Shownotes
Brandon Karpf, Vice President of Programming at N2K Networks and a former cryptologist in the US Navy, shares his extensive knowledge of cybersecurity’s critical role in space operations.
In this episode, Brandon explores the symbiotic relationship between cybersecurity and space, providing insights into how robust cyber strategies ensure the success and safety of space missions. He traces his journey from the Naval Academy to his leadership role at N2K Networks, emphasizing the need to professionalize cybersecurity within the space sector.
In this episode, you'll discover:
- Brandon’s path from the US Naval Academy to becoming a leader in cybersecurity for space operations.
- How cybersecurity is vital for protecting space missions, from securing telecommunications to safeguarding intelligence operations.
- The integration challenges and solutions of cybersecurity within the rapidly growing space industry.
- Future perspectives on how cybersecurity and space operations can co-evolve through strategic collaboration and innovation.
Quote:
"Space has to touch cyber and cyber has to touch space.
We have to do it in a really intentional way to be effective to have these assets for the rest of our lives, in a productive and safe way."
- Brandon Karpf
Episode Links:
Credits:
Production by CxS Partners LTD
Executive Producer: Toby Goodman
Audio & Sound Design: Lee Turner
Join our journey into the world of education and space: https://interastra.space
Transcripts
So I started to realize how important and fundamental the space industry is to our way of life, and even though I'm a cyber nerd, I love cyber security, Space is critical to cyber and cyber is critical to space. So that's when I really knew that these two things had to be brought together if we were gonna move either of these industries further forward.
Hi. I am Brandon Karpf and you are listening to Your Business in Space.
I am the vice president of programming at N2K Networks. What that really means is I run the trade media arm of n2k Networks called n2kCyberwire.
We publish a whole suite of podcasts and newsletters and analysis, all focused on professionalizing the cybersecurity industry across multiple industries, whether that's health care, retail and hospitality, or in this context, the space industry.
We are focused on providing high quality information to professionals working within all of those industries and specifically around digital transformation and digital technologies, and I act as the executive producer and executive editor for that trade media organization.
When I was a kid, I did not wanna be an astronaut or a police officer or any of those things that kids typically wanna do. I wanted to be a pirate more than anything.
So when I grew up, I did the second best thing and I joined the US Navy. So growing up, my grandfather, who I was very close to, he was a army infantry officer during World War 2 in the South Pacific. So he and I were very close and I gained this love of the idea of service.
When I was in middle school, my dad, knowing that he didn't want me to just run off at 17 and join the armed forces, he took me on these tours of the various US service academies, West Point, the Naval Academy. The 1st year I went and saw West Point, it was fantastic. It was summertime and beautiful.
The following year, I was 12 years old. He took me to Annapolis at the end of August. And if any of the listeners have been in Annapolis at the end of August, you know that there is no place in the world like Annapolis in the height of summer. Blue skies, fluffy white clouds, incredible beautiful sailboats, and all of the midshipmen at the Naval Academy in their summer whites. And it is just this extraordinary place. So when I was 12 years old, my whole life became how do I get to the US Naval Academy.
I was focused on academics, but also sports. I was a coxswain on the crew team in high school which ultimately was my ticket to the Naval Academy.
I got recruited there as the heavyweight coxswain, and I was on that rowing team for all 4 years. I studied control systems engineering at the academy. And in that path, I discovered my love for cybersecurity, specifically around, the events of what was called the Stuxnet virus at the time, which was an attack against the Iranian nuclear centrifuges, and I found it really fascinating how the virus affected those centrifuges, the cyber physical systems, and it was a cyber attack that caused a physical effect in the real world. So that became what I studied, what I wanted to focus on. I then went on to MIT once I commissioned in the Navy.
The Navy sent me to MIT for a graduate degree focused on cyber security and computer networks, and then I served in the Navy for about 8 years as a cryptologic warfare officer.
As a cryptologist, my focus was signals intelligence, electronic warfare, yes, space operations as well and how the space architecture supported those things, and cyber operations. I spent the vast majority of my time in the Navy, doing cyber operations mostly on the offensive side and intelligence collection side, but also gaining this love of how the world can be more cybersecure and how cyber security and the digital technologies that we rely on really do affect every single thing we do in this world today.
So when I was a midshipman at the Naval Academy, every single year we had these astronaut panels. These folks that would come in, these astronauts from NASA and they would talk about what they did and what they were working on. And there was this one gentleman that I met one of the years. Actually, I think it was my freshman year.
His name is Frank Culbertson. And Frank Culbertson, NASA astronaut, happened to be the coxswain from the U. S. Naval Academy heavyweight rowing team, and he and I got to talking about space and rowing and our mutual passions.
Ended that he invited me at the time he was CEO of a company that was launching payloads to the International Space Station, and so he took me over to their manufacturing location in Northern Virginia, and I got to go toward where they were actually manufacturing these resupply missions, these autonomous resupply missions to the ISS. I got to see one of them right before it, right before the payload was attached to the rocket and sent up.
And so, that's probably the first spark that made me realize that there was an interesting industry here to work in. Then when I was a cryptologist in the Navy, a significant amount of my training and education covered how space assets were supporting the mission, how we were leveraging space assets assets or needed space assets for telecommunications and cyber operations and signals intelligence and and communications and those types of data flows, and how everything we were doing in the military and especially the navy at the time was heavily reliant on space technologies. The space segment in one way or another.
And so I started to realize how important and fundamental the space industry is to our way of life. And even though I'm a cyber nerd, I love cyber security.
Space is critical to cyber and cyber is critical to space.
So that's when I really knew that these two things had to be brought together if we were gonna move either of these industries further forward, that space has to touch cyber and cyber has to touch space. And we have to do it in a really intentional way to be effective and to have these assets for the rest of our lives, in a productive and safe way.
I mentioned the connection with Frank Culbertson, he and I both being the heavyweight cox on the Naval Academy rowing team. We also had Wendy Lawrence, another NASA astronaut who was instrumental at the Naval Academy both on the rowing team, as one of the coaches on the rowing team, and the officer reps when she was back at the Naval Academy.
And so these are 2 people that I've met numerous times while being at the Naval Academy competing on the rowing team who had a significant influence on my life and kind of realizing that the space industry is something worth pursuing and something that affects all of our lives.
And then the the the the other person in talking, you know, on this podcast with this organization, Interastra, is Charlie Bolden. Charlie Bolden was actually the very first speaker to my class at the Naval Academy during what's called Plebe Summer.
Plebe Summer are the 8 week boot camp that every single midshipman goes through.
And in that 1st week, there's always a speech from some significant distinguished graduate about character and about service, and my class's speaker was Charlie Bolden. And so, he was actually the very first person my class heard from at the Naval Academy, and he told his story which is an extraordinary story. It's one that we've published in T minus that that he's told many times with this organization as well about the challenges he faced and the discrimination in getting to the naval academy and then the opportunities he really pursued and made happen as an officer in the Marine Corps and then at NASA. And his story is incredibly, incredibly inspiring. And so, you know, those three people all connected to the Naval Academy, most connected to the Naval Academy rowing team were really what opened the door to me in terms of the business of space. So when I was leaving the Navy and I decided my wife and I, she was also in the Navy. We decided that wasn't the lifestyle we wanted long term. It was time to move on.
I initially thought that my goal was to be a cybersecurity engineer. Alright? Real traditional technical path in cybersecurity. To do that, to find my way into that industry, I had networked and really connected with a gentleman named Peter Kilpierre. Peter Kilpierre at the time was the founder, CEO of the CyberWire, which was one of the most popular and largest b to b media brands in cybersecurity. I was a daily listener, a daily reader. I had been since the earliest days of CyberWire. I found a lot of value in what they were providing to the industry, and really informative stuff that was just getting me up the knowledge curve way faster than anything else. And so I had reached out to Peter, and he and I got to know each other over the last few years.
And I said, hey, Peter. You know, I'm looking for a job. You know everyone in cyber. Can you help me network and find a job? And and he really did. He was a great resource. He introduced me to tons of companies, tons of people. And eventually after about 6 months of Peter helping me network, he turned to me one day and said, hey, you know, instead of going off and working for Palo Alto Networks or CrowdStrike or one of these big cyber companies, why don't you come work for me? Why don't you come join the start up? Let me tell you a little bit more about what we're trying to do here in terms of professionalizing the cybersecurity industry across multiple industries and see if you're interested in this. We're about to prepare our new markets our new markets and programming ventures as we grow as a business.
And he pitched me on it. I was totally sold. I came on board actually first as as an intern and then worked my way up to the executive team where I'm on now. So, you know, in terms of space, space grew out of that naturally. We were you know, we raised our money, our seed capital as a company. We changed our brand from the CyberWire to N2K, which is news to knowledge. And we were looking at other industries where cybersecurity is absolutely critical to the success and growth of that industry, but also industries that are kind of at the at the vanguard, but the very early days of building a professionalized workforce.
And I analyzed 10 to 15 different industries, and I found that space was by far the closest to cyber security and the most attractive for us to expand into.
And so that's why we launched the T Minus space brand within the space industry and running that today, again, covering the entire industry, providing a strategic intelligence product for everyone, every professional in the industry, but with that digital technology focus and that little bit of a leaning towards digital technologies and always highlighting the security stories and the cyber stories, that highlight the importance of the connection between these two industries. I think the first biggest misconception that I see often is the expectation that the commercial markets is just gonna take care of the business models and that there's just an a huge opportunity in every corner of the space industry today to develop sustainable business models that'll lead to long term growth and the productivity of thousands of space companies. I I don't think that's the case. I think there are a few key parts of the industry that are commercially viable today, but the others still really do need the governments of the world to support and enable. There we need to continue seeing investment, massive investment from federal governments in order for businesses to be successful in space.
So the the few commercial opportunities today that I see, number 1, telecommunications. You know, low earth orbit and medium earth orbit communications constellations, you know, integrating that with the Internet direct to cell phone and growing the, the Internet into, you know, the outer net, I think is a a critical aspect, that is viable commercially today. You think about the massive capital investments that the large telecommunications autonomous systems have made, you know, tens of 1,000,000,000 of dollars over the last 30 years in laying fiber cables.
I can see those same kind of investments making sense in mega telecommunication constellations. The second aspect is manufacturing and space, specifically biotechnology. You see a number of investments, especially with, with companies who have proved that they can do some manufacturing in space and bring that back to earth. I think there's a huge opportunity there that is commercially viable within the next decade. And then the the the last that is I think immediately commercially viable is in space servicing, space debris management which is still kind of a government funded part of the industry, but less, increasingly less so especially as some regulations might come along that require organizations to manage their space debris more deliberately. So I think those are probably the the only commercially viable parts of the industry today in the next 5, 10 years. Long run, there will be more. There certainly will be more space mining, the cislunar economy, and those types of things, but I don't think that those are viable today.
I think that is the misconception that every aspect of this industry is viable. To be successful in those corners of the industry, it requires governments to continue to invest, to continue to put resources towards those problems, to make those economies, to make those core aspects of the industry viable in the long run. That's what's gonna be needed to build a successful and sustainable business model right now. Universities, young people, in terms of building the workforce and building that funnel, the things that people should focus on is literally everything. I I mean this is a growing industry. Everything is an opportunity. There are roles for finance. There are roles for law.
There are roles for engineering and various technologies. There's roles for product and marketing and sales. I mean, quite literally anything. There are I think by the most recent numbers I saw, more than 5,000 space companies in the US alone. That is gonna continue to grow. The workforce isn't as large as some industries that have that kind of footprint yet yet. Right? That's the operative word. As we continue to see those few areas that are commercially viable today grow out and expand, there's gonna be a need for bioengineers.
And again, marketers and researchers and data analysts who can work on all that. So I I don't think there's any type of domain that the space industry doesn't need. I think every role, every type of training and education is required, and that's actually kinda why my company is interested in being in space because it's a green field. It's an opportunity for us to really drive the professionalization of one aspect, and that aspect to us is the cybersecurity workforce in space. And we think that professionalization of these various domains is the only path to success in any industry. Space is relatively new in getting there. It's a greenfield. We see a lot of people talking and focused on it, but that's an opportunity for us to kind of pave the way for the professionalization of all of these myriad of different roles in space.
Today, I am laser focused on providing the highest quality strategic intelligence to professionals in the space industry. That is what we do at T Minus. That's what we do at N2K Networks. We are laser focused every single day with our writers, our analysts, our producers, our on air talent on delivering the insights that keep you a step ahead in rapidly changing industries. The other aspect that we're keen on is professionalizing cybersecurity.
We want people to consider cybersecurity a profession as opposed to what we think of today as just an industry. We are professionalizing cybersecurity. And to do that, we need to touch every single industry whether it's finance, whether it's telecommunications, whether it's retail and hospitality, or whether it's space.
That is what we are really, really intent on solving and bringing to bear and that's our vision for the future. That's what we're focused on, intelligence and workforce intelligence.
I'm Brandon Karpf. You've been listening to Your Business in Space.
All the ways that you can connect with me are in the links in the show notes and to discover more, head to interastra.space.
