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You're listening to the N2K space network.
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From phishing to ransomware, cyber threats are constant. But with Nordlayer, your defense can be too. Nordlayer brings together secure access and advanced threat protection in a single seamless platform. It helps your team spot suspicious activity before it becomes a problem by blocking malicious links and scanning downloads in real time, preventing malware from reaching your network. It's quick to deploy, easy to scale, and built on zero trust principles so only the right people get access to the right resources. Get 28% off on a yearly plan at Nordlayer.com cyberwire daily with code CYBERWIRE28 that's nordlayer.com cyberwire daily Code CYBERWIRE28 that's valid through December 10, 2020.
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Today is November 18th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazes and this is T minus.
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T minus 20 seconds. Los T Drift.
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5 the first ever alleged space crime is no more lean space raises 10 million euro to scale software defined satellite operations. The US Space Force publishes Vector 2025 guidance on force design and war fighting Ursa major hits a $600 million valuation after a $100 million Series E1 York Space Systems files for an IPO after a major revenue. Today's guest is Michael Anderson, co founder and CEO of Seagate Space, telling me all about the unique challenges and opportunities ahead for sea based space launches. That is after today's headlines. Stay tuned. Foreign. Thank you for joining me on this Tuesday. Let's dive into today's Intel Briefing. First up, satellite manufacturer York Space Systems has filed to go public in the United States, according to the company's SEC submission reported by Reuters. In its IPO filing, York disclosed $280 million.9 million in revenue for the first nine months of 2025, which is up from $176.3 million during the same period last year and that is a 59% increase in a year over year period. The company also reported a net loss of $56 million in 2025 as of September 30, which is a comparative decrease in loss compared to last year, which saw $73.6 million in net loss. York Space Systems builds small satellites for government and commercial customers and saw a more than $1 billion valuation back in 2022. The company is planning to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol yss. It is possible that we could see York go public as early as December, but York did not disclose the size or confirmed timing of the offering, and their filing confirms intent to raise capital to expand production capacity and meet growing demand. Next up According to a new story from Bloomberg, Colorado based rocket propulsion startup Ursa Major has secured additional funding that places its valuation at US$600 million, and that valuation comes as Ursa Major announces that it has raised $100 million in a series E funding round. Their new investment will accelerate development of the company's next generation propulsion systems, including its liquid engines and solid rocket motor product lines. Ursa Major says the funding will help scale production capacity and support U.S. government and commercial customers who are seeking independent, commercially developed propulsion alternatives. Ursa Major also highlighted growing demand for domestic propulsion solutions as launch providers and defense programs expand. According to the company's announcement, funds will also go toward advanced manufacturing and testing infrastructure to shorten development timelines and increase responsiveness for future missions. The US Space Force has published a document that they are calling Vector 2025 and it is new service wide guidance outlining how the branch intends to develop, organize and operate forces over the next several years. And according to this publicly released guidance, Vector 2025 is designed to unify modernization, operational concepts and readiness under four functions and those would be force design, force development, force generation and force employment. The US Space Force document explains how it is preparing its documents for contested space operations, strengthening its partnerships, updating its training pipelines and improving its data integration across missions. And and you can read the publicly released Vector 2025 for yourself. Of course the PDF is linked in our show Notes for you. It's a 12 page document, very high level. So as you might imagine, the guidance in there isn't traditional strategy. Instead it's more of a framework aligning the Space Force's evolution as a warfighting organization. Again, link is in the show notes if you would like to give it a read. Checking in with the European space scene now, Strasbourg based satellite operations technology provider leanspace region raised 10 million euros in a Series A round from investors based both in Europe and the United States. The funding raise will be used to expand LeanSpace's Cloud Native Mission operations platform and expand internationally. LeanSpace says it is building the foundation for software defined satellite operations enabling enterprise and institutional customers to configure, manage and scale missions through a fully modular API driven architecture. In their announcement about their new Series A, leanspace also noted seeing increased demand for flexible integrated ground segment software as constellations grow more complex and operators seek digital transformation across mission operations. And for our last story today, it's time to retire a lot of people's favorite unusual space fact the first crime ever committed in space wasn't, and that's official as of today. Former Air Force intelligence officer Summer Heather Worden has pleaded guilty to lying to law enforcement after falsely accusing her estranged wife, NASA astronaut Anne McClain, of illegally accessing her bank account from space. Worden now faces up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $250,000. And her guilty plea marks the end of a years long legal dispute between Worden and astronaut McCl, whose career includes service in Iraq, aviation experience totaling more than 2,000 flight hours and two missions to the International Space Station. Worden had accused McClain in 2019 of guessing her password and improperly entering her bank account during McClain's ISS mission, prompting investigations by the Federal Trade Commission and NASA's Inspector General and leading to many breathless headlines about space crime. Well, federal investigators determined that Worden had previously granted McLean access to the accounts as part of their shared finances, so no space crime ever occurred. Worden will be sentenced on February 12, 2020. And those are today's headlines for you. Links are all in the Show Notes, including again that Vector 2025 document from the U. S Space Force if you would like to read it in full. And of course, we always have lots more that we're looking at that we include in the show notes for your edification and delight. To tell us more about what's in there for you today, my colleague from the Cyberwire Daily host Dave Bittner is here to tell us more. Over to you Dave.
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Thanks Maria. We're looking at a new op ed in Breaking defense by Tom Caracco of CSIS saying it's time for the Pentagon to drop the silent treatment and start telling us all what the Golden Dome actually is. We also have a link to results of the latest Star Lab hackathon in Zurich, an analysis of ISI as Europe's defense space intelligence linchpin, and our congratulations to two time T minus guests, Stefan Powell, co founder and CEO of Dawn Aerospace, who just won the 2025 Prime Minister's Space Prize for Professional Excellence in New Zealand. Back to you Maria.
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Thank you Dave and listeners. All those links are in your Show Notes, in your podcast app, and on space.n2k.com, which is our official show website. Hi T minus Crew. In case you didn't know, we post links to every episode of T minus Space Daily along with the major headlines over on our LinkedIn page. Just look for N2K T Space Daily on LinkedIn and click Follow to get our episodes and headlines directly in your feed. Every weekday and on Saturday. A lot of us are spending quite a bit of time on LinkedIn nowadays and surely a daily space intel briefing from us would be a nice break, maybe from yet another end of year think piece, right? Yeah. N2K T Space Daily on LinkedIn is not. It's yay. Tap that follow button and thanks.
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Our guest today is Seagate Space co founder and CEO Michael Anderson and I asked him to start us off by telling us a bit about his company's story.
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So Seagate Space, we're the maritime partner for the space industry and our goal is to earn that title by developing novel floating platforms that can accommodate the launch of orbital class rockets at sea. We started up in January. My co founder and I left one of the largest US flag commercial maritime companies at that time and we've been at it ever since, adding team members, hitting our milestones and really just continuing to become more and more excited about what we think we can as a company do by bringing real, I would say maritime expertise and deep long standing maritime expertise to the space industry and come to find that there's a lot of folks in the maritime industry that are very passionate about doing new things.
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Well Michael, thank you so much for joining me today and telling me a bit about your company story because the need for greater capacity for launch is huge in the space industry and launching from sea is something that, you know, it's been an interesting sort of puzzle that I know many have tried to address and figure out and I know that you all are taking a really interesting approach there and you mentioned also that you felt like there could be a greater acceptance of. I don't want to put words in your mouth, but just like a different approach that could be taken there. I'd love to hear a bit more about your philosophy on that.
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Yeah, I mean, I'll talk a little more generally and then get into specifically what we're doing. I think timing is everything. When you talk about introducing new approaches, new technology. And I think we're at this really cool stage right now where a lot of the things that were explored 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago that have a lot of merit but maybe various factors just weren't there to make them a success, are coming back around and are showing that if, if the timing is right, as other factors have, have moved into a point where, you know, there's the ability to do something that maybe wasn't possible back then. And so I look at what we're doing in that category. I look at nuclear energy and now the proliferation of small nuclear reactors, whereas previously we had much larger scale nuclear energy facilities that maybe weren't as successful. I look at supersonic air travel and what Boom and other companies are doing there. Where Concorde had attempted that decades ago, was unsuccessful in doing it. So for us, we look at Sea Launch as kind of that legacy. And what Sea Launch attempted to do, it was a much larger scale than what we're doing today. It was using a set of very complex retrofitted assets. And that may have been necessary at the time for the type of rockets they were launching. But now we see the launch industry becoming so much more dynamic. Smaller launch vehicles that are starting to find their niche. And we believe that there's a better opportunity now to bring a maritime asset that's conducive to those vehicles that'll be not just technically viable, but economically successful.
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The time is right. Okay, so yeah, tell me a bit specifically about your approach, your differentiator, if you will.
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Yeah, so I think we have, if I describe it just simply, we've taken the Sea Launch asset and the Sea Launch approach with a semi submersible twin hold structure and we just shrunk it down, made it, made it more of a micro version. The requirements for space launch offshore are different than really any other industry operation. You don't need to think that much about weight and carry capacity. Rockets are built to be light. Actually, the ground systems for smaller rockets themselves are not that much mass to carry. So you don't need to think about moving thousands of tons. And that's what existing assets are built for, typically moving thousands of tons. Whether you're talking about taking an oil rig offshore or whether you're taking, taking a bunch of containerized Cargo offshore. Our launch companies tell us the customers that we're serving today, typically we're talking anywhere from, let's just say, well south of a thousand tons of total capacity required to launch a small rocket. And so we've, we've designed an asset that sacrifices the need to lift a bunch of weight and we've instead created an asset that can actually meet the stability and motion control requirements for a launch at sea in a cost effective way.
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One thing I'm very curious about also is something I have noticed in the space industry is how risk is definitely something you sort of alluded to. It's a little bit risk averse. I don't think it's a controversial statement for me to say that. And people like to stick with things that are flight heritage, things that are proven over decades and decades. Now we're talking about quite a paradigm shift going to sea based launch. So what's your pitch to providers that are maybe going sounds great, but I don't know, how do you convince them?
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Yeah, wow, that's funny that. I mean, yes, I guess the aerospace industry is risk averse to some extent, but it's almost like innately risky. So I guess it's all right.
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Yeah, I know, right.
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And if you look at, you know, my experience is kind of broad across industries. So if you look at other industries, I can tell you, you know, I think that I wouldn't necessarily categorize it that way, but it's all relative. Perhaps. How do we convince customers to explore Sea Launch? Most of them, when we first started the company and first started engaging with them, most of them already were, quite honestly. We went out and started talking to name a company that's building a small lift launch vehicle just to understand where they were at with these launch constraints and what their potential solution set was. And most of them said we're looking at Sea Launch. And then I would bifurcate that into two categories. Category one was we're looking at Sea Launch. We put some folks on it. We realized actually, you know, building a maritime asset is not within our core competency by any means. It's not that easy. We didn't want to distract from getting our, you know, our rocket to work. So we stood that down. The other bucket was, okay, I went to this maritime company that, you know, you might have heard of, we paid them for a feasibility study. They threw some stuff at us and it never really went anywhere. So we kind of just stood down. So that to us is a really positive signal because everyone is looking at this and has some degree of interest and desire to do it, that we're not necessarily starting from square one. What they are then telling us is we're not capable of doing it ourselves. We realize that and the existing industry is not really helping us out. So that's what we started the company to go do, is fill that gap. I think there is certainly, you know, competition for sea launches as an option. But when you look at the, let's say the projects that are out there to build new launch infrastructure, they have their own set of challenges for sure, and we don't have to go into them. But I'll say for our customers right now, they almost all have a significant launch backlog and success is about how quickly they can develop that launch, develop the capability to actually go and fill that backlog. So waiting on the build of a new launch site in some, you know, far flung location I think has, you know, the, maybe the, the, their step up because they've started and they've, they've been engaging longer. But I think what we're showing is that we can develop a maritime asset relatively quickly and field it. And that, that like desire to move fast and that need to move fast is a pretty important variable for our customers right now.
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When you think of your five to ten year vision of, you know, what things will look like, how your company will transform launch, what do you see? What will it look like?
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I mean, if you look at whether it be wind energy or oil and gas, the energy sector, and now we're talking about deep sea mining as well. Other sectors have moved offshore in a substantial way. A substantial amount of their activity occurs offshore. There's puts and takes when you talk about offshore versus onshore operations, but they're peers, one's not niche and the other dominant. So our goal is to drive that same dynamic for space is to enable the amount of, whether it be launch recovery, other operations of activity within the space industry that occurs coastal, we want to match that and enable the industry, I should even say to match that with specialized assets and designs. So for us, you know, I think we're starting in this small rocket class. I think that's the, the cohort with kind of the burning platform. That's the, you know, quite honestly scale of project that as a new company, you know, we can even audaciously take on. But as we start to field those initial assets, we're certainly looking at can we scale up, can we support larger rocket systems, can we support, you know, multiple launches from a single platform rather than having Kind of a vessel that goes to and fro and can we actually move not just the launch, but the recovery, maybe some of the retrofit of those rockets to go again, like make it so that the rocket never has to come back to shore. When we're talking about offshore launch or even have some manufacturing and fuel, fuel capability offshore. So we want to make as much activity occur offshore as possible. Other industries have proven that offshore has its merits. We see it here. That's the long term goal. We're starting small, we're starting focused because we know that we need to prove this out conceptually and then in reality before we can get there. So it's kind of like how do we get from these almost like novelty science projects using existing assets to what I just described? And that's the gap that we're bridging.
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Yeah. This is where I would ask you any wrap up thoughts, anything you want to leave the audience with. You get the final word, anything you'd like to add?
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Yeah, thanks. No, I mean we really are all about partnership and collaboration. Right. Our goal is to be the maritime entity that enables space companies to be successful. So if you're a company that's looking for launch locations, reach out. We want to collaborate with you. We want to find the right design that'll enable you to move faster. As I described, if you're a company with some sort of novel payload that you're concerned about being able to run through some existing spaceports, like we, we are a collaborative group. So come to us with your challenges. We have the maritime folks that can actually conceptualize and then bring into reality what I just described with bringing a scaled offshore capability to support this really awesome industry's needs. So that's what we're all.
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We'll be right back.
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Welcome back. Sometimes for this end of the episode story, I've got something newsy for you. But today it's not newsy. No, because sometimes you see a website pop up on social media and you just gotta share the love. And this one has a tricky name marslife.org and it's tricky because it is not about finding life on Mars. So stand down, okay? Rather, it is about the life that robotic rovers have or have had on Mars and what they are seeing or have seen on Mars. MarsLife.org is a panoramic travel guide to the ongoing robotic exploration of planet Mars. And that is about all the reading on that website that you'll be doing because everything else is just looking around and enjoying the view. This website pieces together the raw imagery from Spirit, Opportunity, Curiosity and perseverance and it makes them into a continuous panoramic image of that soul's mission so you can get a better sense of the wide vistas that these amazing rovers are seeing. You can check out the changing views soul by soul. That's a Martian day. It also very helpfully shows you an overlay of the paths that these rovers have taken. So if you see a plot point in the distance that it has visited and you go, ooh, what was over there? You just click it and you can see what the rover saw. Not a bad way to spend a few minutes, honestly. And yeah, marslife.org go check it out if you haven't been. And that'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 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 Ivan. Peter Kilby is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazes. Thank you for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.
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T minus.
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