[MUSIC PLAYING] Today is October 9th, 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 UK Space Agency has provided whales with 247,000 pounds of new funding. Four. Blue Origin launched the first Kazakh woman to space as part of the NS-36 mission. Three. Momentus has been selected for two NASA demonstration flights. Two. Muon Space has been awarded $44.6 million by the US Space Force for environmental monitoring. One. Stoke Space has raised $510 million in series D funding. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] Today's guest is Mark Wheatley, the founder of Delano Wheatley Consulting. And I'll be speaking to Mark about a new report that he co-authored, calling for the UK Ministry of Defense to utilize UK financial services to boost defense in space. Stay with us for more on that after today's headlines. [MUSIC PLAYING] Happy Thursday, everybody. Let's dive into today's Intel Briefing, shall we? First up, Stoke Space has raised $510 million in series D funding. The new financing more than doubles Stoke Space's total capital raised to $990 million. Stoke says the new capital will expand production capacity for the Nova vehicle and complete activation of Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral. Stoke will also invest in supply chain, their bolt line product, and infrastructure to prepare for high cadence launch operations. Earlier this year, the US Space Force also awarded Stoke a national security space launch contract. And since then, the company has been testing stage one and stage two flight-like engine configurations and advanced structural qualifications for both stages. They have also been working to refurbish Launch Complex 14 at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida, which is scheduled for activation in early 2026. Moving on now, Mew on Space has been awarded $44.6 million by the US Space Force for environmental monitoring. The small business innovation research firm fixed price Phase 3 Other Transaction Authority Agreement was awarded by the Space Force's Space Systems Command System Delta 810. The contract funds the development and on-orbit prototype demonstration of a dual-use space-based environmental monitoring capability. And that capability aims to simultaneously serve the Department of Defense, Meteorology, and Oceanography and users for mission planning and execution, in addition to global wildfire detection and monitoring. The three-satellite prototype demonstration directly addresses the two highest priorities in space-based environmental monitoring that have been identified by the Joint Requirements Oversight Council, and those are cloud characterization and theater weather imagery. The Space Force say these capabilities are essential for mission planning and execution in contested environments or traditional weather data sources may be either unavailable or compromised. Momentus has announced that it was awarded a $5.1 million contract by NASA's Flight Opportunities Program to support the commercial orbital system for microgravity in space crystallization demonstration, also often better known as COSMIC. Now, COSMIC is designed to leverage the microgravity environment of space to advance crystal growth for pharmaceuticals, semiconductors, and advanced materials. Momentus' Vigoride Orbital Service Vehicle will serve as the orbital platform to host the COSMIC payloads. And we should note that that is not the only contract awarded to Momentus by NASA before the government shut down. They've also been awarded a $2.5 million contract by NASA's Armstrong Flight Research Center to conduct a demonstration on orbit of a new thruster called the Rotating Detonation Rocket Engine better known as the RDRE. Now, junior propulsion was selected to develop the RDRE thruster, and Momentus will provide the Vigoride satellite platform and operate it in space, enabling Juno's RDRE thruster to be tested in orbit. This partnership marks a critical step towards validating the technology in a relevant space environment. Blue Origin launched the first Kazakh woman to space yesterday as part of the NS-36 New Shepard mission. The launch from the Blue Origin facility in Van Horn, Texas carried a crew of six to the Karman Line and back to Earth. The mission was the 15th human flight for the New Shepard program, which has now carried, if you can believe it, 80 individuals to the edge of space. And the UK Space Agency has provided the Welsh Government and the Trade Association for the Space Sector in Wales with £247,000 in new funding. And this funding aims to enable Wales to further the development of the space sector and move closer to its goal of being a sustainable space nation. It is provided through the Devolved Administrations Program, specifically to help deliver on the ambitions outlined in Wales, a sustainable space nation, which is the Welsh space strategy that was published in 2022. Now, the Welsh space sector contributes £345 million annually to the economy and sustains over 1,700 jobs across more than 105 organizations. So the new funding will help enable a broad range of space-related organizations across Wales to deliver targeted, high-impact projects. It will be divided into two strands to support a diverse ecosystem of applicants, from early-stage innovators to established cluster partners. And that wraps up today's Intel Briefing. Stay with us for more on the UK Space Sector in my chat with Mark Wheatley, but before we get to that, N2K Senior Producer Alice Carruth joins us now with a look at today's show notes. What do you have for us, Alice? Hi, Maria. We always include links to the original sources of the stories mentioned throughout the episode in the selected reading section of our show notes. Today, we've added two additional stories. Japan has introduced a new certification for Space Food Specialists, and Space Nukes have signed a letter of intent with Deep Space Science to explore how nuclear energy could be used in their future missions. Thank you, Ellis, and a reminder that those links can also be found on our website, space.n2k.com. A lot of people are listening to podcasts through YouTube, and if that's the way you would prefer to listen to this show, well, good news, everyone! T-Minus Space Daily is indeed on YouTube. We post our episodes there, along with video clips from interviews and events throughout the year. So if you're dual-screening at work and keep YouTube in the background while your head's down, listen, I get it, I'm not judging. Since our YouTube channel is for all of our N2K CyberWire content, including T-Minus, at N2K Cyber is our company's YouTube channel name. And yes, you'll find the T-Minus Space Daily playlist there, along with all the other shows we make here at N2K. Again, that's at N2K Cyber on YouTube. [music] Our guest today is Mark Wheatley, the founder of Delano Wheatley Consulting. And I started our chat by asking Mark to tell me about how he got involved in the space industry in the United Kingdom. [music] I wear a few hats. I'm a local politician in the city of London, and I've got two small businesses. One is advisory and recruitment led. And then from that business, I got working with the... I'll use this term quite loosely, but the umbrella for the UK new space economy, the satellite applications catapult. Back in 2023. And I found that exhilarating and an exciting experience, trying to broadly speaking, connect the new space economy in the UK particularly to that community that I represent politically, the UK financial services and professional services community. I enjoyed that. A key output of that was a paper that went to the Department of Science, and I hope anyone with a government app listening to this will forgive me, but I had a strong suspicion that that paper with some great ideas from financial services professionals was going to go into a bottom drawer at the Department of Science and be forgotten. So I decided to set up an events business in loose terms to create a community connecting the new space economy to the city of London capabilities and see what flowed from that. The fence and security themes are adjacent to space. Of course, you know, dual use technologies. And just the way I'm wired, I became increasingly aware of threats that others might have seen years ago to solve them resilience. And I felt it was important to broaden beyond space. So for the last few months, we've been working on a series called resilience, which is about that kind of whole of society approach to dependency security. And trying to really, I suppose, again, galvanize a UK financial and professional services private sector to a public imperative, which is the need by some extent, the defense of the ground. Excellent. Well, Mark, thank you for joining me and thank you for that great tee up about resilience, because that is what we're going to be getting into today. It's a really interesting topic area. And given your really fascinating, different subsets of professional expertise here, I can't wait to hear your perspective. I was wondering if you could guide me through maybe the top line thesis of the statement you're trying to get across, and then we'll just dive into the details of that. Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, like a lot of Western democracies, the UK has some public finance issues. Broadly speaking, a taxation is a mechanism that's producing diminishing returns. The UK economy is, well, stuck a little for borrowing. So borrowing is a mechanism that perhaps the Chancellor of the Czech Republic cannot or should not be looking to kind of pull. And yet we face significant challenges to our economy and to our society. Now, we've seen accidental inter-verte-commerce, drone attacks or drone incursions into Polish airspace. We've also seen Russian fighters probably being Estonian airspace, but they regularly, as you would expect, kind of buzz UK airspace and other allies. So we're seeing those kind of threats become apparent. The way I'd like to frame it is either when we don't see them in the news media, they are, and there are threats apparent in space and in cyber. And in the UK, we've got almost a national institution, Marx and Spencer. Its website was taken out a few months ago, and a great cost both to the company and to its balance sheet. So of course, a lost trading income and its reputation suffered. We've had similar attacks on health provision on local authorities and recently on airports. Now, it might be that those are simply private actors, but there's a strong, more than suspicion, there's a strong sense that the Republic Act is behind those and certain antithetical stakes and for adverse adversaries. So we are being tested, our economy is being hit, our capabilities are being depleted, and the public sector can't step up and address all of that. Our government has set an ambition to increase defence spending, but if you look at the figures, it's the medium term. Right in the short term, we are not raising the funds that perhaps we need to. So my sense is we have an urgent challenge. Public funding is not in the moment, and that means there's almost kind of a duty setting itself before the UK Financial Services and Professional Services community to step up and an opportunity because the city, like any community of that nature, does really well. Is it blends risk and opportunity, and it enables people to drive capital to where it's needed. And in my humble opinion, it's really needed at the innovative end, the threats are in space and in cyber. Well, that's to some extent where the response should be. Sounds almost like you're proposing an incubator program on the city level. Am I, do I have that sort of idea, correct? Yeah, I mean, I guess our initial activities posted around really two things, and there's a looseness to this, but it's that communities who could align and engage don't always know each other. Now, I've been very surprised in some of the new space work, that people who I assumed would automatically be connected to others just aren't. I mean, there are a lot of people in the new tech businesses who know each other, but there are breakages that I've found quite shocking two years ago. And I think some of those even can be apparent within the public realm, but also between public actors and private ones. So what we're trying to do is really two things, create a community that cuts across private and public, that cuts across the primes, the big industrial organizations and the innovators, and brings in financial services professionals, those who are already active and those who could be. So it's really in some senses about getting a community together, quite loose in the early stages, but working it out, or actually yet. And then from that community drawing contact, because I'm surprised at the paucity of thinking in some sectors and some circles. Now, it'd be perfectly clear, that's kind of what I thought in July. And I was aware we'd have a strategic defense review, we'd have a national security strategy, they are very impressive documents. They are really well put together. Our content doesn't go to that level of depth, but what we are is a community that draws, as I say, those private actors, those public actors, and we're looking at how you can get money into the challenges. We've got a very sort of narrow set in that. We had a working group, which scat and the leading law firm was pleased to host in mid-August. And then on the back of that, we've created a document with, well, just over a hundred, what we call provocations, which they're not proven policy ambitions. These are kind of bullet points to say, these are things that can get city resources and capabilities directed to the public in character. And then if it's done well, people will make money from that. Absolutely. Yeah, I mean, unfortunately, defense does cost big money. I was going to say, I imagine it would be considered a more risky prospect to potentially invest in this. So is that also a matter of educating potential investors about potential risk and reward there? Yeah, I think so. And also, yeah, great that it is, if you're a BC investor looking at some defense companies and you're chasing that kind of unicorn that 10 times that you're going to make up the ones in your portfolio that don't work, you might look at a defense company and think, you know, it depends on government contracts. What's the scale of those over here? I mean, the states you've got a much larger market. But yeah, what's the scale? What's the dependability of that government contract? And you begin to sort of say, well, this isn't ever going to be a 10 times company. Therefore, yeah, I'm out. But if there's structures we can help stimulate that kind of blend the risk, recognize as a public imperative. To some extent, we can also look at the dual-use technologies because it's special. But I think some people with face technology have maybe not had the defense capabilities front and center. And some people with defense technology haven't perceived the fact that they're well fully perceived the fact that their technology becomes more attractive to government actors if it has a commercial angle. So where do we go from here? What is the next step? Well, I mean, we want to keep refining it, building the community, refining the content. So we have an event on the 29th of October. So if any of your listeners are in London, then we'll be gathering about 120 people in the city of London. And anyone who's got a kind of a decent focus in defense, security or financial services is welcome to contact me. And we will aim to register them. We'll be hosted by professionals and we'll have great panelists and contributions. That is the next kind of community building activity. So, I mean, our resilience paper that we had a few weeks ago is light. The content we want to create next year is deeper. So we have in mind 12 essays, each of them chunky reading, kind of a deep read, authored by an expert. So we've got a former Lord Mayor, lined up to write one, former Chief Defense Staff, that we thought for pieces to maybe move from kind of punchy population to policy guidance. And then the rest of us are being driven for the unconstruction of your plan. We just want to see how that lands and where we go. [Music] We'll be right back. Welcome back. Fair warning, hungry listeners, maybe don't listen to this next story. I'm not going to be craving McDonald's fries or an Egg McMuffin, but trying to resist that temptation because I'm going to do nothing to help you out there. In fact, this story is all about McDonald's, Macca, Maccudo, Mickey D's. Does anyone still call that? And how you can be "ba da ba ba ba" loving it, specifically loving your very own All Expenses paid trip to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida and say hi to the NASA SLS in advance of the Artemis II launch. Apologies right up front for all of our listeners outside of the United States as apparently this prize is restricted to US residents only. Sorry, I don't make the rules. Anyway, the fast food chain has a visit to see the SLS as one of its prizes for its McDonald's monopoly game where when you get food for McDonald's, you essentially have a chance to win monopoly game pieces that may reward prizes. And like in the board game, which is either Beloved or Despised or both at the same time, you need a bunch of those winning pieces to win big. Yeah, listen, I'm not going to do the marketing for a giant fast food chain. You can look it up for yourself if you aren't familiar with how it all works. Apparently the VIP visit and tour of the Kennedy Visitor Center to see the SLS is a major prize win worth over 9,000 bucks. And the SLS is even on the McDonald's bags? Huh, I guess it's good PR for Artemis II. Well, anyway, good luck to everyone who's gunning for that prize. Here's hoping the ongoing US government shutdown doesn't cause any big mac delays. [Music] And that is T-minus brought to you by N2K Cyber Wire. 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 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 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 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 are mixed by Elliott Peltzman and Tre Hester with original music by Elliott Peltzman. Our executive producer is Jennifer Eiben. Peter Kilpe is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thank you for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
