Today is July 22nd, 2025. I'm Alice Carruth and this is T-minus. Genesis Space Flight Laboratories has secured a €300,000 to proceed investment to kickstart the development of a European re-entry spacecraft. U-TelSat has signed an agreement with NSSL Global to deliver one Weblo Earth orbit connectivity services. Lockheed Martin has shared financial reports for the second quarter reporting $18.2 billion in sales. DeepSat has selected Redwire Corporation to provide advanced modelling, simulation and design services for a planned very low Earth orbit satellite constellation. A new bipartisan congressional caucus dedicated to US leadership in space exploration has officially been established. And Brandon Carp's joining Maria Valve-Marsus for the monthly Cyber and Space segment. He's going to be discussing the vulnerabilities that metadata created by AI can pose to space companies. So stick around for more on that later in the show. Happy Tuesday everyone. A new bipartisan congressional caucus dedicated to US leadership in space exploration has officially been established. The advancing humanity in space congressional caucus was formed through the leadership and vision of its four bipartisan co-chairs, Republicans Don Bacon and Gabe Evans and Democrats Glenn Ivy and George White sides. The latter name is no stranger to the space industry of course. Representative George White sides added to the press release, "As the former NASA chief of staff and CEO of Virgin Galactic, I saw firsthand how space and humanity interact through job creation, economic impact, technological innovation and of course our understanding of the universe. I remain committed to supporting the crucial connection between human spaceflight and science as we plan NASA's future." "I look forward to helping lead this bipartisan caucus and forging a productive and targeted approach to ensuring our country remains on the forefront of space exploration." The advancing humanity in space congressional caucus will serve as a bipartisan forum, demonstrating how space can unite people across ideological divides around a shared vision for the future. It's certainly needed right now with the continuing questions around NASA's future. Earth Observation Startup DeepSat has selected Redwire Corporation to provide advanced modelling simulation and design services for a planned dual use, very low Earth orbit satellite constellation. The contract represents DeepSat's first steps towards deploying a VLEO constellation designed to provide intelligence surveillance and reconnaissance. Redwire will leverage its modelling and simulation software to support the architectural design and performance optimisation of the DeepSat constellation. We've reached that time when quarterly financial updates are starting to pour in. On Thursday we'll be speaking to Chad Anderson from Space Capital about the investment market overall. Today Lockheed Martin has shared financial reports for the second quarter, reporting $18.2 billion in sales. The Defence and Space Giant reported that their space sales during the quarter increased $112 million, or 4% compared to the same period in 2024. This increase was primarily attributed to higher sales of $115 million for commercial civil space programmes primarily due to the higher volume on the Orion programme and $80 million for strategic and missile defence programmes due to higher volume on next-generation interceptor and fleet ballistic missile programmes. Total equity earnings represented approximately $10 million or 3% of space's operating profit for both this quarter and the same period in 2024. UTELSAT has signed an agreement with NSSL Global, a leading provider in satellite communication systems to the maritime enterprise, defence and government sectors, and the UK's Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office to deliver one Web-Low-Earth or BIC connectivity services. This partnership will support a broad range of critical UK government activities worldwide, including diplomatic missions, policing, resilience, defence and other essential operations. UTELSAT OneWeb's Leo constellation will provide high-speed, low-latency connectivity for British embassies, high commissions and consulates, as well as broader UK government activities globally. Croatian company Genesis Space Flight Laboratories has secured a €300,000 pre-seed investment to kickstart the development of GEN, a European re-entry spacecraft designed for frequent, retrievable microgravity research missions. The funding will support the in-house development of GEN's re-entry capsule and service module at the company's facility where work has already begun on the vehicle structure, subsystem design, and a proprietary hybrid retro-pupulsion system powered by wax and nitric oxide. Genesis aims to lower the barriers to space-based life sciences and materials research offering a cost-effective, return-capable alternative to traditional orbital platforms. That concludes today's Intelligence Briefing. N2K producer Liz Stokes joins us now with other stories that we're watching today. Liz, what do you have for us today? We have four additional links in the show notes today. One is on the Office of Space Commerce's updated schedule and roadmap of the traffic coordination system for space, better known as TRAX. Blue Origin has released the names of participants for their next new shepherd flight. Broiders has released a story that Trump's Golden Dome is looking for alternatives to SpaceX, and NOAA's Space Weather Observatory has arrived in Florida. That is a lot. Where can we find those links? All the links can be found in the selected reading section of our show notes and on our website, space.n2k.com. Hey Team Miners Crew, if you're just joining us, be sure to follow Team Miners Space Daily in your favorite podcast app. And also do us a favor, share the inter with your friends and co-workers. Here's a little challenge for you. By Friday, please show three friends or co-workers this podcast. A growing audience is the most important thing for us and we'd love your help to be part of the Team Miners Crew. If you find Team Miners useful, please share so that other professionals like you can find the show. Thanks, it really does mean a lot to me. Brandon Kauff's joining Maria Valmarz's for the monthly cyber and space segment. Last month when you were on the show, we were talking about agentic AI, and you introduced this really fascinating premise about the metadata that AI models can generate. I'm trying to summarize this perhaps poorly. The metadata that gets generated is a lot more revealing than people perhaps realize. And then I think this month is the... Now, what do space companies need to do about that side of the equation? So what do they need to do about it? Yeah, well, both what do they need to do and the opportunity for some space companies to offer solutions and think about kind of where the market will probably go and the direction that the market's going to head in. That's going to create opportunities for space companies. And specifically, I think the opportunities in telecommunications. And we're seeing a lot of movement in direct to sell or space-based internet and services and the mega constellations that are coming online, a lot of movement in that front. And I think that architecture does offer some nascent but critical security elements that actually mitigate the risk of metadata released into the internet environment and specifically metadata from agentic systems. Okay, so can you expand on that a little bit? Keep going. Well, so one of the problems with all that metadata that we talked about last time is it creates opportunity for pattern analysis and for network analysis. And by doing network analysis and looking at what endpoints are communicating to what other endpoints, whether through APIs or other agentic connectors, it can reveal a lot about your network architecture, can reveal a lot about your intent and what your organization is doing. And when you think about agentic systems, they're doing that at machine speeds. So you're creating a tremendous amount of metadata over a very short amount of time. They can be analyzed and reveal a lot of secret information. And reveal vulnerabilities of your network. Now, when we think about how today we move data, people use VPNs, people use proxies, but the problem with those things is those things are static. They're actually mappable. We can actually figure out pretty easily a VPN endpoint, a proxy endpoint. But when we add the space architecture, if you are proxying data in your internet connection through the space architecture, it kind of flips the paradigm on its head. Think about it like a cellular network where the device in a terrestrial cellular network is mobile. And that creates some security because your device is moving. The adversary doesn't know where your device is physically in the world. But the cellular world, the mobile world has created these identifiers that actually have basically taken away all of the security of being a mobile network. Now, when you look at the space architecture, it's not the user. It's not the endpoint that's mobile. It's the router. It's the intermediary node that is mobile. You don't know what node your device is going to connect to directly. And that creates a layer of potential security. And so by routing our network, by routing our traffic, essentially proxying first through a space architecture, it creates this obfuscation layer where someone measuring your internet traffic or looking for your specific company's traffic or something like that is not going to actually know where to look. And it's going to be potentially unpredictable where your traffic is going to get routed. And that takes away a whole threat vector or attack vector, something called packet shaping, where an adversary can actually manipulate the traffic flows of internet data to actually capture data. And again, even if they're capturing data that's encrypted, they're still going to get the metadata. It opens up a whole world of opportunity for security companies and telecommunication companies to add a layer of obfuscation and add a layer of security by routing through a space architecture. So my mind is going, that is a fantastic opportunity and the complexity of that as I'm trying to just sort of, not that I understand networking on a good day, to be completely honest with you. It's not easy to understand, but just the complexity of that, especially as we have more as satellites and Leo and many of them, these in mesh networks, I'm going, holy cow. That sounds also incredibly difficult to implement, not impossible, surely, but that sounds like a challenge to me in my layman's understanding of this. It is a challenge and it's a challenge for a couple of reasons. First, there's not that many providers right now in Space Space, you know, telecom that you can use. Those providers that do exist, they really only have the bandwidth for edge routing, not necessarily backbone routing. When we talk about backbone, we're talking about the massive fiber lines owned by the world's largest telecoms that are moving unbelievable amounts of data every second through undersea cables and things like that. You know, the space architecture doesn't yet have the bandwidth and the throughput needs to be used as backbone. But what we are using those architectures for is the edge routing, like that last router before you get to the edge device, whether it's an IoT device or a mobile device or what have you, it's that last public router before you actually get to a device that's trying to access the internet or a service on the internet. So there are opportunities today to start routing some of your core traffic through a space architecture. Of course, Starlink is the one that comes to mind because they have the most proliferated architecture. But others, I mean, the FCC just authorized a merger between SES and IntelSat. And so like that, that is obviously intended to be a new competitor. Of course, most of their customers are like cable or satellite TV. Satellite TV is in structural decline. No one's really using that anymore. It's the same bandwidth. Shops fired. Just kidding. It is though, right? It's all internet, right? It's all internet TV. It's all streaming services. That's not a controversial statement. I'm sorry. They're all going to invest in the exact same bandwidth. I think most of them are C-band satellites, which is the same band that Starlink is using for a lot of their work. So they'll just turn it into IP traffic. And so that'll be a potential competitor. And then you look at the Space Force, right? The Space Force is investing in MillNet, which is their proliferated Leo constellation. It's like the follow on to their Trunch 3, I think the transport architecture. And so we're starting to see these organizations investing in this. And I think part of it is connectivity, right? There's the benefit of being able to connect anywhere, even in rural areas or in maritime considerations. But you can't neglect the security implications, which is there are great security implications of doing this. And so how can we invest as companies? How can we actually take advantage of this, especially the high risk company? I'm thinking like financial services, maybe healthcare, things that are high risk right now. I was just going to ask about application. Yeah, because to me, I'm like the military use of this makes total sense. In the business world, financial transactions, I could see that being useful. You mentioned healthcare. Anything else, Ries, like the use case makes a lot of sense here. I think the opportunity is probably with the telecoms to start offering these services of getting companies access to direct to satellite connectivity that before it actually touches the backbone of the internet or before it actually touches the high speed fiber of a telecom, just routing data through a space architecture for your most critical applications, your most critical APIs, things that we're talking about industrial secrets. So any manufacturing company that is potentially at threat from competitors, from industrial espionage, I'm thinking those kinds of manufacturers. Anyone who worked with the defense industry and has industrial secrets or is trying to access APIs on like the AWS GovCloud. This is a service that AWS could offer and say, "Hey, if you're going to try to reach an API or now in an agentic world an MCP server that's hosted in the cloud somewhere, we're going to automatically route your traffic first through a space architecture or as the last hop before you get to the actual MCP server, we're going to route it through there and just provide that proxy offset, that obfuscation layer that hides the value add. To me, this is a product opportunity for a telecom or a cloud provider or a data, like a content distribution network even. Cloudflare, Akamai, kind of thing. Right. And even some, maybe some smaller MSPs, right? Managed service providers who are maybe targeting the space industry and saying, "Hey, we're going to offer you guys some value added services." But that's kind of the initial opportunity that I see. But there is a security benefit to this. Interesting. I'm just really curious, does that make a difference if we have greater edge computing in space with this model that you're talking about because it's just basically another computer in the network that we're talking about. So it doesn't matter necessarily where it's located. I think it does. And where the opportunity lies is what we talked about earlier with the constraints on throughput and actually pushing data through a space architecture. It's going to introduce a little bit of latency. The processing power up there right now isn't large enough to necessarily put a lot of data. So you can't use it for a backbone. It's not like a microwave link, a terrestrial microwave link where you can send a ton of data very quickly over relatively long point-to-point distances. As we increase the processing power in satellites and more routers, right? Cell towers in space is something we hear about, but really what that is is it's a router attached to an antenna. As we increase the routing power and the processing power in the space architecture, you can do this today on pretty small satellites with the technology that exists. It'll allow us to push more data and more intelligently through space and be more efficient. Why? Because the data we push up, it can get processed, it can get analyzed, it can get, you know, instead of moving the entire data, the entire packet, the entire session from satellite to satellite, satellite to ground station, you just process it on-site in situ and you just send the processed information. And so I do think that's coming. One of the challenges, right, physics challenge, right, heating and cooling, much more difficult in space than terrestrial. Now there's opportunities for cooling, you know, in a shade, but you know, if you're in sunlight, right, you need to have heat transfer. A nasty physics thing, yeah. A nasty physics thing, right? Like the 400-degree swing between sunlight for shade in space. It's a physics challenge, right? But those technologies exist. I think that makes it a little more expensive. Where I would look for, you know, the initial growth in that sector of like processing in space is actually in Indian space companies. And the reason being is as we add more processing power, as you add therefore more heat management systems, you're getting heavier, more weight, more expensive to get up into orbit. Pound for pound, India is more cost-effective than any other nation in the world and getting stuff into space. So I think that, you know, these things are going to get a little more expensive by adding more processing power as we discussed. So, you know, to make it efficient, to make it marketable, to make the capital expenditures make sense, I would look at India and those companies and see what they're doing because that's probably going to be a leading indicator of where the technology is moving. It's like, let's pick that up next month. [Laughs] [Music] We'll be right back. Welcome back. What does cycling and NASA have in common? No, I'm not referring to the static bike on the International Space Station. Ever heard of biking through France with a NASA textile wrapped around your shoulders? No, it's not sci-fi fashion. It's sustainable innovation in motion. The French cyclist collective Le Rookies is partnering with French textile firm Spinaily Design to road test high-performance NASA-derived fabrics. The garments are made using phase-changed materials originally developed to regulate astronaut body temperatures. That means these riders will be peddling through the Tour de France in fabrics designed for spacewalks. But this isn't just a fashion-forward bike tour. It's a practical demonstration of space tech meeting terrestrial needs. NASA's spin-off technology programs have long-emphasized commercial applications of space R&D, and this is just another standout case. These textiles could pave the way for more efficient thermal wear in sports, medicine and even climate resilience. And as our ground-level infrastructure becomes more connected to space-based networks, stories like this remind us that what's launched into orbit often cycles back to improve life here on Earth. Yes, I added that pun in on purpose. And that's today's T-Minus brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast, your feedback and shows. We deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like the show, please share a 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 proud 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 helps space and cyber professionals grow, learn and stay informed. As the Nexus for Discovery in connection, we bring you the people, technology and ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. Learn how at N2K.com. N2K's producer is Liz Stokes. We're mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Tre Hester with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpie is our publisher. Our host is Maria Varmarzis and I'm N2K Senior Producer Alice Carruth. Thanks for listening. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
