How many anti-satellite weapons are currently in orbit?

[MUSIC PLAYING] Today is October 2, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-minus. 22nd to LOS, T-dred. Open aboard. [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] Five. The European Space Agency has signed a memorandum of understanding with the Korea Aerospace Administration. Four. Axiom Space and Resinac to collaborate on the research development in manufacturing of high-performance semiconductor materials in the environment of space. Three. Belgium's Space Applications Services has joined StarLabs Space as a joint venture partner and investor. Two. Barta Space Industries has reached an agreement with Southern Launch to extend their partnership for 20 re-entries into the KUNIVA test range in South Australia through 2028. One. Intuitive Machines has completed a previously announced acquisition of Kinetics. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] And founder of T-minus, Brandon Karp, is joining me later in today's show for our monthly Cyber and Space segment. Now, last month, we tackled the migration of communication infrastructure to the polls. This month, we're going to be talking about cyber warfare in space. By the way, do you know how many anti-satellite weapons are currently being tracked in orbit? Yeah, it's probably more than you think. You'll want to hear more about that after today's headlines. [MUSIC PLAYING] Happy Thursday, everybody. We are on day two of a US government shutdown. And none the wiser on when or if US politicians can come to some kind of an agreement on funding federal agencies. We do hope that those of you who are impacted by the shutdown are keeping in good spirits. Let's dive into today's Intel briefing. Or there's that old saying, if you can't beat them, join them. Let's take a skewed angle today in M&A. Mergers and acquisitions, it's more like if you can't beat them, we see this kind of thing a lot with large companies like SpaceX acquiring companies that produce products or services that are needed by the launch company. And we're seeing that trend trickle down to other space organizations. For example, take intuitive machines. They have completed a previously announced acquisition of kinetics. Now, kinetics offers intuitive machines access to deep space navigation, systems, engineering, and constellation mission design. Ultimately, the acquisition enhances intuitive machines' ability to provide customers secure, reliable communications and precision navigation for lunar and interplanetary missions by combining its data service platform with kinetics deep space navigation technology. Sounds like a win-win, right? Kinetics is certified by NASA for deep space navigation and has supported some of the most ambitious planetary missions in history, including navigation services to Mercury, Pluto, some asteroids, and yeah, the moon. Kinetics expertise in deep space navigation and mission planning enhances intuitive machines' ability to deliver end-to-end space data relay solutions for lunar and interplanetary missions. Data is king after all. The stock acquisition was completed for $30 million before closing adjustments, including approximately $15 million in cash and approximately 1,400,000 shares of intuitive machines' common stock. We're predicting some big things for commercial lunar exploration in the near future. VARDA Space has reached an agreement with Southern Launch to extend their partnership for 20 re-entries into the Kuniba test range in South Australia through 2028. So far, VARDA has used Kuniba as a re-entry site for the W2 and W3 missions, which re-entered in February and May of this year. Capsules W4 and W5 are scheduled to re-enter at the 15,830 square mile Kuniba test range by the end of 2025. The two companies say that this new agreement will cement Australia's role as the leader in commercial space launch and returns, and secure landing space for VARDA's future missions, which are planned to increase to a near monthly cadence by the end of 2028. Belgium's Space Application Services has joined Starlabs Space as a joint venture partner and investor. Space apps will bring to the partnership experience in space systems, mission operations and payload integration with capabilities that include avionics payload development, the end-to-end international commercial experiment cubes or ice cubes service, as well as mission integration and operations control software. The company also works closely with the European Space Agency and international partners, broadening Starlabs access to global markets and research communities. The partnership will also include collaboration on space apps, space innovation laboratories currently under development across Europe. Axiom Space and Resinac have agreed to collaborate on the research development and manufacturing of high-performance semiconductor materials in the environment of space. The company say that this collaboration paves the way towards leveraging microgravity to advance next-generation chip technologies and accelerate the in-space manufacturing market. Under this new MOU, Resinac also plans to extend its current work with Axiom Space, where Resinac is developing molding components that can reduce soft errors when semiconductor devices are exposed to space radiation. And the European Space Agency has signed its own memorandum of understanding with the Korea Aerospace Administration, better known as CASA. The agencies plan to work together on peaceful uses of space, starting with space weather monitoring and sharing space communications facilities. The agencies may now use each other's ground stations for telemetry, tracking, and command functions. This agreement complements a similar arrangement in place since 2011 with the Korea Aerospace Research Institute, which is an affiliated research institute of CASA. Now, UKSA also reaffirmed their own partnership with ESA. They signed the European Space Agency's Integrated Team Arrangement, which they say marks a significant step in strengthening UK-European collaboration in space exploration. [music] And that wraps up today's Top 5 stories, but really, we have just barely scratched the surface with all of the activities going on in the space industry today. And UK Senior Producer Alice Carruth joins us now to share some of the other stories that are making today's headlines. What are you looking at today, Alice? There's a lot of rumors about layoffs hitting federal agencies during the shutdown, Maria, but nothing confirmed as yet. The FAA, however, has announced that 11,000 of their employees that's about a quarter of their workforce will be furloughed. iSpace has signed a payload service agreement with UEL. T-Mobile has rolled out T-Satellite Services to more customers. Maxar Intelligence is rebranding to Vantnor. Origin has announced the crew for the NS36 mission. And Spacecoin has performed a demonstration designed to prove that data on a blockchain, as the encrypted record behind cryptocurrencies and other digital services, could leave Earth pass through a satellite orbit and return intact. Who knew that wasn't a thing? Right, using Space for Secure Data Transfer, I guess not exactly in new news, still remind us, please, where we can learn about all of those stories. Links to further reading on all the stories mentioned throughout our episode are included in the selected reading section of our show notes. Those links can also be found on our website space.n2k.com. Just click on the episode title. Hi there, listeners. We have regular segments that we air here on T-minus, where we have regular experts that join us monthly to talk in depth about their areas of expertise. And if you have burning questions, our guest experts may just have answers for you. Law, intelligence, policy and innovation, and cybersecurity, which is our segment today, in fact. So, got any questions on any of those? Send us your questions to space@n2k.com, and we will share them with our segment experts to answer on the show. Chances are, whatever's on your mind is top of mind for a lot of other listeners, too. Don't be shy, and thank you. [Music] I caught up with Brandon Karp for our monthly Cyber and Space segment. I want to make a prediction today. And it's not the rosiest of predictions. In fact, it might be a little bit of, you know, fear, uncertainty and doubt. We're doing the fun. Okay. In the next 12 months, we are going to see clear evidence of preparation for another VESAT level hack and attack against satellite infrastructure. Mm-hmm. I, yeah. Now, I'm not sure that the hack will actually go to the point of having effects like VESAT hack did, but we will certainly see clear evidence that some foreign actor, probably Russia, is preparing for another of that scale. Within the same domain as in, within the Ukrainian war, or are we thinking potentially outside of that? I think outside of that. And I think it can be either satellite communications or Earth observation satellites. Damn. Okay. Obviously, not a thing. I just want to happen. I'm just putting that out there. Like, nobody wants this, but one must prepare for potentials. So, anything that you think is pointing in that direction and anything you want to share that makes you think this, I'm curious where you're going with that. Yeah. So, a couple of things are kind of leading to this prediction in my mind. First is the recent incursions into the airspace of Eastern European countries, members of NATO, you know, think Poland, Russia, entering their airspace using attack drones and even, you know, missiles flying through their airspace and actually manned aircraft as well. And so, you see that increased aggressive posture from Russia. Now, that's a physical incursion. Probably as Russia has shown, they have the capability with the VESAT attack, right? They have the capability, the means, and the coordination in their military operations to coordinate in cyberspace with physical space. So, they've proven that they can do that. So, chances are they're starting to think along those lines as well. At the same time, a decrease in the, or a degradation in the open dialogue between the U.S., European countries, and Russia in terms of the Ukraine war and bringing that to resolution. Then, that necessarily doesn't say, OK, there's going to be a cyber attack against infrastructure, but what I do want to bring to the fore is a few statements made by European space leaders at the Space Defense and Security Summit in September of 2025. And the first was from the newly appointed leader of France's Space Forces. This is Major General Vincent, and I'm going to butcher this name. Chessot. Something like that. But these were literally his very first public statements to the world after being appointed. And he talked about the rapid increase in hostility in the space domain and space environment. At the same time, at the same event, Canada's space leader, Brigadier General Christopher Horner, revealed that they are tracking at least potentially more than 200 anti-satellite weapons currently in orbit, which is a scary number. Yeah, I think if you had asked, not that I would know, if you had asked me, how many ASATs do I think are in orbit? I would not have come up with 200, not even close. All right, what do I do with that information? Well, really, it's what does the community do with this information? So what do we know? We know that Russia is starting to do physical incursions into Eastern Europe, testing the responses of the European defense community to those incursions. We know that talks have pretty much broken down on Ukraine. We know that Russia now publicly is saying that the U.S. and the West are perpetrating a full war against Russia. So that is escalating. Now we know that the European space commanders are saying, this is becoming a more and more hostile environment. We know that there are physical anti-satellite weapons in space, a significant number of them, probably a lot of which are Russia's. And we know that Russia has been actively doing things like jamming GPS in Eastern Europe and affecting numerous countries, just in the last two years. And so what do we do? We need to kind of go shields up and start thinking of, we need to start looking for the next BSAT hack. What are the vulnerable systems? How do we defend those systems? How do we approach this? And what are we looking for? And I would like to point everyone and do a little kind of public service announcement. Cisco released a major exploit, kind of an apache for an exploit against Cisco ASA. Now Cisco ASA are edge devices. They're not necessarily related to satellite communications and satellite architectures. But what we know about these ASA devices is they tend to be edge devices, kind of between your enterprise network and the global internet. They are used for everything from firewalls and VPN aggregators, things like that. So they're edge devices and typically used by small and medium-sized businesses. So the types of businesses that are in the defense and aerospace domain, especially industries and businesses with some tech debt. And they haven't updated their systems recently. And this is a critical vulnerability that the existing attacks are techniques that Russia has used in the past. And so there's a connection here, I think, between Russia starting to prepare the battle space and trying to find access points, and maybe they've already found them, to have an effect, an offensive cyber effect against satellite communications and even potentially Earth observation technologies. Yeah, and it's interesting, and I'm making sure to highlight that you've mentioned several times, businesses. Because I know when we're talking about a war potentially heating up, a lot of the instincts that many of us have is this is a government and military thing, but VSSAT was obviously civilian communications. So this is really the businesses need to stand up and take notice, although it is a fascinating thing if not in a good way. If Russia already potentially has a foothold somewhere, then you've got to try to figure out who's in your network right now. It's not an easy thing to do, not impossible, but not easy. Quite gauntlet being thrown potentially, but that is the challenge, isn't it? Especially with an adversary, Russia, who's proved that they have the means, right? They have the capability, they have the intent. Now, we haven't seen, I mean, we have seen an increase in incursions, cyber intrusion, in cyber incidents against space infrastructure just this year, right? Yes. It's been like a 120% increase this year over the previous year. And just the general aerospace demand as well is just like air space, yes. Correct. Now, not all of those are what would be considered necessarily preparation of the battle space. Preparation of the battle space looks a little different. It's much more akin to what Volt Typhoon and Salt Typhoon, the Chinese threat actors have been doing against US critical infrastructure, which is creating persistent access, starting to craft destructive malware against those systems, testing the limits of those controls within those networks. That's not necessarily what the increase in incidents have been, but the situation can tip very quickly from initial access into preparing the battle space. And really, that's what this prediction is about, is in the next 12 months, we're going to really see an increase, a ramp up in preparing the battle space. This is really a call to action to the community to get together. Now, it's also a business opportunity, right? I like covering all these frames for the community, which is anyone who's working on things like digital twins, secure communications, zero trust architectures. Last month, we talked about optical networks and low latency communications and failover. That low latency communications to optical communications allows us to start building self-healing satellite architectures and things like that. So, starting to invest and think about how you can implement those technologies could improve your defensive posture. And is there anything in this context that would be maybe a little different from the normal kind of thing that a defender might see that they should be keeping an eye out for, or is it just more of what they might often see incoming? Yeah, that's a fantastic question. And at the end of the day, when you think about the intrusion kill chain and the cyber kill chain, the first part of that kill chain really does look the same. What are they doing? They are doing recon, investigating the network, looking at different points of intrusion testing, different intrusion capabilities and techniques, testing accounts to see if they can get access. Once they have access, establishing persistence. However, the end target can be different, right? For an actual offensive effect, what the adversary is going to be looking for is not just persistence in memory, but access to parts of memory that are running critical code, operating systems, industrial controls, kind of the crown jewels of the network, not just intelligence about the organization, financial documents, things like that, but actually looking for the critical parts of the network that keep the network up and running. And so once you see a threat actor starting to look for those things in your telemetry, that's when you really have to get concerned. Also, potentially even implanting malware. If an organization is implanting malware and not doing anything, that's a clear sign that they are preparing the battle space to flip the switch at some point. And so that's the type of activity that I'm thinking we might start to see more of in this space, in this domain. I know there's a lot of coordination that goes on behind the scenes and in non-public spaces about sharing this kind of intel, which I'm sure that's going on at pace. And hopefully we'll see more of that. And people will be keeping their eyes and ears peeled. So this is Brandon, not a happy topic, but an important one. You are allowed to give me non-happy topics for the record. It's important. I think that just the next 12 to 18 months, kind of worldwide in this domain is going to get a little testy. And so I think everyone in this community has to start thinking along these lines, to share ourselves. And then of course the new businesses coming online who can provide services, that's valuable, right? New technologies, like we mentioned, the digital twin technologies, very helpful for kind of self-healing constellations and communication networks. You know, we've improved, maybe it's time to start to bring up quantum cryptography again and bring that back in a future segment. You wove that in nicely, yeah. We'll put a pin in that for next time. Yes, that's all I like. I like it. All right, Brandon, thank you. And thanks for keeping everybody informed. It's a joy as always talking to you. So thanks for coming back on the show. Thanks, Maria. Our thanks to Brandon Karp for joining us for our monthly check-in about space cybersecurity. And again, if you have a question you would like him to answer, send it on over to us. Space@N2K.com is our email. And we will share your question, or thought, or idea with him. [music] We'll be right back. [music] Welcome back. Kazakhstan is best known in the space world as home to the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the historic launch site for Soviet and now Russian missions. Indeed, Baikonur was the launch site of Yuri Gagarin and the Gateway for decades of human spaceflight. Still is, in fact, just last month, the Progress 93 cargo resupply to the ISS launch from there and not to rest on its international renowned laurels. Kazakhstan is making even more moves in space science advances. This week, the nation launched Sana 1, which is its first long-duration isolation experiment at the National Space Center in Astana. Not unlike analog astronaut missions that take place around the world, this 10-day study places a four-woman crew inside a spacecraft simulator to test medical, psychological, and team dynamics under spaceflight-like conditions. The sim is led by Kazakhstan's Aerospace Committee with support from Eurasian Space Ventures and local universities. And it is important to note here that this mission is a milestone for Kazakhstan, as Sana 1 is the country's first integrated human spaceflight study. Alan Kozkinoff, who is the deputy chief of the Aerospace Committee of the Ministry of AI and Digital Development of Kazakhstan, said this of the mission. "This experiment lays the foundation for building the country's national research infrastructure and training specialists for future space missions. Its goal is not only to advance the country's potential in space science, but also to promote greater engagement of women in space science. The female crew of Sana 1 symbolizes a new step towards gender equality and demonstrates Kazakhstan's commitment to form its own team of researchers for future space expeditions." All the best to Commander Yulia Bakirova and crew members Asem Kuyandaik, Daria Komarova, and Lenara Zaday-Girova on their endeavor. And while this one is on land, no doubt we'll hear of in-space missions soon enough. Ad Astra. [Music] And that's T-minus, brought to you by N2K Cyber Wire. We would 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 this show, please share our rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes and send an email to space@n2k.com. We are proud that N2K Cyber Wire 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 a 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 Senior Producer is Alice Carruth. Our producer is Liz Stokes. We are mixed by Elliot Peltzman and Tre Hester, with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpie is our publisher, and I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thank you for listening. We'll see you next time. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]