[MUSIC PLAYING] Today is January 29, 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] [MUSIC PLAYING] Five. York Space has announced the pricing of its up-sized initial public offering. Four. NASA's SpaceX Crew 12 team have gone into a two-week quarantine ahead of their upcoming launch to the ISS. Three. The US Space Systems Command has released a draft request for proposals for the Hybrid Architecture and Development for Experimental Systems, or Hades contract. Two. A SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle launched the GPS-39 Space Vehicle 09 for the US Space Force. One. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation has shared plans to develop space-based data centers. [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] [INAUDIBLE] [MUSIC PLAYING] And later in today's program, we are going to be talking to Brian Miske, who is America's space leader for KPMG. Brian is delivering a keynote address today, actually, at Spacecom about how all companies will eventually become space companies and how to prepare them for that transition. Find out more after today's headlines. [MUSIC PLAYING] Happy Thursday, everybody, from Spacecom in Orlando. Thanks for joining me today. And let's dive into today's Intel briefing. First up, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, known as CASC, has shared plans to develop space-based data centers. Details about the gigawatt class Space Digital Intelligence Infrastructure were shared as part of a five-year development plan that was cited by state broadcaster CCTV. The report said that the new space data centers will, quote, "integrate cloud, edge, and terminal device capabilities and achieve the deep integration of computing power, storage capacity, and transmission bandwidth, enabling data from Earth to be processed in space." CASC plans to shift the energy-intensive burden of AI processing into orbit, utilizing gigawatt-class solar-powered hubs to create an industrial-scale space cloud by 2030. According to Chinese media, the document identifies the integration of space-based solar power with AI computing as a core pillar of the upcoming 15th five-year plan, which is China's Economic Development Roadmap. The CASC plan also vowed to achieve the flight operation of suborbital space tourism and gradually develop orbital space tourism in the next five years. And you might have guessed by the lively noise around me today, but we are in Florida for Commercial Space Week this week. And would you believe that we missed the launch on January 27th? It was scheduled just after our bedtime if we're being totally honest with you. And if you missed the news, it's also really cold down here. Florida cold for us folks who are more used to cooler climates anyway. The good news is that the SpaceX Falcon 9 vehicle carrying the GPS-39 space vehicle 09 lifted off without a hitch. The spacecraft, which is known as SV09, aims to enhance global positioning capabilities. It is managed by the US Space Forces Space Systems Command and Combat Forces Command. The Lockheed Martin-built SV09 adds another highly capable M-Code satellite to the constellation, increasing overall system functionalities in geolocation, navigation, and system resilience. Speaking of Space Systems Command, they have released a draft request for proposals for the Hybrid Architecture and Development for Experimental Systems, or Hades Contract. Hades aims to support the procurement of prototype and operational satellite ground systems, satellite operation centers, and support services. The Hades Contract will primarily support the Research Development Test and Evaluation Support Complex at Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico to help them speed up mission design and ground integration, ground system tests, launch, and on-orbit operations, and rapid fielding and support of warfighters. SSE expects to award between four and six task orders under the Indefinite Delivery and Definite Quantity Contract. According to a pre-solicitation posted on SAM.gov, SSE is soliciting comments and questions regarding the draft RFP for the Hades Contract, and will accept feedback through March 20. Make sure to check out the link in our show notes for more details. There is a crew in quarantine and another crew about to join-- another quarantine, just down the road from here. The four crew members of NASA's SpaceX Crew-12 mission have gone into a two-week quarantine at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston ahead of their upcoming launch to the International Space Station. NASA astronauts Jessica Meir, Jack Hathaway, ESA astronaut Sophie Adono, and Roscosmos Cosmonaut Andre Fedyaev are scheduled to travel on Friday, February 6, from Houston to the agency's Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where they will remain in quarantine while conducting pre-launch operations. Crew-12 is replacing the crew that returned a little bit earlier from the orbiting lab due to a medical concern. And they're currently scheduled to launch from Cape Canaveral on Wednesday, February 11, with backup opportunities on February 12 and 13. And is February going to be a busy month for a human space flight, or what? Oh, yeah. And York Space has announced the pricing of its up-sized initial public offering. York is offering 18,500,000 shares of its common stock at a price of $34 a share. In addition, York has granted the underwriters a 30-day option to purchase up to an additional 2,775,000 shares of its common stock at the IPO price, less underwriting discounts and commissions. The shares are expected to begin trading on the New York stock exchange today, January 29, 2026, under the ticker symbol YSS. And the offering is expected to close on January 30, 2026, subject, of course, to customary closing conditions. And that, my friends, wraps up today's Intel Briefing for you, a reminder that you can always read more about all of the stories that I've mentioned throughout today's episode by visiting the links in the show notes. And listeners, we'd love to know if today's interview topic is something that you'd like to hear more about on our show. Please drop us an email at space@ntk.com if you do. And if you happen to have an idea or suggestion or just a wish list of someone you would like us to speak to, let us know that as well. We are always interested in hearing from you. [MUSIC PLAYING] My guest today is one of the keynote speakers here at Commercial Space Week. I will let Brian introduce himself. My name is Brian Miski. I am the America's lead for space for KPMG, which is a big four consultancy global with 360,000 people. And I also serve in a group called Ignition. I lead that group within the US. And it's serendipitous that it sounds like it's related to space. It's really about the human side of innovation and really accelerating different types of aspects of opportunity with innovation, design thinking, system thinking, and really getting our clients and future clients comfortable with disruption and what's happening around them. That's so cool. It's good to speak with you again, Brian. Congratulations on being a keynote speaker at SpaceCom. That is not a small deal. So I just wanted to say that. And that's part of the reason we're talking to each other today is to-- I would love to get a little preview of what you're going to be sharing with everybody. But before we get to that, I always love to pick your brain. And I really want to know what you're excited about space industry-wise right now. What's really interesting is that space is becoming the next digital infrastructure for the world. So if we were prescient back in 1997 to see how the internet would change everything, we're at that inflection point right now. And we're seeing that this digital infrastructure, or invisible mesh, is really impacting everything from terrestrial to an orbital economy, which will eventually turn into a lunar economy, Martian, and deep space and beyond. So there's a lot of opportunity in front of us. And I think we're starting to see some roadmaps, not only from a national security perspective, but really viewing space as the limited-- and as an unlimited domain of exploration, innovation, and commerce. That's fantastic. And it feels like there's maybe a connection to what you want to share at the keynote. You're going to be sharing with the audience some of your vision, not just about what's exciting in space. Obviously, that's always very cool. But also, you're going to be putting a challenge to everyone. And I'm wondering if you give me a preview of that. Well, what's interesting, we're at a crossroads, quite frankly. And the people that are attending this conference has deep experience in the space sector. But space cannot be relegated. It should just the classic aerospace and defense vertical. It impacts every single sector. And I've put it into this construct of plus space. So it's every industry sector plus space, banking plus space, insurance plus space, consumer products plus space. We're seeing things that companies and organizations are doing right now. And over the next 12 months, then I have a trajectory of near, now near next, of the next three to five years, what will be that time horizon, what will be happening. We're seeing five to six different private space stations going up in the next three years or four years, right? Yeah. And then next, it's five to 10 years. And the reason why I use the 10 year trajectory is because a lot of the, I would say, the majority of speculation about the space economy achieving 1.8 trillion and beyond, they're using 2035 as the marker. And what's interesting is we can get into all these different types of projections, but it really gets into what really needs to be true in order to help realize this. So it's not so much about the old promise of $1 trillion plus by 2040. It's not about the numbers, but what you're seeing is the time to realization is sped up by 30%. It's decreased five years. While the trajectory of the dollar amount has gone up 80%. It's all saying that change is happening, and it's happening quickly. So we're looking at different sovereign space agencies and nation states developing space strategies, looking at the commercial dynamics. A lot of the US regulations are enticing. A lot of entrepreneurs that capitalize upon that. And I will be asking the audience and this broader audience here is to think differently, widen your aperture on space, create dialogues outside the industry, not into just adjacent industries, but into industries that you didn't think would be leveraging space. Pharmaceuticals, life science, bioscience, you look at physical AI, robotics, for in-space assembly and manufacturing, and the roadmap associated with that. Tokenizing space assets when we're thinking about banking or insurance or different types of assets from that perspective. And then also, I mentioned the space stations, but it's really about capitalizing upon the need to explore different topics, disciplines, and everything else in more of a commercial atmosphere. Not going to get into tourism. I think that will evolve pretty significantly. Orbital data centers, we've heard that over the last six months, reach a screaming point. Yeah. That's a good way of putting it. Basically, it gets into-- it started with the AI compute and the energy associated with that and offsetting that potentially lower forbit. It's not the full solution, but it's part of a portfolio of approaches of how humanity is addressing this need. But then capitalizing upon latency and reducing that and on-orbit processing of data. There's a lot of different models and commercial models that are going to be created. And my constant question is, are you ready? Are we ready? We're trying to capitalize upon that at KPMG through different types of exploration. It's not just relegated to technology. We use technology, but we focus on every single industry. And how can we bring space into the mix? Like I said, if you were a prescient back in 1997-- and I'm dating myself-- that's something that I think is paramount to what's happening in the space economy right now. You were mentioning the things that need to happen for us to realize the 2035 projections. And I'm wondering, what do you see as barriers to be overcome for 2035's vision to materialize? Well, it's almost-- it's asking a different type of question. What are the components that start to address the problems that need to be solved? Yeah. OK. Yep. So I kind of reduce it to this construct of the 5Rs, which is resilience, regulation, risk, reach, and revenue. It starts off where you start to look at resilience, keeping services operating, having redundancy plans associated with that. And that's what we're seeing with the satellite networks in general. But how does that apply to different aspects of the space value chain? Regulations. Everybody's less talking about it. Yeah. [LAUGHTER] Part of it is, how do we create regulation, not just within the US, but globally, to help the ecosystem increase and operate at market speed? Because there's expectations associated with that. So how can we help establish organization, realize new opportunities of operating in space or capitalizing on space for Earth type of technologies, but also startups? Looking at the startup ecosystem, there are a lot of entrepreneurs. And we're working with a great deal of them, along with Seraphim, directly on this. And that's something that we see as a global opportunity to really become part of the ecosystem. And when I see ecosystem, I really want to be clear here, is that, as I said at the very beginning, it's not just the vertical. The aerospace primes that play a very specific role, they have different space divisions, and they all work in harmony with a lot of the different things associated with national security, which is important. But now we see dual use coming into play. So that's a combination of how do we leverage some of the things that we're doing for national security and commercialize that across multiple industries that place directly into a space. But we also see academia. We see civil agencies beyond NASA, leveraging space assets. There's startups, private equity, venture capital, and the Fortune, Fortune 1000 and beyond. Back in 1997, we said that everyone is going to need an internet strategy, and people pushed that off or gave a specific level of eye roll. Everyone will need a strategy for how they're going to leverage space. And how do you execute upon that? Some of the bigger things associated with that, when I said resilience, regulation, risk, reach and revenue, reach and revenue, we kind of understand. But risk has always been a challenge, because the narrative around space is hard. Oh, yeah. That's the phrase that we bandy about all the time. Yeah. And space is hard. But the key thing here, which is really important, is to widen that aperture to understand, can I use risk as an asset? Can I look at the social, technological, economic, environmental, political, geopolitical, and health, some of those signals in the market to help leverage risk as an asset, becoming more intimate with interdependencies associated with these risks. So not all of them are equal. So you have to balance that out. So yes, while space is hard, I think we need to change the narrative to be more ambitious, more aspirational. And I see plus space as an opportunity to look at that trajectory, not only for organizations, but for humanity. Space is hard, and that's awesome to change the narrative, to put it in my gamer speak. That's how I would-- It's interesting, because we're also seeing different types of technology start to get unlocked. In 2016, 2017, I was doing some work with AI. And a lot of people said, well, I think you're a little too early. So OK, but I think we need to do the things that we do well on a consistent basis and optimize that. But also start to experiment. So to compete in a market of near constant disruption, you need to experiment with intention and learn from that. And we see a lot of that with a lot of the space sector companies doing that. They're experimenting. They're failing. But they're learning from it so they can actually move faster and capitalize upon that. I do think that in terms of the funding, while the government is at the primary funder of a lot of the things that are happening from a space perspective now, it's really private capital. We're looking at capital flows. We're looking at different types of investments and asset classes that are participating in it. And there's a lot of room for improvement, obviously, from what we saw several years ago with SPACs. But ultimately, how do we capitalize on what is the new area? Because I do believe that there's an opportunity to tokenize a lot of things that we're doing with space, especially with the volume of data and information that we're able to collect on orbit right now. So again, that's another thing that gets me really excited is the whole aspects of blockchain and space. Whoever thought that the two would go together. [MUSIC PLAYING] I'll be right back. Welcome back. Here's a quick win for NASA and for anyone who likes their space science neat, tidy, and actually working. The US Space Agency's Arcstone instrument has officially wrapped up its primary mission. And yes, that is a success story, because Arcstone isn't flashy. It's not taking selfies or chasing asteroids. Instead, it's doing something that's really quietly essential, really, measuring sunlight very precisely from space. So OK, why does that matter? Well, because Arcstone acts like a gold standard light meter in orbit. It helps scientists calibrate Earth-observing satellites so we can trust the data that they send back. Climate models, weather forecasts, environmental monitoring. Yeah, all of that gets better when your sunlight math is solid. So after months of on-orbit operations, Arcstone delivered high-quality solar measurements exactly as planned, proving that the tech works and paving the way for future missions. So yeah, no explosions, no drama, just excellent space engineering, getting the job done. Because sometimes the days when it's in space are indeed the ones that quietly make everything else much better. [MUSIC PLAYING] And that, my friends, is T-minus, brought to you by N2K Cyberwire. 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 our 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 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'm your host, Maria Varmazis. Thank you for listening. We'll see you tomorrow. [MUSIC PLAYING] [MUSIC PLAYING] T-minus. 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