Chang’e 6 lifts off from the moon.

[SOUND] Talk about a quick turnaround. On yesterday's show, we led with the news that China had landed a probe on the far side of the moon over the weekend. And today, that same probe has already lifted off from our nearest natural satellite with regolith samples aboard and is now heading back to the Earth, carrying treasures unknown. And I know it's gonna be dust and rock that smells like gunpowder. But, you know, since it's from the mysterious far side of the moon, let's use our imagination. Wouldn't it be something if it really was made of cheese? [MUSIC] >> T-minus. >> 20 seconds to L-O-S, P-dress, open aboard. [MUSIC] >> Today is June 4th, 2024. I'm Maria Varmausis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] >> Peridium lands a $94 million space systems command contract. China's Chang'e 6 lifts off from the moon. ESA completes the first metal 3D printing on the ISS. And our guest today is Aaron Miller, Executive Director of the Space Information and Analysis Center, better known as the Space ISAC. We're gonna be discussing their mission and latest partnership announcements. So stay with us for that chat later in the show. [MUSIC] Happy Tuesday, everyone. Let's dive into today's Intel briefing. And we're starting with some big contract news. And be prepared for a lot of acronyms coming up. Peridium has been awarded a new five-year contract by the United States Space Forces Space Systems Command Commercial Space Office, also known as Comso. For enhanced mobile satellite services, also known as EMSS capabilities and security sustainment services that are also known as ECS-3. Whoo. In support of the Iridium EMSS program, the ECS-3 contract, one sure continued optimal operations of the EMSS service center, in support of critical US government applications. The value of the contract is approximately $94 million, with a potential total value of 103 million, based on future surge requirements. The Iridium EMSS program delivers access to global unlimited, secure and standard narrow band voice broadcast, push to talk and select additional services to an unlimited number of US Department of Defense or DOD and DOD approved subscribers. Think of it as one big family plan. Now supporting this program, the EMSS service center provides connectivity into the Iridium network, enabling critical communication applications. This new contract replaces a previous four and a half year contract, known as the Gateway Maintenance Support Services Agreement, which was signed in 2019 for $54 million. The new ECS-3 contract would support the infrastructure used for EMSS through 2029. And if you want to learn more about Iridium, then we suggest checking out our AWS in orbit episode about extending the resilient edge to space. That episode can be found on our website, space.ntuk.com/aws. China's Chang'e 6 is on a roll, or maybe I should say on its way back to Earth. The lunar probe has already lifted off from the lunar surface and is making its way back to Earth with moon rock samples aboard. The probe's successful departure from the moon means China is closer to becoming the first country to return samples from the far side of the moon. According to state media, the probe used a drill and robotic arm to dig up soil on and below the moon's surface. The mission also captured images of the far side of the moon, which have been shared by the China National Space Administration, also known as CNSA. Images of the probe's lander and ascender were taken by a movable camera brought to the moon by the probe. The mission also proved the reliability of China's Chuiqiao-2 relay satellite, which was launched in April and provided the transmission of the data that was collected by Chang'e 6. CNSA says the probe is now in lunar orbit and will join up with another spacecraft in orbit, and then samples will then be transferred to a return module, which will then fly back to Earth with the landing on China's Inner Mongolia region expected around June 25th. The first metal 3D printing aboard the International Space Station took place last Thursday in the European Space Agency's Columbus Laboratory module. ESA technical officer Rob Postima says the success of this first print, along with other reference lines, leaves us ready to print full parts in the near future. So cool. The metal 3D printer technology demonstrator has been developed by an industrial team led by Airbus under contract to ESA's directorate of human and robotic exploration. The printer itself arrived on the ISS back in January. The print process is overseen entirely from the ground, with the on-board crew opening a nitrogen venting valve before the printing starts. Four shapes have been chosen for subsequent full-scale 3D printing, which will later be returned to Earth to be compared with reference prints made on the ground in normal gravity. ATEL Ventures has reached an agreement to provide $20 million of growth debt to German space company ISAR Aerospace. ISAR is a launch service provider for small and medium-sized satellites, and the capital provided by ATEL Ventures will enable the company to finance the purchase of equipment used in the production of its launch vehicles. And I promise we are not recycling old news when we say that the Hubble has temporarily paused science again. NASA's Hubble Space Telescope entered safe mode on May 24th due to an ongoing gyroscope issue, suspending science operations. Hubble's instruments are reportedly stable, and the telescope is in good health. NASA has invited the media to discuss Hubble operation updates at 4pm Eastern today, and we will bring you that update on tomorrow's show. Things are still looking hopeful for the first crude flight of Boeing Starliner for tomorrow. Fingers crossed! And astronauts on the ISS are eager for the launch for more personal reasons. You see, the International Space Station is dealing with a "urine pump" problem, and the Starliner is due to carry the solution. The pump in the station's urine processor assembly has halted the ability to convert the ISS crew's urine back into drinkable water. A replacement for this part was already scheduled to launch on the next Northrop Grumman Cygnus cargo mission in August, but the pump's unexpected failure has expedited the need for delivery. Understandable! Let's hope they have a safe lift off tomorrow for everyone's sake. MDA Space has been awarded a contract by the National Research Council of Canada to support the development, construction, and integration of radio telescope technology for the Square Kilometer Array Observatory. Also known as the SKAO, the Observatory is an international space exploration and astronomy project that seeks to further our understanding of the formation and evolution of the universe. Canada has announced that they have formally joined the SKAO, making it the 10th member of the intergovernmental organization that currently includes Australia, China, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Switzerland, and the UK. The SKAO telescopes are made up of arrays of antennas, including hundreds of mid- to high-frequency antennas in South Africa and over 100,000 low-frequency antennas in Australia. And as part of its contract with the National Research Council, MDA Space will develop the project's correlator beamformer, which is a data processing engine that will collect and process the large volumes of cosmic signals received by the telescopes. Small rocket manufacturer High Impulse has signed a memorandum of understanding with Southern launches Kuniba Test Range in South Australia. The German startup intends to launch more suborbital flights from the facility. The MOU between the businesses also opens up the possibility of future orbital launches from the Australian company's separate Wailers' Way site. The new agreement comes after High Impulse's first launch of its SR-75 rocket at Kuniba in May was hailed a success. Singapore's Trans-Celestial has signed a collaboration framework agreement with Axiom Space. The company's plan to redefine space communications for government and commercial customers in Southeast Asia. Axiom and Trans-Celestial will collaborate on developing and conducting demonstrations, showcasing interoperability between laser communication networks and orbital data centers for Southeast Asia's commercial, civil and security users. And that concludes our briefing for today. Head to the show notes to find additional articles on New Zealand's space industry ambitions, an IEEE article on space-based solar power, and a link to the release of former guest Brad Bergen's book on SpaceX, Elon Musk and the Final Frontier. Hey team-inus crew, do you have a story that you want to share with our audience? Please pitch it to the show. Just send us an email at space@n2k.com or reach out on our website space.n2k.com and Alice, our producer or some other member of the team will respond to you. We love to hear from our audience and we know that there are some great stories out there, but don't be shy, tell us about them. [Music] Our guest today is Aaron Miller, Executive Director of the Space Information and Analysis Center, better known as the Space ISAC. I started by asking Aaron to tell us more about the organization. [Music] We started this organization at the request of the White House back in 2019, and we've been having loads of fun since then. It's been about four and a half years that we've been engaging and collectively discussing threat intelligence with the space community. We have over a hundred members, and the reason why we stood up the organization is because we saw, and the White House actually saw, that there were silos of information sharing that existed within space critical infrastructure. So across the global space community, we have defense, IC, international, and commercial space companies, and all of them represent the critical infrastructure, the attack surface that is the space industry. And so when they receive attacks against their critical infrastructure, I would say it's about 90 to 94 percent, according to some folks, that is commercially owned and operated. So they've really got a big job, and we have a big responsibility at the Space ISAC to ensure that that information is actually shared amongst industry partners and our government partners in order to raise our defenses against the adversary. For people in the industry who may not be a part of it yet, I mean, what is, can you explain a little bit about how it works? What does it actually look like to be part of the Space ISAC? Yeah, our members have access to our different tools that are part of our watch center, and the onboarding process gets them access really as soon as they join. And it's a small membership fee. We are primarily funded by the commercial sector, and we stood it up that way because ISACs have to be stood up really by the private sector. We have universities, we have FFRDCs. However, we're really run by the commercial sector that owns this critical infrastructure. And so when they onboard as a member, they get access to all of the tools, and now they become part of our watch center. We have headquarters in Colorado Springs that has a operational watch center and a cyber vulnerability lab adjacent to it, and a lot of different collaborative groups. I think we're at over 20 collaborative groups. We also run exercises, and we do about four per year, and that puts our members in a position where now they are in the moment of a crisis and they have to manage the different stakeholders, they have to do incident response, and they have to deal with the impacts on human life that their systems may be connected to, which can be a very stressful situation. We try not to really stress people out. It's more a practical implementation of the tools and the scenarios that we understand to be reflective of real-life situations that have already taken place. And we're putting them through those time and again so that they can realize what their lessons learned and experience those stressors before they actually have to go through the situation. And build those pathways internally to figure out what needs to happen and who needs to be responsible for things. It's such a valuable exercise. It's really just incredible. And I was reading, I think a recent one, at least last year, Hera's Revenge, is that one of them? Can you tell me a bit about that? Yeah, Hera's Revenge was one that we ran a few different times. The most recent one was in August, we had a C-suite level version of Hera's Revenge, where we had the different C-suite representatives from the space industry deal with this situation and they had to really learn what their security operation center and their space operation center were doing to monitor and detect the attacks against their critical infrastructure. And at the same time, deal with the issue of coordinating with all of these different multinational stakeholders, including governments. And in that particular situation, there was an NGO that was an end user. And that non-governmental organization was headquartered in a completely different country than the company that was operating the systems. And so the laws were different and there were people from the medical industry that were the users and they were transmitting HIPAA data and other sorts of sensitive information across these space systems. So the complexity of the law and the complexity of coordinating all of the different stakeholders was definitely a relevant conversation for the C-suite, especially since in the US, we still do not have a designated sector risk management agency that leads for space systems, critical infrastructure owners. Then who you actually call could be really just at your discretion. You know, if you're a space systems owner, operator, owner or operator company, you could call the space ISAC because we have our operational watch center. But knowing which US government agency to call is still an open question at this point in time. Hmm. And it's fascinating that you also mentioned international laws. That's something I've heard a number of times about just the nature of space and governance being what it is that the legal landscape internationally makes things extraordinarily more complicated when it comes to a potential incident than maybe it does in other situations. Is that correct? Am I reading that correctly? Oh, yeah. The laws associated with space managing space systems incidents are different depending on the nation that you're in. And that can open up some complexity depending on the scenario or the mission that you're performing at the time. Most companies, they do take, I would say, these, especially these C-suite executives that we're working with, they had already taken the time to learn the laws that were applicable to their mission. And I would say my impression is that they take the responsibility of cybersecurity for their systems, which includes electronic warfare, includes space weather. They take it very seriously because for a commercial company, this is their business. You know, that infrastructure, it's different than when the government owns the infrastructure, where it might be a highly distributed different teams that have the responsibility for the different parts of the space system. And they're not managed by one central owner like a company is. A company has their C-suite that really owns the responsibility for security. And if their bottom line is going to be impacted by attacks against their infrastructure, they have to rectify that situation immediately and they have to train their teams and be prepared. So we see the members of the Space ISAC really coming together now in different forums in order to address these issues because it's become such a serious matter. Absolutely. It's very heartening to hear that as well. That's really great. The need is fantastically great. And it's wonderful hearing that we have these leaders out there who are driving this. So it's really encouraging. I wanted to switch gears entirely to a space symposium, which already occurred. But I know that Space ISAC had a number of announcements that came out during that event. And I was wondering if you could just walk me through some of them. Absolutely. Yeah, we had a tremendous space symposium this year. Everyone looks forward to that event. And we did. And it's the gift that keeps on giving. We had an announcement about the LeoOwnerOperator Affinity Group kickoff. We invited several different of our industry leaders to speak at that kickoff. We had Capella space there as well as ViASAT assisting us with in a co-chair capacity to be able to kickoff. And then we had our U.S. government counterparts that were present from defense and intelligence community having the same discussion about the attacks against LeoOwner operators and the importance of finding ways to share that information in an automated way, the way that we protect our other critical infrastructure outside of space. That is the other 16 critical infrastructures. The other announcement that we made was quite critical for the time. We announced that we were partnering with the French Space Agency. And the reason why this is important is because it's one of many international partnerships that the Space ISAC has right now. We're also working with and have announced partnerships with the UK Space Agency, also with the Israel Space Agency. Previously, I think two years ago, we signed a partnership with the Japanese Aerospace Agency as well as METI. And we're working with the Greeks and the Germans. And these different organizations that are responsible for space within their respective countries are signing up so that they can do bi-directional information sharing with the Space ISAC and create this collective defense model. So with our watch center being operational, it's been operational for about, I would say, a year and three months. Then we're able to share the alerts that we generate from the different cells as we track the adversary from ground to space. We can share that information, TLP amber and TLP green, which means it can go to our members, industry members and to industry and partners. So there's a direct benefit of these collaborations coming together and raising our overall security posture. That's fantastic. These collaborations are so great. And again, given the global nature of the space industry, that it's so critical to have all that information being shared. So that's wonderful to hear. Congratulations on all these new partnerships. They're fantastic. Anything else that you want us to share with our audience, maybe a call to action for them to join. Anything that you want people to know about the Space ISAC, maybe for people who aren't a part of it yet. Well, I would say if you're not a part of Space ISAC yet, come to our Valley of Space Summit. It's happening on September 25th in Colorado Springs. Who wouldn't want to join us in lovely Colorado Springs? September will be nice. And join the conversation. Even if you're not a member, it is open to the public. It's a very affordable ticket. And we're having these discussions that are important and timely and absolutely essential for us to protect our critical infrastructure and get ahead of the attacks of the adversary. And to be candid, our lives depend on it. So let's do it. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Over the weekend, a lot of us were keeping an eye on the Starliner launch in Florida. I know I took a break from my weekend gardening, put the tools down, and took out my phone to try and catch the launch before returning to my tomatoes. And I know I wasn't the only one. In fact, really close to the attempted Starliner launch at Kennedy Space Center's visitor complex, in fact, something much more important than my tomatoes was going on. An astronaut Hall of Fame induction ceremony for astronauts Marcia Ivins and David Hilmers. Ivins and Hilmers both are astronauts from the shuttle era, with Hilmers flying aboard Atlantis and Discovery four times in all, and Ivis flying to space five times in all aboard Atlantis and Columbia. How poignant it must have been for both astronauts who had both flown on Atlantis at different times to be inducted to the Hall of Fame, and a ceremony held directly below the space shuttle Atlantis herself. Now, award ceremonies are generally not known for their brevity, but this one was not only moved up, it even ended a bit early so everyone in attendance could watch the Starliner's launch attempt. And can you blame them? They were right there at Kennedy after all. And as you likely know, Starliner's launch was scrubbed just four minutes before the lift off. Still, who watching Starliner could possibly be more sympathetic to Starliner's Butch Wilmar and Sonny Williams about the challenges of human spaceflight and the realities of scrubs than fellow astronauts and now Hall of Famers, Marsha Ivins and David Hilmers. Congratulations to them both. That's it for T-Minus for June 4th, 2024, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. And 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. This episode was produced by Alice Caruth, our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president, Peter Kilpie is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Varmasus. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. . T-Minus. Bye. [BLANK_AUDIO]