[MUSIC PLAYING] Today is January 12, 2026. I'm Maria Varmazis, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-minus. 22nd to LOS, T-dred. Open aboard. Right side. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] Five. UTEL-SAT has awarded Airbus Defense and Space a contract to build a further 341 web low Earth orbit satellites. Four. India's polar satellite launch vehicle experienced an anomaly after takeoff, failing to transport 16 payloads into orbit. Three. SpaceX launched a Falcon 9 carrying NASA's Pandora Planet Observing Satellite, along with 39 payloads, as part of the Twilight Right Share Mission. Two. US Space Systems Command awards $739 million in launch contracts to SpaceX. One. NASA's astronaut Mike Finke hands command of Expedition 74 to Roscosmos Cosmonaut Sergei Kud Sheverchkov, ahead of crew 11's return to Earth. Zero zero. [MUSIC PLAYING] Lift off. Lift off. [MUSIC PLAYING] And today we're bringing you the first part of a new Nexus series on space and cybersecurity. Parker Wyschik will be joined by Brandon Bailey later in the program. Stick around for more on that after today's intelligence briefing. [MUSIC PLAYING] Happy Monday, everybody. Thank you for joining me. Let's update you on the latest with the medical situation on the ISS first. Last week, NASA made the call to return crew 11 astronauts back to Earth ahead of schedule due to a medical situation. NASA administrator Jared Isaacman made the announcement on January 8. And now we know that the crew is due to undock from the International Space Station no earlier than 5 PM Eastern time on Wednesday, January 14. NASA astronaut Mike Finke is due to hand command of Expedition 74 aboard the orbital complex to Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergei Kud Shverchkov at the time of our publishing today. Mike Finke shared on LinkedIn this update, "As many of you have heard, our crew will be coming home just a few weeks earlier than planned due to an unexpected medical issue. First and foremost, we are all OK. Everyone on board is stable, safe, and well cared for. This was a deliberate decision to allow the right medical evaluations to happen on the ground where the full range of diagnostic capability exists. It is the right call even if it is a bit bittersweet. What stands out most to me is how clearly NASA cares about its people. Flight surgeons, engineers, managers, and support teams came together quickly and professionally to chart the best path forward. The ground teams across mission control centers and partner organizations around the world have been extraordinary. We're proud of the joint work we've done and the camaraderie we've shared, including some great songs and more than a few dad jokes. We're leaving the ISS in great hands. The three crewmates who arrived in November will continue the mission, and they will be joined by crew 12 in just a few weeks. We here at T-Minus do wish the returning crew the best of luck with their upcoming mission and hope the medical situation with one of the crew members is quickly resolved once they are back on Terraferma. Next up, we're catching up with a flurry of awards from the US Space Systems Commander, SSC. SSC is looking to enhance missile warning and missile tracking capability with nine national security space launch phase three lane one launches that were awarded recently. These recent task order awards provide launches for the Space Development Agency, or SDA, and the National Reconnaissance Office, or NRO. The SDA2 task order will provide two launches for a total of 18 Tronche 2 tracking layer space vehicles built by L3 Harris and one launch for eight fire control on orbit support to the warfighter, or F2, space vehicles, built by Millennium Space Systems. F2 is an eight vehicle, low Earth orbit demonstration satellite constellation that will provide advanced missile defense capabilities against challenging targets. The SDA3 task order will provide two launches for a total of 18 Tronche 2 tracking layer space vehicles by Lockheed Martin. SSC awarded the SDA2 missions to SpaceX for launches projected to begin in the fourth quarter of fiscal year 26 and awarded the SDA3 missions also to SpaceX for launches to begin in the third quarter of fiscal year 27. SSC also awarded the NRO5 launches to SpaceX projected to occur in the first quarter of fiscal year 27 and also the second quarter of fiscal year 28. The total value of all of these awards is $739 million. And speaking of SpaceX, their ears are burning today. They launched a Falcon 9 on Sunday carrying NASA's Pandora Planet Observing Satellite along with 39 payloads as part of the Twilight ride share mission. The mission to dusk dawn, sun synchronous orbit lifted off from Space Launch Complex 4E at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. On board were two other NASA sponsored CubeSats. One was SPARKS, which stands for Star Planet Activity Research CubeSat. And the other is the black hole coded aperture telescope also known as Black Cat. SpaceX also carried payloads for SPIRE Global including a hyper spectral microwave sounder satellite demonstrator and eight communications satellites designed for Myriota. Hawkeye 360 also launched its latest cluster satellite trio cluster 13, which will support U.S. government and international partners with consistent high quality radio frequency insights across multi-domain mission environments. Unfortunately, it's not always successful launches that we report on here on T-minus as India's polar satellite launch vehicle experienced an anomaly after takeoff earlier today. The rocket was carrying 16 loads of equipment and experiments including a military Earth surveillance satellite and the rocket then deviated off track. It was the second failure for the vehicle known as PSLV in eight months, denting the reputation for the Indian space research organization's rockets reliability, which had a more than 90% success rate over about 60 past missions. Isro Chairman V. Narayanan said in an update during the agency's launch webcast, quote, "Close to the end of the third stage, we are seeing a little more disturbance in the vehicle role rates and subsequently, there is a deviation observed in the flight path. We are analyzing the data and we shall come back at the earliest opportunity. We wish him the best of luck in figuring out the issue quickly." U-TelSat has awarded Airbus Defense and Space a contract to build a further 341 web low Earth orbit satellites. This new contract, along with the previous batch of 100 satellites procured in December 2024, brings the total number of satellites ordered up to 440. The satellites will be manufactured at Airbus Defense and Spaces to lose facility on a newly installed production line with delivery starting at the end of 2026. No details were shared in the press release about the contract's value, though we are sure it came with many zeros. And that, my friends, wraps up our top five stories from today. As always, there are a lot of other things going on in the global space industry. And to K Senior Producer, Alice Carruth joins me now with a look at what we are keeping an eye on. Alice, what do you have for us today? "Maria, it's been a busy day, so we've added three additional stories to the selected reading section of our show notes. They cover iSpace's new entity in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Mitsubishi Corporation has joined Starlab as a major space station customer. And the IEEE Awards have also been announced. Of note, the IEEE Simon Ramo Medal has been awarded to Michael Douglas Griffin of Logic Q. You probably remember him best as former NASA administrator. Griffin has been recognized for shaping US space exploration strategy and advancing aerospace engineering, including programs that laid the groundwork for today's crewed fly and deep space missions. Congrats to him." Hello there, T-minus listeners. Pretty soon we will be attending all of the events at Commercial Space Week, and that includes the Global Space Port Alliance Annual Summit, Space Mobility, and Spacecom. Oh, and by the way, there will be a lot of moments from it that we'll want to share with you, but that we just can't fit into our daily show. But the good news is we post those moments over on Instagram. So if you're on Instagram, we are too. We are @tminusdaily if you'd like to see some exclusive videos there, as well as some behind-the-scenes moments from the show floor. Hope to see you there. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] It's time now for our very first installment of the Nexus Space Cyber segment with Parker Wyszik from the Aerospace Corporation. You're here in the Nexus courtesy of the T-minus Space Daily Podcast. My name is Parker Wyszik with the Aerospace Corporation. A bit of a special Nexus episode today. I'm going one-on-one with an expert of ours at the Aerospace Corporation on Space Cyber. His name is Brandon Bailey, and he is principal engineer in our Cyber Department at Aerospace. Brandon, thanks for joining me today. Give us a little bit of a background on your background in Cyber and Space Cyber. How long have you been working on this specialization? Since 2013, I worked at NASA for a number of years. Still support NASA through Aerospace. But basically, in 2013, 2014, is when I started really interacting with the cyber aspect, where we were doing a lot of penetration testing, vulnerability research across NASA's infrastructure on the ground side. So we basically got to go and test a bunch of individualized ground systems, space station, launch control, deep space network, things like that. And then in 2019, we moved over to aerospace and then did a hyper focus on space vehicle, cyber security, while we're been here. How long would you say the space community has been developing a focus on cyber? On the ground side, there's been a little bit of focus because it's more like a terrestrial based IT system. So that's gotten some focus. But more on the space vehicle side, it really started to hit the, I would say, mainstream in 2019. And some of that is due to aerospace doing publications. Some of that is due to academia starting to do research and publish. But I think the real groundbreaking publication that really talked about it was NACIC, which is now NSIC. They published Competing in Space in 2019. And then the DIA followed that up with the challenges and space security. And then you started seeing things like CSIS and these other publications really starting to publish around technology and things of that nature related to space and cyber and just security in general. So it became less of a taboo topic that was really kind of discussed in the back rooms on the military government side and then started becoming discussed in the open probably around 2019, 2020. And that's when we actually started publishing a lot of information to aerospace as well. You and I in aerospace and others in the space sector that we collaborate with regularly, no space cyber is an important consideration. You hit on a general theme in this area that ground used to be the focus. And that's because I would wager it was familiar. Like you said, it was similar to terrestrial IT systems. Space segment not always given that extra cyber focus. The prevailing thought of days past was that spaceborne satellites and other assets were untouchable. And we know that not to be the case today. We also know that space is more integrated with critical industry sectors, finance, weather, navigation, things people use every day. They rely on this information that is under constant attack. Can you describe the environment that space systems are operating in? Whether it's a focus on threat in an environment where there's all these different use cases relying on resiliency. - Yeah, so there's a couple of things that you touched on there. So on the ground side, yeah, that is true that it's more familiar. But I also think about just the legacy nature of space, right? If you go back to the obviously the Apollo days, early space exploration, a lot of it was analog on the space side, right? And then we've went into this like digitization revolution, if you will, on the space assets. I've seen a study by NASA that just shows like an exponential growth of software lines of code as we've moved through in this current space age. So that brings cyber ramifications. So that's a big part of it. It's just the technology changed. And then from the threat landscape perspective, we know more now than we did before. These are embedded computers in space. So that all goes into it. Also, what makes this interesting is the critical aspect of it all. Everything that we do in life, almost in the US and globally, depends on some level of space capabilities. I know when DHS, they did analysis through the 18 critical sectors and the 50 some, 55, I think, national critical functions. How many of those are supported by space and all 55 national critical functions are supported by space? I actually, I think I read about that in the congressional testimony in 2022, trying to get space to recognize as some sort of critical infrastructure component. So the criticality of space brings eyes on it and everyone's acknowledged this fact. So when the acknowledgement happened, that space basically supports everything that not only brings just the good people's eyes, but it also brings the adversary eye to it as well, if it's like, well, how do you flip the most pain? Well, if I take out capabilities that provide services to the nation, something like GPS, for instance, if I can take out some of those assets, that will prevent farming, that could prevent bill of sale, stock market, financial sector, all these things. So I think it's just a combination of a bunch of different things kind of all happening in this, I would say 20 year span. All of those sectors you mentioned are populated by government and industry users, individual people use those things. The demographics of what's in space also looks dramatically different where it used to be just government systems in space. Now there is a robust commercial sector that is operating things in space, proposing new things to operate in space. This is a sector that is defined by companies of all stripes, all maturity levels, and theoretically a range of cyber readiness. Talk a little bit about what we know about the cyber threats that are specifically facing all of these actors in space. Yeah, so we have obviously the RF based threat, which I think is pretty well understood is from a, it's where you blend the EW, the electronic warfare and the cyber element is just communicating signals to these assets. So that's kind of a legacy threat that we've known about. Something that's relatively new that not just space deals with it, but everyone deals with is the supply chain, right? That's just a global problem. In general, it's exacerbated on the space side because if there is some sort of supply chain compromise, you can't really touch things once they're in space. So that makes this supply chain validation even more critical. We'll be back in the nexus with more about Sparta, the space attack research and tactic analysis in space cyber with Brandon Bailey and a leading cyber expert from commercial space. Thanks so much to T-minus and you the listener, and we'll see you again next time in the nexus. (upbeat music) We'll be right back. Welcome back. A bit sooner than maybe quite a lot of us might have expected. Artemis 2 is seriously for real life, maybe actually going to launch as soon as February 6th to make its 10 day journey and then also swing around the moon while it's doing that. And doing the quick math, February 6th is not far away. So that can only mean one thing. The rocket needs to be rolled out to the launch pad from the vehicle assembly building. So anyone who happens to be local to the space coast, January 17th is the day that NASA says the SLS rocket with the Orion capsule on top will be slowly, slowly, slowly, carefully crawled over from the vehicle assembly building to Kennedy Space Center's Launch Pad 39B. And for all of us who will be at Commercial Space Week in Orlando, Florida later this month, because reminder the T-minus team will indeed be there. Yours truly included, of course. Oh yeah, wild horses could not keep me away from seeing this beauty on the launch pad. And I will absolutely be making the trek over there while I'm in Florida. I imagine I'll see many other Commercial Space Week attendees there as well. Just a reminder that Artemis 2 has three designated launch windows coming up, with the soonest one being February 6th through the 11th, the second one being March 5th through the 11th, and the third is April 1st through the 6th. Good luck and add Astra Artemis 2. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) And that is T-minus, brought to you by N2K Cyber Wire. 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 the show, please share a rating and review in your podcast app. Please also fill out the survey and the show notes or 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 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. (upbeat music) - T minus. (upbeat music) (water splashing) [BLANK_AUDIO]
