[MUSIC PLAYING] Today is January 26, 2026. 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 another launch service contract under the Flight Ticket Initiative. Four. [MUSIC PLAYING] Strattor Launch says it has completed a significant capital raise to support its hypersonic launch capabilities. Three. [MUSIC PLAYING] Paladine's AI subsidiary called Guide Tech has secured a contract with Portal Space Systems to support the development of next-generation maneuverable spacecraft platforms. Two. A winter storm is the latest delay to finalizing budget decisions in the United States. One. Vandenberg Space Force Base in California has released a new strategic plan, outlining priorities for 2026 and beyond. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] And later in the show, I will be joined by Dave Fittner, host of The Cyber Wire and cybersecurity executive and friend of the show here at T-minus, Brandon Harp. For our monthly space and cyber segment, we're going to be discussing space domain awareness and its impact on space intelligence. So stick around for more on that later in today's program. [MUSIC PLAYING] Happy Monday, everybody. I hope you had a great weekend, and thank you for joining me today. It is Commercial Space Week in Florida this week. Events are kicking off tomorrow with the Global Space Port Alliances Annual Summit. Our T-minus producer team, Alice Caruth and Liz Stokes, are already in or on route to Orlando, and will be at the conference tomorrow. And I'm heading down for the rest of the conference from tomorrow as well. So join us all week as we bring you some of the highlights of the events and some of the keynote speakers from the conference right here on T-minus Space Daily. Before all that, though, let's dive into today's Intel Briefing, shall we? And we will start off today's report with updates-- or should I say plans for updates-- at Vandenberg Space Force Base in California. US Space Force Colonel James Horn, Space Launch Delta 30 Commander, has unveiled a new strategic plan outlining priorities for 2026 and beyond. The plan is built around three core pillars-- mission, people, and future-- and is designed to guide the base through an era of increased operational demand and technological change. As one of only two major strategic space launch bases in the United States, Vandenberg supports national security objectives and hosts all three US Space Force Field Commands, serving as a central node for command control and training of space forces. Key mission priorities include streamlining operations, improving efficiency across the Space Port, and strengthening the resilience and security of critical infrastructure. The plan also reinforces Vandenberg's efforts to build a space port of the future by expanding space port throughput, enhancing launch and test range support, growing airfield operations, and hardening base infrastructure. The plan acknowledges that much of the base's existing infrastructure was designed for a different era and must evolve to meet modern demands. So, to address this, Space Launch Delta 30 plans to modernize base support functions and aggressively pursue automation. The 2026 strategic plan positions Vandenberg Space Force Base to sustain its role as a vital national security space port, while adapting to rapid growth and change. And as our listeners across North America are well aware right now, there has been a significant winter storm across most of the United States and Canada over the weekend. Among the many issues that this storm has caused, the weather has delayed the U.S. Senate's return to office, giving them one less day to complete action on the final minibus of six fiscal year 2026 appropriations bills before Friday when the continuing resolution expires. That continuing resolution for those not familiar with the return is the bill that's keeping federal departments and agencies operating at the budget agreed to last fiscal year. Defense, financial services, homeland security, labor HHS, state foreign ops and transportation HUD have passed as three separate bills over the course of two weeks in the House, but the plan is to combine them for consideration by the Senate. The House will not be in session this week, and if the Senate makes any changes, it would have to go back to the House for approval, and since they won't be there, that puts pressure on Senators to pass as is to avoid another shutdown. So even though it won't impact NASA, it's important to note that one, because NASA is funded through the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related agencies. This all would affect the launch ranges. Fingers crossed, everybody. Moving on, Paladine's AI subsidiary GuideTech has secured a contract with Portal Space Systems to support the development of next-generation maneuverable spacecraft platforms. GuideTech will provide capabilities spanning navigation, guidance, spacecraft modeling, embedded software, and avionics support. The collaboration supports Portal Space Systems' mission to deliver highly maneuverable, flexible spacecraft platforms for civil defense and commercial applications. Paladine AI says this new engagement marks a strategic expansion of the company's market opportunity into the space domain. StratoLaunch says it has completed a significant capital raise without disclosing the actual amount. The company says the funding will be used to accelerate growth and expand the company's hypersonic production and flight capabilities. StratoLaunch is looking to increase production capacity of hypersonic vehicles, increase flight cadence, and pursue additional carrier aircraft, enabling more frequent and operationally relevant demonstrations for the Department of War and its partners. And the funding announcement comes as the Test Resource Management Center and Naval Service Warfare Center Crane Division selected StratoLaunch and VARDA space for a new contract. They have been selected for the Task Area 3 under the Multiservice Advanced Capability Hypersonic Testbed 2.0 program, also known as AMCH-TB. The AMCH-TB program is aiming to create an affordable flight test bed that would rapidly increase hypersonic flight test capability. And let's head on over to Europe right now for our last story. The European Space Agency has signed another launch service contract under the Flight Ticket Initiative. The initiative, led by the European Commission and the European Space Agency, offers companies and organizations an opportunity to fly their technology and demonstrate it in space. The new contract comes just five months after the first batch was announced. The selected technologies include the LERBAT mission, which will test new propulsion techniques and more, and two CubeSats that will fly five experiments selected by the European Commission. Both missions will be launched on Rocket Factory Augsburg 1 launch vehicle from Saxaverd Space Port in Scotland. [Music] And that wraps up today's Intel Briefing. T-minus producer Alice Grewth left us all with these updates on the other stories that are making headlines before hopping on her plane to Orlando. Alice? Hey Maria, looking forward to catching up with you tomorrow in person in Orlando. We've added three additional stories to today's selected reading section. The first is an update on a story we touched on last week, the future of Orbex. We've included a damning op-head from CNN on whether SLS is safe to fly and an update on Ciderspace's next Lizzie Satmission. Regular listeners know that every day at the end of each episode of T-minus I read the names of all of the people who work on this show. It is a big team effort to get the show published every day. And you, dear listener, play a very important role too. That's because every time you share an episode of T-minus with your colleagues or on social media, that actually not only helps us grow, but more importantly it also shows us how our work is useful and interesting to you. So if you enjoy T-minus, please don't keep us hidden. Share our show in your social and professional networks because it helps us grow and makes T-minus even better for you every day. So thank you for being a part of the T-minus crew. [Music] I recently joined my colleague and host of the Cyber Wire, Dave Bittner, and Cybersecurity and Intelligence Expert, Brandon Karf, to discuss space domain awareness. Here's our conversation. [Music] So I want to talk about space safety and who's keeping track of what's where in orbit. Maria, is it fair for me to start with you to give us the little TLDR on how we track things in orbit and where to begin with this? I'm going to do my best. It is confusing. So I'm sure a listener out there who knows this world inside and out is going to go, "I got half of this wrong." But I'm going to try. Our view of what's going on in space is not as complete as I think most people would think it is. We know very well, for the most part, what geostationary satellites are in orbit because from our perspective they don't really go very fast. We see them and they're up in the sky and they're like, "Okay, they're there." So in low earth orbit we have a somewhat patchwork understanding of what's on orbit. There's a lot that we miss. Essentially, there's no one entity that's in charge of tracking all this. I think that's the thing that surprises a lot of people. There's no central traffic control. There are a lot of private companies that are tracking space satellites, space debris of different sizes, things like that. There are several different governments that are tracking satellites. The United States government certainly is doing its bit on that part. Then there's the U.S. Department of Commerce that is sort of seen as the best that we have at a central repository for understanding what's on orbit. But again, there is no complete knowledge of everything that's up there. So when people are saying how many satellites are in orbit, it's always an estimate because we can't know at one time. You think of a sci-fi movie, "Oh, we can see all the satellites up there. We know exactly where they are." No, we don't. It's just not that complete. We have a good sense of it. There are different ways to patch this information together, but it's not a complete, accurate picture of our asset management system or our network. We just don't know entirely. This article talks about a system. Do I have it right? It refers to as TRAX. TRAX, yeah. What is that? TRAX is a system that is currently in beta, that is coming out of beta, that is headed by the U.S. Department of Commerce, that is supposed to be the best that we can get at a central understanding of what's going on in space. And this is a project that's been in the works for some years. And in the middle of 2025, there actually was the White House budget, a thing to kill it entirely, which was very alarming for people in the space industry because a lot of people had been banking on this coming out. So thankfully, it sounds like that didn't happen because the industry rallied to save it. But it did start this larger conversation of we seriously do not have a great understanding of all of the assets in space. TRAX was seen as our best bet, but it's still not the best. And again, there's a lot of confusion about it. I'm confused as trying to explain it because there really isn't a great clear picture of this. And every time I try to learn more about it, it's like there's a bazillion small companies that are trying to add to this. And are they all talking to each other? No. It's not great. It's not great. Kind of like a disaggregated air traffic control system, right? Yeah. And it doesn't exactly engender confidence in this whole thing. We're talking about space debris, collision avoidance, that kind of thing. It's like, do we have that one single pane of glass of knowledge? And the answer is no. And that's terrifying to me, to be honest. So what this article gets to, Brandon, is we closed out last year. We closed out last year with an executive order from President Trump, which was titled, Ensuring American Space Superiority, which talks about these traffic management services. And there was a subtle shift in the language used here. Can you unpack that for us? Yeah. I'll start with kind of like a lie. This is so important right now. Yeah. Years ago, when I was in undergrad in college, I somehow got myself accepted into an internship program at the National Reconnaissance Office, so NRO in Chantilly, Virginia. And so as an intern at this place, I got to tour their wash floor and their operations center, this kind of really cool dark room with all of these computer screens and these big screens on the wall with abstractions of orbits and things like that. And this massive floor, there was about five people there. And there were mostly like 20-year-old Air Force enlisted airmen. And this was way before the Space Force. Way before. And when I was asking this one what he was doing, he was looking at all these conjunction warnings. And really a conjunction warning is when a piece of debris or two satellites get within 100 miles or something like that of each other, there's a warning based on what we're actually tracking. And so I was asking, cool, like how many satellites are there? And he's like, well, probably about a thousand that we're tracking. And cool, how many pieces of debris are we tracking? He goes, oh, another couple thousand. That's awesome. So how many conjunctions are you addressing? And this explains why there was only five people on the wash floor. He goes, we get one, like one a day, maybe. So that was a little bit ago with a thousand satellites. A thousand satellites, this was a while ago. Today we have 14,000 satellites up there. Approximately. Approximately, right? With plans of growing potentially to like 100,000 in the next four years. Satellites. In different orbits. In different orbits. On top of that, all the space debris continues to increase. So now conjunction messages have increased from one a day, a couple a day, maybe a few dozen a day, to over 600,000 every single day. Yeah. Wow. And who's the central authority for, hey, there's a conjunction event happening. Who do you talk to? Who coordinates with whom on that? How do you, how does that, how does it work? And it's definitely not NRO because they're focused on their, the few exquisite military and intelligence community satellites. It's not NASA because that's not NASA's mission. It's not really the FAA because the FAA does some stuff with space traffic, but mostly with launching recovery. For some reason, this track system is with the department of commerce. So really what we're getting to is, as Maria pointed out, there is no central authority to, as the White House has released, ensure American space supremacy with, you know, over the over the coming decade, especially when it comes to traffic management. And so what's interesting here in the change is this policy put out by the White House, I think, I mean, what was it like December 18th? It was right before the holidays. Is that the US government is going to make this system available for free, make the data within the traffic management system, this track system. And I assume others, although it's still kind of unclear exactly what data and from where and to whom and how to get access to it, but supposedly making it accessible to the whole industry. Which would be a good thing because more information is good. Is there a downside to this? No, I mean, it's a budget item. The government funding act, the one big beautiful bill act that was passed over the summer, did increase the FAA's ability to charge commercial space companies in terms of how much payload by masks they're putting into orbit. And so there are increased revenue lines for the government to potentially fund things like this. But I think it's a, to me right now, especially this being totally new without a lot of analysis being put forward, it's a little unclear where this data is coming from, how people get access to it, whether tracks is going to be the system of record. If Department of Commerce is going to continue to manage that, which is a little bit odd. It's not like, at least I'm not aware that they do traffic management for shipping, or for air traffic or things like that. So why would they do space traffic? A little bit unclear. So this article points out that space situational awareness is no longer just a safety function, but a strategic one. And so, Brandon, putting on your former military hat, is there a case to be made strategically to limiting the availability of this information? Interesting question. Certainly within these feeds, and there will probably be information on the location that positioned the vectors of more exquisite space capabilities. But then again, that stuff is up there. It's not like it's a secret, right? What it does is potentially a secret, but it's pretty obvious to see the thing, because if you have a clear unobstructed view of the night sky, you can pretty much track anything that's up there with some relatively inexpensive equipment, whether through radio frequency collection or from actually measuring and doing kind of like radar type telemetry off of satellites. So I think the analogy here is probably similar to Earth observation, where all these commercial providers of Earth observation assets, now you can go and buy down to the 10 centimeter level Earth observation data, pictures of Earth down to that level of granularity of anywhere on Earth. You can go and buy this of views of war zones like Ukraine and see that data yourself. Historically, that's just been nation states who have access to that information, but now private companies are providing that. Similarly, not just with Earth observation, but also signals intelligence, right? There's some companies like Hawkeye 360 are providing site surveys and signals around different areas of the world. Again, typically an exquisite capability that was reserved to nation states. So this is kind of democratization of exquisite data is nothing new to this industry. I think the more we see the space industry grow and accelerate, the more we're going to see exquisite sources of data being broadly accessible to anyone who wants to write a check to these companies. What's unique here, I think I've pointed out is this is being provided by the government. And it's not just government data, it looks like it's some commercial data as well. Again, who's paying for it? Unknown. Adding out as a corollary that the space industry overall, especially in the U.S. is at this very interesting point where a lot of capabilities that have been grandfathered in are like with the DOC owning tracks doesn't, at least to my mind, make a whole lot of sense why it's there. There's this element of maturity that's happening very quickly right now by necessity. And it's going to be very interesting to see if we get any transparency about some of this data. As you said, we don't know where some of the commercial stuff is going to be coming from or going to. And if that's, do we even need to know that? But I mean, there are some capabilities that tracks can't do that the commercial sector is trying to fill in those gaps. Like for space debris, for example, there are certain sizes of space debris that are so tiny, but still extremely dangerous that a lot of people in the private sector are trying to make their niche of detecting that space debris. Is that information going to make it into tracks? And if it is, I imagine it's going to come at a very premium price, but it's still extremely important to avoid not just collisions, but eventually even the Kessler effect, God forbid. Yeah, I wonder how quickly does this problem or this challenge become hard to manage or impossible to manage. Brandon, you talked about going from one a day to 600,000 alerts. So it doesn't strike me as being linear, right? The more objects we put up there, the more potential for interactions and debris and collisions and all that kind of stuff. So when does this become unmanageable and who's in the best position to manage it? Yeah, the rules of the road here are kind of interesting. You know, in your pick your analogy, if we looked at the FAA's air traffic control system, right, the number of flights per day are still pretty limited and regionally so. And controllable with proper staffing, that's a separate issue entirely in terms of the air traffic controllers of the FAA. But it's a tractable problem at human speeds, right, and human analysis, especially with airplanes all having their transponders and transcoders and sending their location information and moving relatively slowly. Whereas in low earth orbit, things moving much faster. Of course, the distances are greater, but you're having a lot more and a lot more potential conjunctions. This quickly to your point grows exponentially to a stage where I don't think human intervention is going to be the proper approach. So now a different analogy would be like the security operations center who's looking at intrusion alerts and things like that. Well, we're now getting potentially billions of alerts per day at the largest security operations centers and no staff, no human staff can review all those alerts. So you have to implement a layer of automation and automatic analysis on top of that to elevate the most critical alerts or to respond automatically, which is what we're seeing in the security world, right? And the initial response is happening autonomously without human intervention. And that's just not a human tractable problem. It's amazing to me that when you mentioned the security operations center, when I was at one of the space conferences, I saw something about alert fatigue and cutting through the noise and I'm going, oh my gosh, that language is now in the space world. And I was just thinking of all the things about cutting through the noise and how to make sense of what's in your logs and I'm going this exact same problem. But talk about an opportunity for the folks in the cybersecurity industry, potentially kind of diversifying, SOAR, Security Orchestration Automation and Response, Konami and Space Operations Automation Response, right? Oh, nice. The same kind of tools that have the cybersecurity industry has been forced to innovate around and develop over the last decade could be incredibly helpful. And the lessons learned of how to build proper operations floors and teams and manage the human element like alert fatigue, et cetera. Time will tell. It strikes me that we're playing a bit of catch up when it comes to this stuff, but that's just my sense. Alright, Maria Vermazes is host of the T-Minus Space Daily podcast and Brandon Harp is the leader of international public-private partnerships at NTT. Thanks for joining us, friends. Thank you. Thank you. We'll be right back. [Music] Many of us throughout North America, as I mentioned earlier in the show, are a bit snowed in at the moment. Where I am in Massachusetts, we got more than two feet of snow. That is more than half a meter for the rest of the world. So I am really not going anywhere today, at least until tomorrow when I have to head to Orlando for Spacecom. Wish me luck. Lots of people are otherwise stuck at home for a bit. And when I get to Orlando, I will send a bit of a short long distance wave to a whole group of people who are also stuck right where they are with nowhere to go. And that would be the entire Artemis II crew who are officially beginning their 14-day pre-flight quarantine. Oh yeah, 14 days to the first launch window we are officially in the final countdown. Cue the music. It's the final countdown. Oh yeah. And the Artemis II crew in quarantine does include the two backup crew members, Jenny Gibbons of Canada and Andre Douglas of the United States. Shout out to them both, as even though they know it is unlikely that they will fly, it's not an impossibility. So they also have to be prepared to go just in case they are needed. And into a 14-day quarantine, they also go as well. Hope they all have some good TV and snacks. And that's T-minus, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. We'd love to know what you think of this podcast, your feedback. Ensures that we deliver the insights that keep you a step ahead in the rapidly changing space industry. If you like our show, please share our 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. Your Peter Kilpe is our publisher. And I am your host, Maria Varmazis. Thank you for listening. See you tomorrow. [Music] T-minus. [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]
