Today is December 8th, 2025. I'm Maria Varmazis and this is T-minus. Reuters is reporting that SpaceX has informed investors and representatives of financial institutions that it plans to pursue an initial public offering in the second half of next year. ISpace has signed a strategic partnership agreement with Kurita Water to create business opportunities focused on water resources and building supply infrastructure on the lunar surface in the future. Kosmonaut Sergei Ryazhikov to hand over command of the ISS to four-time space flyer NASA astronaut Mike Finke. NASA has selected two science instruments designed for astronauts to deploy on the surface of the Moon during the Artemis IV mission. ICEYE has secured 150 million euros in new funding. Our guest today is Jerry Hudak, VP of Engineering at Rendezvous Robotics. We're going to be talking about their missions on the ISS and future plans for Rendezvous Robotics after today's headlines, so stay with us. It is Monday, everyone. Thank you for joining me and apologies in advance. I am getting over a cold. I'm sure you can hear it, but we're going to get through it today, alright? Alright. We're kicking off our Intel briefing today with the latest on Europe's latest push for more sovereign space capabilities. ICEYE has secured 150 million euros in new funding as well as 50 million euros in secondary placement. The new series E funding brings evaluation of the company to 2.4 billion, yes, with a B, euros, which amounts to 2.8 billion dollars on the other side of the pond. The managing director and head of Europe at General Catalyst, which led the series E filing, said Europe's security starts with sovereign space capability. ICI enables that with the world's largest SAR constellation, software-defined satellites, and fully sovereign missions that put independent visibility back in Europe's hands. The new capital will be used to develop ICEYE's Synthetic Aperture Radar, or SAR constellation, and the accelerated deployment of sovereign satellite systems, advanced sensing capabilities, and data intelligence services. And let's check in with NASA now. The US Space Agency has selected two science instruments designed for astronauts to deploy on the surface of the moon during the Artemis-4 mission to the lunar South Pole region. The experiment selected is the Duster Instrument Suite led by Xu Wang of the University of Colorado Boulder. The Duster, which stands for Dust and Plasma Environment Surveyor Investigation, consists of a set of instruments mounted on a small autonomous rover which will characterize dust and plasma around the landing site. These instruments will advance understanding of the moon's natural dust and plasma environment and how that environment responds to human presence, including any disturbance during crew exploration activities and the lander lift off. The contract is valued at $24.8 million over a period of three years. And the other instrument selected is the South Pole Seismic Station known as SPSS. And SPSS aims to enable scientists to characterize the lunar interior structure to better understand the geologic processes that affect planetary bodies. The seismometer will help determine the current rate at which the moon is struck by meteoric impacts, monitor the real-time seismic environment and how it can affect operations for astronauts, and determine properties of the moon's deep interior. The crew will additionally perform an active source experiment using a thumper that creates seismic energy to survey the shallow structure around the landing site. That does sound straight out of due, and I hope they do not summon any lunar sandworms. The SPSS instrument is led by Mark Panning of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and the team has been awarded $25 million over a period of three years. Congratulations to both projects. They sound very cool. It is a time of great change on the International Space Station, and it's change of time indeed. On Sunday, Roscosmos Cosmonaut and Station Commander Sergei Ryzhakov handed over a symbolic key that represents command of the orbital outpost to four-time space flyer NASA astronaut Mike Finke. Finke will formally take responsibility of the station operations and lead the new Expedition 74 crew at the moment that Ryzhakov and flight engineers Alexei Zubritsky of Roscosmos and Johnny Kim of NASA leave the orbit. Outpost. They are all due to depart on their Soyuz capsule at 8.41pm tonight, and you can watch their re-entry on NASA's live stream services. Icebase has signed a strategic partnership agreement with Kurita Water to create business opportunities focused on water resources and building supply infrastructure on the lunar surface in the future. The partnership is a follow-on from the Memorandum of Understanding signed in March of this year regarding payload transportation for Kurita's future lunar water treatment demonstration test equipment and the third-party allotment of new shares to Kurita announced in October. The new collaboration aims to establish the CIS Lunar Water Resources Industry, and this includes demonstrating water resource utilization technologies on the lunar surface, conducting feasibility assessments, and planning payload integration for future commercial missions. Kurita's expertise in water treatment, technology, and water resource management, as well as ispace’s experience in lunar exploration and transportation services positions the partnership well to establish sustainable water resource infrastructure in space. And yeah, I'm glad someone's thinking about it already, because someone's got to. And the question that so many people have been asking for quite some time, could SpaceX finally be going public? Well, Reuters is reporting that SpaceX has informed investors and representatives of financial institutions that it plans to pursue an initial public offering in the second half of next year. According to the report, SpaceX is considering a public listing of the entire company, including its Internet Satellite Service Starlink. The news of the potential IPO follows a media report that said that SpaceX is kicking off a secondary share sale that would value the rocket maker at $800 billion, pitting it against open AI for the title of the most valuable private company. Wow, we will bring you more on this story when or if the report is confirmed. And that wraps up today's briefing. Thanks for hanging in there with me. I know my voice sounds pretty strained, but believe it or not, this is better than I've sounded for a few days. In the meantime, you can read more about all the stories that I mentioned in today's show by following the links in the selected reading section of our show notes. And by the way, T-minus listeners, in January, we here at T-minus will be attending Spacecom in Florida, and there will be a lot of moments from that event that we will want to share with you that I just can't always squeeze into the daily show. We are at T-minus daily if you would like to see some exclusive videos there, as well as some behind the scenes moments from the show floor. And if you're going to be at Spacecom in Florida, hope to see you there. [Music] Our guest today is Jerry Hudak, Vice President of Engineering at Rendezvous Robotics. And Jerry started off by telling me about how the company was started. [Music] So Rendezvous Robotics was kind of spun out of this technology from the Raleigh Institute and Dr. Eric Ecclos worked. The origin of the technology was on building large habitats in space, which is something down the road that we have an eye on. So starting with kind of advancing this technology and taking kind of the eight years of work that she has put into this and commercializing. We think there's an opportunity here for how do we build bigger in space. The technology is using magnets to assemble pieces that you send up, which in a similar way is kind of how we build on Earth and is not how we've been building in space. Now, if you want to send something to space, you have to build it in its final form and that has to survive this very violent ride for three minutes. And then it's in zero gravity or microgravity and it's now over designed for the environment that it's in just so that it could survive the three minute transportation to get up there. It's also very volume inefficient. We have to fit it in this fairing. So it has to fit in this cylinder and since it's in its final form, there's a lot of gaps and spaces unused. And so looking at kind of taking inspiration from how we build things on Earth, we send the materials to the final destination and then we assemble them there. And up until recently, you'd say, well, yeah, that makes sense. But how are you going to, who there's no one in space to assemble them, right? And we've have had that right. The International Space Station was assembled in orbit, but it was very expensive, right? Very expensive robotic arms, it's risky, right? Having astronauts on EVAs outside the vehicle. So very risky, very expensive. But some of the advancements in computing and autonomy, looking at like self-driving cars or drone shows, it starts to make that possible to be able to send up smart material that we can then assemble in space. So we should no longer be thinking about being constrained to the fairing. And we're still kind of like talking about things in the office that you're like, oh, wait, these things that we've treated as like universal truths are no longer true. It's taken a lot of work to get to this point to be able to show that these things are possible to build in space, like the International Space Station, magnificent feat of engineering to get it up there. In terms of scaling, I mean, I think it's, you know, 6,000 square foot, and it's like $100 billion, which is still incredible that this giant thing is in space. But if you compare it to what's on Earth, if we truly want to scale space, we need to figure out how to get that cost down, or else like, you know, building a New York City in deep space will be like trillions of dollars. The money doesn't exist, right? We need to get the efficiency down. So our idea is to kind of build these building blocks that are smart autonomous tiles that you could, you know, if you have an idea for something that you wanted in space, that you could basically order kind of these different types of tiles. And we, you know, there's just a line going that you can take them off the line and assemble them. It's a remarkable hearing you describe this because it is a true paradigm change. And also when I'm looking just at the imagery on the Rendezvous website, it's, when I think of the ISS, I just think of series of tubes kind of all just jostled together. And it's because it's what we could do. But this, when you're talking about these tiles that would be assembling, self-assembling in some way. The forms that this can take are truly just, it really does open up some remarkable possibilities in ways that I think we only dreamed about in sci-fi for truly. Yeah, it's kind of, it's going to take a bit, I think, to, yeah, like unlock that because we think about, I mean, before the space station was there, you wouldn't think of like this giant thing and, you know, you'd be like, that's crazy to like have this football field size thing. So this takes the first group doing it to then kind of shift that. So now we're like, okay, that's just a given that that that is a thing you can do in space. So like to advance it further and kind of rethink about how we, because you can change how you design satellites right now. You don't have to design all the fault tolerance in the same way, right? Like think of like James Webb, right? So worried about like you put all this money into it. If one fastener goes, the whole thing is gone. So you're like, okay, well now we have to like over design that. And so like then it just kind of cascades, like, well now we put this much into it. We really have to make sure that it works. So like, and it's just being like a different way of approaching the problem. And I think, you know, that might have made sense at the time, but kind of making it, making it where that we don't have to, we're not thinking about it the same way and we can do it how we're doing on Earth, where we can, you know, maybe send up a hundred tiles and two, do go bad a little early, right? So you have ways to contain them, right? You don't want to have space debris out there, right? You have safe containment in ways that, you know, it's kind of like a dead pixel on a TV. But you like, you can go replace it, right? You can go up, you send up another second tiles, or maybe when that, when that those tiles are, you know, kind of the older version in five years, you can replace the one that, like the structural tiles probably still fine, but you know, you have upgraded flight computers that you want to put in, or you want to have an upgraded sensor. So you can just, you know, like, send a whole brand new thing up. Yeah, well, let's just throw that away and build a whole brand new one. Right now you can just replace the parts that make sense and use the materials that are already up there, maybe repurpose them for something else. So kind of shifting how we think about just designing for space and trying to truly unlock like a space infrastructure economy. Yeah, I mean, the idea of this modular design being able to swap out and upgrade parts, just like we do with our computers or you name a thing. I mean, that's just a, won't it be great? So that will be so great. So I'm very curious about the business case that, you know, you all are working commercializing this. So who, what are the markets that you're looking at for this? I'm hearing satellites. Is that what you're primarily going after right now? So in the long term, I think it's everything, right? It's like anything you can build, like we want to be like the space construction company. Like if you want to build something in space, like we want to be the people you go to, like, you know, you have your idea or application for it, but like the building blocks of how we, how we assemble things in space and get large structure and scaffolding and all that. Like we want to kind of be able to do that. We're looking to initially start with large flat structure. So just to kind of simplify the process a little bit, right? Making like a very complex three dimensional shape looks very cool, but there are some challenges there. So kind of starting small with like large flat structures, one being like a solar array is one that we're looking at there. The thermal radiator is another things where like area is the biggest dial. So for like a thermal radiator, it's really just like how much area you have pointed at the darkness of space and a few other things in there, but like area is a huge dial on that. And then looking at, you know, potentially the antennas are in there as well. Things where like just large flat area is kind of the really gets you a lot that can get you out of an architectural GM where you're starting to get much more complicated on somewhere else. Yeah. It kind of like just scaling beyond kind of right now we have, we do have ways to deploy things that are bigger than the fairing, but we're spending a lot of effort to squeeze out like an extra 10% of size when like we need to like 10x that size. Right. So like we're spending like double and triple and multiples of investment to like create this very, it's cool from a get engineering perspective. It's crazy the way that people have figured out how to make these happen, right, to get that little bit. But we think it's like a band-aid on the real solution of like if we want to build something that is like, you know, a city block in space, then we can't be like trying to squeeze out a little bit more like the complexity of a deployable at that size. You wouldn't even be able to fit that like mass into a rocket. So after I get to the partnership that you all announced recently with Star Cloud, tell me about that. Yeah. Super excited for our friends over at Star Cloud. Like I mentioned before on the solar arrays, we think that we can help with building large things in space. But it's not our only thing, but it has been interesting to see kind of the internet kind of be drawn to this data centers in space concept. Super excited of their successful launch and test of their first demo mission. So excited to see where that goes. I also wanted to make sure I asked about the ISS demo that you all are going to be doing hopefully next year. Can you tell me anything about that? Yeah. So those tiles are done and ready to end up getting the final bow put on them, just kind of working out the ride logistics and kind of final details on that to get it right up there. But super excited to see those demonstrated on the ISS for the third time. And so kind of expanding on some previous generations. So yeah, we'll be excited to get the data back from that sometime next year. [Music] We will be right back. Welcome back. For our last story today, here's a fun one that'll make you maybe think twice about the development of new technology. NASA just got a cybersecurity wake up call and it came from AI. For three years, a quiet vulnerability was hiding inside mission critical spacecraft software system, Crypto Lib. You may have heard of it. And this was a command injection vulnerability, which means it was a flaw sitting in the digital wiring of NASA's orbital fleet and of every industry spacecraft that also uses the Crypto Lib CCSDS Space Data Link protocol. And that flaw theoretically would have allowed hackers to intercept commands or manipulate telemetry. Not a sci-fi disaster thriller setup. It is real life actually. And as skeptical as I often am about AI hype, gotta hand it to him this time. Artificial intelligence is what actually spotted this problem so it could be fixed. And here is the really wild part. Once the AI model identified the issue, it then patched the vulnerability in just four days. I mean, that is all hands on deck emergency software engineers working all nighters to get this thing fixed level of fast. So this is a very good and tangible example of where AI can be a fantastic force multiplier on the security side of things. In this case, the AI system used by security researchers at IEL security scanned through millions of lines of code of NASA's Crypto Lib, cross-referenced behavior patterns and then flagged the anomaly well before human teams even knew where to look. I'm adding this one to my memory bank as a new and really good example of how space operations increasingly can and should depend on AI for efficiency and for resilience in this space to Earth communications stack. This story, by the way, is not a dig at NASA in any way. This kind of thing where a vulnerability can linger quietly for years, it's super common across every industry. And in fact, attackers often depend on finding and exploiting flaws that the rest of us don't even know about. So that said, defenders detection and responses are accelerating things to automation as in AI. Fast commercial and government missions rely more heavily on interconnected networks, often interconnected space networks from satellite operations to ground systems to in orbit processing. It does seem like AI is taking steps to becoming the guardian of the orbital high ground. Now listen, space is cool, but space security and hopefully I'm not the only one who thinks this is even cooler. [Music] And that's T-minus brought to you by NTK Cyberwire. 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 the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. You can also fill out the survey in the show notes or send an email to space@ntuk.com. We are proud that NTK 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. NTK 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 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 Kilpie is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thank you for listening. I'm going to go get some hot tea. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
