[MUSIC] Today is May 22nd, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. [MUSIC] The US Space Force is expecting to lose 14% of its civilian workforce. >> Four. >> Redwire has been awarded a contract by Space Tech to provide Avionics technology for ESA's next generation gravity mission satellites. >> Three. >> Europe's Cassini Business Accelerator Program has selected 20 new businesses for the latest cohort. >> Two. >> The UAE's Rashid Two Rover will join Firefly Aerospace's second lunar mission in 2026. >> One. >> Don Aerospace's Aurora spacecraft has been offered for direct sale to customers with deliveries expected in 2027. >> Three more. [MUSIC] >> Our guest today is Steve Luzensky, President of the Aero Space Village. Steve recently participated in HAC SpaceCon and shares with us his experiences at that event. It was at Kennedy Space Center, by the way, very cool. And the growing awareness of vulnerabilities in Space Tech. Join me for that chat later in the show. [MUSIC] Imagine if you will, if you could, buying a space plane just like you might buy an airplane if you have the funds for that anyway. Well, that is the business model that Don Aerospace is offering. The Aurora spacecraft, designed to fly beyond the Carmen line, has been offered for direct sale to customers. It is expected to be the fastest and highest flying aircraft ever to take off from a conventional runway. Here's what Don's CEO, Stefan Powell, presented to the Global Spaceport Alliance earlier today. >> So clearly, the airline model presents us with a far more scalable model for transportation and one that we would really like to draw on. And so that's really where we draw a lot of our inspiration for how we want to bring space flight to the world and how we built Aurora. Ultimately, this is an aircraft with the performance of a rocket, not a rocket with wings. That is to say, reliability, reusability, and ultimately, scalability are not afterthought. They are things that are baked in from day one to enable this airline model. When you really boil down to what does that mean in terms of technical decisions, it means we have highly redundant systems, say, failure modes, just like you have on an aircraft. This vehicle is pilotable. It has lots of autonomous features on board. The vehicle can essentially fly itself, but especially for certification reasons, it's much, much simpler and more scalable to be pilotable. You can fly very frequently. We've demonstrated six-hour turnaround times. Four-hour turnaround times is absolutely achievable. And we use common infrastructure. We fly out of existing airports. We don't have to build a new dedicated launchpad with dedicated facilities every time we want to launch from a new spot. So when can we expect Aurora Space Plains in an airport or space port near you? The company says that deliveries are expected as early as 2027. No details yet on how much it'll set you back, though. How much do you think it would cost to purchase a suborbital space plane? You know, just asking for a friend. Firefly Aerospace has signed a new agreement with the United Arab Emirates' Mohammed bin Rashid Space Center to deliver the Emirates Lunar Missions Rashid-2 rover to the far side of the moon on Firefly's Blue Ghost Lander. The rover is aiming to demonstrate lunar surface mobility on the far side of the moon and will use various materials on its wheels to evaluate their durability when exposed to lunar dust. The data collected will help guide the development of future lunar technologies such as spacesuits, habitats, and other critical infrastructure. The vehicle will also study the moon's plasma, geology, and thermal conditions in support of future in situ resource utilization. The Rashid-2 rover will join Firefly's second lunar mission in 2026. In addition to payloads from Australia, the European Space Agency and NASA as part of the Commercial Lunar Payload Services Initiative. The Cassini Business Accelerator Program, which is an initiative of the European Commission and the European Union Agency for Space Program, has selected 20 new businesses for the latest round. This is the fifth cohort of the program and the companies will follow a six-month program, which will run from June to November of this year. The Cassini Business Accelerator aims to empower startups to scale their business development and sales through a dynamic mix of strategic initiatives, and those include direct access to investor matchmaking and exclusive industry events, as well as expert-led training and mentoring that provide valuable guidance and support along their innovation path. Among the selected cohort is Atmos Space Cargo, who just completed their first re-entry demonstration. Not bad. The final list can be found by following the link in our show notes. Redwire has been awarded a contract by Spacetech to provide avionics technology for the European Space Agency's Next Generation Gravity Mission Satellites, known as the NGGM Satellites, the spacecraft RISA's contribution to a planned NASA and ISA Earth Observation Satellite Constellation. The constellation will be known as MAGIC, that's a pretty nice acronym, which stands for Mass Change and Geophysics International Constellation. MAGIC will combine four satellites, two NGGM satellites developed through ISA, and two GRACE satellites developed through NASA, and the German Aerospace Center, all to measure fluctuations in Earth's gravitational field. The planned constellation will provide data for water management applications, including monitoring droughts, floods, ice melts, and sea level rise. Redwire's wholly-owned subsidiary Redwire Space NV will design and build the engineering qualification model of the spacecraft's instrument control unit. And in unfortunate news, the United States Chief of Space Operations General Chance Saltzman set on Tuesday to the Senate Armed Service Committee hearing that the military branch is expecting to lose 14% of its civilian workforce. The reduction surpasses the United States administration's 10% target, and the loss, which amounts to about 780 people, is due to the Trump administration's effort to dramatically cut the federal workforce. Saltzman says the early retirement and voluntary resignation programs have had a "out-sized impact" on the US military branch. Civilians currently account for around 5,600, or more than one-third, of the service's 17,000 people. Saltzman says the loss of civilians is "a large hit to the United States' space force." And you can read more about Saltzman's comments and more on all the other stories mentioned throughout the show by following the links in our show notes. And 2K senior producer Alice Carruth has more on the additional stories that we've added in there for you today. Alice? Maria, we've added two additional links in that selected reading section of our show notes for you to enjoy. One is the announcement on the crew selection for Blue Origin's next new Shepard tours and flight, and the other is on the mysterious Project Bleat in Florida. We're still none the wiser about the company developing on Merritt Island. I mean, you know, there's a few names that come to mind. Yes, but which one? It's like the plot of an Adifer Christi novel. Minus the murders, of course. Those links can also be found on our website, space.intuk.com. Scroll down on the home page until you find today's episode link. 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 love to hear from you. Send us an email at space@intuk.com, or send us a note through our website so we can connect about building a program to meet your goals. Today's guest is Steve Lusensky, president of the Aerospace Village. It's been a while since we caught up, and I wanted to hear about the latest with the Aerospace Cybersecurity Specialists. The village has been incredibly busy. We, as a village, have attended more conferences already this year than I think we have in any other year. We shifted our focus towards not just the larger conferences. DEF CON, of course, is one of our highlights, because that's a primary place to meet our audience, but smaller B-sides events where people want to hear more about what's going on in aviation and space information security. So, and then another byproduct as we're growing and people knowing who we are and what we're doing is we get invited to things like HACS-BaseCon. And the first day was very specific, a small group of speakers, and I was very excited. My talk was selected by co-presenter Henry Danielson, who's a, he kind of does everything, but he's a professor at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, and we did a presentation talking about what the Aerospace Village is, how we got started, how it connects to space, and that was one of the talks on day one on Tuesday. And then the other two days, Wednesday and Thursday, were like a B-sides where you had a collection of villages out there, and you had other speakers and vendors showing things off and getting to go through and all of that in a pretty interesting venue, of course. Yeah, I was going to say the venue, we should probably mention where this was, because it bears mentioning. Oh, yeah, absolutely. So HACS-BaseCon, conveniently enough, was at Kennedy Space Center, and this was the third year that they've had it. And I know we've had different speakers that are connected with the village, but this was our first year being there in person, and both in our speaking capacities, the folks that we had, like I mentioned, Henry and I, our lead for all things space, Jacob Oakley. He spoke a couple of times there about the specific venue that was at the Space Center on day one, was a building, a conference center, the Astronaut Memorial Foundation hosts. And they've actually, the conference has outgrown that center, so they had a jam packed on day one for the initial talks that were there. And the thing about that was you walk a short walk on the sidewalk, and you are in the rocket park. You are right there where they have the Atlantis on display, you know, simulators, all the things you can do as a tourist, that was part of your badge and your entry for coming to day one of the conference. The second day was just down the road at a conference center, so it was still nearby, and that was like a B-Sides. Like I said, it was really nice in the sense that there was more room, but it was still small. You could talk to people, you could talk to the speakers that were up on stage, and just the cross-section of people that they had that was great. What do we mean by a B-Sides conference? Depending on your background, right? So if you've been to DEF CON, massive event, if you've been to RSA, even more massive event, you've got so much territory to cover. There's only so many places you can go, but they're great because they're huge and there's tons of content. B-Sides, which is in the hacker community, smaller events, smaller venues. We, the village, we focused on B-Sides events this year as one option. There's B-Sides Charm up in Baltimore that we've been to previous years. We've been to B-Sides, New York City, CactusCon, B-Sides, Northern Virginia, just a number of things that when they invite the villages in, like ourselves, we can come in and have either speakers or we can bring content. And that's what we did at this event. So it's smaller, I'll say 800 because I think that was the limit for the conference center at Kennedy Space Center. And so this was probably around the same 800, but more room at the conference center they had. And you've got all variety. We're down there at Cape Canaver, right? So you've got Tampa, Orlando nearby. You've got colleges nearby. We met students from Central Florida, University of Central Florida, South Florida, University of Florida, Embry Riddles right there, just all variety coming in and talking to us. Like I said, in addition to our speaking, the activities and the demonstrations that we brought to show off. Yeah, and the wonderful thing about B-Sides conference is like they're very regional, but they're very practitioner focused. So that's the place you go to learn. If you want to be the person doing the hard work, that's where you learn from your peers and you get those really good, meaty, technical presentations. You can actually have these conversations. Yeah, exactly. So Henry, Henry has a significant background from his teaching space systems, cyber security, all of those things. And he had a CubeSat that our friend Tim Fowler, who started Ethos Lab, that's his business, let us use and demonstrate. And if you look at the talk on the Hack Space con site, you'll know Henry because he is wearing a CubeSat on his head and trying to keep up with him and his speaking energy and his energy in general is quite a bit of work on my part. It was awesome. But he is demonstrating with this CubeSat some of the concepts of the security side of things. When you're dealing with a vehicle that's going to orbit in space, then he's also showing because we are partnered with Cal Poly, which is where he's a professor, and they have a space grand challenge and they open that up throughout the year for students. It's targeted towards high school and college students. That's gamification using a Unity platform to give challenges in an interesting manner to get engagement from there. And he brought that to the event and he's telling folks, this is what it is, he's showing that. I'm curious of the people that you met who are already in their careers. Were these folks that were already like infosec practitioners who want to go into space or were they already like, what was the intersection there of the two? I'd say a little bit of both. We had folks who were like, no, I'm on the, I'm a sysadmin at this large company, brand names you would have heard of. I'm on the IT help desk over here. I'm on the security team over there. But I want to learn about more on the space side, which helps being in that part of Florida, all the things that are going on and a cybersecurity person who wants to get into space. That's kind of easy in the sense that it's hard to get people into cybersecurity, space and rockets and aviation and all the stuff we do in the village. That's easy to tempt people like, here's this cool stuff over here, you want to come hang out with us. It's a little bit harder to get an engineer who does aviation or space into cyber. That is not typically the way. So we saw folks who were established in information security that wanted to get into it. We saw other folks who were like, I just want to get into this. Where do I start? Both on the space side and on the security side. And again, that was another tremendous opportunity because we're able to tell them, here's how he got here and here's how she got here. And if you want to learn more, here's all the resources on our website, aerospacevillage.org. If anybody's interested. But that's where we put our YouTube videos up. So one of the good benefits of COVID is we recorded everything early on. Since then, we've got all our talks from DEF CON. And we put that out. And anytime that we get a chance to record at a conference, we post it there. That has become a resource that people use. That's exciting to be at the cusp of that. And you did mention DEF CON and I would be remiss if I didn't ask 'cause I'm sure you all are in the thick of it right now with DEF CON planning. Yeah, do you want to give me a little preview of what we can expect for this year's DEF CON? Well, we are absolutely in the thick of it. Like you said, we have our core team and as we're growing our volunteers, starting to get on that, going from once a month to every other week to pretty soon every week, having a meeting just because there's so many things that we're getting together. We're nailing down the different partners that we have. It is the folks who donate their time, their resources. They may be bringing in something their company uses, but it's all to teach. It's to get our audience either interested if they've never heard of these things or to, hey, I've heard of that. How do I do that? Well, okay, let me teach you what's going on here. What's behind the scenes of this framework that's used for satellite security. This game, Space Grand Challenge by Cal Poly. Here's how that works and here's what you can do with it. Whether you're a student that just wants to do it and enjoy it or you're a teacher that goes, how do I get my kids involved in that? All the way through on the aviation side, when we say we're the aerospace village, it's all those different elements across aviation, which includes drones and the space side of things. So we're continuing to grow that. We're gonna have capture the flags that we've had in the past. We have students from Embry Riddle that are coming in. They design, they build and they run a capture the flag and they do that throughout DEF CON. So folks can come in and do that and it's focused on aviation. And I'm very happy to say for the first time that we have developed a space themed capture the flag. And that is being run by Jacob Oakley, who I mentioned before, who leads all things space for the village. But he has worked with a team and they are bringing that in to the village this year. And so we're gonna work that into things. It's again, it's another activity. It's another interest item. It's an education piece. And it's focused on the space side of things, which is something that we've wanted to continue building so. Similar things from previous years, plenty of brand new things. We've got even more floor space. So these are awesome problems to have of getting all the gear, getting all the people, making sure there's room where the audience can come in, sit down, try an engagement, talk to someone, do all the activities and demonstrations. But yeah, lots of good stuff going on this year. (upbeat music) - We'll be right back. (air whooshes) Welcome back. If you were in the United States, West Midwest or Southwest last Saturday and we're looking up at the sky at around 11, 24 mountain time, you might have seen quite an interesting phenomenon in the sky, a huge bright white luminous streak cutting across the night sky. So yeah, what kind of space weather would cause such a site, you ask? Could it be the elusive Steve? Yes, Steve, honestly, that is its name. A very rare site when Aurora also emit white ribbons in the sky. Nope, it was not Steve. The spectacle was entirely caused by humans. Folks from Washington state through the Rockies down to Space Valley, New Mexico, were not seeing a geomagnetic storm or whatnot, but it was actually a Methilox fuel dump from a Jiu-Jui 2E rocket, which had just deployed six satellites into Leo after launching from Jiu-Juan in China. And the cool thing about this, if one could say a fuel dump is ever cool really, is that it did actually occur during a real geomagnetic storm. So there are some pretty spectacular shots of aurora skies and all their purpley-pinky-greeny glory with a singular, massive, white, non-Steve ribbon cutting through it all. Seriously, Steve, Google it. This was something of a swan song for the Jiu-Jui 2E, actually, as this fuel dump happened right before the rocket de-orbited and burned up on reentry. Quite a dramatic way, I gotta say, to announce one's departure, that is for sure. (upbeat music) That's it for T-Minus for May 22nd, 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 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 Kilpe is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening, we will see you tomorrow. (upbeat music) - T-Minus. (upbeat music) (water splashing) [BLANK_AUDIO]
