Spooktacular NRO treats.

[MUSIC] >> Fingertree! >> Hey, NRO, happy Halloween. What are you dressed up as this year? What's that? Your costume is your favorite historical siege weapon. Oh, I know this one. Are you an honor chair? A tributary? No? You're a ballista? Wow, gotta hand it to you, NRO. That's pretty creative. Can't beat an OG missile launcher. Well, go on then. Why don't you take three pieces of candy? [MUSIC] >> T-minus. >> 20 seconds to alloy. >> Open aboard. [MUSIC] >> Today is Thursday, October 31st, 2024. Happy Halloween. I'm Maria Varmasus, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] NRO awards three ballista contracts. Matter Intelligence emerges from stealth. Skyrora, Viasat, and CGI complete ground testing for an ESA telemetry contract. And today we have an AWS in orbit discussion with Skynopee. And I'll be talking to Pierre Bertrand, CEO and co-founder of Skynopee about how AWS for aerospace and satellite enhances their ground station as a service mission. [MUSIC] It's Thursday, let's get going. We're kicking off this spooky day with awards from the National Reconnaissance Office's Office of Space Launch. NRO's OSL announced the award of three broad agency announcements for Agile Launch Innovation and Strategic Technology Advancement Contracts, or Ballista Contracts for short. These ballistas aim to assess and evaluate advanced space technologies, and cognitive space, impulse space, and starfish space have all been selected for the contracts. The Ballista effort are the first broad agency announcement contracts awarded by OSL. The contracts cover areas of interest in in-space mobility and maneuverability, on-orbit logistics and sustainability, mission acceleration, artificial intelligence for ground operations, and spacecraft propellant particle count. These very specific kinds of contracts are smaller in scope and will assess emerging providers and capabilities, and are intended to demonstrate new mission capabilities that directly solve critical intelligence problems, or address technology needs of interest. No details were released about the financial rewards. Welcome out of stealth, Matter Intelligence. The California-based remote sensing startup has unveiled its plans to launch space sensors capable of capturing never-before-seen data about all matter on Earth, from surface to atmosphere. Matter Intelligence says it specializes in advancing sensor infrastructure that captures detailed, beyond visible data of both natural and artificial materials, creating the most comprehensive, extreme resolution Earth observation dataset ever compiled. This startup has secured $12 million in seed funding, and Matter Intelligence's first satellite, the Earth One, plans to create the first global encyclopedia of Earth's material composition, imaging the entire globe with more than 500 times the information density of today's existing sensors. No details were shared about when we can expect Earth One to be launched. Skyrora, ViASat, and CGI have been awarded a contract by the European Space Agency under the Commercial Space Transportation Services Program to demonstrate in range a space-based launch vehicle telemetry relay system, which will benefit launch vehicle providers across the industry globally. Companies have already completed a ground test of the system, and the full demonstration will be held on Skyrora's suborbital Skylarq L Launch Vehicle, which plans to launch in 2025. The project is an extension of Skyrora's existing contract with ESA through the boost exclamation point, Commercial Space Transportation Services, and Support Program. This granted Skyrora with 3 million euros to support the development of the company's Orbital XL vehicle, a three stage light-class launch vehicle. And ViASat is also collaborating to enable advanced hybrid satellite communications capabilities on the Embraer C390 Millennium Military Aircraft. ViASat will deliver its hybrid SATCOM approach for integration on the new C390 Multi-Mission Aircraft. The European Space Agency has selected its main contractors for the agency's CyberCube mission. A GMV-led consortium, which includes GMV's teams in Romania as the prime contractor, and Spain, along with Elen Space, will manage the end-to-end lifecycle of the CyberCube mission. And the project is a key initiative with the Cyber Evolutions Program of ESA's Cyber Security Operations Center known as CSOC. And its goal is to provide the European Space Agency with cost-effective, reconfigurable cyber capabilities to demonstrate new in-orbit technologies, minimize risks, and accelerate the adoption of cybersecurity solutions in future missions. The CyberCube mission will validate the CSOC's radio frequency capabilities and provide a real-world demonstration of sophisticated data analysis tools designed to detect and counter potential cyber threats. We're heading to the stratosphere now with High Altitude Platform System manufacturer, Sky. And they've announced a cooperating research and development agreement with the United States Geological Survey and a Space Act agreement with NASA. The partnership will help track essential environmental data and metrics in real time, and also positions Sky to support NASA and USGS in expanding the range of climate data collection and in strengthening forecasting models. The Space Rapid Capabilities Office has selected Raft to develop technology solutions for the US Space Force procurement group. Raft is one of the 20 small businesses awarded a $600,000 contract, which is part of a larger $1 billion IDQ contract that was awarded earlier this year through rapid, resilient command and control, which is a combined program with Space Systems Command that aims to modernize satellite operations. And honestly, we love the headline, Voyager One, Ghost NASA. It's very appropriate for the spooky season in Halloween today, but it doesn't quite cover the story. The interstellar spacecraft has inexplicably turned off one of its radio transmitters. I'd be a little grumpy too if I was that far away from home. That said, NASA shared that on October 24th, they reconnected with the Voyager One spacecraft after a brief pause in its communications. The spacecraft recently turned off one of its two radio transmitters. Voyager One normally transmits data via an expand transmitter, but it has switched to a second radio transmitter called the S-Band. While the S-Band does use less power, Voyager One has not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981. Honestly, I think the spacecraft was just feeling a little bit nostalgic. Who can blame it? NASA teams are now working to determine what caused the issue if it's not nostalgia. And American astronauts on the International Space Station have cast their votes in the US election, just like any other American away from home. Astronauts may fill out a federal postcard application to request an absentee ballot. After an astronaut fills out an electronic ballot aboard the orbiting laboratory, the document flows through NASA's tracking and data relay satellite system, or TDRS, to a ground antenna at the agency's White Sands Test Facility, not far from Alice in Las Cruces, New Mexico. And this is our reminder to you all in the United States to get out and cast your ballot for whomever you support in the upcoming election. [MUSIC PLAYING] And that concludes today's Intel Briefing. Stick around for some Halloween updates from the ISS after our chat with Skynapee. As always, you'll find links to further reading on all the stories we've mentioned in today's show. And we've included an additional announcement from Voyager Space on their newly appointed executive vice president of national security. KT-Minus crew, every Thursday, we sit down with industry experts in a segment called Industry Voices, all about the groundbreaking new products, services, and businesses emerging around the world. Every Gaston Industry Voices has paid to be here. We hope you'll find it useful to hear directly from businesses about the challenges that they're solving and how they're doing it. And today you'll hear from Pierre Bertrand, the CEO of Skynapee, about how their work with AWS for aerospace and satellite enhances their ground station as a service mission. Visit space.nzuk.com/aws to learn more. Today's guest is Pierre Bertrand, CEO and co-founder of Skynapee. This is an AWS in orbit program that explores how AWS for aerospace and satellite enhances Skynapee's ground station as a service mission. And here's Pierre with more details about how Skynapee got started. We founded Skynapee a year ago by noticing that in the markets, the current space market and space industry has been, if we think it's based on three pillars, the first pillar is basically the launchers, the rockets that we use to send satellites into orbit or orbital systems and other capsules or stations. The second pillar is basically the satellites in itself, the hardware, the systems that are going to live in orbit and sustain and need to be efficient and to be operational in orbit. And the third pillar that is less known and less advertised and less visible, I would say, it's the ground station. So it's basically antenna that you rely on to download the data created into orbit, but also that you use this grand antenna to talk to your satellite to send comments and receive what we call the telemetry, so the data. And the space market is booming because the two first pillars have been completely disrupted over the past 15 years, mostly by space six, but also by other players. And the third pillar hasn't really changed for the past 60 years. So it's the same type of antenna that we're relying on. And so now it's starting to be the bottleneck. And if we zoom in a little bit more, we see that satellite operators are facing two major difficulties and pain points. The first one is the need for CAPEX to invest in their ground antenna, as well as investing in their launcher capabilities and their satellites. So it's very tough for newcomers into the market to buy their 10, maybe 20 satellites, and as well buy their 10, 20, maybe 30 ground stations. So this market does not scale if all of these new operators need to buy their own antenna. So we see that it's a market where if we take the analogy of the cloud, something can be done. The second pain point that the market is facing is that if we take the analogy of the mobile phone connectivity, these days you have operators that can sell antenna time, but they are not. It's as if like T-Mobile or AT&T or Vodafold or others were just providing you a map of the location of the antenna, but not providing you any SIM card. And as we see that this is not scalable, like the market is as if like you to use your phone, you need it to basically know which frequency modulation protocols use to just send a WhatsApp and to point your phone towards like the nearby antenna and so knowing where they are and so on. So this does not scale. And what we want to do at SkynoP is basically solve these two issues. So the need of CAPEX and we're solving by providing a network of ground stations and we sell antenna time and antenna access rather than just selling the antenna. And the second thing that we are solving is basically this lack of end-to-end connectivity. So it's providing you, providing our customers basically the connectivity kits to put on board of its satellites to natively be connected to ground stations. First of all, it's fascinating to hear how you're disrupting just the ground station access market. That is fascinating on its own. And then also you're talking about sort of a really interesting differentiation between ground station access as a very basic thing and connectivity as a service, which is like a whole new paradigm. Can you tell me a bit more about that paradigm that you're developing and maybe what that looks like also for your customers? Yeah. So the angle that we believe that all of the new customers coming into orbit these days, they, I mean, back in the days they had like experts in launchers of satellites, of radiation, of thermal engineering, of software, and as well of radio frequency. So antennas, modems, radios. We see that as the market evolves, you no longer need when you launch satellites to have an expert of launchers because SpaceX is taking all of that for you, all of that expertise. And our dream is basically to have like in the future, when you launch a satellite or a constellation or other stuff, you don't need any radio frequency expert because we're going to provide to you the end-to-end connectivity. And we believe that when you launch a satellite or a constellation, you want to focus on your end customers. So if you take like images of the Earth in high-spec or digital or infrared or stuff, you want to know exactly what your end customer wants or like firemen detecting fires or like detecting like illegal phishing. If you launch like a debris removal, you want to have like AI and computer vision and like cameras on board of your satellites to take debris and remove them. And all of these applications you don't want and you don't need necessary with the SkyNOP offer, the radio frequency engineers and all of the-- to handle all of the complexity. So it's kind of like back in the analogy of the mobile phone connectivity. And so this is our vision for the market. We're not there yet. But our value proposition is basically to offer this brand network of antenna that is highly scalable. So within just like 10 months, we already succeed to access 15 antenna all over the world. That is like well enough to secure like two passes per orbit for satellites, which is like kind of like more than the current like state of the art of the market. And the second thing that we're providing, so it's not only the ground network, but it's this end-to-end connectivity. And this is thanks to our connectivity kids that we're developing. That's fantastic. And considering your company is still very new, that's an amazing vision to have. I feel like this is probably a good time to also introduce your partnership with AWS. Can you tell me a bit about how working with them has accelerated your go-to-market strategy? Yeah. So we did see how like complementary was the approach with AWS and we're extremely happy with this partnership for several reasons. We saw that AWS is seeking businesses where they can scale very strongly across hundreds of thousands of maybe millions of users. And when we zoom in in like the space business and like satellite business, we do see that you always have like very tiny discrepancies among like customers and it does not scale super well. And so we see how complementary we are with AWS because we take over AWS on this part because we know well the market and we have this radio frequency expertise that is the kind of the last mile towards like the D&C customers that we can take over. And so it's really complementary because we're relying on this huge network of 12 ground stations all over the world that is extremely beneficial and that would have taken years to build and operate. But we are adding this part of engineering and like business intelligence and business knowledge that AWS did not want necessary to invest in. And for us, I think it's like three good news for us because it gives us access to like a large amount of stations of antenna like very soon in our history. All of the process of the technical review by AWS engineers was extremely beneficial for us to grow in maturity very fast. And it's also like a trust that AWS is like providing to us in terms of commercial pipeline and like differentiator compared to our competition. I would imagine given what AWS does, Cloud also plays in here a little bit as well a lot. Can you tell me a bit more about that also? Yeah, so working with AWS, it's extremely beneficial because of the stations for the business we have. So they have like a sort of large ground antenna, so 5.4 meters antenna which is above the standard of the market. And then it's not only the antenna but it's all of the cloud suites that we can use that scales very well and that's extremely mature technology to handle. And so basically it's very easy for us to, based on this infrastructure, to focus on like the difficulty of like handling radio frequency, modems, radio and like adding this to our customers. Fantastic. You have a lot of different types of customers I would imagine. Tell me about them. This first type of customers that we're selling to are what we call satellite operators. So they're basically like players that needs to connect their satellites to retrieve the data from orbit and to their satellites. Among this first category of satellite operators, we would say there are like three types of players. The first ones are Earth observation satellite operators. So using their satellites to take pictures of the Earth to serve customers being in agriculture, in environments, in defense, in like a whole bunch of like markets. The second subcategory of satellite operators are more like connectivity and IoT internet of things or like telecommunications, constellation and operators wants to send their satellites to help people on the Earth to better connect to objects to other people and so on. So this is the second subcategory and the third category of satellite operators are all of the operators that wants to operate services in orbit. So basically like docking with other satellites, debris, removal, space manufacturing, all of this. So this is a big first category of people who wants our ground station or the ground station we can leverage to operate their satellites or constellations or being multiple satellites. The second category of customers that we help, we call them like platform providers. So it's basically the manufacturers of the satellites on the ground that sell the equipment, the hardware. And we see that the market these days is like we have these players that are specialized into this hardware, but when it comes to connectivity to how to choose the right antenna on board of the satellites to connect to antenna on the ground, they are usually suboptimized. So we can go to seek them and help them to maximize their basically their data rate or what we call the data budget. So it's the second type of customers that when we do see like that we bring a significant gain and like added value for these customers. Absolutely. It sounds like what you're doing is really a force multiplier and also just an optimizer. I'm using a lot of computer terms, but it makes a lot of sense given what the market needs and also where you all fit in. So that's it's just really fascinating to see what you're doing. When you think about the convergence of technologies in space cloud and connectivity as we've been talking about, what opportunities do you see there? I mean, especially where Sky Nippy fits in, there's got to be a lot there that you see really ample opportunity. Yeah, so we see like a rising need for doing like edge computing in space or like using pictures, but like it's still like very, very long and very costly to download all of the picture on our fence. And sometimes for some application, you need to treat the data on board of the satellites. We're not there yet because when you fly hardware, it needs to be resistance to radiation, to thermal temperature and so on. And we don't have so much of GPU, for example, over there. But we see that as we go, there are more and more applications and more and more hardware to be being developed to basically maximize the edge computing part and to do processing on board. This is very interesting for us because so potentially you will download less data. That's like T0. But most of the time we see that T0, you will download less data. But maybe when you have time, you will still download the entire picture. And in any case, we see that this Internet of Things and Edge Computing paradigm are always requiring more connectivity than less connectivity. Even though you treat data on the edge, it requires more frequency feedback to be physical. We'll be right back. Welcome back. It's Halloween and we're all getting pretty excited for the fun evening of trick-or-treats around the world and especially here in the US. But there are currently 13 humans in low Earth orbit and at least seven of them are looking to mark the holiday. Astronauts and cosmonauts who find themselves in space during the holidays have found their own unique way to celebrate the occasions. Trick-or-treaters don't easily come knocking at the International Space Stations from Hatch, but crew members aboard the orbiting lab still like to get into the Halloween spirit. In years past, either individually or as an entire crew, the crew often dress up in creative costumes and we have seen superheroes, minions, Star Wars characters, of course, pirates, and even wears Waldo on board the station. Astronauts will often design their own costumes for materials available aboard the orbiting lab. You got to love the resourcefulness. They've used oranges instead of pumpkins to carve jack-o-lanterns, and of course they've made Halloween crafts. You got to love it. And this year, Don Pettit posted a video of ice water melting like the Wicked Witch of the West, but we've yet to see the costumes for this year. What would you dress up as if you were in low Earth orbit? I got to wonder. That said, we still have very fond memories of Scott Kelly's Gorilla antics chasing Tim Peake through the facility. It's a great video. Maybe next year, Mission Control in Houston should all dress like Planet of the Apes, give the astronauts a real scare. Whatever you're wearing and however you're marking Halloween this year, if you're marking Halloween that all, we hope it's spooktacular and very spoopy fun. Happy Halloween. That's it for T-Minus for October 31st, 2024, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at 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. This episode was produced by Alice Carruth. Our associate producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Trey Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Ivan. Our executive editor is Brandon Karp. Simone Petrella is our president. Kier Kilpe is our publisher. And I'm your host, Maria Vermazes. Thanks for listening. Happy Halloween. 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