European space giants unite.

Today is October 23, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. China says Chang'e 7 has received all international payloads and is ready for its next robotic lunar mission. SpaceX says it has disabled more than 2,000 Starlink devices connected to scam compounds in Myanmar. SatVue has announced its participation in NATO's Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space Initiative. The Republic of Cyprus has signed an associate agreement with ESA and is expected to become an associate member in the coming months. Airbus Leonardo and Tullis have signed an agreement aimed at combining their respective space activities into a new company. Our guest today is Andy Coronios, CEO of the newly formed Australasian Space Innovation Institute. ASII was announced at the IAC this year and Andy will be sharing his plans for the organization with us later in the show. Happy Thursday everybody. Thank you for joining me. We have a somewhat European focus on the show today. Torsten Kreening will also be joining us later with the latest from the Space Sustainability Summit in Paris. But before we get to that, let's dive into today's Intel briefing. First up, after months of discussions and whispers of agreements, European giants Airbus Leonardo and Tullis have signed a memorandum of understanding aimed at combining their respective space activities into a new company. No, you are not dreaming. This is a bit of a story that we've covered before, but there is a new development. Now, this combination has been widely touted as Europe's sovereign alternative to U.S. aerospace giants. Airbus Leonardo and Tullis are aiming to strengthen Europe's strategic autonomy in space, a major sector that underpins critical infrastructure and services related to telecoms, global navigation, Earth observation, science, exploration and national security. This new company would also intend to serve as the trusted partner for developing and implementing national sovereign space programs. Airbus Leonardo and Tullis plan to pool, build and develop a comprehensive portfolio of complementary technologies and end-to-end solutions from space infrastructure to services, but excluding space launchers. They say it will accelerate innovation in the market in order to create a unified, integrated and resilient European space player with the critical mass to compete globally and grow on the export markets. So, this agreement is just the first formal step in forming the new organization, which is expected to generate mid-triple-digit million euro of annual total synergies on operating income five years after closing. So, completion of this transaction is, of course, subject to customary conditions, including regulatory clearances. With the new company, fingers crossed, expected to be operational in 2027. Let's stay in Europe for our next story, as the European Space Agency is set to gain a new associate member. The Republic of Cyprus has signed an associate agreement with ESA and is expected to become an associate member in the coming months. Cyprus became a European cooperating state in 2017, and the island nation plans to proceed with ratification to receive associate membership by early 2026 during its presidency of the Council of the European Union from January to June 2026. And with Cyprus's ratification, ESA will have four active associate member states, and those would be Cyprus, Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia. SATVU has announced its participation in NATO's Alliance Persistent Surveillance from Space Initiative, also known as APSS. Now, SATVU has already successfully delivered an infrared familiarization program to NATO personnel at the NATO Communications and Information Agency, or NCIA. The APSS initiative is a multi-year, multi-domain, multinational effort designed to enhance space-based intelligence sharing across the Alliance. By integrating commercial and government-owned space-based assets, APSS enables NATO to build a comprehensive cross-domain intelligence picture to inform political decision-making and military operations. The program is managed by NCIA, and they ensure that the data is collected, aggregated and delivered at speed, providing decision-makers with actionable insights when they are most needed. With SATVU's involvement, NATO analysts gain access to advanced thermal imaging capabilities that complement existing optical and synthetic aperture radar data sources. And our next Space and Cyber Security story comes from my friend and host Dave Bittner in our partner podcast, The Cyber Wire. SpaceX has disabled more than 2,000 Starlink satellite devices used by scam compounds in Myanmar after mounting pressure from politicians and anti-trafficking advocates. Lauren Dreyer, SpaceX's vice president of business operations, said the company proactively shut down over 2,500 kits near suspected scam centers and is cooperating with global law enforcement. The move follows reports that Starlink had enabled internet access for cybercrime operations near the Thai border, despite previous government crackdowns. Thai and US officials, including Senator Maggie Hassan, had urged Elon Musk to prevent Starlink's use in human trafficking and large-scale fraud. Myanmar authorities recently seized dozens of Starlink devices in a raid that detained over 2,000 people at a major scam complex. While some operations have been disrupted, reports suggest new compounds continue to emerge despite ongoing enforcement. Thank you, Dave. Alright, for our last story, let's head on over to China now. And could China beat America to become the first nation to find water on the moon? Well, the nation's space agency certainly believes so. And they've announced that the next Chang'e mission, Chang'e 7, has received all international payloads and is ready for its next robotic lunar mission. The lunar probe will be carrying instruments from Russia, Egypt, Bahrain, Thailand, Italy, and Switzerland, as well as the Hawaii-based NGO, the International Lunar Observatory Association. The mission is focused on studying the environment and searching for water ice near the moon's south pole. And Chang'e 7 is slated for launch in August 2026. Next year is going to be a busy one for the moon. [Music] And that concludes today's Intel Briefing, my friends. We will have more updates from the Space Sustainability Summit from Torsten Kreening at SpaceWatch Global after my chat with Andy Coronio's first. But before we get to all of that, N2K's senior producer Alice Carruth joins me now with a look at all the other stories that are making today's headlines. Thanks, Maria. We've included four additional links today in the selected reading section of this episode's show notes. They cover Apex's plan for an on-albit space-based interceptor demonstration, financial updates from Iridium and Honeywell, and investment news from Venus Aerospace. Congrats to them. Those links, along with links to the original sources of all the other stories mentioned throughout the episode, can be found on our website, space.n2k.com. Hello, T-minus crew. Whether you're tuning in to T-minus for the first time or for the 500th, we want to know what you think of our show. So, yeah, how are we doing? You can tell us directly with our listener survey as a matter of fact, and it only takes a few minutes to fill out, and you can rest assured we will be pouring over your feedback. The link to the survey is in the show notes for you, and thank you. [music] Our guest today is Andy Coronios, CEO of the newly formed Australasian Space Innovation Institute. Andy started our chat by telling me more about what AS-II is. [music] The Australasian Space Innovation Institute actually is based on an idea that world-class research really only matters when it makes a difference on Earth. So, when we began the SMARTs.CRC, the Cooperative Research Centre, which is an Australian government program to bring universities and industry together, you could think of it a little bit like an FFRDC, except much smaller scale than the large FFRDCs like MITRE and Aerospace and so on. We thought that we would actually be able to do quite a lot of work in developing niche and unique technologies in space, even though Australia has not really been a space-capable nation for a long time. We did build one of the earlier satellites, but we have not really had a space industry until really Elon Musk and the commercialization of space in the United States, where the price of launch has become so small, the satellite design and development has become relatively inexpensive so that it's no longer a monopoly of governments. And Australians are competitive. We are very innovative and we thought this would be a very big opportunity for Australia. And that's why we started the Cooperative Research Centre. So, we worked for six and a half, nearly seven years in the Cooperative Research Centre, but that typically has an end. It's a time-bound program. The partners that we worked with, the universities, the industry, some of them are US companies like Northrop, Northrop Grumman, but also many other global as well as local industries. Those partners and of course our government, we do work for defence and other government departments, those thought that in fact we would want to have a permanent entity that has the same role. And that's very much around translating satellite technology, bringing AI and advanced communications into real-world impact. So, our tagline is "Make space for Earth". We want the space technologies to be applied in agriculture, in disaster management, in securing our nation, and of course in helping isolated communities because Australia is very big. In fact, it's nearly as big as the continental USA in landmass, but very small in population. Yeah, I would love to hear more about those focus areas because this is a fascinating initiative and its mission is so important. It's been really interesting to me personally watching the Australian space industry growing by leaps and bounds in recent years, not just in their partnerships, but in their homegrown capabilities also. So, I'm so curious about certain focus areas that you all are looking at. Yes, certainly. The original polka of the SMARTs at the Cooperative Research Centre were very much around Earth observation and advanced communications. And we've done quite a lot of work in that area in developing optical communications, in developing IoT sensor collection via satellite. In fact, some of these companies that we supported began with a couple of professors and now they are global companies like Miriota and others. So, we began with those areas. We thought that Earth observation would be a very big area for us. It is a big opportunity and we focused on that. Australia is also reasonably big and good in AI, particularly at the academic perspective. And therefore, robotics and autonomy and AI was a major work for us. And indeed, what we really wanted was to see how might we make the satellite much more intelligent to do a lot of edge processing on the satellite itself, not only in understanding its health and its function, but also in processing the massive amount of data that it collects now with those very high resolution sensors. So, that was the original kind of work that we did. We had more than 200 projects. Funding was 270 million, which was the modest kind of funding by Australian standards, actually quite big. And we developed dozens of technologies. A couple of technologies are funding themselves in the United States at the moment on the testing and validation. So, we believe that the spots at CRC produced quite a lot of work. But it produced technologies, bits, if you like, of technologies, of algorithms. What do we want to do now into the new institute? Because we believe strongly in actually taking a lot of those technologies and making them useful to the pharma, to the miner, to the emergency responder and so on. We have now developed and are currently developing some, we call them flagship programs of impact. One of those is the Australian Agricultural National Digital Twin. It will basically be a live, AI-enabled virtual model of our agricultural landscape, integrating not only satellite data, but drone data, weather and climate data, data about the use of fertilizers, farm business data and so on, to be able to actually get the farmers to see exactly what is likely to be the yield in a particular paddock, to be able to then do simulations. If I plant corn, what is likely to be my yield given the weather conditions and the soil condition and so on? Do a lot of what-if simulation analysis so that they can actually plan before they act. As you know, we are very big in food production and we want to make sure that farmers grow more with less. We are a very dry continent and yet a lot of the watering is done very inefficiently and even worse, a lot of the fertilizers and pesticides are done in a way that it's not optimized. We want to bring all of that together so that not only farmers actually make more money and food costs less, but of course very importantly, we protect the environment. So that's just one of our flagship programs, we have a number. That's fascinating and such a great use case in explaining how space can do so much in the public good for Earth and not only just everybody loves saving money, but in truly making a positive environmental impact. I'm very curious as we maybe zoom out a little bit, thinking about the Australasian Space Innovation Institute, or ASII, if I'm using the acronym correctly. For you, when you look at the long term, what will be to you a measure of success for this program? I think it would be very important for us to see what would be the impact. We want to be focused on the outcomes rather than on the outputs of our work. So for us will be, okay, how many of these flagship programs do we have that are actually useful to agriculture, useful to mining, useful also to helping the Indo-Pacific region be able to look after its security, its economic resilience, and its environment. We, for instance, we have a very strong partnership with New Zealand, and that's why we call this institute the Australasian Space Innovation Institute, rather than Australian, because we want to actually support the entire region. For instance, Australia and New Zealand, together, they have a search and rescue and economic exclusion zones that combine 16% of the globe. Just imagine two of tiny countries looking after 16% of the entire earth, most of the water, of course, and of course that has its own problems. There is a lot of drug trafficking, there is a lot of illegal fishing and croaching on some of those lower countries, smaller countries in the Pacific nations, who have no capabilities to be able to look after their own fishing rights and their own climate and so on, to be able to play a role in there. So we will be measuring our KPIs on having technologies that actually do maritime monitoring far more effectively than happens at the moment, which by the way, Maria, it's only with patrol boats and aeroplanes. You really cannot, it costs billions, and there are many blind spots because you cannot really monitor such a big part of the globe with aeroplanes. We always aspire and are inspired by the work that is happening in the United States, in the space industry in particular, the fact that it's been so democratized and the opportunities are there. We would love to collaborate, as you know, Australia shares the same culture, more or less the same language as the United States. We have the same goals, resilience, sustainability, security in the region. Can we work together? Can we be your landing pad, if you like, in the Indo-Pacific area, providing support? For example, having US satellites collecting data, Australian AI doing the processing, and the Pacific nations actually applying it. Being working together in a collaborative network. We will be right back. Welcome back. And now I'll hand you over to our colleague at SpaceWatch Global, Torsten Kreening, for the latest from the Space Sustainability Summit in Paris. Hello Maria from the Paris Airport again. It was a day that connected policy, power, and purpose across Europe's space landscape. Paris was pretty much the center of European space today. So Paris hosted the second day of the 7th Summit for Space Sustainability by the Secure World Foundation, but also saw major announcement making a decisive moment for Europe's space autonomy and industry alignment. At the summit, the conversations turned from debris and dual use delivered to market creation regulation and responsibility. Meanwhile, the 337th ESA Council meeting wrapped up in Paris, preparing key decisions for the ESA Ministerial Council, CM25, in Bremen next month, setting the tone for Europe's next decade, or at least next three years, of space funding and cooperation. And in a stunning industrial move, Airbus Leonardo and Thales announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding to combine their space activities into a new joint company, a European Space Champion, expected to launch operations by 2027. The new entity employing 25,000 people and generating 6.5 billion euro in annual revenues, aiming to strengthen Europe's strategic autonomy and competitiveness across telecommunication, navigation, Earth observation and national security. Just as a sideline, Germany's space industry just holds 10,000 people, so just to compare that. Back at the summit, Sarah Dalladon of the European Space Policy Institute opened the day with a sharp keynote on the upcoming EU Space Act. Europe's first attempt to create a unified legal and industrial framework for space activities. Her message was clear. Europe needs rules that enable, not restrain. The act, she said, must balance regulatory certainty with industrial flexibility, allowing companies to operate seamlessly across borders while ensuring sustainability, safety and security. Dalladon's address positions the EU Space Act as a bridge between sustainability and serenity, connecting environmental responsibility with economic resilience, a theme that echoed throughout the day. The discussion on governance and strategy, deepened with insights from Xavier Pasco, director of the French FSR and Julie Beam from NATO and others. But Pasco described how Europe's military and commercial actors are convening a second circle of trusted industrial partners emerging between national defence programmes and the private sector. France's new Space Act, he noted, formalised this collaboration, ensuring that commercial capabilities can securely serve sovereign missions. And Julie Beam outlined NATO's growing engagement with commercial space, especially through its commercial space strategy and space front door initiatives and entry point for industry to cooperate more efficiently with the Alliance. Her key line captured the moment. Space is no longer peaceful by default, but it can still be governed responsibly. Later, Candice Masucci, Templar of Novo Space, brought data and realism to the debate with her spotlight on how the space sustainability segment can reach the other side. She revealed that 87% of all funding in the space logistics between 2020 and 2024 went to space situational awareness, SS8, nearly all from public and defence budgets. Other services from debris removal to life extension and in-orbit manufacturing remained underfunded, generating just 256 million in total revenues today. Her undertake? Sustainability is finally becoming a market, but it needs anchor customers, interoperable standards and hybrid funding models to truly take off. So, on a single October day, Europe's space story came full circle. Policymakers pushing for common regulation, the summit strengthens a narrative for space sustainability and industry giants forming a new European space champion. And analysts reminding us that sustainability must also make business sense. That's from Paris as discussions shift towards space traffic management norms of behaviours in financing sustainability at scale. See you next time, maybe next week for SB's autumn conference in Vienna. Space Watch out and back to you, Maria. Huge thank you to Torsten and the whole team at Space Watch Global for providing us updates from events in Europe. [Music] And that's T-minus brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of his podcast. Your feedback ensures 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 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 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]