[MUSIC] Today is February 27th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] >> T-minus. >> 20 seconds to LLM. >> [INAUDIBLE] >> Go for the floor. [MUSIC] >> Live. >> Weatherstream has been awarded a $2 million phase two Ciber contract from the Office of Naval Research. To further develop its multi-model platform for environmental remote sensing. >> More. >> Lumen orbit has renamed itself as Star Cloud and has raised $10 million in new funding for its space-based data centers. >> Three million. >> Astroscale Japan has been awarded a 7.27 billion yen contract by Japan's Ministry of Defense to develop a responsive space system demonstration satellite prototype. >> Two. >> Varda's W-2 spacecraft lands in the Australian outback after completing its second mission. >> One. >> Intuitive Machines' LUNAR lander Athena is heading to the moon. [MUSIC] >> And our guest today is Colleen MacLeod Gardner, a commercial strategist and brand developer. And Colleen and I spoke about the crossover opportunities for the space industry and the need for good marketing. You can hear that chat after today's headlines. [MUSIC] >> And our guest today is Colleen MacLeod Gardner, a commercial strategist and brand developer. [MUSIC] >> Happy Thursday everybody. It's getting busy on the highway to our nearest natural satellite as IM2 becomes the third commercial mission heading to the moon this year. At 7.17 p.m. Eastern last night, a SpaceX Falcon 9 launched from the Kennedy Space Center, putting the Athena lunar lander on its planned trajectory towards the moon. The Athena lander is expected to descend to touchdown on a flat, mesa-like structure known as Mons Mouton on March 6th, just 100 miles from the moon's south pole. If they achieve the planned touchdown, it'll put the lunar probe closer to the south pole than any other spacecraft has yet attempted. And as I mentioned, it is the third lunar lander heading to the moon right now, times we live in, huh? Fireflies Blue Ghost is also expected to touch down on the lunar surface in the coming days. Both probes are part of NASA's commercial lunar payload services program, and both are carrying commercial and federal payloads. The third mission is ice-based Japan's resilience lander, which isn't expected to touch down until May. Athena's mission is the first to search for suspected ice from the moon's surface. On board, it has a hopper named Grace after software pioneer Admiral Grace Hopper, well-known in the cybersecurity community, and the mobile autonomous prospecting platform rover built by a company called Lunar Outpost. They will communicate with the Athena lander via cellular networking equipment provided by Nokia in a first-of-its-kind demonstration. Additionally, a tiny micro rover known as Yaoki, provided by Tokyo-based Diamond Corporation, will be dropped to the surface from the Athena lander. It'll provide close-up images of the lunar soil or regolith, and then beam them back to Earth through Athena. Athena is also carrying payloads for Lone Star data holdings, Columbia Sportswear, and the German Aerospace Center or DLR. Athena, by the way, was not the only payload on the Falcon 9 rocket that launched it. Astroforge's Odin asteroid prospector was released four minutes after Athena. NASA's Lunar Trailblazer satellite was then deployed about 20 seconds after that, followed a few seconds later by Epic Aerospace's Chimera Geo-1 Spacetug, and we wish them all the best of luck on their missions. Calling all Spaceballs fans, the Winnebago is back on Earth! Varda's W2 space capsule, which was launched on January 14th, has returned from its second mission in Leo. The capsule is carrying payloads for customers, including a spectrometer from the Air Force Research Laboratory, in addition to Varda's expanded pharmaceutical reactor. According to a post shared on social media at 5.52 am Pacific Time today, the W2 spacecraft successfully executed its final reentry burn and prepared to de-orbit. 24 minutes later, the capsule separated from the vehicle, and after another 17 minutes, the parachutes deployed and the capsule landed safely in the Australian outback. Varda says it will be recovered by their team tomorrow during daylight hours. A huge congratulations to all involved. Astroscale Japan has been awarded a 7.27 billion yen contract by Japan's Ministry of Defense to develop a responsive space system demonstration satellite prototype. The project includes the development and testing of a proto-flight model for a small geostationary demonstration satellite. The development and testing phase will run from March 2025 to March 2028. In the launch and operations phases, which will be managed under a separate contract, the satellite will demonstrate technologies to advance space domain awareness, space surveillance, intelligence gathering, and space operations capabilities. LumenOrbit has renamed itself as StarCloud, great name by the way, and has raised $10 million in the seed funding round for its space-based data centers, and the funding comes after December's announcement that the startup brought in $11 million from early investors. StarCloud is aiming to place a network of megawatt-scale computer servers in Earth orbit powered by grids of solar panels that could stretch as much as two and a half miles in width. StarCloud's 132-pound demonstrator satellite is due to be launched into low Earth orbit by this summer by, what else but, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, as part of the bandwagon 4 rideshare mission. And Weatherstream has been awarded a $2 million phase 2 super contract from the Office of Naval Research to further develop its multi-model platform for environmental remote sensing. The company's platform Spectrum enables rapid development of environmental algorithms from remote sensing data, supporting a wide range of applications including weather forecasting, atmospheric monitoring, and severe storm and hydro-media detection. The Office of Naval Research is hoping that the satellite company's platform can be used for cutting-edge meteorological use cases while reducing costs. [Music] And, NTK Senior Producer Alice Karuth has details on additional stories that didn't make it in today's Top 5. Alice? Thanks Maria. We always like to point out additional opportunities to read up on what's going on in the space industry. Today we have three additional stories included in our selected reading section of the show notes. One on Satelogix, data set now openly accessible on AWS. Details on Virgin Galactics Q4 and 4-year 2024 financial results. And an update on Etihad Sat. And remind us yet again Alice, where can we find those stories? As mentioned, links to those stories along with further reading on all the other stories mentioned throughout the show can be found in our show notes and on our website, space.ntuk.com, and click on this episode title. Hey T-minus crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership or group talent, T-minus can help. We would love to hear from you. Just send us an email at space@entuk.com, or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. [Music] [Music] Our guest today is Colleen MacLeod Garner, a commercial strategist and brand developer. Colleen and I spoke at SpaceCom 2025 about crossover opportunities for the space industry and the need for good storytelling in this industry. Let me tell you, I was very invested in this conversation. My mission is amplifying every industry, all industry needs a space strategy. So if I was in a room with, you know, whatever company and they were asking me about the ROI, I would say number one, the reason that we are going to space is for Earth. A lot of people don't know that. They don't know that, you know, they're banking, they're Uber, they're memory foam on their bed, was all space. The general public doesn't know the space for Earth benefit. I think we need a better job of messaging that, which goes back to sales and marketing. That's true. I think what's fascinating is you've got what I like to call the second Kennedy moment, where you have the head of, you know, the government, the head commander and chief saying we are doing this as priority one. That is going to move that cruise ship and everyone else will fall in line on that mission. That's right. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I think for many of us, we love space, it's great. It's an easy selling point for us. I'm thinking to myself, okay, why is it that we don't see more collabs from non space businesses, but flip side, I feel like if we have this conversation with people who it's not as evident to who are in the space industry, why is there hesitation from within the space world to also do those collaborations outside? You know what I mean? It's sort of like a two way thing. There's hesitation in both directions, but why? Because it just seems like a natural thing. It comes down to communication and there actually are some really talented people in our space side that are making those connections. I think there's a lot of meat on the bone still for a quote marketing gimmick. I don't even like to say that because it sounds cheap, but I mean, if you think about these multi million dollar marketing budgets that some of these companies have, they are always looking for the next innovative coolest sexiest thing. This is true. Right? Yeah. In order to refresh your brand, you innovator, you die. And so I think it's really just we need to have better communication, find the person in the haystack that's in charge of partnerships. That's it. There are some amazing people that I know personally that are doing those types of things and bringing more people into the ecosystem. Yeah. Yeah. I'm so curious. A conversation I've had a few times over the past few days here has been about how the space industry has so much to learn from other businesses. We don't need to reinvent how we do things because the medical community or the hospitality community has been doing some of these things for decades really well and space can learn from them. I'm curious if you could make things happen out of thin air right now. What would you like to see? Oh my gosh. You have so many great questions. I'm sorry. And it's also probably a really hard question to answer because I'm putting you on the spot for that. But if you could have your druthers, what would you want to see happen? Well, I mean, follow the money. Let's start there. I think we need to solve for that and even talking with a lot of these entrepreneurs, I help out with some incubators. I love entrepreneurs. I love them at every stage. I want to help them. I want to see them succeed. The issue that you run into a lot of things that I'm generally speaking. When you're dealing with people who are introverts, like a lot of scientists and engineers, there's a struggle to make people understand your widget. Very true. Very true. And furthermore, I think in the space ecosystem from what I have seen is that you've got this amazing widget. You've been successful with said widget. And then you promote, you promote, you promote. And people don't have business acumen or the business abilities or toolbox, I would say, to bring them to this profitability scalability that you need to do or iterate or whatever. So you need a team of, we need the brilliant scientists and engineers. We can't do it without you. But we also need the sales and marketing. And we need the business acumen, the strategy, the CFO. I completely know what you mean. Yes. And I think it's interesting. I completely agree with you. And it's a conversation that I know that I've had this conversation with my colleagues. It's to me sort of a lack of respect for what business functions can do. And I don't mean this to be mean to my engineering and science friends. But I know a lot of times they're like, "Well, my product is so brilliant. Why would I need someone to help me sell it? It should be self-evident how great and how life-changing and paradigm-shifting this thing is." It's like, I'm sure that's true. But if you don't know how to make a strong business case and communicate and do an elevator pitch first, the basics, people don't know about you. And that requires respecting what these roles do. I agree. And I think there's also understanding how important it is. And so how do you explain to said entrepreneurs, or said scientists, said engineer, that is the CFO or the CEO of a company to say, "Where's your sales and marketing team? What budget have you allocated to them?" And they are like, "Well, we don't need it. It's like, yes, you do." Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And again, it's like respecting that expertise. Absolutely. All of us on the comm side, we massively respect the expertise of our builder friends. But flip side, those of us who tell the stories, who talk to people who make those connections, that's a skill too. Let's respect that. As you mentioned, you work with a lot of entrepreneurs. So when you are coaching them, guiding them, what do you want them to know about building within the world, the space world, but also outside of it? I ask a lot of questions. I ask them challenging questions to get them to get themselves to the correct answer. Right? So if one of the accelerators I'm on is biotech. I know nothing about biotech. I love biotech. But if you're showing me a deck with an encyclopedia for your widget, like you lost completely and utterly. You need to break it down like I'm a kindergartener. Because if you are going back to what you said about the elevator pitch, if you can't tell me what you do in one sentence, you're dead in the water. Forget about the funding. Forget about all that stuff. I'm sure your protein is really cool. But what is that going to do for me? Absolutely. I'm sure people like yourself, you hear all these amazing business ideas all the time and it's very hard to sort of... There has to be something distinguishing there. There has to be that value proposition. If I'm using my correct term. You are correct. Yes, you are correct. Very good. I'm not a business person. Yes you are. You're using very business terms. I was like, yeah, I cannot do what you do though at all. I like stories like meeting people. But I could never... That's the hitch right there, friend. Storytelling. That's what I do. That is what it is. You know what? You're in sales sister. Own it. Oh my God. I'll take that. I'll take that. Alright, well Colleen, this has been really fun. I want to make sure that I sort of give you the table for our parting words. Anything you want to impart the audience with before we close out today? Well, thank you for listening. I hope that your ears aren't bleeding. No. And thank you for having me on the show. Of course. Thanks for coming. And I will just say this. I am so full of hope right now in this time. It is an amazing time to be alive. I mean seriously. And I think a lot... What I also would say is we stand on the shoulders of giants that came before and did all the hard things. And I would say respecting legacy and embracing innovation is where we're at. [Music] We'll be right back. [Music] Welcome back. Blue Origin has announced the next crew for its New Shepherds 31st mission and it's going to be one for the history books. And you'll probably be hearing about it also on entertainment news. That's because Blue has lined up an all-female crew that includes activist, journalist, educator, CEOs, oh yeah, and a big ol' pop star. To say that they're a powerhouse would be an understatement. This flight, by the way, is the first all-woman flight since the Soviet Union's Valentina Tereshkova's solo space flight in 1963. Let's just let that one sink in for a moment. Anyway, the crew for New Shepherds 31st mission includes Aisha Bell, Amanda Wynn, Gail King, Katie Perry, Kari-Ann Flynn, and Jeff Bezos' fiance, Lauren Sanchez, who brought the whole mission together. Lauren says she's honored to lead a team of explorers on a mission that will challenge their perspectives of Earth, empower them to share their own stories, and create lasting impact that will inspire generations to come. My goodness, Oprah's Gail in space. What? I gotta admit, I did not see the Katie Perry announcement coming. I mean, what a dark horse. Are we going to hear her roar? Or is she going to launch like a firework? Yes, there are three song titles in there. Sorry, you know, you were thinking it too. And whether or not the launch, which is expected to happen in the coming weeks, is used as a backdrop to a new music video or publicity stunt, it's regardless going to be an epic performance. These women are all incredible in their own rights, and we suggest you go and check them out by following the link in our show notes. Hint, Amanda Wynn is an absolutely incredible human being. We applaud Blue Origin for their empowering mission and hope to see a lot of coverage leading up to this amazing light. Go, ladies. [Music] And that's it for T-minus for February 27th, 2025, 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. N2K's senior producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Trey Hester, with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpey is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
