Today is March 13, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. T-minus. Twenty seconds to L-O-N. T-minus. Open aboard. Five. NASA's SpaceX Crew-10 is targeting no earlier than 7.03 pm Eastern time on Friday, March 14 to launch to the ISS. Four. Thales Alenia Space and Telespasio to design and develop the space segment of the navigation system for ESA's Moonlight Lunar Communications and Navigation Services program. The Norwegian Space Agency has signed a contract with ISAR Aerospace to launch its Arctic Ocean Surveillance Program satellites. Two. Spaceforge has been awarded the UK's first ever license for in-space advanced manufacturing. ESA's Hera performs a close flyby of Mars and Deimos. Our guest today is Alvaro Alonso Ruiz, co-founder and COO at LeanSpace. Alvaro and I spoke about software in space and the need for drastic modernization. It's a great chat if I can say so myself, so join us after today's Intel Briefing. Happy Thursday, everybody. I hope you're having a good one. We're kicking off with an update from the European Space Agency's Hera mission for planetary defense. The spacecraft, which launched in October of last year, made the first use of its payload for scientific purposes beyond the Earth and the Moon. It activated a trio of instruments and imaged the surface of the red planet as well as the face of Deimos, which is the smaller and more mysterious of Mars' two moons. The images are quite stunning, and we absolutely implore you to follow the link in our show notes to see them for yourself. Hera was able to image Deimos from as close as 1,000 km away, practically next door, surveying the opposite side of the tidally locked moon from the red planet. Those images have now been used to create a video of the dust-covered Deimos, which is believed to be a leftover of a giant impact on Mars, or perhaps also a captured asteroid. Other instruments gathered a black-and-white 1020 x 1020 pixel image captured by the asteroid framing camera, and Hera's HyperScout H HyperSpectral imager gathered a visual in a range of colors beyond the limits of the human eye to help characterize mineral makeup. Hera, on her carefully designed journey, came as close as 5,000 km out from Mars. The planet's gravity shifted the spacecraft's trajectory towards its final destination (you might remember this name, dimorphos), and the larger Deimos asteroid that it orbits around. This maneuver shortened Hera's journey time by many months and saved a substantial amount of fuel. Its main mission is to gather close-up data about the dimorphos asteroid, which was impacted by NASA's Revenge of the Dinosaurs Dart spacecraft in 2022. It's hoped that data collected by Hera will help turn asteroid deflection into a well-understood and potentially repeatable technique. Let's go over to the UK now, and Spaceforge has been awarded the UK's first-ever license for in-space advanced manufacturing. The UK Civil Aviation Authority has given approval for the launch of Forge Star-1, which is Spaceforge's in-orbit manufacturing satellite. The company is aiming to demonstrate a scalable, returnable, and relaunchable platform for manufacturing high-performance semiconductor materials in space. The Forge Star-1 is scheduled to launch later this year, and the license marks a significant milestone as the spacecraft is set to become the first UK ISAM satellite in orbit. A huge congratulations to the Spaceforge team! The Norwegian Space Agency assigned a contract with ISAR Aerospace to launch its Arctic Ocean Surveillance Program satellites. ISAR Aerospace's launch vehicle Spectrum plans to transport two vehicles to sun-synchronous orbit from the company's dedicated launch complex at Andoja Space Port launch site in Norway. The launch is not expected until 2028, with ISAR Aerospace currently preparing for its first test flight from Norway. Teleslénia Space assigned a contract with Telespasio to design and develop the space segment of the navigation system and satellite navigation infrastructure for ISA's Moonlight Lunar Communications and Navigation Services Program. Telespasio is the lead contractor on ISA's Moonlight Program, aiming to create a satellite constellation orbiting the Moon, and is designed to provide advanced communication in navigation services. Teleslénia Space will be responsible for the design, development, and deployment of four lunar elliptical orbit navigation satellites. Additionally, the company will develop key elements of the Earth mission segment and oversee the complete testing and validation of the first satellite navigation system orbiting the Moon. And we're sure that many of you tuned in last night to watch the launch of Crew 10 from Florida only to find that the launch had been scrubbed 40 minutes before liftoff. Mission managers decided to wave off a launch attempt on Thursday, March 13, due to high winds and precipitation forecasted in the flight path of Dragon. NASA's SpaceX Crew 10 is now targeting no earlier than 7.03 pm Eastern time on Friday, March 14. The launch for crew members to the International Space Station. It'll be a happy Pi Day indeed. And that concludes our intelligence briefing for today. And 2K Senior Producer, Al's Crews, what extra stories do we have in the selected reading section of our show notes? Maria, today we have four additional links for you to read at your leisure. A couple on partnerships between Telesat Orange in Space Norway, SkyFight in Earth Space, Airtel and SpaceX's Starlink, and a financial announcement from Spire Global. And a reminder that those links, in addition to being in our show notes, can also be found at space.ntk.com. Just click on this episode title for more. Hey T-Minus Crew, if your business is looking to grow your voice in the industry, expand the reach of your thought leadership or recruit talent, T-Minus can help. We'd like to hear from you. Just send us an email at space@ntk.com or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. Our guest today is Alvaro Alonso Ruiz, co-founder and COO at Lean Space. And I started by asking Alvaro what attracted him to the space industry and to start his company. What I saw at the space industry is amazing, especially this new space movement, a lot of new companies spawning, doing amazing stuff. So on the one hand I was very inspired by all the innovation going on, and on the other hand I was appalled by the state of software in the industry, especially because I had seen software in other verticals. And when I saw that space missions, they were state of the art in many technologies, but in software they were stuck decades in the past. I was amazed, I couldn't believe it. So that was kind of the driver for co-founding Lean Space. Tell me a little bit about what you've seen and maybe why are things the way they are? Well, the space industry is inherently risky. So a lot of decisions are made to minimize risks, which makes sense, right? Especially because in the previous decades space missions were done by engineers, for engineers, if you know what I mean. All the missions were kind of R&D in a way. Every mission was a one-off. They were reinventing the wheel over and over again. Everything was a custom implementation. There was massive redundancy being put in the spacecraft and also in the ground. And so they were trying to minimize risks all across. They were extremely expensive missions. They took forever. So when finally you launched that satellite, nothing could fail. And it made sense in the past. But now it doesn't make sense anymore. You see, for example, very successful companies like SpaceX, they operate in a completely different manner. They actually run their business as a software business. They launch a lot of satellites and some of them fail, but most of them succeed and they have very quick turnaround. They innovate constantly. It's like in software development, you work in sprints. You work with close feedback loops. You don't do a waterfall approach. You do a agile approach. This is exactly the concept. And still in the space industry, while these kind of agile development methodologies have been around for over 20 years, the space industry still operates waterfalls. So you have missions that are defined at the outset. Every single detailed requirement is carved in stone. And only then you start development. And then nothing can change. But of course, things change. Because when you have a mission that lasts for years, requirements will change. So then things start to change. And then it's chaos all across because introducing changes in a waterfall process is very complex. So what space companies have not realized is that they cannot keep on running hardware businesses because every company in the world is a software business. If you use software to deliver a service to your customers, if you use software to manage your paychecks, you use software to do your planning, to manage your emails. You are a software company. You just have assets that do things. But you run your business through software. And you have to think as a software business. But in space, we are hardware focused. And that's a limitation. Yeah. That's the thing that I'm curious about. As I mentioned to you before we started recording, I came from cybersecurity. So software is the world that-- and when I started doing this job, the differentiation I often heard was, well, that's bits. We're talking atoms. We're making physical things. We can't do that kind of thing here. Is that just a mental limitation? Is that just something-- I mean, obviously they're different. I mean, I'm not saying they're not. But a lot of the pushback I've heard is we just can't do those things. It's just not possible in the physical space. Do you buy that? Do you feel that that's not valid? Yeah. Of course not. Yeah, yeah. Of course-- no, of course not. Like all the industries across the world, they're digitalizing. I mean, this concept of digital transformation is a thing. And even like the very aging industries, like banking, for example, they are undergoing this digital transformation because they have realized the risks of staying anchored in the past are worse than the risks of actually implementing and introducing new technologies into their businesses. I think the problem in space is the mindset. Like everyone says, space is hard. It is? Or are we making it hard? Because something is yes. Some things no. For example, today, I know of a constellation of Earth observation satellites, which is operated using Windows 95. Not kidding. So can you imagine-- I mean, you have a background in cybersecurity. Can you imagine the risks these people are taking? It's insane. And when you talk to them and you say, hey, why don't you use-- you can migrate your control center into a cloud native, cybersecurity infrastructure, resilient. And they say, no, no, that's risky. Really? You're operating a system that has not maintained since 20 years. It's really frustrating. A few weeks ago, I was speaking at an event. I was on stage. And it was a panel on artificial intelligence, of course, AI. Of course, yeah. Everyone talks about AI. And it was the third time I was on stage talking about how can we leverage AI in the space industry. And it was extremely frustrating because it's like, how can we leverage AI if we are using technologies from the '70s when we're using these connected systems that don't talk to each other, when operators are sending commands manually, literally typing the commands and sending them manually to spacecraft. You cannot use AI. We've missed a technological step. So first, you need an infrastructure that connects everything together. So you have all your data harmonized, standardized, usable. So that with this data, you can actually train your AI models. And then after the outset of the AI algorithms, you need actionable insights that you can actually action. So you need a place where you bring it back. You bring back this output. And you can do something with it. So you need this infrastructure that enables you to connect data in and out. And this doesn't exist in the space industry. Very, very few companies have something like this. They all have distinct systems, different technologies, incompatible. It doesn't work. So that was actually the trigger of me starting to be more vocal about the inherent limitations we see in the space industry. No one is doing anything about it. So I'm trying to step up and change things. I think for folks who are outside of the space ecosystem, there is that general assumption that, well, space is either really, really behind or really, really advanced one or the other or both at the same time. But I don't know if there's that pipeline of talent going to the space industry from the software side. That's a whole other conversation. But I'm so curious about, as you said, that it's a mindset issue, how we go about shifting that. I think there's so much to be explored there. Let me answer first to a comment you just made. Sure. So, software talent entering the space industry, because this is a question that was asked in this last AI panel. And the question is that this is part of the problem, because the space industry is plagued by aerospace engineers, not by software developers. So when a software developer joins the industry, and instead of working like in APIs or like, you know, microservices or like AI, they have to maintain code written in Fortran in the 70s. I'm not kidding. This is the case. I know. I believe it. Yeah. We don't have a hard developer, though. Yeah. We don't have good software talent entering the industry. All the companies we work with, the people writing the ground software are typically aerospace engineers. They don't know how to code. They are typically reducing libraries and things from way back, because they're proven, they're validated, like open source. There's so many open source tools in the industry that people use. There's a huge risk you open open source libraries. Some of them are right. Some of them, they're not, because, you know, they might have a bug that someone introduced during the 90s, and no one is maintaining this. No one knows, and no one will know. It's a huge risk. So technical debt. Yeah. Technical debt is a huge problem. I was going to say, I'm imagining a software engineer looking for a really exciting job and the prospect of going into facing what you just mentioned. They have a lot of options. I'm not sure they'd want to take that on. I don't know how one fixes that. But anyway, I wanted to hear your thoughts. What do we do? It's not about me. It's about you. The first thing we have to do is educate the market. That's what I'm trying to do, because, I mean, the problem is that it's a lack of knowledge. It's a lack of knowledge that actually modern software technologies reduce risk. They reduce costs. They reduce delays. There's a massive advantage that people need to understand. That's the first thing, changing the minds. The second thing is that we need phased transitions, because we cannot just, like, disconnect a control-centered flying satellite and connect another one. It doesn't work. We need a middleware layer that connects legacy systems with cloud-based applications, kind of an integration platform. And that's what we're doing at Lean Space, for example. We have an integration platform that can connect to all the hardware, all the different legacy software systems, and you can build applications with all this data that has been centralized. It also enables to break down monolithic architectures into microservices. And then the third thing I would say is, like, most of the systems in the space industry are based on premise, because the cloud sounds dangerous or insecure, or public is like, "Security of my data." And actually, a lot of times, like, cloud providers have much better security than you have in your own basement. And some missions, of course, they need to be regapped because of obvious reasons, but some don't need to be. So I think adopting hybrid cloud approaches and gradually migrate functionality as we're comfortable with or as the mission requires makes sense. So I think that's how I would take it. And there are technologies out there that enable this transition, but the first step is actually willing to do so. We'll be right back. Welcome back. Hey Space Cadets, the night sky has a rare, maybe kind of creepy, treat for us tonight. A blood moon. A total lunar eclipse will occur, and the moon will be cast in a deep, coppery red hue. And the eclipse will be observable from the Earth's western hemisphere, and will start in most places this evening, with totality expected in the early hours of tomorrow, on Pi Day, no less. A total lunar eclipse is when the moon is completely in the Earth's shadow, and it takes on a reddish hue as the only sunlight that reaches the moon has to first pass through the Earth's atmosphere. It's a phenomenon known as Rayleigh Scattering, coming into play there. Colors of sunlight that are associated with longer wavelengths scatter less, and are able to make it around the Earth to reach the moon. While shorter wavelengths, colors scatter everywhere else, and never make it to the moon. So, now you can explain it when someone asks you why it's red during a total eclipse. We've included a link to see what time the eclipse occurs where you are. So send us your pictures if you're lucky enough to see it. Visit for T-minus for March 13, 2025, brought to you by N2K Cyber Wire. 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 Elliot Peltzman and Tre Hester, with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Iben. Peter Kilpe is our publisher, and I'm your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We will see you tomorrow. T-minus. [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
