Forging new space in Portugal.

[MUSIC] >> Today is May 29th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. >> T-minus. >> 20 seconds to LLN. >> T-minus. >> Open aboard. [MUSIC] >> VASTS Haven 1 Space Station has completed a test of a critical air filter system. >> Four. >> Astrobotics 176 flight of its Zodiac rocket ended in the loss of the vehicle. >> Three. >> Carbon Space and Defense has acquired industrial solid propulsion. >> Two. >> Singapore's Defense and Science Technology Agency is collaborating with AST Space Mobile to enhance connectivity. >> One. >> UK ISAM Company Space Forge has increased its global footprint by opening a new office in Portugal. [MUSIC] >> Our guest today is Michael Geist, Vice President of Product Management at SCS Space and Defense. We're going to be discussing Simon. You know, it's not a person, it's the secure integrated multi-orbit networking. So stick around for more on Simon and more later in the show. [MUSIC] >> Happy Thursday, everybody. Let's dive into today's Intel Briefing, shall we? UK ISAM Company Space Forge has announced the opening of a new office in Portugal on the island of Santa Maria in the Azores. It establishes a satellite return location on mainland Europe and Space Forge says it marks the beginning of its wider European expansion. The new location supports the development of a scalable return infrastructure across the continent and will be central to the company's ambitions to make space a viable platform for industrial scale manufacturing of advanced materials. Space Forge plans to work in partnership with the Azores regional government to bring its Portuguese facilities online. The company says it is the first step in broader plans that include R&D into future platform architectures and the development of one or multiple European manufacturing sites for next generation semiconductors using seed crystals forged in space. Over to Asia now, in Singapore's Defense Science and Technology Agency, also known as DSTA, is collaborating with the US's AST Space Mobile to enhance connectivity. DSTA plans to harness the space-based cellular broadband network for humanitarian assistance, disaster relief, and emergency response situations, offering improved situational awareness and response in remote areas. DSTA says this collaboration with AST Space Mobile will move the needle for Singapore's connectivity capabilities. Carmen Space and Defense has acquired industrial solid propulsion, also known as ISP. ISP specializes in energetic propulsion technologies, including small boost motors and solid propellant gas generators, for the rapidly growing unmanned aerial systems, or UAS, UAS Intercept, and rocket-assisted takeoff systems markets. Carmen successfully closed an offering to increase the size of its existing $300 million term loan B by $75 million. The majority of the proceeds from this offering were used to fund the acquisition of ISP, which consisted of $50 million in cash, approximately $5 million in Carmen's common shares, and $5 million in potential earn-out payments. The transaction closed yesterday, May 28. Astrobotics' 176th flight of its Zodiac rocket ended in the loss of the vehicle. The Zodiac launch was held at the test site in Mojave, California. While the vehicle remained within its planned fight envelope, Astrobotics says it detected an anomalous condition and commanded a flight termination. This resulted in a rapid descent and caused a loss of the vehicle upon impact with its launch pad. No injuries have been reported, and there is no significant damage to the test site's infrastructure. Astrobotics says the team is conducting an investigation into the cause of the flight termination. Vast's Haven 1 space station, the Darling of Space and Potassium 40, has completed a test of a critical air filter system for keeping future astronauts healthy in orbit. Testing confirmed that the system can maintain a safe and healthy atmosphere for all planned Haven 1 mission phases. Testing of the trace contaminant control system was completed at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama as part of a Reimburseable Space Act Agreement. NASA supports the design and development of multiple commercial space stations through funded and unfunded agreements. The space agency plans to procure services from one or more companies following the design and development phase as part of the agency's strategy to become one of many customers for low-Earth orbit stations. [Music] And that concludes today's Intel Briefing, and 2K Senior Producer Alice Carruth joins us now to tell us other stories to keep an eye on. Alice? Thanks, Maria. We've added three additional links in today's selected reading section of our show notes. The first covers voyages onboarding with the U.S. Government's Oasis Plus program. The second is on Altair's MOU with Georgia Tech, and the third is on a U.S. bill to clear SpaceJump. Let's hope the latter passes quickly. Indeed, it is a very pressing issue. Alice, can you remind our listeners where the links can be found, please? In addition to the podcast show notes, you can always find the links to further reading on all the stories mentioned throughout the show on our website. Simply visit space.intuk.com and click on today's 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 recruit talent, T-Minus can help. We'd like to hear from you. Just 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. [Music] Our guest today is Michael Geist, Vice President of Product Management at SES Space and Defense. [Music] My name is Michael Geist. I'm the Vice President of Product Development, Product Management at SES Space and Defense. SES Space and Defense is the U.S. Fokai Mitigated Proxy Organization of our Luxembourg parent SES, which is a satellite operator and systems integration organization. And we Space and Defense specifically do that for the U.S. government. So in my role, I focus on developing new technologies, products, and solutions that meet current and emerging government requirements. Fantastic. Well, thank you so much for joining me today, Michael. And the reason we reached out to you all was to learn more about SES's announcements about Simon. So can you tell me a bit about what Simon is? Yeah, so Simon is an acronym that stands for Secure Integrated Multi-Orbit Networking. And so essentially what that is, is it's commonizing multiple disparate connectivity pathways for users to provide an enhanced resilience of their connectivity. So essentially, it takes multiple different connectivity mediums, combines them, makes them seem and act as a single connectivity medium for the user to deliver resilient connectivity independent of effects that may happen to one or many of those different mediums, whether that is weather or unintended interference or perhaps intended interference or different things like that. And so a lot of companies can do that. And that doesn't make it a big deal. But what makes us unique in this capability and what we reference as far as Simon is that as a satellite operator, we have other levers that we can turn relative to the spacecraft and gateway operations and so forth to deliver assured outcomes for our customers. But in addition to assured outcomes, we can give the user levers to determine, are they interested in more affordability in their network resilience? Are they interested in more assuredness in their resilient connectivity? And you would ask, well, why do we do that? We do that because our operators, our users operate in a variety of different environments from benign environments all the way through congested environments to contested environments. And the level of resiliency that you may need to dial up needs to change as you're moving through those environments. And so having the ability to provide the warfighter with the ability to turn up the resilience as the environment changes enables them to maximize the affordability of that resilience for the taxpayer while making sure that our warfighter stays safe. So it's a good, responsible solution. It hasn't been done before, which makes us unique in that vein. And if I compare it to what occurs today, what occurs today is a PACE architecture, P-A-C, which stands for primary, alternate contingency, emergency communications pathways. And so for a long period of time, those pathways have been each individual pathway one at a time. And so the complaints that we've heard from our government customers about that scenario have been that they pay for four things, but they only ever get one, or they get one at a time. And so that has moved from a PACE construct to an auto PACE construct, which enables automatic switching between different mediums, but still doesn't get after the affordable resilience, which is what Simon really focuses on. That sounds like a, I mean, not to be too hyperbolic, but that does sound like a game changer for a lot of your end users, honestly, to be able to have that option, especially given the current state of the market. So that must be, I imagine there was a lot of user feedback that went into that and that you all have been working on this for some time. Yeah, we've been contemplating this for well over a year. We have been messaging the art of the possible to various different user communities, and they have been excited about the possibilities that we can bring through this capability set. And so now with the with the contract from Defense Innovation Unit, as well as other parallel contracts that the company currently has, we're in the execution pace. And so we'll be testing this capability initially later on, later on this fall. And then we have plans to continue to enhance this capability to add even more levers for customers to choose from and to do more testing with our with our user communities in in terms of how effective is the resilience that that we're offering. And so we'll be doing that over the course of the next year or so as we're rolling out sort of a minimal viable product. You mentioned the other contracts that this is sort of working in parallel with. Can you speak a little more to that? Yes. So some of the other contracts are contracts that have that have existed for a while within SES spacing offense. One of those contracts is the Air Force Research Lab, DUCI program. DUCI stands for Defense Experimentation using commercial satellite internet. And so we have a variety of different things, experiments like that and Air Force has one and Army has one and Navy has one and Marine Corps has one. And so all of these different organizations are pursuing the same capability set, which is multi orbit networking at the end of the day. And and so this is just one solution that can be applied to that multi-urban networking. And and I'm going to say that many of the different solutions that can address this problem are similar. Ours just goes a step further and has plans to go two steps further. Fascinating, I guess I'll be looking forward to hearing more about what that means in the future when that news is more publicly released. Oh, Michael, thank you so much for for giving me this great overview. I want to make sure if there's anything else that you wanted to mention about this news from SES Defense and Spacer, anything else about maybe future vision? The floor is yours. Anything you wanted to add? No, I appreciate that. I appreciate your time. You know, we're certainly excited about the future, both in geostationary as well as non geostationary orbits and working with our with our various partners in orbits in which we don't provide our own solutions. The satellite communications industry is is quite an industry of a lot of friendly partners who realize that in order to deliver capabilities that our warfighters needs need, we have to work together. And I have never seen as much collaboration across the industry as I have recently. And that's very exciting for us and allows us to really pursue advanced technologies that benefit our warfighters. We'll be right back. Welcome back. The University's Space Research Association's Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science, bit of a mouthful, but stay with me here. In collaboration with BCG X AI Institute and NASA has unveiled the Gaia Foundation model. Now the Gaia Foundation model is an open source AI designed to revolutionize extreme weather prediction. It's trained on 25 years of global satellite data from sources like goes, Mediosat and Himawari. And Gaia stands out for its ability to reconstruct missing satellite data and estimate precipitation with remarkable accuracy. This model achieves a spatial resolution of four kilometers and updates every 30 minutes, offering a new level of detail and atmospheric analysis. What also sets Gaia apart is its innovative architecture, which combines masked auto encoders with self distillation techniques. No, I do not know what that means either, but I'm assuming somebody does all of this to capture both local and global atmospheric patterns. It all allows Gaia to outperform traditional models and tasks like gap filling and precipitation estimation, even when it has limited training data. And my favorite, it's open source and it's open source nature, making it available on platforms like always fun to say, hugging face invites researchers worldwide to contribute to and benefit from this advancement. And the implications of Gaia are vast from enhancing disaster preparedness to informing sectors like agriculture and aviation. And as climate challenges intensify, tools like Gaia exemplify how collaborative efforts in AI and science can lead to transformative solutions. Well done, Gaia. [Music] That's it for T-minus from May 29th, 2025, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. Reprivileged 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 Eiben, Peter Kilpe is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thanks for listening, we'll see you tomorrow. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]