Commercializing space.

Damian DiPippa: You can't protect everything all the time. That's just an impossibility. And cyber in space is similar to cyber, you know, here on our networks on Earth. As soon as you build a better mousetrap, along comes a better mouse, and you've got to keep evolving. Okay. We know we're not going to be able to protect. We know a better mouse is going to come along at some point in time. So how do we quickly recover when something does occur? And so those are all the challenges you've got to build in upfront in order to have these, you know, resilient systems that are going to last, you know, so that people's GPS systems work.

Maria Varmazis: Welcome. I'm Maria Varmazis, and you're listening to T-Minus: Space-Cyber Briefing. In this show, we examine the evolution of cybersecurity in the global and orbital infrastructure that powers, protects, and connects our lives. Hello, and happy 250th Independence Day weekend to our listeners in the United States and wherever you are. I hope you're having a good one. On today's show, I'm chatting with Auria Space CEO Damian DiPippa, and we're taking a look at how space systems have evolved over the decades from government-run, siloed, vendor-locked, exquisite programs to a commercial-driven ecosystem enabled by lower launch costs, where commercial applications now largely outweigh national security uses. That means we're looking at an increasingly fragmented ecosystem needing interoperability, and yep, lots of cybersecurity implications there. Let's dive in.

Damian DiPippa: I'm Damian DiPippa. I'm the CEO of Auria. You know, I personally have over 35 years experience in space systems, C5ISR, national security space. I started, you know, as an aerospace engineer back at the end of the Reagan administration and what they call the Star Wars days. So I was one of those young engineers sitting around a table, kind of looking at each other, going, "Can we really make two things hit each other 3 kilometers per second in the endo and exo-atmosphere?" And so I was solving those problems, then moved into, you know, space systems, C5ISR systems. I was a chief satellite architect for communication satellites, for the US intelligence and national security satellites, and then led large space and intelligence organizations for companies, you know, like Northrop Grumman, MANTECH, Perspecta. I was part of the management team that sold the company Perspecta to Peraton, and then I was the president in Peraton, and then, since then, I've been working with private equity firms putting, I'll say, mid-sized companies together really to be agile and attack some of the more innovative problems here in the marketplace. And now I'm excited to be working with Enlightenment Capital for the past few years, where we've assembled, you know, a number of companies together into a mid-sized company really to attack the command and control and communications continuum for space and advanced missile systems and operations. So that's really, at Auria, what we do. We are innovators and integrators of solutions across the command and control and communications continuum for advanced space and missile operations, and we're developing software and hardware from orbit all the way to the tactical edge.

Maria Varmazis: That's awesome, Damian. Thank you so much for joining me, and thank you for that fantastic intro. It is wonderful speaking to someone who has really seen the industry change. I cannot even begin to imagine what you have seen over the course of your career, and how things have just changed from those Reagan days to now in the space industry, let alone in the last 10 years. But again, we're even further back than that. I'm wondering if you wouldn't mind indulging me a little bit in telling me a bit about that evolution that you've seen. I imagine both in hardware and in the software world, what kind of changes you've seen and where we've arrived.

Damian DiPippa: Yes, you know, it's actually amazing when you look back over how the last 30-some years, and particularly with space systems, satellite systems, how they've evolved. You know, back in the early years when I was started -- this was all government-run. This -- the -- you know, you wanted to work in the space industry. You were either as part of the government, or you were a contractor supporting one of the major government programs, you know, whether with the Department of Defense with satellite or NASA, working satellite or space systems, and that's where you were kind of entrenched. And those systems were very siloed. I know you wanted to talk about this a little bit, but they were, you know, usually exquisite. They were usually built end-to-end by single providers or teams, you know, very much vendor-locked from that perspective. And to see it evolve over the years now, particularly as launch costs have really gone down, in order to get things to orbit, it has really opened up the commercial space ecosystem in a sense, and that has brought in a lot of providers able to build and launch space systems for use to where, quite frankly, the commercial applications for space today outweigh the national security military applications for space. And that has really advanced technology in a way that, you know, we could not imagine, you know, 30-some years ago, where, you know, various technologies that apply to systems here on Earth are also applicable to space, and you've got those companies now building a corporate marketplace for space systems. And that has really broken down a lot of these, you know, previous silos, these vendor-locked solutions, those solutions that lacked an ability to connect with each other. And that's really where we come in from Auria, and we fit the market, and we fill the gap where there are numerous fragmented systems that can't interoperate with each other, can't communicate with each other. They have, you know, they can't be updated, and that all goes to the siloing. And we come in and what we bring is that non-vendor-locked open architecture ability, applying commercial applications to this space ecosystem.

Maria Varmazis: I'd love for you to tell me more about breaking down those silos because you said it so well about, you know, the classic thinking of, you know, these space systems being exquisite, custom-built, beginning to end. And of course, many of these systems are still in existence, and there's a long -- there's a long life for a lot of these missions. But with the advent of and the mushrooming truly of the commercial sector, you know, that's changing, but still, of course, these systems have to be interoperable. And I cannot even begin to imagine the fascinating technical and also process challenge that this all presents to be able to interoperate with all these different systems, some of which maybe are on the old paradigm, some of which are new. I mean, how on Earth do you tackle such an incredible set of challenges with, you know, legacy systems and new systems that are operating on these different paradigms?

Damian DiPippa: Yeah, we still have a need for some of the legacy exquisite systems that are in medium or high elliptical Earth orbit doing, you know, specific missions, you know, classified or highly sensitive, and so that requirement will always -- will always exist. What we're really seeing is the proliferation of, you know, the low Earth orbit, medium Earth orbit systems, where commercial providers are able to enter the market space and, you know, we're seeing things like, you know, Amazon coming in with their new system, you know, Starlink, other providers, you know, mapping the Earth every day with numerous satellites out there. And that's really the biggest change, I think, that we have seen is really how the commercial market space has driven the use of space for application in the commercial areas that now the US government wants to leverage, right? And so now, as we're working more and more with, you know, the US military, intelligence community, they are really asking us more, "How can we leverage these advances in commercial technologies to our benefit?" Because they're outpacing what is being done, you know, within the government in some cases. And with that, we come along to really break down that communication, command, and control fragmentation and tie these pieces together, even with things like cloud technologies. I mean, we are working one program right now where, you know, US Space Force wants to be able to have access to commercial antennas to be able to do the command, control, and telemetry of their satellite systems through a secure cloud environment with their own mission operations centers. And we are providing kind of that connectivity for them to be able to do that, so that -- you know, because their own resources for commanding and controlling the satellites are really at capacity and they need to expand outward. And that's really where we come into play on these things.

Maria Varmazis: Yeah, that's a great example, and I'm wondering if you can dive a bit more also into the challenges and opportunities here. I'm thinking of the incredible complexity of the different systems that we're talking about, and I'm just wondering if you can just tell me a little bit more about this.

Damian DiPippa: Sure. You know, some of the challenges deal with being able to design a system thinking forward, knowing that technologies are going to change. How do you design a system that -- like for us, example, where we develop, you know, the software and the APIs, knowing that in the future we're going to have to modify that as the technology, you know, moves forward and evolves as well. And so we do want to design those systems with open architectures. For example, like we are doing for the joint antenna marketplace for the US government, where we're reaching out to commercial antenna providers, knowing that the technologies for the antenna systems are going to change. But not only that, knowing that the government may want to access multiple cloud providers. So whether it be a Oracle or a Microsoft or a, you know, AWS as the cloud provider, to be able to have that architecture open, knowing that you're going to have to be able to swap in and out different components in the future as they evolve. That's probably one of the challenges, you know, we work with mostly in designing these systems and planning these, going forward. The other one, like everybody else deals with, is the cyber side. You know, we at Auria, we really work hard to bake the cyber solution in from the beginning into what we're doing and not try and bolt it on afterwards, recognizing, too, that you can't protect everything all the time. That's just an impossibility. And cyber in space is similar to cyber -- you know, here on our networks on Earth, as soon as you build a better mousetrap, along comes a better mouse, and you've got to keep evolving in order to solve that. But more importantly, too, you've got to design your systems to be, you know, kind of three ways. You know, A, ubiquitous, so that, you know, you have fallbacks in your solution. If something happens, you got other satellites, other systems to be able to take that load. If something gets attacked, you've got to be resilient, hardened where you realize the most important aspects of your system are, knowing that you can't protect everything. Well, what must I protect, you know, more than everything else to be sure we're able to do that? And third, to be able to recover. Okay. We know we're not going to be able to protect. We know a better mouse is going to come along at some point in time. So, how do we quickly recover when something does occur? And so, those are all the challenges you've got to build in upfront in order to have these, you know, resilient systems that are going to last the test of time, that you can continue to build on, you know, so that, you know, people's GPS systems work. You know, John Deere tractor is able to get their weather data in order to, you know, do what they need to do for the farming industry. And, you know, every other aspect of our lives, from, you know, communication to travel to just basic logistics that is so co-dependent on the space industry today can still operate.

Maria Varmazis: Let's take a quick break now. When we get back, reflections on the rapidly changing space market from Auria Space CEO Damian DiPippa, after this.

Maria Varmazis: Welcome back. Here's more of my conversation with Auria Space CEO Damian DiPippa. Something that you mentioned earlier that I wanted to go back to was about the concept of agility, and that's something that I wanted to ask you about as well. Given the incredible market pressures right now, and certainly we've many signals from the US government about the need for more space solutions, not just more resilience, in the face of adversarial action, but more quickly developed and responding to, you know, potential threats, and that it -- I mean, stereotypically, one does not often think of, you know, the space industry as being necessarily agile, but that is changing. Can you speak a bit to how, you know, you all are able to respond to those changing market pressures at speed?

Damian DiPippa: Yeah. Absolutely. Look, they are definitely changing, and we embrace this. We at Auria, we actually love this, you know, because we are agile and we are innovators. But, for example, some of the latest competitions we've been involved with and are currently involved with are very different at how the government is acquiring what they're looking for versus, you know, what they might have -- how they might have asked for it, you know, 20 years ago. Now, they're, you know, they're asking for, you know, kind of proof. You know, they want us to come in with our tech team and, you know, provide an oral presentation that actually demonstrate we know what we're talking about, and then they'll typically down-select, you know, two or three providers to actually build a prototype over a short period of time. So you're actually demonstrating your ability to be agile and innovative in solving their solution, and they're asking for commercial application to be involved in what you're doing. And so, that's a definite change with maybe how we've done business, particularly, you know, with the US government in the past. And so, you know, from that perspective, you know, we love that because we are agile in that sense. Now, we also have the added advantage that we develop products commercially. So we have some large space systems providers that are actually, you know, licensing our products, utilizing our maintenance agreements, maybe purchasing a little non-recurring engineering from us to help integrate those systems together. And as a commercial provider of these product lines, we're constantly evolving them ourselves. We're constantly updating with, you know, for the new operating systems, the new technologies. And so, from that standpoint, you know, we kind of maintain a leading edge of agility and innovation that our other government customers then benefit from because we're already doing it in the commercial marketplace. And so, we're really kind of ourselves excited about this because it does break down the old barriers of the very large classical, you know, systems integrators having a lock in the market because they're the only ones that could do it, right, because the government required a complete end-to-end system. But now, the government's willing to buy things in parts and piece them together because they want these open architectures, and we've carved out this whole C3 portion -- the command, control, and communications side of it -- where we're experts on, and also because we actually have real space operators that have worked in that environment and understand how it works as well.

Maria Varmazis: Damian, I'm very curious. I always love asking CEOs, you all are thinking about the market and the larger -- so -- you know, the macro so much more, and I'm very curious, if you had a crystal ball for the next five-10 years for the space industry, as you see it, what do you see happening in terms of opportunities?

Damian DiPippa: Yeah, there's going to continue to be commercial opportunity in space, particularly on the communication side. You know, we're continuing to see that. We're seeing, you know, we're seeing more constellations go in that deal with various types of communication. You know, I honestly think, you know, if I'm looking at my crystal ball, you know, everybody's got their iPhones today based on cellular networks, you know, I think cellular networks are going to be, you know, a thing of the past at some point. Everybody's going to have direct-to-satellite, you know, with their own phones, you know, from that standpoint, and then you'll have worldwide connectivity no matter where you are in that sense. And then I see as we are actively making progress toward interplanetary-type activities, "Hey, okay, we've just circumnavigated the Moon again. We got the whole Artemis mission. And now, we're talking about Moon bases. And then, you know, Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, and there's plans for Mars." So the communication side of that is always, always going to be a major thing that has to be worked on. The command, the control, the communication, the use of satellite systems, how they connect, how they operate. And so, I think that market's going to be around for a very long time, both on the military and the government side, as well as commercially. And we're excited about that because we play on both those market areas.

Maria Varmazis: That's fantastic. Well, Damian, I'm recognizing that we're coming up on time, but I always want to give my guests the last word. If there's anything that you want to leave our audience with, anything that I missed that you wanted to talk about, this is sort of the bingo free square in the middle. Anything at all, I will hand the floor to you.

Damian DiPippa: Yeah. Great. Look, you know, like I said, we're innovators. I also like to tout maybe a little bit of what we're doing in modeling and simulation, as well as training for our systems. You know, because, like I said, we have the technologists that understand how to do command, control, and communications from a technology standpoint. We also have operators that actually work real-world mission operations centers, commanding satellites, and doing the communication side of this. And one of the innovative things that we've done is we've paired up our operators with, you know, modern-day software developers, modern-day game developers, UI/UX developers, and we've created training systems for the next generation of space operators as well as space warfighters. So, for example, we got tools being utilized at what's called the National Space Defense Center, as well as at the US Air Force Academy, that is teaching the next generation of, you know, space warfighters and space operators how to operate in a space environment, how to command your satellite systems, how to do the orbitology, how to manage the payloads, and then even how to do space warfare, force-on-force space warfare. And we do it in a very modern-day gaming-type environment that this generation of space operators is used to seeing, you know, who grew up in a gaming world where you didn't need thick manuals to learn how to use a system. It just -- it came on intuitive. So that's kind of another area, you know, we've branched out into with our command and control and communications talent, along with our innovative software development and systems development, and it's really gaining a lot of traction as well, and we're excited about it. We demo it often at various symposiums we go to.

Maria Varmazis: Oh, that's awesome. Well, Damian, thank you so much for telling me about that and also for sharing your expertise with me and the audience today. I learned a lot from you, and that's the best part of my job. I get to learn from my guests. So thank you so much for joining me today. I appreciate it.

Damian DiPippa: You bet. Take care.

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