I recently had the honor of speaking with Joy White, she is freshly retired after a remarkable 40-year career in federal service — most recently as the Executive Director of U.S. Space Systems Command, the top-ranking civilian in the organization. Joy led a global workforce of over 15,000 personnel and oversaw a $15.6 billion portfolio delivering agile, resilient space capabilities for national defense. We caught up to discus her career, the evolution of space acquisition, and what’s next for the future of space operations.

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Tim Ryan, a retired Air Force Lieutenant Colonel and has nearly 30 years in space operations and national security strategy, Tim is now helping Guidehouse advance its space mission capabilities for the Department of Defense and Intelligence Community. I recently had the chance to speak with him about how space is becoming a more connected, contested domain — and what it takes to stay ahead.

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IBM and NASA have just unveiled Surya, a groundbreaking open-source AI model designed to forecast solar activity with unprecedented accuracy. It's trained on nearly a decade of high-resolution solar data and represents a major leap forward in space weather prediction — a field that’s becoming increasingly vital as our reliance on satellites, GPS, and telecommunications grows. For a chance to discuss how this will help in those areas, I spoke with Juan Bernabe-Moreno, Director of IBM Resarch for Europe, UK and Ireland.

https://newsroom.ibm.com/2025-08-20-ibm-and-nasa-release-groundbreaking-open-source-ai-model-on-hugging-face-to-predict-solar-weather-and-help-protect-critical-technology#:~:text=By%20releasing%20Surya%20on%20Hugging,for%20their%20regions%20and%20industries

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A new partnership between Globalstar, a satellite company, and the U.S. Army, looks to test and improve satellite technology that can be used for secret and secure communication in military operations. Specifically, they want to see how well new low-visibility satellite devices work in difficult environments where traditional communication systems might not be available or reliable. To find out more about this endeavor, I spoke with Henry Orejuela, head of Government Sales and Business Development for Globalstar.

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There is certainly a lot of hardware falling in Low Earth Orbit at the moment. So much so that many are looking at leveraging new technologies for ways to decommission satellites, or even simply move objects out of the way to ensure there are no disastrous collisions. One new company that has taken on this challenge, Kall Morris Inc., who say they've recently successfully completed the first commercial capture of an unprepared object in space. To learn more about the tech behind the milestone, I spoke with Troy Morris who is Co-Founder and CEO of Kall Morris Inc.

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As advancements are made in space, so to are they made in the nuclear armament fields. Maintaining global nuclear security you could say is one of the most important jobs for our international leaders, but with the two areas becoming more and more intertwined, it might help to have those in the nuclear security field learn more about space. That's what the Secure World Foundation is hoping to accomplish with it's new initiative. In partnership with the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), it recently announced a two year effort hoping to explore the growing intersection of space and nuclear security in order to strengthen cross-sector understanding and enhance strategic stability. To find out more, I had the pleasure of talking to Victoria Samson, who is Chief Director of Space Security and Stability at the SWF.

https://www.swfound.org/space-nuclear-initiative

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Contained within the plans to slash government spending, NOAA, that is the National Oceanic and Administrative Administration's, particularly its Office of Space Commerce and its TraCCS system, is one of the targets. That's a problem for the many organizations in the commercial space industry who've come to rely on it. That's why a coalition of space industry associations have all come together to implore Congress to continue funding the program. One of those members, Audrey Schaffer, VP of Strategy and Policy at Slingshot Aerospace, told me more about this initiative.

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Space enthusiasts and hopefully listeners of this show know the term LEO, or low Earth orbit gets tossed around a lot, but what about VLEO, that's very low Earth orbit. Well you may begin hearing that phrase more and more. Orion Space Solutions announced the successful completion of a test readiness review (TRR) for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Ouija program VLEO mission. It's slated to launch this summer and could open up the potential for more activity in that space. For an explainer about this program and VLEO information overall, I talked with Chad Fish, President and CEO of Orion Space Solutions.

https://orion.arcfield.com/press-releases/orion-space-solutions-prepares-for-historical-vleo-darpa-ouija-program-mission-launch

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