Hacking space (6/5/23)

Good morning. Payload’s DC bureau (that’s interim managing editor, Jacqueline) is thrilled to be heading to the Big Apple next week for the Secure World Foundation’s Summit for Space Sustainability.

Jacqueline will moderate a keynote on new debris mitigation recommendations developed by the World Economic Forum in conjunction with ESA. Panelists Nikolai Khlystov of the WEF and Bryn Orth-Lashley of GHGSat will provide details of the new guidelines, plus more on industry players who have signed on. You can still register for the event here.

In today's edition...
📡 Galvanick’s seed round
🎥 Livestream from Mars
🗓️ The week ahead

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Galvanick Raises $10M for Industrial Cybersecurity

Galvanick, an industrial cybersecurity startup, raised a $10M seed round to expand its team and continue developing its debut product.

The seed investors include MaC Venture Capital, Founders Fund, Village Global, Countdown Capital, Hanover Technology Investment Management, Shrug Capital, and 8090 Industries.

Protect the machines: Galvanick was founded in 2021 and is led by Josh Steinman, a former senior director for cyber at the National Security Council. The company focuses on the industrial operations market, protecting machinery that connect to cyber networks.

The startup’s first product is an extended detection & response (XDR) platform that:

• Collects industrial data from hardware

• Monitors industrial environments for threats

• Contextualizes the threats to IT teams

As industrial hardware increasingly integrates with IoT networks, the market to protect the new security risks has swelled to $20B a year, according to SecurityWeek.

Hacking space: One of Galvanick’s focus areas is space, where cyber threats are particularly acute due to national security interests. In 2020, the White House issued a memo–which Steinman helped write–stressing the importance of protecting space hardware from cybersecurity threats such as spoofing, jamming, and unauthorized guidance.

The memo states: “It is necessary for developers, manufacturers, owners, and operators of space systems to design, build, operate, and manage them so that they are resilient to cyber incidents and radio-frequency spectrum interference.”

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Broadcasting Live from Mars

20 years after launch, ESA’s Mars Express orbiter is still notching new achievements. On Friday, the spacecraft broadcast the first ever livestream from Mars.

Previous space missions—including Neil Armstrong’s step seen ’round the world during Apollo, and last year’s DART mission to bump an asteroid off its course—have provided the public with live imagery from space, but none from so far away as Mars. “When it comes to a lengthy livestream from deep space, this is a first,” ESA wrote in a release.

Live from the Red Planet: To get a truly live broadcast from Mars, which is currently ~200M miles away, you’d have to break some laws of physics by transmitting data faster than the speed of light in the vacuum of space. Still, Mars Express did the best it could, beaming an image of the planet’s surface home to Earth every 50 seconds for about an hour.

“Normally, we see images from Mars and know that they were taken days before. I’m excited to see Mars as it is now – as close to a Martian ‘now’ as we can possibly get!” James Godfrey, the spacecraft operations manager at ESA’s mission control in Germany, said.

• Each image took ~17 minutes to reach Earth, and another minute to process in ground stations.

• Viewers at home experienced some weather-related delays—par for the course for space fanatics—due to rain storms over the deep space relay station in Spain.

• As of Sunday evening, the livestream had nearly 1.4M views on YouTube.

As the craft orbited Mars, snapping photos along the way, the planet grew closer and closer in our field of view, then shrank away again.

In Other News

• The Starlink terminal aboard Starship’s maiden flight set an altitude (123,600 ft) and speed (Mach 1.7) connectivity record.

• South Korea and the US will jointly investigate debris from North Korea’s failed spy satellite launch.

• China successfully made early-stage blood cells in space for the first time.

• The Shenzhou-15 crew returned from Tiangong.

• RFA (Rocket Factory Augsburg) successfully hot-fired its upper stage for 280 seconds.

• Committee leaders Rep. Frank Lucas (R-OK) and Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) wrote a letter to the GAO requesting a review of NOAA’s planned GeoXO weather satellite program.

The View from Space

China’s Shenzhou-15 crew landed safely on Sunday, as seen in this photo from Xinhua, China’s state news agency.