← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
The Fairytale of Near Space Network.
00:27:35
NASA selects multiple companies to expand the Near Space Network. Liechtenstein signs the Artemis Accords. SpaceX launches the Bandwagon-2 mission. And more.
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- [00:02]
Maria Varmazes
You're listening to the N2K Space Network.
- [00:11]
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- [01:15]
Maria Varmazes
Today is our last daily intel briefing for the year, but don't fear. We'll be releasing content over the holidays, but just not as a daily News roundup until January 2, 2025. So it's only fitting that we end this year on a high note and start today's briefing with contract news that is valued at billions of dollars. Not so much jingle bells as they are cha jingle bells. T minus 22nd at the Los Speed Reservoir. Today is December 23rd, 2024. I'm Maria Varmazes and this is T.
- [01:59]
Aaron Miller
Let's go.
- [02:05]
Maria Varmazes
NASA selects multiple companies to expand the agency's Near Space Network Lichtenstein signs The Artemis Accords, SpaceX launches the Bandwagon 2 mission and we're bringing you one of my chats from earlier in the year with Aaron Miller, Executive Director of the Space isac. We spoke back in spring about some of their new partnerships that were secured in 2024. Find out more about that later in the Happy Monday everybody, and thank you for joining us for this, the last intel briefing of 2024. NASA has selected multiple companies to expand the agency's Near Space Network's commercial Direct to Earth capabilities services. The Near Space Network will play a large role in NASA's Artemis campaign, providing missions out to 1.2 million miles with communications and navigation services, enabling spacecraft to exchange critical data with mission operators on Earth. The cumulative maximum value of all Near Space Network services contracts is $4.82 billion. Big numbers, yes, but this is an IDIQ, or indefinite delivery indefinite Quantity contract that will be shared among multiple contractors, and there are some big names amongst those selected, including Intuitive Machines, Kongsberg Satellite Services, SSC Space, and viasat. Intuitive Machines will receive two task Order awards on its contract for GEO to Cislunar Direct to Earth or DTE Services and Cislunar DTE services to support NASA's Lunar Exploration Ground segment. Intuitive machines will provide additional capacity to alleviate demand on the Deep Space network and to meet the mission requirements for unique, highly elliptical orbits. The company also previously received a Task Order award for Geode Assist Lunar Relay Services, and you can read more about the other companies selected and their contracts by following the link in our show notes. And what about NASA's Deep Space Network? The US space agency is adding a new antenna to it, bringing the total to 15 to support increased demand for the world's largest and and most sensitive radio frequency telecommunications system, teams at NASA's Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California installed a metal reflector framework for Deep Space Station 23, a multi frequency beam waveguide antenna, and they're aptly calling it a crowning moment. When operational in 2026, Deep Space Station 23 will receive transmissions from missions such as Perseverance, psyche, Europa Clipper Voyager 1 and a growing fleet of future human and robotic spacecraft in deep space. Liechtenstein has become nation number 52 to commit to the Artemis Accords. The European country signed the agreement on Friday during a ceremony hosted by NASA Deputy Administrator Pam Melroy at the agency's headquarters in Washington, D.C. the U.S. says it welcomes Lichtenstein to the Artemis Accords as a valued friend and partner with a steadfast commitment to human rights, democratic values and good governance. SpaceX's Falcon 9 launched the Bandwagon 2 mission to orbit from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on Saturday. Onboard this mission were 30 payloads for Korea, ADD, Arrow ADD and technology Exolaunch, Hawkeye360, Maverick Space Systems, Citus Space Tomorrow, companies True Anomaly and Think Orbital Rideshare Integrator. Exolaunch deployed 22 customer satellites on the mission, including two new satellites for IceEye. Iseye says both satellites have established communication and early routine operations are underway. Rocket Lab completed its 16th launch for the year, deploying a satellite for Japanese Earth Observation Constellation operator Synspective. The all the Way up mission lifted off from Rocket Lab Launch Complex 1 in New Zealand on December 22 at 3.17am local time. The mission deployed a single Strix satellite to orbit from the Electron launch vehicle. Rocket Lab founder and CEO Peter Beck added to the press release that we look forward to continuing to increase our launch cadence in the new year as we strengthen Electron's position as the leading small rocket globally and also enter the medium launch market with Neutron's debut. And yep, we are looking forward to it too here at T Minus, a space sustainability consortium made up of Deorbit, Astroscale and ClearSpace has secured 691,000 pound from the UK government to test a Rendezvous and Proximity Operation, or RPO. The funding was secured from the UK Department for Science, Innovation and Technology for a regulatory sandbox project to test RPO missions, help regulators understand these emerging technologies and their implications, and ultimately inform and enable regulation for such novel space activities. The UK is funding the regulatory sandbox for rpo. As they say, it'll provide an advanced capability that will underpin all future in orbit servicing, assembly and manufacturing missions and NASA completed the first maximum afterburner engine run test on its X59 quiet supersonic research aircraft earlier this month. The ground test, conducted at Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works facility in California marks a significant Milestone as the X59 team progresses towards flight. The X59's first flight is expected to occur in 2025 and we'll be back with a daily intel briefing in 2025 on January 2, to be precise. In the meantime, you'll find daily programs in your podcast feed over the holidays. Just keep you updated and informed about the rapidly changing space industry. Hi T minus Crew. If you would like daily updates from us directly in your LinkedIn feed, be sure to follow the official N2K T minus page over on LinkedIn. And if you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do here, we are T daily on Instagram and that's where we post videos and pictures from events, excursions and even some behind the scenes treats. Links are in the show notes for you. Hope you'll join us there.
- [08:44]
Dutch Bros Representative
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- [09:16]
Maria Varmazes
Earlier this year I spoke with Aaron Miller, Executive Director of the Space isac, about some of the new partnerships that the organization had formed in 2024 and we hope to bring you an update from space ISAC in 2025.
- [09:31]
Aaron Miller
We started this organization at the request of the White house back in 2019 and we've been having loads of fun since then. It's been about four and a half years that we've been engaging and collectively discussing threat intelligence with the Space Community, we have over 100 members. And the reason why we stood up the organization is because we saw, and the White House actually saw, that there were silos of information sharing that existed within space critical infrastructure. So across the global space community, we have Defense, ic, international and commercial space companies. And all of them represent the critical infrastructure, the attack surface that is the space industry. And so when they receive attacks against their critical infrastructure, I would say it's about 90 to 94%, according to some folks, that is commercially owned and operated. So they've really got a big job and we have a big responsibility at the Space ISAC to ensure that that information is actually shared amongst industry partners and our government partners in order to raise our defenses against the adversary.
- [10:41]
Interviewer
For people in the industry who may not be a part of it yet. I mean, what is, can you explain a little bit about like how it works? What does it actually look like to be part of the Space isac?
- [10:50]
Aaron Miller
Yeah, our members have access to our different tools that are part of our Watch center. And the onboarding process gets them access really as soon as they join. And it's a small membership fee. We are primarily funded by the commercial sector and we stood it up that way because ISACs have to be stood up really by the private sector. We have universities, we have FFRDCs. However, we are really run by the commercial sector that owns this critical infrastructure. And so when they onboard as a member, they get access to all of the tools. And now they become part of our Watch Center. We have a headquarters in Colorado Springs that has a operational watch center and a cyber vulnerability lab adjacent to it and a lot of different collaborative groups. I think we're at over 20 collaborative groups. We also run exercises and we do about four per year. And that puts our members in a position where now they are in the moment of a crisis and they have to manage the different stakeholders, they have to do incident response and they have to deal with the impacts on human life that their systems may be connected to, which can be a very stressful situation. We try not to really stress people out. It's more a practical implementation of the tools and the scenarios that we understand to be reflective of real life situations that have already taken place. And we're putting them through those time and again so that they can realize what their lessons learned and experience those stressors before they actually have to go.
- [12:29]
Interviewer
Through the situation and build those pathways internally. Right. To figure out what needs to happen and who needs to be responsible for things. It's such a valuable exercise. It's really just incredible. And I was reading, I think a recent one, at least last year, Hera's Revenge. Was that one of them that you. Can you tell me a bit about that?
- [12:48]
Aaron Miller
Yeah. Harris Revenge was one that we ran a few different times. The most recent one was in August. We had a C suite level version of Harris Revenge where we had the different C suite representatives from the space industry deal with this situation and they had to really learn what their security operations center and their space operations center were doing to monitor and detect the attacks against their critical infrastructure and at the same time deal with the issue of coordinating with all of these different multinational stakeholders, including governments. And in that particular situation, there was an NGO that was an end user and that non governmental organization was headquartered in a completely different country than the company that was operating the systems. And so the laws were different and there were people from the medical industry that were the users and they were transmitting HIPAA data and other sorts of sensitive information across these space systems. So the complexity of the law and the complexity of coordinating all of the different stakeholders was definitely a relevant conversation for the C suite. Especially since in the US we still do not have a designated sector risk management agency that leads for space systems critical infrastructure owners, then who you actually call could be really just at your discretion. You know, if you're a space systems owner, operator owner or operator company, you could call this space ISAC because we have our operational Watch center. But knowing which US government agency to call is still an open question at this point in time.
- [14:32]
Interviewer
And it's fascinating that you also mentioned, like international laws. That's something I've heard a number of times about just the nature of space and governance being what it is, that the legal landscape internationally makes things extraordinarily more complicated when it comes to a potential incident than maybe it does in other situations. Is that correct? Am I reading that correctly?
- [14:52]
Aaron Miller
Oh yeah. The laws associated with space managing space systems incidents are different depending on the nation that you're in. And that can open up some complexity depending on the scenario or the mission that you're performing at the time. Most companies, they do take, I would say these, especially these C suite executives that we were working with, they had already taken the time to learn the laws that were applicable to their mission. And I would say my impression is that they take the responsibility of cybersecurity for their systems, which includes electronic warfare, includes space weather. They take it very seriously because for a commercial company, this is their business. That infrastructure, it's different than when the government owns the Infrastructure where it might be a highly distributed different teams that have the responsibility for the different parts of the space system and they're not managed by one central owner like a company is. A company has their C suite that really owns the responsibility for security. And if their bottom line is going to be impacted by attacks against their infrastructure, they have to rectify that situation immediately and they have to train their teams and be prepared. So we see the members of the Space ISAC really coming together now in different forums in order to address these issues because it's become such a serious matter.
- [16:24]
Interviewer
Absolutely. It's very heartening to hear that as well. That's really great. The need is fantastically great and it's wonderful hearing that we have these leaders out there who are driving this. So it's really encouraging. I wanted to switch gears entirely to a space symposium which already occurred. But I know that Space ISAC had a number of announcements that came out during that event and I was wondering if you could just walk me through some of them.
- [16:48]
Aaron Miller
Absolutely.
- [16:49]
Maria Varmazes
Yeah.
- [16:49]
Aaron Miller
We had a tremendous space symposium this year. Everyone looks forward to that event and we did. And you know, it's the gift that keeps on giving. We had an announcement about the LEO owner operator affinity group kickoff. We invited several different of our industry leaders to speak at that kickoff. We had capella space there as well as viasat assisting us with in a co chair capacity to be able to kick off. Then we had our US Government counterparts that were present from defense and intelligence community having the same discussion about the attacks against LEO owner operators and the importance of finding ways to share that information in an automated way. The way that we protect our other critical infrastructure outside of space, that is the other 16 critical infrastructures. The other announcement that we made was quite critical for the time we announced that we are partnering with the French Space Agency. And the reason why this is important is because it's one of many international partnerships that the Space ISAC has right now. We're also working with and have announced partnerships with the UK Space Agency, also with the Israel Space Agency. Previously, I think two years ago we signed a partnership with the Japanese Aerospace Agency as well as Medi, and we're working with the Greeks and the Germans and these different organizations that are responsible for space within their respective countries are signing up so that they can do bidirectional information sharing with the Space ISAC and create this collective defense model. So with our watch center being operational, it's been operational for about, I would say a year and three months. Then we're able to share the alerts that we generate from the different cells as we track the adversary from ground to space, we can share that information, TLP Amber and TLP Green, which means it can go to our members, industry members, and to industry and partners. So there's a direct benefit of these collaborations coming together and raising our overall security posture.
- [19:05]
Maria Varmazes
That's fantastic.
- [19:06]
Interviewer
These collaborations are so great and again, given the global nature of the space industry that it's so critical to have all that information being being shared. So that's wonderful to hear. Congratulations on all these new partnerships.
- [19:18]
Maria Varmazes
They're fantastic.
- [19:19]
Interviewer
Anything else that you want to share with our audience?
- [19:22]
Maria Varmazes
Maybe a call to action for them to join?
- [19:24]
Interviewer
Just anything that you want people to know about the Space isac, Maybe for people who aren't a part of it yet?
- [19:29]
Aaron Miller
Well, I would say if you're not a part of Space ISAC yet, come to our Valley of Space Summit. It's happening on September 25th in Colorado Springs. Who wouldn't want to join us in lovely Colorado Springs? September will be nice and join the conversation even if you're not a member. It is open to the public. It's a very affordable ticket and we're having these discussions that are important and timely and absolutely essential for us to protect our critical infrastructure and get ahead of the attacks of the adversary. And to be candid, our lives depend on it. So let's do it.
- [20:17]
Maria Varmazes
We'll be right back.
- [20:22]
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- [20:54]
Maria Varmazes
Welcome back. It is quite obviously the holiday season for most of us here on Earth. You'd struggle to travel far without seeing decorations, advertisements, people sharing holiday cheers. But what about those of us off the Earth? There are currently 10 folks living in low earth orbit right now. Three of them are on China's Tiangong Station and seven of them are on board the International Space Station. And despite finding out this week that the Crew 10 mission is being extended, meaning Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore will have their stay in Leo extended again, the crew on the ISS are upbeat. They're already getting into the holiday spirit, wearing Santa hats and planning their Christmas Day in orbit. NASA says the seven astronauts will spend the holidays opening gifts, sharing a meal and talking to family. And of course, they're not the first astronauts to spend the holidays in space. Famously, on December 21, 1968, Apollo 8 launched, carrying astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell and Bill Anders to the moon. Around 1 billion people heard the crew read verses from the Bible's book of Genesis while orbiting the moon. And holidays in space even precede that launch. Jingle Bells became the first song played in space when, on 16 December 1965, it was broadcast during NASA's Gemini 6A spaceflight. Then, of course, there's the original Christmas story, with its guiding celestial body playing a key role. So really, space and the holidays go together like peas and carrots, carrots and peas. On behalf of all of the T Minus team, we wish you all, wherever you are in the universe, very happy holidays. That is it for T minus for December 23, 2024, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire for additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes@spare.n2k.com we'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures that we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please fill out the survey in the Show Notes or send an email to space2k.com we're privileged 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 makes it easy for companies to optimize your biggest investment your people. We make you smarter about your teams while making your team smarter. Learn how@n2k.com this episode was produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ivan. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president, Pierre Kilby is our publisher and I'm your host, Maria Vermazes. Thanks for listening. Happy Holidays and Happy New Year. T minus.