Today is August 14th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. T-minus, 22nd to LOS, T-dris. Open aboard. The ride is roll. The cabin is ready. The cabin is ready. The crew is ready. The crew is ready. The flight is rolling. Bye. KBR and Axiom Space have completed three successful crewed underwater tests of the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit. Four. Inspire Global announced preliminary revenue results for the second quarter. Three. The Italian Space Agency has signed an agreement with SpaceX for an uncrewed mission to Mars aboard a future starship mission. Two. The Lott satellite network has been awarded a multi-million dollar contract by Israel's Ministry of Defense for the delivery and integration of satellite communications systems and services. One. U.S. President Donald Trump signed the Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry Executive Order. Zero zero. Lift off. Lift off. Our guest today is Luis Torres, founder of Torres Orbital Mining, known as TOM. And TOM is a startup developing robotic systems for sustainable lunar excavation, and Luis will be sharing more about his company with me later in the show. Happy Thursday, everybody. We're kicking off today's intelligence briefing with an executive order signed by U.S. President Donald Trump, which is titled Enabling Competition in the Commercial Space Industry. According to the summary released by the White House, the EO aims to enable a competitive launch marketplace and substantially increase commercial space launch cadence and novel space activities by 2030. And the order aims to streamline commercial license and permit approvals for U.S.-based operators. This includes eliminating regulatory barriers and expediting environmental reviews for commercial launches and re-entries. It says it will cut unnecessary red tape to make it easier to build new spaceports in the United States, where more commercial space operations will be launched from. To ensure this next-generation spaceport infrastructure, duplicate review processes will be eliminated and environmental reviews will be expedited. The White House wants to promote new space activities like in-space manufacturing and orbital refueling through a streamlined framework. It will also establish a new position in the Office of the Secretary with the responsibility of advising the Secretary of Transportation on fostering innovation and deregulation in the commercial space industry. As you may remember, the current Department of Transportation Secretary, Sean Duffy, is also acting as the Interim NASA Administrator. The FAA's Associate Administrator for Commercial Space Transportation will also be a senior executive non-career employee, and the Office of Space Commerce will be elevated into the Office of the Commerce Secretary. And finally, the executive order expects to mitigate the risk of the United States losing its competitive edge in the commercial space industry by dismantling regulatory barriers that it says prevent rapid innovation and expansion. Acting NASA Administrator Sean Duffy added a comment following the release of the EO, stating, "People think the Department of Transportation is just planes, trains, and automobiles, but we have a critical role to play in unlocking the final frontier. By slashing red tape, tying up spaceport construction, streamlining launch licenses so they can occur at scale, and creating high-level space positions in government, we can unleash the next wave of innovation. At NASA, this means continuing to work with commercial space companies and improving our spaceports' ability to launch. I look forward to leveraging my dual row at DOT and NASA to make this dream a reality." And the latter statement certainly seems to imply that we will not be getting a new full-time NASA Administrator for some time. In any case, you can read the full executive order for yourself by following the link in our show notes. Moving on now, Galat satellite networks has been awarded a multi-million dollar contract by Israel's Ministry of Defense for the delivery and integration of satellite communications systems and services. Deliveries are expected before the end of 2025. The contract includes the rapid deployment of advanced SATCOM services tailored to meet the operational requirements of Israel's defense forces. Galat says that their subdivision Galat Defense will lead the contract to develop systems that are engineered for operation in harsh and unpredictable environments, making them ideal for a wide range of military communication needs. Let's head over to Italy now, and the Italian space agency ASI has signed an agreement with SpaceX for an uncrewed mission to Mars aboard a future Starship mission. And the agreement includes provisions for several payloads, including a plant growth experiment, a radiation sensor, and a meteorological monitoring station. ASI expects to collect data not only during the mission's six-month interplanetary cruise, but also throughout its time on the Martian surface. ASI President Teodoro Valenti shared on social media about the agreement declaring "Italy is going to Mars." Valenti called the agreement a first of its kind and said it affirmed the country's continued commitment to lead in space exploration. Spire Global announced preliminary revenue results for the second quarter, reported revenue to be in the range of $18-19 million. So why only preliminary financial results at this time? While Spire cited complexities related to the sale of their maritime business as the reason for the slightly delayed finalization of their financials, providing preliminary figures allowed them to update the market on key financial metrics while the final closing procedures and adjustments were still being completed. And the company is holding a call this evening to provide updates to its investors. KBR and Axiom Space have completed three successful crewed underwater missions of the Axiom Extravehicular Mobility Unit, also known as the Axiomu. The spacesuits are being developed for use on NASA's Artemis III mission. KBR and Axiom conducted the tests at NASA's Neutral Buoyancy Lab at Johnson Space Center. The tests involved an astronaut being fully submerged in the Neutral Buoyancy Lab's 6.2-million-gallon pool while wearing the Axiomu. The goal was to evaluate the suit's integrity in an environment that closely simulates the weightlessness of space, and the company say that the suit remained completely sealed and airtight, signifying that it is ready for more advanced evaluations and, ultimately, future missions. [Music] That wraps up today's Intel Briefing. As always, we add links to the original sources of all of the stories that we mentioned throughout the episode in the selected reading section of our show notes. And to K Senior Producer, Alice Carruth is hovering in the wings now to let us know what extra stories we have included in there for you today. Alice, what do you got for us? There's just one additional link in there today. It covers a brief social media announcement that Space Kinetic Corp has raised over $12 million from private investors, which they say they'll use to build a new paradigm for space superiority and missile defense. I'll be honest, I'm not completely sure what they're aiming to do with that vague statement, but hopefully with the new investment they'll be able to communicate their future mission a little clearer. Well, less jargon is always better. And please remind us where else our listeners can find those links. For the next two weeks, we have a new episode on our website, space.intuk.com. Scroll down to find today's episode title and included on that page is the selected reading section with hyperlinks to all the stories covered in today's podcast. 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. [Music] Today's guest is Luis Torres, founder of Torres Orbital Mining, also known as TOM. And I started our chat by asking Luis to tell me about how he came up with the idea to start TOM. [Music] There's a methodology that I use a lot to solve problems. I think it's called the generation of abstract ideas. So you get into this problem and you try to come up with a crazy, really absurd idea and then you start shipping away what makes it a crazy idea, right? So while reviewing my career aspirations throughout my MBA, we were really thinking of entrepreneurship, right? And create something for by ourselves and get experienced this challenge. Then I started thinking, where's my experience in? And how could I leverage to create something, right? So when I started doing my research, okay, maybe let's take a look into what the companies are doing, just out of curiosity. And that's when I saw that we're relying on hoppers, we're relying on conveyors. And there's a lot of material transition points that I'm thinking, okay, all of these areas are just going to be issues. And let me give you a hard data. Yeah, so to run a mine, 50%, somewhere between 50% to 60% of the cost to run it is human labor. And the maintenance, the mobile center conveyors take a look at the machine. That means that if we were to replicate all of the methodologies on orbital bodies, we're going to have to think on how we're going to replace this 50% of human labor, right? Either AI, software or robotics, and all of this just keeps adding on layers of complexity. So now it's something that could be feasible. It becomes incredibly hard. So when talking with the idea, that's when we assign ourselves some objectives, right? Okay, so we need to assign something that has less transition points, that has a good management of us, even more after learning how sharp Regal it is. So that's how we come out with our design. And in a very simple terms, it's nothing but a drill with some inside transitions of the materials. And from there, we started moving on. By giving me the point of view from space research, right? Having some collaborators that have been participating in their work in Luxembourg. With the point of view from space resources. And so I think that for the past eight months that we've been working and analyzing. So first, we have a good idea. Second, is it feasible? And then how can we attach it? How can we create this good mix in between the experience between earth mining and the issues that I can see that we could, that I'm going to translate exponentially. And how to understand this material, right? I was looking on your website and it's fascinating looking. And is this what you're testing right now? Yeah, absolutely. So our first design, it was the moon of thermos extractor lander. That's the first thing that we work on. And the idea for me was that in order for us to be able to think of, "How are we going to utilize the space resources on there? Are we going to mine asteroids?" I think we need to prove that we can actually mine good amounts of space resources. The first machine that we designed is, it's designed to carry or to excavate around 1200 kilograms of lunar soil. So after a few conversations with very smart space people, they told me, "Okay, iterate. Let's scale it down." If you're telling me that your technology is scalable, scale it down and let's start testing the prototype, right? So that's what we ended up with, Toshly, which is our first medium class prototype, capable of extracting 25 kilograms of regolith. I was thinking it's so interesting to me to hear scaling it down. It makes sense for space because we have to get things smaller. But I often think of scaling as scaling up. In this case, it needs to be scaled down. Yeah, absolutely. And this is something that I've been experiencing during the past couple of months while designing this. I'm used to design very heavy duty equipment. And now I'm trying to design very lightweight, even the legs for the rover. And I'm dealing with millimeters and something. It's just amazing for me. So just to give you a little context under this name, Toshly comes from the now world world rabbit. It goes with the, I guess you can call it "Lay-Yant," one of the kids that called one of the gods who saw a humble rabbit that was offering to him and decided to imprint his silhouette on the moon. So I have always thought of that story. I love that. I love that tribute and I love that. That's wonderful. Yeah, thank you. So yeah, we tested Toshly, the Premotion Mobility and some excavation analysis, Jeff. And right now we're trying to run in this better agile methodology, you know, like create a list of what we want, select what we can do, and try to work and iterate faster. And that's how, from the lessons learned from this prototype, we are creating right now, our smaller rover. So we're even scaling down once more. So this one is, it's assigned around nine kilograms of regulates, so less than half of the big one. But I think this is going to let us iterate faster. And with the lessons from Toshly, we're going to be able to produce faster results and something that's easy to carry to conferences. That's a nice bonus as well for you and your team. So that's wonderful. It is so fascinating to me to think of, just as you said with mining, you do think of these extremely heavy duty equipment. And now we're talking about things that are so refined and almost delicate, but still have to be rugged enough to be dealing with regulates and all the arduousness of mining. I mean, that sounds like a really fascinating technical and engineering problem to be working out. But also, I imagine it also taps into your imagination of what's possible and what mining on the moon will look like. Because right now, we're all still trying to figure that out, but you are doing that work right now to help shape that future. Absolutely. And let me tell you something. When I first was bouncing the idea with my wife, one of the first things that she told me was, don't blow up the moon. We need it. Fair. That's fair enough. And having to deal with a lot of environmental permits and issues and circumstances here on our mining, one take to look into what's on the moon. What are we writing about? What are the standards and mostly around mind planning? What can and when can we do? And it was also surprising to see that we're pretty young in that regard. There's some agencies that are starting to work on these space policies. I kept seeing a lot of space lawyers starting this very important conversations. So I'm seeing a lot of experts on mining, on earth mining, starting to give their feedback into mind planning and to what geology needs to look like before we're actually starting kind of big commercial mining for in-city research. And that's what I kept thinking, what I kept telling to my team, like, that's the goal, right? That's the vision to be able to be, to supply with these raw resources or pre-processed resources to different companies or even governments that are trying to leverage the resources while on orbit or on return missions. Yeah. But I think before all that happens, we really need to be able to know how to make a hole in a very safe manner of how to do it. And mostly around dust and of course, how we're going to take care of the whole afterworks, right? Yeah. I'm so curious. I guess this is the engineering part of me. How you do testing of your prototypes given, can't really easily get to the moon to test this. What's your analog for doing all this testing that you're working on? Right now, we're using just basalt and half inch crusher wrong with a lot of things. So I think right now our goal for the prototype is to test first that the idea works, right? Yeah. And then we have that rough estimate of how much power is the motors consuming and stuff. And trying to create a good mathematical model to be able to base on the new prototypes and new designs. Right now, our next goal is to actually start producing some even smaller scale tests so that we can actually start using some simulats. We have to design the correct profile for the drill head, make sure that we have all of the mechanisms well understand that all they're going to work together, right? Yeah. It's mostly our first prototype is something that can work here on Earth. But now we need to make sure that it's going to work on the moon and it's going to work in the most efficient way that it can. [Music] We'll be right back. [Music] Welcome back. A tip of the hat to Monisha Ravissati, astronomy editor at space.com for a great article that combined two of my favorite things, astronomy and classic nerdery in the form of Lord of the Rings. You can't pretend you're surprised by that. Just put a pin in that information for a sec though. The article covers new information and a striking picture of a plasma jet in the Blazar PKS 1424+240, which, OK, maybe doesn't sound interesting perhaps, but it definitely is both scientifically and visually. It took 15 years for astronomers to complete this picture of this object. And those years of study did pay off, say Yuri Kovalev, who is the principal investigator of the multi-messenger studies of extragalactic supercolliders project at the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy. And he says this, "When we reconstructed the image, it looked absolutely stunning. We have never seen anything quite like it. A near-perfect toroidal magnetic field with a jet pointing straight at us." Now, the object, as I said earlier, is a Blazar and not a jacket, but imagine a quasar with its distinctively super bright central jet cone. And now imagine that jet pointing directly at us. And when a quasar jets the sky like a big evil eye, it's a blazar. And Monisha Ravi-Satti at space.com makes, honestly, a perfect comparison. This infernally hot, red streaky, circular-ish formation with an incredibly bright center, it is just like the eye of Sauron in space. And honestly, it really does look like something that would give any creature, hobbit or otherwise, quite a fright. Link in the show notes for you so you can see for yourself. [Music] And that's T-Minus brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of our 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 are 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 cybersecurity professionals grow, learn and stay informed. As the Nexus for Discovery and Connection, we bring you the people, the technology and the ideas shaping the future of secure innovation. 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 Kilpey is our publisher and I am your host, Maria Vermazis. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
