← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
Time to place your order for a spaceplane.
00:29:01
Dawn Aerospace’s Aurora spaceplane available for purchase. Firefly to carry UAE’s Rover on its next lunar mission. 20 companies selected by CASSINI. And more.
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- [00:02]
Maria Varmazes
You're listening to the N2K space network.
- [00:11]
Dave
Hey everybody, Dave here. I've talked about Deleteme before and I'm still using it because it still works. It's been a few months now and I'm just as impressed today as I was when I signed up. Deleteme keeps finding and removing my personal information from data broker sites and they keep me updated with detailed reports so I know exactly what's been taken down. I'm genuinely relieved. Knowing my privacy isn't something I have to worry about every day. The Deleteme team handles everything. It's the set it and forget it peace of mind. And it's not just for individuals. Deleteme also offers solutions for businesses, helping companies protect their employees personal information and reduce exposure to social engineering and phishing threats. And right now, our listeners get a special 20% off your delete me plan. Just go to JoinDeleteMe.com N2K and use promo code N2K at checkout. That's JoinDeleteMe.com N2k code N2K.
- [01:27]
Maria Varmazes
Today is May 22nd, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazes and this is T minus.
- [01:35]
Steve Luszynski
T minus 20 seconds to losing.
- [01:46]
Maria Varmazes
The U.S. space Force is expecting to lose 14% of its civilian workforce. Four red wire has been awarded a contract by Space Tech to provide avion technology for ESA's next generation gravity mission satellites. Europe's Cassini Business Accelerator program has selected 20 new businesses for the latest cohort. The UAE's Rasheed 2 rover will join Firefly Aerospace's second lunar mission in 2026. Dawn Aerospace's Aurora spacecraft has been offered for direct sale to customers, with deliveries expected in 20. Our guest today is Steve Luszynski, president of the Aerospace Village. Steve recently participated in HackSpaceCon and shares with us his experiences at event. It was at Kennedy Space center, by the way. Very cool. And the growing awareness of vulnerabilities in space tech. Join me for that chat later in the show. Imagine, if you will, if you could, buying a space plane just like you might buy an airplane if you have the funds for that anyway. Well, that is the business model that Dawn Aerospace is offering. The Aurora spacecraft, designed to fly beyond the Karman line, has been offered for direct sale to customers. It is expected to be the fastest and highest flying aircraft ever to take off from a conventional Runway. Here's what Dawn's CEO Stefan Powell presented to the Global Spaceport alliance earlier today.
- [03:50]
Stefan Powell
So clearly the airline model presents us with a far more scalable model for transportation and one that we would really like to draw on. And so that's really where we draw a lot of our inspiration for.
- [04:08]
Steve Luszynski
How.
- [04:08]
Stefan Powell
We want to bring space flight to the world and how we built Aurora. Ultimately this is an aircraft with the performance of a rocket, not a rocket with wings. That is to say, reliability, reusability and ultimately scalability are not after thoughts. The things that are baked in from day one to enable this airline model. When you really boil down to what does that mean in terms of technical decisions, it means we have highly redundant systems, safe failure modes, just like you have on an aircraft. This vehicle is pilotable. It has lots of autonomous features on board and the vehicle can essentially fly itself. But especially for certification reasons, it's much, much simpler and more scalable to, to be pilotable. You can fly very frequently. You know, we've, we've demonstrated six hour turnaround times, four is abs. Four hour turnaround times is absolutely achievable. And, and we use common infrastructure. You know, we fly out of existing airports. We don't have to build a new dedicated launch pad with dedicated facilities every time we want to launch from a new spot.
- [05:20]
Maria Varmazes
So when can we expect Aurora space planes at an airport or spaceport near you? The company says that deliveries are expected as early as 2027. No details yet on how much it'll set you back though. How much do you think it would cost to purchase a suborbital space plane? You know, just asking for a friend. Firefly Aerospace has signed a new agreement with the United Arab Emirates Mohammed Bin Rashid Space center to deliver the Emirates lunar missions. Rasheed 2 rover to the far side of the moon on Firefly's Blue Ghost Lander. The rover is aiming to demonstrate lunar surface mobility on the far side of the moon and will use various materials on its wheels to evaluate their durability when exposed to lunar dust. The data collected will help guide the development of future lunar technologies through such as spacesuits, habitats and other critical infrastructure. The vehicle will also study the moon's plasma geology and thermal conditions in support of future in situ resource utilization. The Rasheed 2 rover will join Firefly's second lunar mission in 2026. In addition to payloads from Australia, the European Space Agency and NASA as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Initiative. The Cassini Business Accelerator Program, which is an initiative of the European Commission and the European Union Agency for Space program, has selected 20 new businesses for the latest round. This is the fifth cohort of the program and the companies will follow a six month program which will run from June to November of this year. The Cassini Business Accelerator aims to empower startups to scale their business development and sales through a dynamic mix of strategic initiatives and those include direct access to investor matchmaking and exclusive industry events, as well as expert LED training and mentoring that provide valuable guidance and support along their innovation path. Among the selected cohort is Atmos Space Cargo who just completed their first RE entry demonstration. Not bad. The final list can be found by following the link in our show notes. Redwire has been awarded a contract by Spacetech to provide avionics technology for the European Space Agency's next generation gravity mission satellites, known as the NGGM satellites. The spacecraft are ESA's contribution to a planned NASA and ESA Earth Observation Satellite constellation. The constellation will be known as magic. That's a pretty nice acronym which stands for Mass Change and Geophysics International constellation. MaGIC will combine four satellites, two NGGM satellites developed through ESA and two GRACE satellites developed through NASA and the German Aerospace center, all to measure fluctuations in Earth's gravitational field. The planned constellation will provide data for water management applications, including monitoring droughts, floods, ice melts and sea level rise. Redwire's wholly owned subsidiary, Redwire Space NV will design and build the engineering qualification model of the spacecraft's instrument and in unfortunate news, the United States Chief of Space Operations, General Chance Saltzman said on Tuesday to the Senate Armed Service Committee hearing that the military branch is expecting to lose 14% of its civilian workforce. The reduction surpasses the United States administration's 10% target, and the loss, which amounts to about 780 people, is due to the Trump administration's effort to dramatically cut the federal workforce. Saltzman says the early retirement and voluntary resignation programs have had a, quote, outsized impact on the US military branch. Civilians currently account for around 5,600, or more than 1/3 of the service's 17,000 people. Saltzman says the loss of civilians is, quote, a large hit to the United States Space Force. And you can read more about Saltzman's comments and more on all the other stories mentioned throughout the show by following the links in our show notes. NTK senior producer Alice Cruz has more on the additional stories that we've added in there for you today.
- [09:42]
Alice Cruz
Alice Maria, We've added two additional links in that selected reading section of our show Notes for you to enjoy. One is the announcement on the crew selection for Blue Origin's next New Shepard tourism flight, and the other is on the mysterious Project BLEEP in Florida. We're still none the wiser about the company developing on Merritt Island.
- [10:00]
Maria Varmazes
I mean, you know there's a few names that come to mind.
- [10:04]
Alice Cruz
Yes, but which one? It's like the plot of an Agatha Christie novel. Minus the murders, of course. Those links can also be found on our website, space.n2k.com scroll down on the homepage until you find today's episode link.
- [10:17]
Maria Varmazes
Hey T minus crew. If your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership or recruit talent, T minus can help. We'd love to hear from you. Send us an email@space2k.com or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals.
- [10:59]
Dave
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- [11:51]
Maria Varmazes
Today's guest is Steve Lusinski, President of the Aerospace Village. It's been a while since we caught up and I wanted to hear about the latest with the aerospace cybersecurity specialists.
- [12:05]
Steve Luszynski
The Village has been incredibly busy. We as a village have attended more conferences already this year than I think we have in any other year. We shifted our focus towards not just the larger conferences, defcon, of course, one of our highlights, because that's a primary place to meet our audience, but smaller B sides events where people want to hear more about what's going on in aviation and space, information security and then another byproduct as we're growing and people knowing who we are and what we're doing is we get invited to things like Hack spaceconnect and the first day was very specific, a small group of speakers and I was very excited. My talk was selected my co presenter Henry Danielson, who's a he kind of does everything, but he's a professor at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo. And we did a presentation talking about what the Aerospace Village is, how we got started, how it connects to space. And that was one of the talks on day one on Tuesday and then the other two days, Wednesday and Thursday, were like a B sides where you had a collection of villages out there and you had other speakers and vendors showing things off and getting to go through and all of that in a pretty interesting venue, of course.
- [13:30]
Maria Varmazes
Yeah, I was going to say the venue. We should probably mention where this was because it bears mentioning.
- [13:36]
Steve Luszynski
Oh yeah, absolutely. So HackSpaceCon conveniently enough, was at Kennedy Space center. And this was the third year that they've had it. And I know we've had different speakers that are connected with the Village, but this was our first year being there in person and both in our speaking capacities. The folks that we had, like I mentioned, Henry and I, our lead for all things space, Jacob Oakley, he spoke a couple of times there. But the specific venue that was at the Space center on day one was a building, a conference center the Astronaut Memorial foundation hosts. And they've actually, the conference has outgrown that center. So they, they, they had a jam packed on day one for the initial talks that were there. And the thing about that was you walk a short walk on the sidewalk and you are in the Rocket park. You are right there where they have the Atlantis on display. You know, simulators, all the things you can do as a tourist. That was part of your badge and your entry for coming to day one of the conference. The second day was just down the road at a conference center. So it was still nearby. And that was like a B sides. Like I said, it was really nice in the sense that there was more room, but it was still small. You could talk to people, you could talk to the speakers that were up on stage and just the cross section of people that they had there was great.
- [15:02]
Maria Varmazes
What do we mean by a B sides conference?
- [15:05]
Steve Luszynski
Depending on your background. Right. So if you've been to DEF con, massive event, if you've been to rsa, even more massive event, you've got so much territory to cover. There's only so many places you can go. But they're great because they're huge and there's tons of content. BSides, which is in the hacker community. Smaller events, smaller venues. We, the Village, we focused on BSIDES events this year as one option. There's BSIDES charm up in Baltimore that we've been to previous years. We've been to BSides New York City, CactusCon, BSides Northern Virginia. Just a number of things that when they invite the villages in like ourselves, we can come in and have either speakers or we can bring content. And that's what we did at this event. So it's, it's smaller. I'll say 800 because I think that was the limit for the conference. Center at Kennedy Space Center. And so this was probably around the same 800, but more room at the conference center they had. And you've got all variety. We're down there at Cape Canaveral. Right. So you've got Tampa and Orlando nearby. You've got colleges nearby. We met students from Central Florida, University of Central Florida, South Florida, University of Florida. Embry riddles right there. Just all variety coming in and talking to us. Like I said, in addition to our speaking, the activities and the demonstrations that we brought to show off.
- [16:38]
Maria Varmazes
Yeah, and the wonderful thing about BSides conferences, like, they're very regional, but they're very practitioner focused. So that's the place you go to learn if you want to be the person doing the hard work. That's where you learn from your peers and you get those really good, meaty, meaty technical presentations.
- [16:57]
Steve Luszynski
Conversations. Exactly Deep. So Henry, Henry has a significant background from his teaching, space systems, cybersecurity, all of those things. And he had a cubesat that our friend Tim Fowler, who started Ethos Lab, that's his business, let us use and demonstrate. And if you look at the Talk on the HackSpaceCon site, you'll know Henry because he is wearing a CubeSat on his head and trying to keep up with him and his speaking energy and his energy in general. It's quite a bit of work on my part. It was awesome. But he is demonstrating with this cubesat some of the concepts of the security side of things when you're dealing with a vehicle that's going to orbit in space. Then he's also showing, because we are partnered with Cal Poly, which is where he's a professor, and they have a space grand challenge and they open that up throughout the year for students. It's targeted towards high school and college students. That's gamification using a Unity platform to give challenges in an interesting manner, to get engagement from there. And he brought that to the event and he's telling folks, this is what it is. He's showing that.
- [18:17]
Maria Varmazes
I'm curious of the people that you met who are already in their careers. Um, were these folks that were already like infosec practitioners who want to go into space, or were they already like, what. What was the intersection there of the two?
- [18:30]
Steve Luszynski
I'd say a little bit of both. We had folks who were like, no, I'm on the. I'm a sysadmin at this large company. Brand names you would have heard of. I'm on the IT help desk over here. I'm on the security team over there. But I want to learn about more on the space side, which it helps being in that part of Florida, all the things that are going on. And a cybersecurity person who wants to get into space. That's kind of easy in the sense that it's hard to get people into cybersecurity space and rockets and aviation and all the stuff we do in the village that's easy to tempt people. Like, here's this cool stuff over here. You want to come hang out with us? It's a little bit harder to get an engineer who does aviation or space into cyber. That is not typically the way. So we saw folks who were established in information security that wanted to get into it. We saw other folks who were like, I just want to get into this. Where do I start? Both on the space side and on the security side. And again, that was another tremendous opportunity because we were able to tell them, here's how he got here and here's how she got here. And if you want to learn more, here's all the resources on our website, aerospacevillage.org if anybody's interested. But that's where we, you know, we put our YouTube videos up. So one of the good benefits of COVID is we recorded everything early on. Since then, we've got all our talks from DEF con and we put that out. And anytime that we, you know, we get a chance to record at a conference, we post it there. And that has become a resource that people use.
- [20:06]
Maria Varmazes
That's exciting to be at the. At the cusp of that. And you did mention DEF con, and I would be remiss if I didn't ask because I'm sure you all are in the thick of it right now with DEFCON planning. Yeah. Do you want to give me a little preview of what's going to. What we can expect for this year's defcon?
- [20:21]
Steve Luszynski
Well, we are absolutely in the thick of it, like you said. We have, you know, our core team, and as we're growing, our volunteers starting to get on that, going from once a month to every other week to pretty soon every week having a meeting just because there's so many things that we're getting together. We're nailing down the different partners that we have. It is the folks who donate their time, their resources. They may be bringing in something their company uses, but it's all to teach. It's to get our audience either interested if they've never heard of these things, or to, hey, I've heard of that. How do I do that well, okay, let me teach you what's going on here. What's behind the scenes of this framework that's used for satellite security. This game Space Grand Challenge by Cal Poly. Here's how that works and here's what you can do with it. Whether you're a student that just wants to do it and enjoy it or you're a teacher that goes, how do I get my kids involved in that? All the way through. On the aviation side, when we say we're the aerospace village, it's all those different elements across aviation, which includes drones and the space side of things. So we're continuing to grow that are we're going to have capture the flags that we've had in the past. We have students from Embry Riddle that are coming in. They design, they build and they run a capture the flag and they do that throughout DEF con so folks can come in and do that. And it's focused on aviation. And I'm very happy to say for the first time that we have developed a space themed Capture the flag.
- [21:58]
Maria Varmazes
Oh, cool.
- [21:58]
Steve Luszynski
And that is being run by Jacob Oakley, who I mentioned before, who leads all things space for the Village. But he has worked with a team and they are bringing that in to the village this year. And so we're work that into things. It's again, it's another activity, it's another interest item. It's an education piece and it's focused on the space side of things, which is something that we've wanted to continue building. So similar things from previous years, plenty of brand new things. We've got even more floor space. So these are awesome problems to have of getting all the gear, getting all the people, making sure there's room where the audience can come in, sit down, try an engagement, talk to someone, do one of the, you know, do all the activities and demonstrations. But yeah, lots of good stuff going on this year.
- [22:59]
Maria Varmazes
We'll be right back.
- [23:03]
Steve Luszynski
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- [23:36]
Maria Varmazes
Welcome back. If you were in the United States, West, Midwest or Southwest last Saturday and were looking up at the sky at around 11:24 mountain time, you might have seen quite an interesting phenomenon in the sky. A huge bright white luminous streak cutting across the night sky. So, yeah, what kind of space weather would cause such a sight, you ask? Could it be the elusive Steve? Yes Steve, honestly, that is its name. A very rare sight when aurora also emit white ribbons in the sky. Nope, twas not Steve. The spectacle was entirely caused by by humans. Folks from Washington State through the Rockies down to Space Valley, New Mexico were not seeing a geomagnetic storm or whatnot. But it was actually a methalox fuel dump from a Juqui2e rocket which had just deployed six satellites into LEO after launching from Jiuquan in China. And the cool thing about this, if one could say a fuel dump is ever cool, really, is that it did actually occur during a real geomagnetic storm. So there are some pretty spectacular shots of aurora skies in all their purpley pinky greeny glory with a singular massive white non Steve ribbon cutting through it all. Seriously Steve, Google it. This was something of a swan song for the ju2a2e actually, as this fuel dump happened right before the rocket deorbited and burned up on re entry. Quite a dramatic way, I gotta say, to announce one's departure. That is for sure. That's it for T minus for May 22, 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. We will see you tomorrow. T minus.
- [26:20]
Dave
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