← T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing
US Caucus to push leadership in space.
00:27:56
A new Congressional Caucus formed to push US leadership in space. DeepSat selects Redwire for VLEO project. Lockheed Martin reports Q2 financials. And more.
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- [00:02]
Alice Carruth
You're listening to the N2K space network.
- [00:11]
Dave
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- [00:49]
Maria Valmarzes
Today is July 22, 2025. I'm Alice Carruth and this is T minus.
- [00:56]
Brandon Karp
T minus 20 seconds.
- [01:07]
Maria Valmarzes
Genesis Spaceflight Laboratories has secured a €300,000 pre seed investment to kickstart the development of a European re entry spacecraft. Eutelsat has signed an agreement with NSSL Global to deliver one Web Low Earth orbit connectivity services. Lockheed Martin has shared financial reports for the second quarter reporting $18.2 billion in sales. DeepSat has selected Redwire Corporation to provide advanced model simulation and design services for a planned very low Earth orbit satellite constellation. A new bipartisan Congressional caucus dedicated to U.S. leadership in space exploration has officially been established and Brandon Karp's joining Maria Valve Mars for the monthly Cyber and Space segment. He's going to be discussing the vulnerabilities that metadata created by AI can pose to space companies, so stick around for more on that later in the foreign A new bipartisan Congressional caucus dedicated to U.S. leadership in space exploration has officially been established. The Advancing Humanity in Space Congressional Caucus was formed through the leadership and vision of its four bipartisan co chairs, Republicans Don Bacon and Gabe Evans, and Democrats Glenn Ivey and George Whitesides. The latter name is no stranger to the space industry, of course. Representative George Whitesides added to the press release, quote, as the former NASA Chief of Staff and CEO of Virgin Galactic, I saw firsthand how space and humanity interact through job creation, economic impact, technological innovation and of course, our understanding of the universe. I remain committed to supporting the crucial connection between human spaceflight and science as we plan NASA's future. I look forward to helping lead this bipartisan caucus and forging a productive and targeted approach to ensuring our country remains on the forefront of space exploration. The Advancing Humanity in Space Congressional Caucus will serve as a bipartisan forum demonstrating how space can unite people across ideological divides around a shared vision for the future. It's certainly needed right now with the continuing questions around NASA's future, Earth observation startup Deepsat has selected Redwire Corporation to provide advanced modeling, simulation and design services for a planned dual use very low Earth orbit satellite constellation. The contract represents Deepsat's first steps towards deploying a VLIO Constellation designed to provide intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. Redwire will leverage its modeling and simulation software to support the architectural, design and performance optimization of the Deepsat Constellation. We've reached that time when quarterly financial updates are starting to pour in. On Thursday we'll be speaking to Chad Anderson from Space Capital about the investment market overall today. Lockheed Martin has shared financial reports for the second quarter reporting $18.2 billion in sales. The defense and space giant reported that their space sales during the quarter increased $112 million, or 4% compared to the same period in 2024. This increase was primarily attributed to higher sales of $115 million for commercial civil space programs, primarily due to the higher volume on the orion program, and $80 million for strategic and missile defence programs due to higher volume on next generation interceptor and fleet ballistic missile programs. Total equity earnings represented approximately $10 million, or 3% of space's operating profit for both this quarter and the same period in 2024. Eutelsat has signed an agreement with NSSL Global, a leading provider in satellite communication systems to the maritime enterprise, defence and government sectors and the UK's Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office to Low Earth Orbit Connectivity Services. This partnership will support a broad range of critical UK government activities worldwide including diplomatic missions, policing, resilience, defence and other essential operations. Eutel sat1web's Leo constellation will provide high speed, low latency connectivity for British embassies, high commissions and consulates as well as broader UK government activities globally. Croatian company Genesis Spaceflight Laboratories has secured a €300,000 pre seed investment to kickstart the development of GEN, a European re entry spacecraft designed for frequent retrievable microgravity research missions. The funding will support the in house development of Gen's RE entry capsule and service module at the company's facility where work has already begun on the vehicle structure, subsystem design and a proprietary hybrid retropropulsion system powered by wax and nitrous oxide. Genesis aims to lower the barriers to space based life sciences and materials research by offering a cost effective return capable alternative to traditional orbital platforms. That concludes Today's Intelligence Briefing. N2K producer Liz Stokes joins us now with other stories that we're watching today. Liz, what do you have for us today?
- [06:32]
Liz Stokes
We have four additional links in the show notes today. One is on the Office of Space Commerce's updated schedule and roadmap of the Traffic Coordination System for Space, better known as Tracks. Blue Origin has released the names of participants for their next New Shepard flight. Reuters has released a story that Trump's Golden Dome is looking for alternatives to SpaceX and NOAA's Space Weather Observatory has arrived in Florida.
- [07:00]
Maria Valmarzes
That is a lot. Where can we find those links?
- [07:03]
Liz Stokes
All the links can be found in the selected Reading section of our show Notes and on our website, space.n2k.com Hey T Miners Crew.
- [07:12]
Maria Valmarzes
If you're just joining us, be sure to follow T minus Space daily in your favorite podcast app. And also do us a favor. Share the intel with your friends and co workers. Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday, please show three friends or co workers this podc. A growing audience is the most important thing for us and we'd love your help to be part of the T Minus crew. If you find T minus useful, please share so that other professionals like you can find the show. Thanks. It really does mean a lot to me.
- [07:53]
Dave
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- [09:08]
Maria Valmarzes
Brandon Karps joining Maria Varmazes for the monthly Cyber and Space segment.
- [09:16]
Alice Carruth
Last month when you were on the show, we were talking about agentic AI and you introduce this really fascinating premise about the metadata that AI models can generate. I'm trying to summarize this, perhaps poorly. The metadata that gets generated is a lot more revealing than people perhaps, perhaps realize. And then I think this month is the now what do space companies need to do about that side of the equation? So what do they need to do about it?
- [09:43]
Brandon Karp
Yeah, well, both what do they need to do? And the opportunity for some space companies to offer solutions and think about kind of where the market will probably go and the direction that the market's going to head in, that's going to create opportunities for space companies. And specifically I think the opportunities in telecommunications. And we're seeing a lot of movement in direct to sell or space based Internet and services and the mega constellations that are coming online, a lot of movement in that front. And I think that architecture does offer some nascent but critical security elements that actually mitigate the risk of metadata released into the Internet environment, and specifically metadata from agentic systems.
- [10:38]
Alice Carruth
Okay, so can you expand on that a little bit? Keep going.
- [10:44]
Brandon Karp
Well, so one of the problems with all that metadata that we talked about last time is it creates opportunity for pattern analysis and for network analysis. And by doing network analysis and looking at what endpoints are communicating to what other endpoints, whether through APIs or other agentic connectors, it can reveal a lot about your network architecture, can reveal a lot about your intent and what your organization is doing. And when you think about agentic systems, they're doing that at machine speeds. So you're creating a tremendous amount of metadata over a very short amount of time that can be analyzed and reveal a lot of secret information and reveal vulnerabilities of your network. Now, when we think about how today we move data, people use VPNs, people use proxies. But the problem with those things is those things are static, they're actually mappable. We can actually figure out pretty easily a VPN endpoint, a proxy endpoint. But when we add the space architecture, if you are proxying data in your Internet connection through the space architecture, it kind of flips the paradigm on its head. Think about it like a cellular network, where the device in a terrestrial cellular network is mobile. And that creates some security because your device is moving. The adversary doesn't know where your device is physically in the world. But, but the cellular world, the mobile world, has created these identifiers that actually have basically taken away all of the security of being a mobile network. Now, when you look at the space architecture, it's not the user, it's not the endpoint that's mobile, it's the router, it's the intermediary node that is mobile. You don't know what node your device is going to connect to directly. And that creates a layer of potential security. And so by routing our network, by routing our traffic, and essentially proxying first through a space architecture, it creates this obfuscation layer where someone measuring your Internet traffic or looking for your specific company's traffic or something like that is not going to actually know where to look. And it's going to be potentially unpredictable where your traffic is going to get routed. And that takes away a whole threat vector or attack vector, something called packet shaping, where an adversary can actually manipulate the traffic flows of Internet data to actually capture data. And again, even if they're capturing data that's encrypted, they're still going to get the metadata. It opens up a whole world of opportunity for security companies and telecommunication companies to add a layer of obfuscation and add a layer of security by routing through a space architecture.
- [13:24]
Alice Carruth
So my mind is going, that is a fantastic opportunity. And the complexity of that, as I'm trying to just sort of, not that I understand networking on a good day, to be completely honest with you, it's not easy to understand, but just the complexity of that, especially as we have more satellites in LEO and many of them these enmeshed networks. I'm going, holy cow. That sounds also incredibly difficult to implement. Not impossible surely, but that sounds like a challenge to me in my layman's understanding of this.
- [13:58]
Brandon Karp
It is a challenge and it's a challenge for a couple reason. First, there's not that many providers right now in space based telecom that you can use. Those providers that do exist, they really only have the bandwidth for edge routing, not necessarily backbone routing. When we talk about backbone, we're talking about the massive fiber lines owned by the world's largest telecoms that are moving unbelievable amounts of data every second through undersea cables and things like that. The space architecture doesn't yet have the bandwidth and the throughput needs to be used as backbone. But what we are using those architectures for is the edge routing. Like that last router before you get to the edge device, whether it's an IoT device or a mobile device or what have you, it's that last public router before you actually get to a device that's trying to access the Internet or a service on the Internet. So there are opportunities today to start routing some of your core traffic through a space architecture. Of course, Starlink is the one that comes to mind because they have the most proliferated architecture. But others, I mean the FCC just authorized a merger between SES and Intelsat. And so like that is obviously intended to be a new competitor. Of course most of their customers are like cable or satellite tv. Satellite TV is in structural decline. No one's really using that anymore. It's the same bandwidth.
- [15:26]
Alice Carruth
Just kidding.
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Brandon Karp
Well, it. Right. It's all Internet, Right. It's all Internet tv, It's all streaming services.
- [15:32]
Alice Carruth
That's not a controversial statement. I'm sorry.
- [15:34]
Brandon Karp
They're all gonna, they're all gonna invest in the exact same bandwidth. I think most of them are C band satellites, which is the same band that Starlink is using for a lot of their work. So they'll just turn it into IP traffic and so that'll be a potential competitor. And then you look at the Space Force. Right. The Space Force is investing in milnet, which is their proliferated leo. Yep. It's like the follow on to their tranche three, I think the transport architecture. And so we're starting to see these organizations investing in this and I think part of it is connectivity. Right. There's the benefit of being able to connect anywhere, even in rural areas or in maritime considerations. But you can't neglect the security implications, which is there are great security implications of doing this. And so how can we invest as companies? How can we actually take advantage of this? Especially the high risk company? I'm thinking like financial services, maybe healthcare, things that are high risk right now.
- [16:36]
Alice Carruth
Yeah. I was just gonna ask about application. Yeah. Cause to me I'm like the military use of this makes total sense in the business world, financial transactions. I could see that being useful. You mentioned healthcare. Anything else where he's like, you know, the use case makes a lot of sense here.
- [16:52]
Brandon Karp
I think the opportunity is probably with the telecoms to start offering these services of getting companies access to direct to satellite connectivity that before it actually touches the backbone of the Internet or before it actually touches the high speed fiber of a telecom, just routing data through a space architecture for your most critical applications, your most critical APIs, things that we're talking about industrial secrets. So any manufacturing company that is potentially at threat from competitors, from industrial espionage, I'm thinking those kinds of manufacturers. Anyone who worked with the defense industry and has industrial secrets or is trying to access APIs on like the AWS GovCloud, this is a service that AWS could offer and say, hey, if you're going to try to reach an API or now in an agentic world, an MCP server that's hosted in the cloud somewhere, we're going to automatically route your traffic first through a space architecture or as the last hop before you get to the actual MCP server, we're going to route it through there and just provide that proxy offset, that obfuscation layer.
- [18:02]
Alice Carruth
As a value add.
- [18:03]
Brandon Karp
Yeah, the value add, exactly. So to me this is a product opportunity for a Telecom or a cloud provider or a data. Like a content distribution network, even Cloudflare.
- [18:15]
Alice Carruth
Akamai kind of thing. Yes, yep.
- [18:17]
Brandon Karp
Right. And even maybe some smaller MSPs. Right. Managed Service providers who are, who are maybe targeting the space industry and saying, hey, we're going to offer you guys some value added services. But that's kind of the initial opportunity that I see. But there is a security benefit to this that's interesting.
- [18:36]
Alice Carruth
I'm just really curious. Does that make a difference if we have greater edge computing in space with this model that you're talking about? Or is it just basically it's another computer in the network that we're talking about. So it doesn't matter necessarily where it's located.
- [18:47]
Brandon Karp
I think it does. And where the opportunity lies is what we talked about earlier. With the constraints on throughput and actually pushing data through a space architecture, right. It's going to introduce a little bit of latency. The processing power up there right now isn't large enough to necessarily put a lot of data. So you can't use it for a backbone. It's not like a microwave link, a terrestrial microwave link where you can send a ton of data very quickly over relatively long point to point distances. As we increase the processing power in satellites and more routers, right? Cell towers in space is something we hear about, but really what that is is it's a router attached to an antenna is we increase the routing power and the processing power in the space architecture. And we can do this today on pretty small satellites with the technology that exists. It'll allow us to push more data and more intelligently through space and be more efficient. Why? Because the data we push up, it can get processed, it can get analyzed, it can get, you know, instead of moving the entire data, the entire packet, the entire session, from satellite to satellite, satellite to ground station, you just process it on site, in situ, and you just send the processed information. And so I do think that's coming. One of the challenges, right? Physics challenge, right? Heating and cooling much more difficult in space than terrestrially. Now there's opportunities for cooling in a shade, but if you're in sunlight, right, you need to have heat strength for.
- [20:18]
Alice Carruth
The nasty physics thing.
- [20:20]
Brandon Karp
Yeah, nasty physics thing, right. Like the 400 degree swing between sunlight versus shade in space. It's a physics challenge, right? But those technologies exist. I think that makes it a little more expensive. Where I would look for the initial growth in that sector of processing in space is actually in Indian space companies. And the reason being is as we add more processing power as you add therefore more heat management systems, you're getting heavier, more weight, more expensive to get up into orbit. Pound for pound, India is more cost effective than any other nation in the world in getting stuff into space. So I think that, you know, these things are going to get a little more expensive by adding more processing power, as we discussed. So, so to make it efficient, to make it marketable, to make the capital expenditures make sense, I would look at India and those companies and see what they're doing because that's probably going to be a leading indicator of where the technology is moving.
- [21:19]
Alice Carruth
It's like, let's pick that up next month.
- [21:36]
Maria Valmarzes
We'll be right back.
- [21:43]
Dave
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- [22:22]
Maria Valmarzes
Welcome back. What does cycling and NASA have in common? No, I'm not referring to the static bike on the International Space Station. Ever heard of biking through France with a NASA textile wrapped around your shoulders? No, it's not sci fi fashion. It's sustainable innovation in motion. The French cyclist collective Le Roukies is partnering with French textile firm Spinali Design to road test high performance NASA derived fabrics. The garments are made using phase changed materials originally developed to regulate astronaut body temperatures. That means these riders will be pedaling through the Tour de France in fabrics designed for spacewalks. But this isn't just a fashion forward bike tour. It's a practical demonstration of space tech meeting terrestrial needs. NASA's spin off technology programs have long emphasized commercial applications of space R and D. And this is just another standout case. These textiles could pave the way for more efficient thermal wear in sports medicine and even climate resilience. And as our ground level infrastructure becomes more connected to space based networks, stories like this remind us that what's launched into orbit often cycles back to improve life here on Earth. Yes, I added that pun in on purpose. And that's today's T minus. Brought to you by N2K CyberWire we'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures 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 also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to spacen2k.com 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 cyber professionals grow, learn and stay informed. As the nexus for discovery and connection, we bring you the people, technology and ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how@n2k.com N2K's producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iban. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. Our host is Maria valmarzes and I'm N2K senior producer Alice Carruth. Thanks for listening.
- [24:56]
Liz Stokes
T minus.
- [25:09]
Dave
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