Europe switches on IRIS².

[MUSIC PLAYING] Today is January 28, 2026. I'm Maria Varmazis in Orlando, Florida for Commercial Space Week, and this is T-minus. [MUSIC PLAYING] T-minus. 22nd to L-O-S T-dress. Open aboard. [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] NASA Ames announces its newest and most powerful supercomputer, Athena. [INAUDIBLE] The wet dress rehearsal for Artemis 2 is scheduled for this Saturday. [INAUDIBLE] Planet Labs signs a new agreement with the surveying and mapping authority of Slovenia. [INAUDIBLE] Full speed ahead on UMETSAT's newest constellation, EPS Sterna. [INAUDIBLE] Europe, which is on IRIS squared, it's 10.6 billion euro sovereign alternative to Starlink. [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] Lift off. [MUSIC PLAYING] And later in the show today, I will be speaking to Les Lake, Vice President of Business Development at AltPoints Logistics. Les is speaking at SpaceCom this week, and will be sharing his insights into preparing spaceports for increased launch cadence after today's intelligence briefing. And we here at T-Minus are at Commercial Space Week in Orlando until Friday. Make sure to come by and say hello to the team at booth 8647. And not wait to see you. [MUSIC PLAYING] Hi, everybody. Happy Wednesday. And though we, the T-Minus team, have all converged in Florida-- I'm looking at some swaying palm trees right now, in fact-- our top stories today are all about Europe. The European Union has officially and metaphorically switched on the IRIS Secure Satellite Communications Network, which is the homegrown 10.6 billion euro European alternative to Starlink. The plan is for 290 dedicated satellites for the IRIS squared constellation to be fully deployed and operational by 2030. IRIS squared network communications are currently routing through GovSatCom satellites, eight of them very much already deployed in geostationary orbit. As a result, IRIS squared and GovSatCom networks have now begun limited operations for EU member states, with Ukraine also requesting access. EU Defense and Space Commissioner Andreas Kubilius said all member states can now have access to sovereign satellite communication, military and government, secure and encrypted, built in Europe, operated in Europe, under European control. Experts are saying it would be better than Starlink. This is our ambition. Kubilius also noted that he has urged member states to speed up their timelines, with the need for sovereign secure space communications for Europe needed much sooner than later. And he aims to have IRIS squared fully deployed by 2029, instead of the original 2030 goal. And speaking of switching systems online, it is all systems go for Europe's newest weather and climate monitoring satellite constellation. ESA and UMETSAT, which is the European Satellite Agency for Weather and Climate Monitoring, have finalized their agreement on what the EPS Sterner constellation will look like. So now it's on to the execution phase on satellite development. So expect to hear contract announcements soon. The constellation will be fully funded by UMETSAT and is expected to be operational by 2029. EPS Sterner will improve the accuracy and reliability of weather prediction models by 6% over the mid-latitudes of Europe and by 9% over the Arctic regions. Planet Labs has signed a new agreement with the surveying and mapping authority of the Republic of Slovenia. The new partnership will provide Slovenia's public administration with high resolution and high cadence tasking services. It will specifically monitor forest cover, agricultural health, tracking for urban and infrastructure planning, as well as rapid detection and response capabilities for natural disasters, specifically wildfires, droughts, and floods. And a quick mention now while we're on European news. The European Agency for the Space Program, or USPA, announced today that it has signed a new contract with Arian Space to launch two second generation Galileo L18 satellites on the Arian 6. Many Galileo constellation satellites have been previously launched with SpaceX Falcon 9s, but again, key phrase of our times is sovereign space access. And the Arian 6 is Europe's own launch vehicle. From Europe now, let's shift our focus to, well, just down the road from me now at Cape Canaveral, Artemis 2. The SLS is stacked, the crew are in quarantine, and we are continuing our final countdown to potential launch in early February. Key final preparations continue at pace and a big final milestone, the wet dress rehearsal, is officially scheduled for this Saturday, January 31st. A wet dress rehearsal is when you essentially fuel up the rocket, do a full launch countdown, and then empty the fuel tanks, and then do it over again a few more times. This is a key practice test, not just for the ground systems, but especially for the launch teams themselves under just about as close to actual launch conditions as you can get. Wishing them all the best for Saturday and go Artemis 2. And this last story is another one from NASA, specifically NASA Ames in Silicon Valley. Their modular supercomputing facility has launched its own goddess to support Artemis, and her name is Athena. She's a supercomputer in NASA's high-end computing capability project and is their most powerful and most efficient supercomputer to date. And NASA wants us all to know that Athena is now available to give her gift of wisdom to new generations of missions and research projects. Athena delivers over 20 petaflops of peak performance and can help scientists and engineers either at NASA or working with NASA in detangling some of their toughest challenges in space, aeronautics, and science. And that is it for our Intel briefing today, my friends. There are a few extra stories that I didn't cover today in our show notes. Make sure to check them out on our website, justspace.ntuk.com, or in your podcast app. Now I'm heading over to commercial space week in just a moment. By the time you hear this episode, I will have just completed a full day of interviews on the show floor. And if you are here as well, definitely drop by our booth number 8647 tomorrow, as we will still be there. Hope to see you then. [Music] Our guest today is Les Lake, Vice President of Business Development at All Points Logistics. My name is Les Lake, I'm the Vice President of Business Development at All Points Logistics. In my role here at the company, I am involved with obviously business development activities, but also wear another hat for mission solutions and technical sales. In the space industry, customers don't buy their products necessarily off the shelf. They usually require some level of engineering and technical wear with all to go evaluate all of the requirements and make sure that their operations are going to execute seamlessly. So I lean in and I work with my customers on the front end and prepare a lot of that material, do what these evaluations, and then go forth and bring the total solution together and put together pricing for that. The company is currently on a multi-year mission to develop payload processing facilities, logistics and transportation, and operations control centers on the east and west coast near the launch sites. This was a need that was identified probably about six or seven years ago. They started seeing the problem forthcoming where the payloads need to come to the launch sites and get prepared for launch. That's a ground operation that takes place in some very technical spaces, clean rooms, and things like that where we conduct health status checks, shipping and receiving inspections, and propellant servicing, sometimes payload integration. And from there, they typically get encapsulated with the two halves of the fairings for the vehicles and then we transport it out to the various launch sites for integration to the rocket. So right now on the east and west coast, that is a huge choke point for the industry. A lot of payloads trying to get in the sky, the rockets can scale up, but this processing space is not something that scales easily. And this is the problem we're trying to address. Yeah, and you were describing the choke points, which is a really great way of encapsulating the challenges there. And I'm wondering if you could describe to me both the challenges and the opportunities that you all are working on to address. Historically, the United States government has stood up a program with a rocket, single launches, and a single processing facility at each of those pads, and each one was different. And over the years as those programs have ended, so did the use of those facilities in many cases. Not all, but the majority. The rockets are now starting to get larger, and the volumes and the throughput is increasing dramatically. So now you face with a new kind of problem where the clean rooms and the entryways in and out are not large enough. And by the way, I need more than one. So you go look at what SpaceX is doing and what you see the others coming forth with the rideshare community. You begin to see, as you read through, that they've got 20, 30, 40 different customers. And you see these pillars and you see these SBIR rings, it's all stacked with hardware, and you see the different manufacturers. And so all of that has to come together in a well-organized manner. Yesterday's clean rooms were basically outfitted for GPS satellites to fly on the Atlas V and things of that nature. The shuttle program, so we put a lot of hardware in the space in the shuttle program, but the SSPF was essentially an industrial building single story. It was horizontal processing. That's very limited. You can still do work in there, but there's a lot of activity now that requires taller facilities. And the facilities of the past are not tall enough and large enough for today's forthcoming rockets. So that's what we're trying to tackle. Yeah, you've mentioned that we've got newer, bigger rockets. I mean, as we see many different launch providers coming through, which is exciting, the very different payloads from all these new players, established and new players coming in all the time. And then also, I would imagine the pace of launch also, just add that factor in right there. And then I'm thinking also, just thinking about what's going on in terms of golden dome and increasing militarization of space. The space force exists and there's a lot of need that they have for missions that and support for those missions that they have. So that's got to add another level of interesting complexity for what you all are looking at. Anything you can share about that? So the work we had been doing for several years in preparation and our concepts, design and planning work was originally at a more simplistic level. We have advanced dramatically the concepts by which this program will come together. So let's take a moment back and talk about a single launch pad, single launch vehicle, single payload. That payload comes in, they fuel it, they conduct their operations and on certain days of activity, they only affect themselves. Right. So now we have a community where the launch pads are filling up, they're impacting each other as they get ready for launch or shutting each other down. And we need a more sustainable solution. So obviously, your first thought would be to just build several of these, but I have to be able to do it in a way where the facility and the operations are programmed to allow continuous operations independent of what each other is doing to each other on any given day, whether it's offloads, whether it's fueling, take your pick. So we take that recipe and we start to work that forward and we start to build facilities of the future. Things that we knew we could do but weren't cost effective until you modeled this in a proper environment for a multi-user. Because these are expensive facilities and they need to be occupied as much as possible. Right. Clean rooms are not cheap and they like, they're like a boat. If you don't use it, it gets upset. It wants the environmental systems up and running. That's when they behave the best. So from there, you start to look at now, how do I take and support this even yet further? And how do I bring more benefit to the community to help streamline their operations? So you now you begin to look at some warehousing on site. So now associated with our facilities, we have the ability to store early arrival hardware. We have the ability to prepare constellations and stage those constellations either in the clean rooms or adjacent and clean storage and give the customer some new options on what he wants to manifest and how he wants to fly. So you take that the next step further and how do you prepare that and make that easier for a customer to come in, do some operations, get to the pad and launch and take time out of his schedule. So we're working some advanced concepts now. If you look at rapid integration and rapid schedules to get to a launch, you need certain elements that come together that prepare and can execute and get the rocket out to the pad quickly where they just do their final fueling and launch. And so these are the concepts now where we have moved into that trade space. And the beauty is that it didn't really cost us anything to go do it. These were inherent features of the building we have learned to capitalize on the capabilities of that inherent flexibility that we've designed into our space, the proper orientation between all the working environments and each of the customers in a secure manner where they don't interfere with each other. And then you have a business case on top of it where the commercial industry is now prepared to actually conduct operations and make money and sustain it. Yeah. Independent of not just government contracts, but now we've still got this whole commercial component going on. So yeah. There's a lot of complexity there, but it's fascinating hearing how that's sort of all shaking on it. That's honestly very interesting. I want to shift gears slightly recognizing part of the reason that we are speaking to each other today is because of Commercial Space Week. And I know that you're going to be speaking during Commercial Space Week, and I wanted to make sure our audience knows what you're going to be speaking on and when. So could you tell us a bit about that? Yeah. So I'm participating in a panel during Space Mobility. Name of the panel is Reconstitution and Reinforcement, Justating Combat Power in Orbit. So that's a lot of government vernacular that you have to unpack. Yes. Please translate that if you could. And you have to unpack because everybody has their own code. And if you're pitching that to guys who build guns and rifles and missiles, that means something. If you're speaking to a space crowd, it means something different, similar, but it's that readiness. And it's not just a case of put a satellite in orbit and make sure it's got a lot more fuel and a lot more batteries. It's way past that. But the ability to replenish on orbit, replenish constellations, replenish key satellites, and to do it in a short order, that's really where our capabilities benefit that conversation. To bring that environment together where the government now using digital twin concepts and other methodologies by which they make their determinations. What do I need in the sky? How soon do I need it? And what's my options? So we're enabling the fleet and we're enabling the satellite community to bring that hardware somewhere and get it ready to give those defense forces those options they need. [Music] We'll be right back. Welcome back. With commissioning complete and scientific operations now underway, ESA's biomass mission is moving from promise to performance. For the first time, scientists now have access to global space-based measurements capable of directly probing the world's forests and quantifying the carbon that is stored deep within their structure in trunks and large branches that have long remained hidden from view. And crucially, and I really want to underline this point, this data is now freely available to all wherever you are in the world. The biomass mission fills a critical data gap in Earth observation with a fascinating first as the first ever P-band synthetic aperture radar in orbit. Yes, you heard me right. P-band and that's 280 to 440 megahertz. It's tomographic and in ferrometric measurements will allow researchers to track forest carbon stocks and changes over time with unprecedented accuracy providing a much needed foundation for climate science, ecosystem monitoring, and evidence-based policy decisions. And biomass is expected to support a broad international research community, particularly in forest-rich regions of the global south, where consistent high-quality observations have historically been difficult to obtain. Early results are already demonstrating the mission's potential, and the coming years of repeated global coverage do promise deeper insight into how exactly forests respond to climate change, land use pressures, and conservation efforts. So yes, TLDR biomass is now fully online, and with its data now in the hands of researchers around the world, actionable climate intelligence will now help scientists finally see the forest and the wood and the carbon through the trees. And that's T-minus brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. If you'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. Please also fill out the survey in the show notes or send us 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 next is 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, in Orlando for Commercial Space Week. Thanks for listening. See you tomorrow. [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [BLANK_AUDIO]