I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about, and talking to people about a post-Falcon world. Why sunset the world’s best rocket? Can Starship replace it? What about Artemis? Why are SpaceXers flocking to Memphis? Grab a coffee, this is a long one.

The cyber incidents of the last 48 hours have been pretty mind blowing. I’ve been trying to piece together the “why now” question, and I think what we’re seeing is the first of a new kind of super-agent driven vulnerability cascade-- first one vulnerability is found by a malicious actor, then other bad actors pop up to try and take advantage of it before companies patch their systems. But because each bad actor is using swarms of thousands of super-agents, those agents are not only exploiting the existing vulnerability, but finding new zero days as well, all in a matter of hours. And the cycle repeats. As of the writing of this post there have been vulnerabilities found across at least half-dozen independent systems including LiteLLM, PHP, eMudhra Certificates, NGINX, Bind 9, and NodeJS. The list continues to grow hour by hour. Basically everything connected to the internet is at risk. Not just company websites and the usual databases of sensitive personal information, but all our critical infrastructure-- banks, power grids, pipelines, government agencies, all of it. The good news is that cybersecurity and ops teams had a chance to see this coming. This is why from when Mythos first dropped and had our first warning, these teams have been hard at work shoring up systems across the board. This is also why at Astranis we’ve seen a massive uptick in demand for truly air-gapped, sovereign networks, deployed via dedicated satellite to span an entire country or connect a large enterprise. It is in fact possible to take an entire category of critical infrastructure off the internet entirely. With a fully self-contained network where all the endpoints are off grid. This is not a new concept-- anyone could do this for your home today with equipment you can buy from Best Buy. But to stand up such a network covering a large geographic area or an entire country, without touching the existing fiber or other network infrastructure, you can only do that with a dedicated satellite. And specifically a satellite in a special orbit called geosynchronous orbit. Over the past year we’ve begun working with some of our customers on what it will take to implement truly air-gapped, standalone networks in support of mission critical use cases like core government functions, emergency response, defense, core infrastructure, or all of the above. That might sound extreme, but that is the kind of measure we expect will be required to shrink the attack surface of some of the world’s most critical infra. That’s just the position we are now in. It's a brave new world.

I'm thrilled to share that Ashley Christenson (@ashnichrist) is joining the Arkaea Media Group team as Director of Video and Audience, where she'll lead strategy for Spectra (our new visual content arm) and our audience growth initiatives. Ashley started in the creator economy in 2012, specializing in internet-native live shows, before moving into tech as head of growth at an AI company. She has since built marketing strategies for nearly 60 startups and has spent the past few months helping build out our new live show. Much more to come soon, but for now welcome, Ashley!