nor is it about everybody crossing their fingers that maybe, maybe, maybe it's actually aliens because hint, it's never aliens. No, indeed, this is about a totally different object. Object Arjuna 2025 PN7 Yes, a totally different thing. Arjuna Asteroids, for context, are a group of near Earth objects, and there are several such near Earth object groups. But key thing to remember your Earth object. Okay, so indeed this Arjuna object of interest, like its compatriots, are often called quasi moons or quasi satellites. And going back to that funny headline from Popular Mechanics about this object being from a dead civilization, there are no sci fi revelations to be had here. The dead civ they're referring to is the Soviet Union. Back to the USSR, baby. There are signs that this object, Arjuna 2025 PN7 is actually not a near Earth rock, but a near Earth bit of space debris that we all kind of lost track of and has come back to say hello. It is entirely possible, if not entirely likely, that this object is actually from a failed USSR mission to Venus in April 1967, the Zond one. And if you are thinking because you are a very smart listener, dear T minus listener, hey, didn't we also have another failed USSR mission to Venus doing some space debris type stuff not that long ago? You are very, very smart. Yes, you would be correct. Indeed, that was May 10, 2025 when the Cosmos 482 descent craft for a Venera mission to Venus came back to Earth 53 years ago. That USSR mission never left Earth's gravity. In contrast, the Zond 1 mission, which was actually a predecessor to the Venera missions, actually did get within 100,000 km of Venus, but a lot of its onboard systems had already failed by that point. So if this object is from Zond1, it'll be interesting to see that the two USSR era missions to Venus have in some way made their way back to Earth this year. Makes you wonder. Is Venus trying to tell us something? And that's T minus Brought to you by N2K CyberWire we'd love to know what you think of our podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like our show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. You could also fill out the survey in our show notes or send an email to spacen20point. We are 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 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 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 Kilby is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Ramazes. Thank you for listening. See you tomorrow.
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Dave Bittner
T minus.