← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
The US Senate says there’s a bad moon on the rise.
00:25:35
US Senate Committee discusses reauthorization of NASA. India and Singapore strengthen space cooperation. Israel launches a spy satellite. And more.
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You're listening to the N2K space network.
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Today is September 4th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T minus.
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T minus 20 seconds. Losing go for deploy. Roger roll.
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SpaceX's Dragon has completed an initial burn to test the spacecraft's new capability to help maintain the altitude of the International Space Station. Spire Global has been awarded two separate NOAA contracts valued at over $13 million. Israel launched the OFAC 19 spy satellite atop a shovet rocket on Tuesday. India and Singapore deepen their cooperation in areas such as semiconductors, maritime and digital connectivity and the space industry. The US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held a full committee meeting to discuss a longer term reauthorization of N. Today's guest is space cyber security expert Jacob Oakley. We will be discussing his recent experience with the aerospace village at defcon, so stick around to find out more later in the show. Happy Thursday everybody. Thank you for joining me. This is a short week for us here in the US and it is flying by and once again we have a lot to get through, so let's dive into today's intel briefing. First up, the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation held a full committee meeting yesterday to discuss a longer term reauthorization of NASA. The hearing was titled There's a Bad Moon on the Rise why Congress and NASA Must Thwart China in the Space Race, and US Senators wanted to assess how US Policy and investments can foster America's competitive edge in the face of growing challenges from adversarial nations like China, whose rapid space advancements pose a direct threat to US leadership in this domain. Senator Maria Cantwell had this to say about her concerns with adversarial nations. Today.
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We're here in a race with China to return to the moon and stay there. Beating China back to the moon isn't just about bragging rights and it's certainly not just about grabbing headlines. But today it's clear that President Xi, President Putin and Prime Minister Modi are all in China having a big national security and strategic discussion that could easily, easily include space and defense and security and defense implications. No surprise, actually, that Kim Jong Un is also there. Let's just take for a consideration that he would like to figure out how to improve his rocket technology with more accuracy, more distance, more tracking. I don't like the scenario. The strategic value of maintaining our position to live and work on space and in space is critical. It's critical to our future economic and national security. Returning to the moon requires us to push the limits of technology to find the solutions that we can solve and maintain our national defense and innovation economy.
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And the committee also heard from witnesses, including former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. Those witnesses warned that delays, budget uncertainty or wavering commitments could undermine both US Industry and international alliances, stating that uncertainty could drive partners and suppliers towards China's accelerating lunar mission technologies. One of the nations that the committee mentioned, by the way, was India. And they are working on a roadmap on cooperation with Singapore in areas such as semiconductors, maritime and digital connectivity and the space industry. Singapore is India's top foreign investor, accounting for about a quarter of India's foreign direct investment equity inflows since 2000. Singapore's Prime Minister Lawrence Wong is on an official visit to India and said, quote, in this very uncertain world, there is all the more reason for us to double down on this very critical India Singapore relationship. And I certainly look forward to doing so with Prime Minister Modi. And it looks like we will be seeing more of these partnerships develop following the recent tariffs imposed on nations who such as India, by the United States. Moving on now, Israel launched the OFEC 19 spy satellite atop a shovet rocket on Tuesday. The sunrise launch caused a brief panic in the country who is currently facing a conflict on its shores. The spacecraft lifted off from Palmakim Airbase on Israel's Mediterranean coast, about 9 miles south of Tel Aviv. After launch, the satellite successfully entered orbit and began transmitting data. According to an update from the Israeli Ministry of Defense. Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz wrote on X the launch of the OFEC 19 satellite yesterday is an achievement of the highest global level. Few countries possess these capabilities. This is also a message to all our enemies, wherever they may be. We are keeping an eye on you at all times and in every situation. End quote. SPIRE Global has been awarded an $11.19 million contract from the national oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to provide Global Navigation Satellite System radio occultation data for a one year period starting from September 18, 2025. The award is part of an indefinite delivery, indefinite quantity contract for NOAA's Commercial Weather Data Program Radio Occultation Databy 2 say that five times fast. NOAA, together with NASA, the US Air Force and the Navy, will integrate Spire's GNSSRO data into their weather and space weather models, while additional US and international agencies will leverage the data to strengthen forecasts and advance climate research. Additionally, SPIRE was awarded a separate two and a half million nine month contract by NOAA for satellite weather data. The contract is part of NOAA's Commercial Weather Data Pilot Ocean Service Winds Pilot Study 2 pilots in that sentence. Yes. To evaluate how commercial satellite observations can improve measurements of ocean surface winds. It is believed that these measurements are critical in forecasting hurricanes, winter storms and other severe weather. Last up SpaceX's Dragon spacecraft has completed an initial burn to test the spacecraft's new capability to help maintain the altitude of the International Space Station. Two Draco engines located in the trunk of Dragon, which contains an independent propellant system, were used to adjust the space station's orbit through a maneuver lasting 5 minutes and 3 seconds. The initial test burn increased the station's altitude by around 1 mile at perigee or low point of station's orbit, leaving the station in an orbit of 260.9 x 256.3 miles. The new boost kit in Dragon will help sustain the orbiting lab's altitude through a series of longer burns planned periodically throughout the fall of 2025. And that wraps up today's intel briefing for you, but there are a lot of other stories making the headlines today. N2K senior producer Alice Carruth is in the wings right now, just dying to jump in. All right, Alice, what you got?
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A lot, Maria. We've added five additional links to today's selected reading section. The ITU has released a report on how much investment is needed to get the world connected via the Internet. Spoiler alert. It's going to run into the trillions of dollars. JetBlue has announced that it's going to work with Amazon Kuiper for Wi fi connections on their flights. Tribe Capital has unveiled a new Canopy Aerospace and Defense Organization, NASA and the Space Force held an exercise at KSC and the FAA has updated the environmental assessment for SpaceX's Falcon 9 operations at the SLC 40 site.
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Phew. That is a lot. So where can we find out more about all those stories?
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Links are in the Selected Reading section of the Show Notes and also on our website space.n2k.com just click on today's.
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Episode title it -crew. If your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership or recruit talent, we here at T Minus can help. We would love to hear from you. Just send us an email@space2k.com or send us a note through our website and and then we'll connect about building a program to meet your goals.
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I recently caught up with space cybersecurity expert Jacob Oakley following his time at the Aerospace Village at defcon.
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So my name's Jacob Oakley. I'm a technical director at a company called Sixgen, where I'm responsible for our space cyber practice. I'm also the space lead at Aerospace Village of DEFCON fame, adjoin faculty at Embry Riddle, and on the steering committee for the IEEE Space Systems Cybersecurity Standard Working Group.
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Excellent. Jacob. Again, thank you so much for coming back on the show. Good to see you. And as you mentioned, the Aerospace Village of DEFCON fame and indeed the Hacker Summer Camp that is in early August every year. You were just there and I'm just very curious to hear how it went. And so there are many, many conferences that happen during that week in Vegas. But let's start with Black Hat, which is often sort of how things often kick off. And then we'll go into defcon. So what was your experience at Black Hat this year?
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Def Black Hat was really good. Myself and my friend Michael Butler, who's the CEO of Final Frontier Security, we Taught our two day satellite hacking course, two durations of that. So we've now taught that at three different Black Hats, including internationally. Sounds really cool. It was also really cool to kind of feature the Aerospace Village. We had Henry Danielson, who's part of our space team, came and gave like a guest lecture. We had some folks from Aerospace Corporation who were there to share their research. So even though it was a course taught by us at Black Hat on satellite hacking, it's good to see the space cyber community kind of growing and continuing to be involved there.
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Yeah, yeah.
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At Black Hat, I did get to go see some folks from Vision Space, Andy and Malenko who do vulnerability research and they actually published brand new CVEs against space system flight software and ground station software at the conference. So that was really cool to see. And they're part of the collaborators with the Village for DEFCON as well.
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Yeah, they've been doing great work. I read their report with great interest and I'll be speaking to them soon. Also, I'm curious, given that you've done this course for three, three different Black Hats and for audience who may not know, I'm going to sort of basically describe Black Hat as more technician focused. There's a lot of, you know, thought leadership stuff, but it is a lot, you know, for, for people who need to implement these skills. There's a lot of very technical tracks at Black Hat. So have you noticed any, any kind of overall trend in terms of who's attending the class? Like what their interests are, what. What are they all from the space sector? Any, Anything you can glean from that?
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Yes, that's actually kind of funny. You know, I'd say last year's Black Hat we had pretty good government and military representation, which is kind of what I expected. Right. It's a, it's a niche topic and that's probably where a lot of the people are practitioners. When we did it in Europe, it was actually really funny that half of our class were just like, well, this sounded like the coolest thing I could sign up for and I'm allowed to take one class every year. I was like, okay, great, you know, credits for it.
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And then. Yeah, yeah.
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That the materials and the interest in the topic kind of spans the gamut of, you know, really technical people, hackers, people who are involved in the space community and those that aren't. I think everybody kind of realizes it's a growing trend. And you know, I think maybe we talked about last time I was on here is Find me the. Find me the computer or cyber nerd who doesn't like some sort of space science fiction franchise. So I think they're all pretty interested to learn about it. And then obviously, you know, this year, less government and military travel. I think the conferences as a whole kind of seem to feel that, like, the Black Hat definitely seemed. And Black Hat has more of that crowd. They seemed a little bit smaller this year.
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Yeah, they don't usually like to go as much to DEFCON for cultural reasons. So to put it. Put it politely, I won't get into that part. But, yeah, that is interesting. And it's just. Clearly there's a demand. And again, the fantastic research that was presented at this year's Black Hat, it's just very interesting to see these things growing. So very interesting insights there. So, yeah, since we're talking about defcon, this is where a lot of the action was, and I'd love to hear how that was for you as well, especially regarding the Aerospace Village.
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Yeah, so, I mean, the Aerospace Village went really, really well. We had a really good experience, I would say, last year, moving into that new, bigger space at the Las Vegas Convention center. And it allowed us to have a lot more real estate. So we, you know, the village got to have, like, drone workshops, drone cage space for that. We got to have space for some of the displays from the other aerospace partners that were there doing stuff. So that went really well. Our badge sold out again, which was awesome. And this year we were able to have it kind of ready to go from day one of sales, as opposed to last year, where we were struggling to get some stuff on site to sell.
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So I feel like I should explain the badge thing for people who don't know about DEF con. Yeah, this is a really interesting thing about DEF con, where different villages or different parts of DEF CON have their own badge in addition to the conference's own badge. And they're extremely unique and very cool and often extremely interactive, and sometimes they interact with each other. And what did this year's badge do? Because I think I saw some of that on LinkedIn and it had some very cool capabilities.
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Yeah, so the original badge that kind of debuted late last defcon is able to do some really cool stuff, like you can pick up the air airline tracks, you can do some GPS stuff, things like that, what looks like a radar scope, which is really cool, amongst a bunch of other things, like being able to play Game Boy games, of course. But this year, then Add on, was actually able to pick up, like, air traffic control frequencies, so you could Kind of like actually listen to and watch flights coming out, which was super cool.
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That is so cool.
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Yeah, that went really well. I would, you know, I'm biased, but I do think our badge is probably one of the more sophisticated and better ones available at defcon. So humble bragging rights.
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That is awesome. Yeah, I was gonna say you deserve the bragging rights. That is. That's pretty great. I still have a lot of my really old DEF CON badges that are pretty kickass like that. So these are things that you keep over the years because they're great. Yeah. So one of the activities that made its return this year under a slightly different name was the Capture the Flag activity at the Aerospace Village. Could you give our audience, for folks who may not be familiar with what we mean by a Capture the Flag or ctf, what does that mean in like a cybersecurity context?
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Yeah, so, you know, it's. It's a challenge, a competition. Typically at defcon, a lot of them are obviously more hacker oriented. That's not to say there aren't, you know, like blue team competitions, things like that, where you're doing sort of defensive challenge solving to get points over the course of a couple of days to see who wins. We really felt like there was a huge gap left behind when hackersat, you know, ran out of funding and stopped that whole program. So last year there was not a space hacking CTF at the, at the Village or at defcon. And so we really endeavored to kind of gather some volunteers and put something together for this year. So us, some of our partners, Ethos Labs, Cal Poly, 6Gen Vision Space, we're able to. We got a bunch of challenges together involved doing things from like looking at captured traffic, talking from a satellite to a ground station, to hacking software that would be on a satellite, software that would be on the ground station, things like that to solve challenges. I think we had 900 teams sign up, which was pretty amazing.
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Wow.
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Several hundred of them were actively participating across the duration. I think we had over 100 that actually solved at least one challenge, which is pretty good. We were very happily surprised that it went that long to be able to bring space hacking back to the Aerospace Village and defcon. So hopefully next year we're able to improve on that for sure.
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That's awesome. Yeah. And it's not just. I mean, the bragging rights are legit. I mean, there are a lot of bragging rights from doing something like this. But people engage in these to learn, and it's not necessarily for nefarious Purposes, although, you know, you never know. But what were the takeaways that you wanted participants to get from this? Because again, aside from like the cool factor, there is something that you wanted people to learn.
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Yeah, I mean, we, we really, you know, me personally, and I think the other people who were part of the challenge would agree is that, you know, there's a pretty big underappreciation, it feels like, for just how complicated it's going to be to, to secure things in this, in the space domain, you know, for all the different reasons. So we did our best to try to convey, you know, the technical difficulties that were going to come with doing that and the environmentals and things like that. So next year we hope we can do more of it. We also hope to maybe make it a little more inclusive of the newer people to cybersecurity and CTFS in general. I think that our initial stance this year was like, well, let's make something, we don't want it to fall over, right? We didn't want people to like win in four hours. And so we had some pretty challenging flags to get on there. And we definitely want to keep that because we want the serious competitors to be involved. You know, obviously we hope it's a Black Badge event at DEF CON eventually, which is, you know, a pretty big honor for something like a hacking competition. But yeah, we hope that also next year maybe we have some challenges that can help. Maybe the people who are a little newer to CTFS in general and space kind of have some flags that they can solve.
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We'll be right back.
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Welcome back. Okay, everybody, here's a pitch for you. Restoring sight to the blind by building retinas in space. Real or sci fi dream? Okay, maybe that was a little too easy for you dear listeners, because yeah, it is 100% real. And I know that you knew that. Now, making human retinas in low earth orbit is, pardon the pun, the vision behind Lambda Vision, which is a Connecticut biotech that just secured a phase two NASA INSPA award. And the company is making protein based artificial retinas designed to help patients with degenerative eye diseases to regain their vision and to do that, LambdaVision has found that microgravity offers the perfect environment to make these artificial retinas. So using the incredible LEO science lab that is the International Space Station, to make these retinas you have to assemble carefully layer upon layer of proteins that mimic the light absorbing cells in our eyes. And. And go figure that without gravity tugging at every step, the process produces smoother, more stable films than anything that's achievable on Earth. And now with their new award from NASA, LambdaVision is moving closer to the first clinical trials for a space made medical therapy that could change millions of lives back home. Definitely a medical innovation to keep an eye on. And that is T minus Brought to you by N2K CyberWire what do you think about T Minus Space Daily? Please take a few moments to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. 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 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'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 Ibin. Peter Kilpe is our publisher and I'm your host, Maria Varmazes. Thank you for listening. See you tomorrow.
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T minus.