DIU selects new companies for the Hybrid Space Architecture project.

Today is May 13th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. Ravada Space Networks has signed an agreement with Q-Con to power network expansion and digital transformation across Africa and beyond. AST Space Mobile has reported financial results for Q1. Crossbow Systems has raised $105 million in a Series B funding round. The US Space Force Space Systems Command has selected ARIA Space and SPINX Defense to each develop and deploy a secure cloud-based joint antenna marketplace prototype. The Defense Innovation Unit has selected 12 companies to join its effort to build a secure network of military and commercial communications satellites. Our guest today is Suzanne Haig, Maxar US Government General Manager. I spoke to Suzanne about Maxar's Raptor system, which creates 3D maps, so stick around to learn more about that later in the show. Happy Tuesday, everybody. Let's dive into today's Intel Briefing, shall we? And we have a slurry of US military contract news to start us off with. First up, the Defense Innovation Unit has selected 12 companies to join its effort to build a secure network of military and commercial communications satellites. The IU's Hybrid Space Architecture Project aims to integrate civil, commercial, and military space assets into one integrated architecture to provide the warfighter with asymmetric awareness and improved decision-making at the edge. The IU says the project has the potential to increase network resilience by employing multi-path routing of communications to optimize data transport and mitigate adverse effects caused by weather or other obstructions. The IU awarded new contracts to Capella Space, Edge Cortex, UTEL-SAT America Corp. plus one-web technologies, Fairwinds Technologies, AST Space Mobile, Illumina Computing Group, Lockheed Martin Space, Map Large, SES Government Solutions, SkyCorp, SkyFi, Ursa Space Systems, and ViASAT. Get all that? They will join existing HSA performers. Here's another list for you. Illyria Technologies, Amazon Web Services, Amazon Kuiper, Andoril, Astronis Space, Atlas Space Operations, Enveil, Google, Palantir, Planet Labs Federal, Microsoft, and SpiderOak. The project is building the Technical and Programmatic Foundation to pilot an operational hybrid commercial and government space architecture by 2026. The US Space Force Space Systems Command has selected Aurea Space and Sphinx Defense to each develop and deploy a secure cloud-based joint antenna marketplace prototype. The prototype, known as JAM, will connect satellite operations centers to commercial and government owned antennas in support of US and Allied lethal fighting forces that contribute to ensuring the nation's security in from and to space. The contracts are worth a combined value of $17.6 million, with Aurea receiving $8.1 million, while Sphinx will receive $9.5 million. The companies will each develop a JAM prototype, which will demonstrate the core cloud-based capabilities to support an enterprise commercial solution with an emphasis on scalability. Space Systems Command is calling the award a "pivotal collaboration" between government and commercial industry aimed at enhancing scheduling flexibility, improving system resiliency, and ensuring robust support for current and future space operations at speed and scale. Crossbow Systems has raised $105 million in a Series B funding round. The strategic portion of the round was led by Lockheed Martin. Crossbow and Lockheed Martin have entered into a strategic agreement allowing Lockheed Martin to accelerate Crossbow as a new independent supplier of solid rocket motors and other services for their existing and future programs. Crossbow plans to open a Texas Energetics campus located just south of Austin. The new facility will utilize the company's advanced manufacturing of solid, propellant technology. AST SpaceMobile has reported their financial results for Q1. The space-based cellular network provider reported cash, cash equivalence, and restricted cash of $874.5 million at the end of the quarter. They say they anticipate orbital launches once every two months on average during 2025 and 2026. The first block-to-bluebird satellites are expected to ship in Q2, with orbital launch scheduled during July. AST says it plans to activate initial cellular broadband capabilities across the United States, Europe, and Japan with AT&T, Rakuten, Verizon, and Vodafone. And Ravada Space Networks has signed an agreement with Qcon to power network expansion and digital transformation across Africa and beyond. Qcon is a South African satellite internet provider, and they plan to use Ravada's OuterNet to strengthen data networks in Africa and offer secure connections for industries like banking that need high-level cybersecurity. Ravada's OuterNet plans to provide secure service that aims to improve network performance and offer new business opportunities with multi-gigabit speeds and global coverage. And that is it for today's Intel Briefing, and 2K Senior Producer Alice Carruth has more on the other stories that we are keeping an eye on. Thanks Alice. Maria, we have included two additional links today in the selected reading section of our show notes. The first is on an education partnership between the Space Development Agency and the University of North Dakota, and the other is a story on Hungary's return to space. Yes, and they have announced not going on the AXIA mission coming up, and please remind us where we can find those links again. We include links to all the original sources of all the stories we mentioned throughout the show in our show notes, which can also be found on our website space.intuk.com. Just click on the episode title. Hey T-minus crew, if you are just joining us, be sure to follow T-minus Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. And also if you could do us a favor, share the intel with your friends and coworkers. Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday, maybe show three friends or coworkers this podcast. The reason we ask is because a growing audience is the most important thing for us, and we would honestly really love your help as part of the T-minus crew. So if you find T-minus useful, maybe please share the show so other professionals like you can find it. Thank you, it means a lot to me and all of us here at T-minus. Our guest today is Suzanne Haik, Maxar US Government General Manager. I caught up with Suzanne at the Space Symposium to discuss their new Raptor Program. I'm Suzanne Haik. I'm a Senior Vice President and General Manager of the US Government Business at Maxar. So I oversee all of our US government work. I've been at Maxar about two years. Prior to that, I spent about a decade at Palantir Technologies. So really have a background in defense, intelligence, technology, and that's really actually what drew me to Maxar, kind of bringing my background in defense tech to this company and this mission. That's awesome. It's got an incredible legacy too. So it's a great company to bring that to. You all have some really interesting news with Raptor. This really caught my attention when I saw it. Tell me a bit about Raptor. What is it? Yeah. So why don't I start with sort of the problem? Like why did we develop this? Sure, yeah, sure, sure. If you want. So if you think about sort of where modern warfare is going and the proliferation of drones and autonomous vehicles and UAVs, all of those are guided with precision GPS capabilities. And that's really important when you're thinking about what they're doing and kind of the payloads that they're carrying, the accuracy. But as we're using more drones and UAVs, our enemies are becoming much more sophisticated. So our enemies are figuring out ways to use electronic warfare, spoofing, GPS jamming to stop these drones from hitting their targets. So enter Raptor, right? So we see this problem. How do you navigate in a GPS-denied environment? And Raptor is a software suite that can be deployed onto any platform. It's actually platform agnostic. So deployed onto any drone and it allows you to do navigation in a GPS-denied environment. So it's interesting also for Maxar because what it does is build on our 3D maps. So we take our satellite imagery and we're able to turn those into very high-resolution 3D maps. So all Raptor needs is basically the drone's camera combined with our almost 100 million square kilometers of high-resolution 3D and it can use that to navigate. Is this globally available in terms of where there's just certain regions or how does that, where is that working? Yeah, our 3D is pretty much globally available. And so when we've already been doing test flights with Raptor both here in the US and internationally. So because it's platform agnostic, we're also testing it with a lot of different types of drones. Oh, that's really interesting. One of the things that really stood out to me, and this is admittedly perhaps a perception versus reality thing, is software is not usually the first thing I think of when I think of Maxar. So I was really fascinated by that play. Now again, this may not be accurate, but that's just my perception. Tell me a bit about this being a software play. I just thought that was really, really interesting. Yeah, so you're right. A lot of times when people think of Maxar, they think of imagery. They think of pixels. And that's something that Maxar has been doing very successfully for over 20 years. Supporting the US government, supporting commercial companies, building out base maps, 3D maps, using our imagery for those more foundational use cases. Going forward, we're thinking about how do we transition to think about more operational and tactical use cases, and how do we use our imagery and our data in more mission solutions and outcomes. So I talked about 3D in terms of kind of using our 3D data to build out this Rafter software suite. But we can also use our 3D data in a lot of different ways. So we support an Army program where our 3D data is the base foundation to do modeling and simulation and training. So before a soldier goes out and does a mission or an operation, they need to practice. And they need to go into a virtual environment and practice. And our 3D data can help enable that. So it's a very different way that you can think about the 3D data being used kind of in preparation, mission rehearsal. There's other things that we've also been seeing demand for. So we talked a bit about Raptor from an operational and tactical use case. There's also, we're seeing a lot of interest, especially in the US government, for use cases like site monitoring. So wanting to be able to have both a persistent understanding of particular locations, but also what's going on, patterns of life, object detection, change detection. So in order to do that, you obviously need imagery, but you also need AI models and software and technology in order to identify what is at that site, what's changed, alert a user so that they can actually make a decision. That makes me wonder about commercial applications for Raptor. Because as you've been talking, I mean, government customers, it sort of almost goes without saying it makes a lot of sense for them. Thoughts on commercial applications here? Yeah, we are seeing interest in the commercial market, as well as civil use cases and kind of humanitarian use cases. So any environment, I think where you need to have drones, there's probably also other commercial delivery type use cases. Really anywhere where you have a drone and you're going to have potentially some sort of GPS interference, which could be probably nefarious in a warfighting environment and maybe just natural in kind of a commercial environment. That's fascinating. Anything else about Raptor that you want to share? I feel like we've covered quite a bit of it, but I just want to see if there's anything I missed that you wanted to make note of. What's interesting, as I said, about Raptor is sort of where it shows, I think, where Maxar is going and how we're able to take our data, our base maps, our imagery and create new capabilities off of them. And I think what's interesting too about Raptor is it sort of plays into where I think a lot of the US government is going, is thinking about sort of this digital battlefield, right? How do you both use software and technology, but also create sort of a digital understanding of what you're doing and where you're going? We'll be right back. Welcome back. Now I want you to imagine two spacecraft 150 meters apart dancing in perfect harmony around the Earth. No strings, no manual controls, just pure autonomous coordination. Does that sound like science fiction to you? Well, the European Space Agency's Proba 3 mission has turned this into a science fact. The coronagraph and the occultor satellites have achieved a groundbreaking feed, maintaining millimeter level precision in formation flying. Move over, blue angels, under birds. The occultor led the dance, casting a shadow with its 1.4 meter disk. The coronagraph followed, staying perfectly aligned within this shadow to study the sun's elusive corona. The setup is allowing scientists to observe solar phenomena without waiting for natural eclipses. But precision like this does not come easy. The satellites are using a combination of technologies that include wide angle and narrow angle cameras, flashing LED lights, and a fine lateral and longitudinal sensor. It's a laser system that ensures that they're in sync down to the millimeter. And let's not forget the shadow position sensor, an onboard algorithm that ensures the coronagraph stays within the occultor's shadow by measuring light intensity around its aperture. It is a little bit like having an internal GPS, but for shadows. This mission isn't just a technological marvel, it is a leap forward in space exploration. And by mastering autonomous formation flying, ESA is paving the way for future missions that could involve multiple satellites working together as one giant observatory. And that would be super neat. [Music] That's it for T-minus for May 13th, 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 are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Tre Hester with original music by Elliot Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpie is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] [Music] T-minus. [Music] (birds chirping) [BLANK_AUDIO]