50623
[MUSIC PLAYING] Today is June 23, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-minus, 22nd to L-O-N, T-dred. Open aboard. Right side. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] Five. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory reveals its first stunning images. Four. India's HAL officially enters the small satellite launch vehicle market. Three. Piper Space's tech demo, Baguette 1, to launch from southern France. Two. ESA and Assault took collaborate further, and Pulsar signs an MOU with Tullis Alenia. One. The second batch of satellites launch for Amazon's project Kuiper. Lift off. [MUSIC PLAYING] And in the second half of the show today, we have my chat with Greg Gillinger, SVP for strategy and development at Integrity ISR. And he's talking with me about the dynamic nature of space operations and intelligence. [MUSIC PLAYING] Thanks for joining me on this lovely Monday. Hope you're having a good one. Let's dive into today's Intel Briefing, shall we? And we're starting with two launch updates now for the top of the show. Firstly, this morning, a ULA Atlas V rocket lifted off from Cape Canaveral in Florida, carrying 27 more satellites for Amazon Project Kuiper to low Earth orbit. This is the second batch of Project Kuiper satellites for Amazon's new satellite broadband constellation. Amazon's goal is to get 3,200 Kuiper satellites to Leo. And the SpaceX Transporter 14 ride share mission, which was originally planned for launch yesterday, was bumped due to weather concerns for a new launch time today, with a launch window opening at 218 Pacific time today. If successful, this small satellite ride share mission will carry more than 70 payloads to low Earth orbit. Moving on now, it's a big space news day for France today. First up, the assault aviation and the European Space Agency have signed a letter of intent to explore collaboration on next generation orbital transport systems, focusing particularly on reusable vehicles for low Earth orbit missions. At the center of this collaboration is the assault's Vortex concept, which is a reusable, lifting body space plane designed for crew, cargo, and in orbit servicing missions. Vortex builds on assault's historic contributions to European space plane programs like Hermes and the X-38, and incorporates new technologies for hyper-velocity reentry, modular payload integration, and next generation materials. Pulsar Fusion is scaling up with a strategic expansion into the US market by opening an office in Austin, Texas to engage American clients and investors. And in parallel, Pulsar UK has signed a memorandum of understanding with Telus Alenia Space to collaborate on its 5 kilowatt moon ranger Hall Effect thruster, which is currently in live test. This partnership marks a significant step towards integrating Pulsar's electric propulsion technologies into Tier 1 space platforms. Now, back in the UK, Pulsar is commissioning its first of two newly built space-grade vacuum chambers, the largest in the country, at its Bletchley facility. These chambers are critical for the qualification and endurance testing of both the Moon Ranger thruster and their next generation sunbird Fusion propulsion platform. French startup Hyberspace has announced plans to launch its -- I cannot believe this is its name, but it really is -- Baguette 1, suborbital demonstrator from a mainland French military test site, following an agreement with France's Defense Procurement Agency, the DGA. Scheduled for 2026, the -- yes, that name again -- Baguette 1 is a 7-meter single-stage rocket using hybrid propulsion, combining solid fuel with a liquid oxidizer for improved safety and cost efficiency. This launch will serve as a precursor to the company's planned orbital vehicle, the Orbital Baguette 1, or OB1. Yes, targeted for 2027 and capable of deploying 250 kilos to Lourth orbit. The project is backed by France's 35 million Euro France 2030 Investment Initiative, which reflects a national push to foster sovereign micro-launch capabilities. Operating from a government-controlled defense site underlines the strategic potential of this platform for both civil and defense applications. And yes, they definitely named it OB1. Yeah, they knew what they were doing. Okay, next up, India. India has officially transferred its small satellite launch vehicle program to the private sector, awarding Hindustan Aeronautics, or HAL, and its partner L&T, a 5.11 billion rupee, or $59 million, contract to build, own, and operate small satellite launch vehicle missions. HAL, which is traditionally a warplane manufacturer, now becomes the lead player in commercializing India's small launch capability. And this does mark the first time a complete launch vehicle system is privatized in India, and it's part of a broader push to liberalize the country's space sector under Prime Minister Modi's in-space initiative. And the small satellite launch vehicle, or SSLV, designed by ISRO, is a cost-effective quick-response launcher that can deploy up to 500 kilos to Lourth orbit. And with the global small-sat market projected to triple by 2032, India is positioning itself to boost its current 2% market share significantly. HAL's offering is expected to undercut existing launch prices, thereby making it competitive globally. And today has been a hotly awaited day for many in the world of astronomy. We saw the very first images from the Veracirubin Observatory released to the public today, and they are. Overwhelmingly stunning? Stunningly overwhelming? The phrase that I'm seeing from the Rubin team is that it's all a cosmic treasure chest. And yeah, that feels about right. This observatory is some 30 years in the making and is located high in the mountains of Chile and was built and is actively supported by over 40 international organizations from around the world and is a joint venture of the US National Science Foundation and the US Department of Energy's Office of Science. The Rubin Observatory houses the world's most powerful digital camera capturing petabytes, yes, petabytes of data for massive swathes of our night sky at an unprecedented scale, both in breadth and depth. So if there are planets or other large objects in our solar system that we've somehow missed, which is actually entirely possible, we can expect that Rubin will uncover them within its first year of operation. And for the next 10 years, Rubin will be continuously filming the Southern Night Sky. So the possibilities for what this will mean for scientific understanding are truly fascinating. What will we learn about our galaxy's formation and what the universe is made of? I cannot wait to find out along with all of you. In the meantime, Rubinobservatory.org is where you can find the images as they are released and just get utterly lost in their scale. You really haven't seen anything like this before, trust me, where every single pixel is a galaxy and you can zoom in and zoom in and zoom in and zoom in. Have fun, everybody. [MUSIC] And that is it for today's Intel Briefing. If you'd like more on all of the stories that I've mentioned today, be sure to check out our show notes both in your podcast app and on our website, which is space.ntuk.com. [MUSIC] Hi, T-minus crew. If you would like daily updates from us directly in your LinkedIn feed, be sure to follow the official N2K T-minus page over on LinkedIn. If you're more interested in the lighter side of what we do here, we are @t-minusdaily on Instagram. And that is where we post videos and pictures from events, excursions, and even some behind-the-scenes treats. The links are in the show notes, everybody. Hope you will join us there. [MUSIC] My guest today is Greg Gillinger. He is the SVP for Strategy and Development at Integrity ISR. And he's talking with me about the dynamic nature of space operations and intelligence. [MUSIC] Greg, it's great to see you. It's great to have you on the show. And I wanted to also say welcome as part of, you know, you're coming on as a T-minus segment host. So that's pretty exciting. Thank you, Maria. I've been listening to you guys for a couple of years now. It's been a fantastic show. You guys do a wonderful service for a lot of folks. So I'm really proud to be part of it. Oh, Greg, that's very kind of you. And I'm honestly really thrilled to be bringing you aboard because you bring a wealth of great experience and knowledge that I cannot wait for our audience to be able to benefit from. So why don't we start with, I guess, an introduction of, you know, who you are and what your area of expertise is in? Sure, sure. So, Greg Dillinger, I was in the United States Air Force for 26 years. I retired in 2019. And what I retired on was the chief of the Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance Division, or ISR Division, and the Combined Space Operations Center. And I was also the lead intelligence director for, at the time, was 14th Air Force, which is a number of Air Force. It's an organizational unit in the Air Force. That no longer exists. It's now become part of the Delta structure in the Space Force. So I was doing intelligence work for decades, and I was looking up to be put into some jobs early on that involved space intelligence, which at the time really wasn't considered a great career growth sort of a thing, but it turned out to be one of the best things for me. Yeah. And so after my retirement in 2019, I started up with a company called Contagri ISR, a small company, great folks, doing a great mission. And we do a lot of space training, and we also do some operations support. And so I've been lucky enough to work with, to continue to work with the team up at Vandenberg, where we teach all of the enlisted Space Force personnel that are coming in to be, what we say, a 5CR or 5S. That's their career code, career specialty code. And then we also are training the 5I for the intelligence enlisted personnel. That's out of good fellow Air Force base. And then we, finally, we have some instructors out in Keesley Air Force Base in Mississippi as well training what we call the 5Charlie's or the Space Cyber personnel for the Space Force. And then we have a number of other contracts that we're supporting. One of my favorite things that we do is something we call ISR University, where we travel all over the world and offer various training courses. Many of them are space related. See different companies, different governments. Have the opportunity to go to Australia. After we get off our call here, I'm going to be talking to some students out of New Zealand. I don't get, this one's going to be virtually unfortunate. It's a fantastic opportunity. I just throw the be-all part of this of the team that I'm with. And one of the things that I do as part of that team is the integrity flash news log, which is I think how we kind of met. And in that, every couple of weeks or so, if I can get my act together, I take a look at Russian and Chinese space operation. So there's a lot of, what I noticed after I retired was there's a lot of coverage on the unclassified side of things being watched because well, it's exciting and it's hard to hide and watch our rockets go up. The real mission occurs after a wash, obviously. And there was very little information about what occurs in space after a satellite gets into a sort of event. I think five, 10 years ago, there's probably a reason for that because once things were in orbit, they kind of just stayed and basically as Kepler was driving. There was a whole lot of maneuvering happening, that sort of thing. But in the last five years or so, maybe a little bit longer, we've started to, the domains become much more dynamic. So, you know, - Yeah, maneuverability's changed the game, right? - Yeah, yeah, exactly. And what I'm seeing too is a lot of times satellites are being launched into constellations. So it's not just the satellite's relationship with the Earth that's important, but it's the satellite's relationship with other satellites that may form a group of capabilities that may reinforce one another. So, tracking where everything is in relationship to other satellites is another thing that not many folks were focused on. And just started doing some research and found some great mentors out there to kind of coach me along on some of the organome mechanics when I ever had a question. And there's also a lot of free tools available for us to use to do some of this analysis. There's much more capability out there than I had ever existed. - That's amazing. And it's amazing what one can glean from open source, public information, and sort of connecting dots, which I know you do extraordinarily well. - Lots of dots. - Lots of tiny dots, way up in different orbits even. - Exactly. - Yeah, the thing that's really fascinating for me as a civilian who's always been a civilian and has no military understanding whatsoever, and I'm fessing up to that, is how much, like when you introduced me to the idea of space intelligence, how much is also very relevant to the private sector, where I think a lot of people might not have thought that this was something, I think many people might hear space intelligence and go, "Oh, that's military. That's not my concern. That's not my lane." And that's just not how it is anymore. - Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, again, you can go back 10 years or so, but there's not too many environmental monitoring or remote sensing companies out there. But we're seeing a tremendous growth with companies like Maxar and Planet, and I'm going to leave that out. Hawkeye 360, ICY, many US-based, many European-based, and others, right? And it's really turned into kind of the growth industry. But now I would say a lot of the commercial ventures are the largest customer, tends to be the departments of defense out there. And that's kind of fueling a lot of this initial stage of growth here. But they're forming a very important, fulfilling a very important role. I mean, we saw this, you know, prior to the invasion of Ukraine, I think it's pretty well documented that helping to get a lot of our European allies on board with, "Hey, we're really concerned that this is turning into a thing here," was the ability to share pretty high-quality imagery of different stages of Russian deployment in and around Ukraine territory. Absolutely. And being unclassified is vital, so you can show, you're putting these back, right? And some people can see it with our own eyes. So it makes things much more real. And as we're looking into, we're always partnering with other nations and when it comes to defense and other areas as well. So the ability to share information quickly and easily has been a real key. And it's one of the biggest benefits of commercial space capabilities that we have right now. Yeah, absolutely. So you'll be joining us monthly for a segment where you're going to be giving us, and I'm putting this very broadly, space intelligence. But what would be sort of your description of what our audience can expect to hear from you? Like what kind of insights will they be able to glean from what you'll be sharing? Yeah, so like I mentioned, I do a newsletter every couple of weeks. So what I'm thinking about is, and you all do a great job of covering all of the launches. So I'm going to give the post-launch kind of the report as to, okay, this spacecraft was launched by China, say three weeks ago, and it was at the time that you were reporting, it was probably in geostationary transphorobit, or geosynchronous transphorobit. But by the time I come on, maybe it's settled in and maybe that position is interesting for some reason or another. So a good example of this are the China just launched for their TGS satellites. These go out to geostationary orbit, and we believe they're either intelligence gathering or some sort of inspection satellite, or maybe missile line satellite. So where China decides to place them in orbit is something that is not true. So all that is probably not way in advance, and then it's done for a purpose. So sometimes there's things that we can look at just by the positioning of a satellite and the nature of its orbit. That may tell us a little bit about either what it's there to do, or what's there to check out. Maybe it was what it's there to support those sorts of things. So an example of the TGS satellites that China lost, a fairly rapid succession for them over the course of a couple of months, where are they actually now? And there's a couple of interesting details that we'll talk about as we have these discussions. I think on Friday. Yeah, you dropped some really interesting nuggets about orbital mechanics that I had no... I will always fast up to things I'm ignorant of. Orbital mechanics is definitely one of those. I don't know nearly as much as I would like. And you had revealed some very interesting things about what certain things can mean. And I'm trying to be a little vague because I don't remember all the details, but I found that just really... Sorry. But I just found it really fascinating. Yeah, that so much can be gleaned from changing inclination, I think was one of the things that you mentioned, and just what that can say. And this is, for me, I was just kind of hanging on your every word, like, "Wow, really?" So I have a feeling I'll be doing that with your segment too. Like, "Wow, that's really cool that we can figure that out." And that these things can mean certain things. So I am really looking forward to it, Greg. So I'm very appreciative of you sharing your expertise with all of us. No, of course. Of course, yes. Certain maneuvers are more expensive than others. So if you're doing some sort of plane change maneuver, that definitely signals some sort of intent. And then also launching into a particular inclination can also signal some intent. I think since we've talked, Russia launched a satellite Cosmos 2588 into a coplanar orbit with one of our high-value US assets. So USA 338, I believe it is. So the first time they've done that, they are currently three, I believe, our Nibbler satellites, inspection satellites, that are coplanar with various high-value United States reconnaissance satellites. So it's... Something to keep an eye on before shore. Yes, we'll dive into what that means to be a coplanar and why that's important. And I've got several mentors out there that are fantastic and they will no doubt let me know if I run astray at the laws of physics. So I think we'll... We will be right back. Welcome back. Tricky problems often require creative solutions and one very notoriously tricky problem for astronomers, and this will include even the aforementioned Vera Rubin team, is dealing with the proliferation of satellites in low-Earth orbit and the bright white streaks that these satellites could just rip through long-duration images of the night sky. Especially when they're taken around dusk or dawn. Just think about it. You put a shiny reflective metal thing up into orbit and it does what shiny reflective metal things do when they catch even the faintest amount of sunlight. They go, "ping," which is not great for astronomy. So since we're not likely to have fewer satellites in Leo anytime soon, what exactly is to be done here? Well, what about making those shiny reflective metal things less shiny and reflective? What about painting as much of that satellite as possible? Not just pitch black, but Vantablack. Why not, right? Well, Vantablack, if you're not familiar with it, is often called the darkest man-made paint on Earth, and it absorbs over 99% of all light. And Surrey Nanosystems, which is the creator of Vantablack and the University of Surrey in the UK, are partnering up to coat the hull of a CubeSat with a new version of Vantablack and launch it in 2026 to see what kind of effect that Vantablack might have on making satellites less bright and intrusive to ground-based astronomy. The CubeSat will be called the Jovian-1, and it'll be part of the Jupiter mission. And yes, of course, that's an acronym, and it's for the Joint University's Program for In-Orbit Training, Education, and Research. Putting on my artist hat for a sec, one note about Vantablack from that world is that it is considered kind of notoriously fragile as a paint coating, so it'll be very interesting to see this latest iteration of Vantablack and how it holds up to the rigor of launch and being in Leo. There's also lots of chatter about what coating a satellite in black paint will mean for heat retention, too. It'll be very interesting to see, or I guess not see, the results from this one. [music] That's it for T-Minus for June 23rd, 2025, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. For additional resources from today's report, check out our show notes at space.n2k.com. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast. Your feedback ensures we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like our show, please share our rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space@n2k.com. We're privileged that N2K Cyberwire is part of the daily routine 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 makes it easy for companies to optimize your biggest investment, your people. We make you smarter about your teams while making your teams smarter. Learn how at n2k.com. 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. Go check out those Rubin images and have fun. See you tomorrow. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
