← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
To boldly regulate (space) where none have gone before.
00:26:16
Echostar to sell spectrum licenses to SpaceX for $17B. NASA seeks input on its commercial space station strategy. Planet releases Q2 results. And more.
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Foreign you're listening to the N2K space network.
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Foreign.
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Today is September 8, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazes and this is T -T -20 seconds to Los T Drift. NASA has announced its selected crew for the next Trapea mission. 4 Planet Labs has announced financial results for the period ended July 31, 2025. EISCI has signed a 158 million euro contract with the Finnish Defense Forces for the procurement of SAR satellites. NASA seeks feedback from industry partners on its next phase of its commercial space station strategy one. EchoStar has entered into a definitive agreement with SpaceX to sell the company's AWS4 and H Block spectrum licen for approximately $17 billion. And today we have our monthly space law FAQs with Bailey Reichelt from Aegis Space Law and her new co host Matthew Linton from Linton Space Law. Bailey and Matthew will be discussing the use of AI and legal compliance. Stick around for that chat after today's headlines. Foreign Everybody, thank you for joining me. Let's dive into today's Intel Briefing, shall we? First up, EchoStar has entered into a definitive agreement with SpaceX to sell the company's AWS 4 and H Block spectrum licenses for approximately $17 billion. The sale includes up to $8.5 billion in cash and up to $8.5 billion In SpaceX stock valued as of the entry into the definitive agreement. Additionally, the definitive agreement provides for SpaceX to fund an aggregate of approximately $2 billion of cash interest payments payable on EchoStar debt through November of 2027. SpaceX and EchoStar will also enter into a long term commercial agreement which will enable EchoStar's Boost Mobile subscribers to access SpaceX's next generation Starlink direct to cell service. The FCC opened inquiries into EchoStar in early 2025 questioning its use of 2 GHz mobile satellite services spectrum for terrestrial 5G and its compliance with 5G build out obligations, a review that was spurred by SpaceX's complaints that EchoStar was underutilizing the spectrum. EchoStar says it anticipates this transaction with SpaceX along with the previously announced spectrum sale, will resolve the Federal Communications Commission's inquiries. Closing of the proposed transaction with SpaceX will occur after all required regulatory approvals are received and other closing conditions are satisfied. Also affected by that sale NDA Space has received a termination for convenience notification from EchoStar Corporation for the Constellation contract that was announced on August 1, 2025. The contract termination is the result of a sudden change to EchoStar's business strategy and plan in the wake of spectrum allocation discussions with the FCC in the United States. MDA Space says it will be compensated for all related termination costs and fees as per the EchoStar contract. Next up, NASA has released a draft phase two announcement for partnership proposals asking for feedback from industry on on the next phase of its commercial space station's strategy. Under its new interim leadership, the US Space Agency has reassessed the commercial space Station's acquisition strategy to ensure mission continuity, affordability and national alignment and to reduce the potential for a gap of a crew capable platform in low Earth orbit. In Phase two, NASA intends to support industry's design and demonstration of commercial stations through multiple Funded Space act agreements selected through a full and open competition. The Phase two agreements are expected to include funded milestones leading to critical design review, readiness and an in space crewed demonstration of four crew members for a minimum of 30 days. Agreements are expected to include up to a five year period of performance. NASA is looking for feedback before September 12th. IceEye has signed a contract with the Finnish Defense Forces for the procurement of SAR satellites. This procurement follows the letter of intent signed with the Finnish Ministry of Defense back in June. The Finnish Defense Forces say it will significantly enhance their intelligence and surveillance capabilities from space and the acquisition includes icei's synthetic aperture radar satellites and the technical systems and equipment required to establish a sovereign space based surveillance capability for the Finnish Defense Forces. The total value of this acquisition is approximately 158 million euros. Planet Labs has announced financial results for the period ended July 31, 2025. The Earth Observation Company reported that their second quarter revenue increased 20% year over year to a record $73.4 million. Planet says the increase is due to growing customer and partner relations, including recent contract expansions with the Department of Defense. The Defense Innovation Unit optioned a seven figure contract increase under its existing hybrid space architecture pilot with Planet, and the NRO has expanded its contract with Planet under the Electro Optical Commercial Layer program. You can read the full financial report by following the link in our show notes. And for our last story today, NASA has announced its selected crew for the next CHAPEA mission. Four research volunteers will participate in NASA's year long simulation of a Mars mission inside a habitat at the agency's Johnson Space center in Houston, Texas. Ross Elder, Ellen Ellis, Matthew Montgomery and James Spicer will enter into the 1,700square foot Mars Dune Alpha habitat on Sunday, October 19th to begin their year long mission through a series of Earth based missions called chapea, which stands for Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog. NASA aims to evaluate certain human health and performance factors ahead of future Mars missions. The team will live and work like astronauts for 378 days, concluding their mission on what day of all days? Halloween? October 31, 2026. We've still got more to come with our monthly space law FAQs segment and an update that all Star Trek fans like me and LEGO fans also like me have been waiting for for literally decades. But before we get into all of that, N2K senior producer Alice Cruz joins me now with some updates. Alice, what do you have for us today?
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Nothing quite as exciting as Star Trek and lego. I can't wait to find out more, but we do have links to all the original sources of the stories mentioned throughout the show in the Selected Reading section of the show Notes. Today we've added one additional link for you to read at your leisure. SpaceX has announced an expansion to its Central Texas facility. Now do I get to find out about the new Lego pieces?
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Okay, well Scotty once said Starfleet captains are like children. They want everything right now and they want it their way. But the secret is to give them only what they need, not what they want. So we'll get through Those space law FAQs first. Hey T minus crew, if you would like daily updates from us directly in your LinkedIn feed, be sure to follow the official N2K T page over on LinkedIn. And if you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do, here we are T minus daily on Instagram. That is where we post videos and pictures from events, excursions and of course even some behind the scenes treats. Links are in the show notes for you. Hope you'll join us there.
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Bailey Reichelt from Aegis Space Law and Matthew Linton from Linton Space Law. Join us now for our monthly Space Law FAQs.
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Welcome back this week to Space Law FAQs. I'm one of your hosts, Bailey Reichelt. My background's in space law, I'm a regulatory attorney and here's my co host, Matt Linton.
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Hi Bailey. Thank you, Matt Linton. My firm is Linton Space Law. I focus on outside general counsel work and all of the p is in between for early stage space AI and deep tech companies.
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And we're doing a two part episode on AI. Everyone's talking about AI, so we just wanted to join the conversation. We thought it would be fun to weigh in from a legal perspective, space law FAQs for your use of AI. So for the first part, we're going to talk about using AI without legal jeopardy. So like kind of the risks of using AI for your everyday company and where you can avoid those risks. I thought it'd be cool to start us off with some of the ways people have used it really poorly that are kind of in the news. There's some cases where lawyers have basically cited text or they've written briefs with AI and they never check to see if those citations were actually real and authentic. I think citations are a real easy place to embarrass yourself heavily, especially if you file something formally. So if you're filing with a regulator, I think that's a great case of where you can get in a lot of trouble by not checking AI. And then there was another case, some marketing cases that I found where companies just let AI run unchecked to create marketing videos and they went off the rails. Matt, have you seen anything like that happening?
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I think it's really interesting, Bailey. Thanks. You know, we certainly see it happen. I haven't seen, you know, personally somebody send me some product that turned out to be hallucinated AI generation, but you certainly see some of these interesting cases that have come up in, you know, with judges in particular in the litigation arena. And you know, I think it actually does remind me a bit though of, you know, the early days of, you know, even something as simple as Wikipedia, if you remember, people would, you know, initially cite to stuff like that. And at the end of the day I think this comes down to good judgment and good process. As a lawyer for your clients, knowing that AI is a tool and you must nonetheless use your brain and ask some questions to follow up and dig in and ensure that you got the right information.
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So that being said, maybe we could talk about ways that some of our listeners could use AI and could also like reduce their legal risk or their compliance risk when they use AI. Can you think of like any good use cases off the top of your head?
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One of the things, you know, great for is being able to do, you know, wide research across domains where you might even be looking for more technical paper information really surfacing the thought content that, you know, either you as a client may need or you know, we as lawyers are looking to really understand, you know, the breadth at times. So I certainly have deployed it in the regulatory context for clients to really do a broader scope search on particular issues specific even to the space industry, where you can leverage that, you know, force of multiplier of being able to pull in data from sources that you may not have even realized existed to help build that picture that you're trying to paint for your client in front of, whether it's an agency, a judge, or maybe just another business that you're engaged with.
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Great thoughts there and kind of building on what you just said, one of my favorite ways to apply some AI solutions is definitely the perspective shifting capability to help me think outside the box or understand concepts I don't understand very well. So maybe for you guys, just a piece of advice. If you're trying to communicate a complicated engineering concept to your lawyers, just tell the AI to assume the role of your average non technical attorney and rewrite your thoughts, rewrite your email in a way your attorney can understand. I think that's a fun use case. Sometimes I use use it to rewrite something in non technical ways for different audiences just to help me communicate more efficiently. And I think that's a really great way to gain that efficiency and help shift perspectives, communicate more efficiently. But you don't really carry the risk. You're not necessarily citing anything or putting anything out there in front of people, unless of course it's your email and you forget to unbold the random words that's the obvious giveaway, right?
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Yeah, it's easy to spot at times. How do you handle attorney client privilege issues in the way you sort this, Bailey?
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Oh, yeah, that's a really good topic. So if you're wondering, most of you are probably not attorneys. There's heightened ethics rules for certain professionals, including attorneys for protecting client data. So we actually buy secured enterprise solutions if we're going to put any data inside an AI, because we don't want the AI training on client data and we want to make sure everything's still protected in a cybersecure environment. And then on top of that, we also have a written policy for how we do things within the firm that basically says everyone will check everything. You're not using this to draft anything that's going before the government. Stuff like that. You can use it to help you play devil's advocate. You get to tell the AI, hey, you're going to be the government and you're going to pick apart this thing I'm discussing with you, this topic. And that can help you find the loopholes in an argument so you can fill them preemptively. But everything has to be double checked. You have to protect against those hallucinations and you have to protect that attorney client privilege by keeping data in a secure environment. So very important considerations for everyone who's using AI models.
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Do you think that the lawyers that may be hesitant to deploy AI in their practice for clients, is that the right move right now to stay on the sidelines? Is it realistic?
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What do you think the lawyers who are not going to embrace technology will eventually get left behind? It's going to take a little while, I think it always does for the effects to trickle all the way through the legal profession. But yeah, everyone expects things to be faster and more efficient, I think. What is that? Moore's Law. Technology grows exponentially and we all need to get on board. We need to create efficiencies and align ourselves with client incentives. Clients, especially in the space industry, they're moving fast, they're iterating fast and they have the same expectations of the people that work with them, or at least they should. But we're covering that in episode two. What should you expect from us? So thinking about other legal pitfalls of using AI, can you think of any other situations that you might see a client use AI that might lead to maybe reputational damage or other things should be aware of?
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You bet. You know, I think certainly if a client has used a public model, there's a couple of risks, right? If so if they're using a public, non enterprise model that they are ideating with or perhaps trying to even sort through some initial concerns, they have some initial legal concerns before they reach out to a lawyer. Something that's just critical to keep in mind is that's not going to be protected under attorney client privilege for the client. That being said, copying and bringing that conversation you've had with the AI back to your lawyer in the context of seeking legal advice may provide some, some protection there. But you know, ultimately, yeah, reputationally, you know, if you're the top executive at a, at a, you know, interesting new company somewhere and it becomes clear that you were offloading some of your work to the AI without doing your own proper adjudication of the issues and seeking the right counsel for whether it's lawyers or other professionals and just, I don't know, perhaps engaging in a naked AI experience of just going for it and seeing what happens. Yeah, I think we're actually seeing a lot of people doing that right now and there is obvious risk. And again, this just goes back on the client side of being thoughtful. This is a tool. Would you broadcast to the world in an unsecure way your concerns over, over a deep legal matter that you have for your company? Probably not a good idea. You want to make sure that you have been thinking about how you're actually sharing those very critical, what we would consider attorney client privileged protected communications in an ordinary course.
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Yeah, I think you make a really good point there. And that's a great place to close out. This episode is, hey, if it's proprietary, don't put it on the Internet. Is the AI Internet? Yeah, it's basically the same thing as dumping it on the Internet. So you should avoid that, but you should use the tool. And there are lots of safe ways to use AI to maximize your efficiency without just dumping proprietary information on the Internet. Make sure you tune in for our next episode where we're talking about what you should expect of us and lawyers and professionals using AI to provide services for you. We'll be right back.
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Welcome back. Let me beam into my full nerdery for today's final story. Because it is Star Trek day today, my friends, my Star wars friends, Y' all get May 4th. But the 8th of September is for us Trekkies. Because on September 8th, 1966, Star Trek, the original series first aired and introduced the world to Gene Roddenberry's vision of a hopeful future of a wondrous universe brimming with infinite diversity in infinite combinations. Nearly 60 years later, that vision continues to inspire generations to explore, imagine and of course boldly go where no one has gone before. I am as sure as anything that many of you listening have your own space dreams because at some point in your life, Star Trek had you imagining that future. And that is certainly true for me as well. As a little girl, my Barbie dolls were the crew of my very own Federation Starship. And the opening scenes from the Star the Next Generation theme with the Enterprise swooshing past mysterious planets and galaxies and had me looking intently at the then new pictures from the Hubble Space Telescope. Extrapolate from there, fast forward quite a bit and well, here I am. It is lovely to hear similar tributes from space agencies and organizations too. Like this one posted today by the European Space Agency who wrote Happy Star Trek Day. From warp speed dreams to real missions exploring the final frontier, Star Trek has inspired generations of space explorers and including us. I love that. And the headliner for today's Star Trek celebrations, something that people have been hoping for for decades, Lego has finally announced their very first official Star Trek set. And that rumbling sound you hear is the sound of millions of Trekkies stampeding. To the official Lego website for more info. Oh, the poor lego.com site has no.
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Idea what just hit it.
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In any case, happy Star Trek Day to all who carry the spirit of discovery and inclusivity into their day to day and into the cosmos. Live long and prosper. And that's T minus brought to you by N2K CyberWire. By the way, happy 600th daily episode to the entire T minus team. Yes, 600 T minus space daily shows happens to fall on Star Trek Day. Truly, there is no such thing as a coincidence in space. What do you think about T minus Space Daily? Please take a few minutes to share your thoughts with us by completing our brief listener survey. 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, 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 Kilpe is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thank you for listening. Live Long and Prosperity T.